The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (24 page)

T
he rabbit is a rabbit is a rabbit. His ears are keen. His nose twitches. He scratches an invisible itch with his white fluffy paw. Cocks his head, listening. He does not speak. He never speaks, just gestures, nods, shakes his head. It’s amazing what can be communicated without words.

The rabbit cannot believe how easy this is. How the girl has come to trust him, to
love
him. They try to play crazy eights because she says it’s her favorite game, only he can’t hold the cards. She laughs. There’s something about her laugh. Something that makes the rabbit feel alive in a way he hasn’t in a long, long time.

She’s a sad girl. Her daddy died not long ago. And her mommy is so caught up in her own grief that she can do little to comfort the child. But the rabbit knows how to make her smile. The rabbit has come hopping in like the hero in a fairy tale, banishing sorrow.

And the little girl has named him Peter. He does not tell her how odd this is. When the rabbit is the rabbit, he has no other, human life. He leaves all traces of personhood behind and becomes something more…pure. More perfect.

The rabbit has a name for the little girl, too. A secret name. Birdie, he calls her in his mind.

His darling Birdie, back again.

B
ACK IN HER
car (still parked in front of the gas pumps), Rhonda pressed the cell phone against her ear. She felt keyed up. Cagey. Like she had to do something, but she didn’t know what. Tempting as it was to start the engine and crisscross the state searching for the little girl and the rabbit, she knew it would do little good. Every cop in Vermont was on the lookout; every citizen who paid attention to TV or radio as well. Still, Rhonda hated doing nothing.

Peter picked up on the third ring.

“How’d the interview go?” he said.

“Something’s happened, Peter.” She told him about the kidnapping, that she was at Pat’s still and didn’t know what to do with herself. When she was through, she heard him cover the phone and mumble.

“Tock’s home?” Rhonda asked, her heart sinking a little.

“Yeah, I was just filling her in. We
know
Ernie. She’s a friend of Suzy’s.”

Tock picked up the extension—probably in the kitchen, Rhonda imagined. She pictured Peter in the living room, sitting on the brown couch, his feet up on the coffee table. She wondered if he was wearing sneakers or work boots.

“Jesus, Ronnie,” Tock said, “a white rabbit took Ernie?”

“It sounds crazy, I know, but…”

“The world is full of crazy shit, Ronnie,” Tock cut her off.

“Jesus Christ, it’s just like the girl in Virginia. There’re some real wackos out there! I think you should come over. We’ll grill some steaks and have a good soak in the hot tub.”

“Yeah, come on over, Ronnie,” said Peter. “Have dinner with us.” Rhonda heard movement, the squeak of couch springs. Peter was adjusting himself, probably sitting up straight, getting ready to reach over and hang up the phone once she agreed. Peter always seemed anxious to get off as quickly as possible when Tock was around.

“Okay, I’ll come. I’ll be there in half an hour or so.” She felt hesitant about accepting the invitation, but didn’t want to spend the evening alone, kicking herself in the ass for letting the little girl be spirited away by the rabbit.

She hung up, placed the phone back in her purse on the seat beside her. Then she gazed out through her windshield at Trudy’s car, doors open, surrounded by police.

Beetles, too,
Rhonda remembered. The TV news shows reported that little Ella Starkee ate beetles. Rhonda wondered what the rabbit would feed Ernie; what she might have to do to survive.

RHONDA STOPPED OFF
at her apartment to change and grab her bathing suit. She lived on the top floor of an old Victorian near the center of town. It had been divided into three apart
ments: the first floor was occupied by the landlord and his wife, the second by their unmarried daughter and her two kids, and the refurbished attic was Rhonda’s. The peaks of the roof gave many of her walls a terrific slant. To get up to the apartment, she had to climb a set of spiral stairs behind the house.

Rhonda unlocked the door at the top of the stairs, went straight for her bedroom, and changed, relieved to be out of her uncomfortable suit at last. From the dormer window beside her bed she had the perfect view of the south end of Nickel Lake. She stood for a moment with the curtain pulled back, watching the swimmers and sunbathers at the town beach, wondering if word of the kidnapping had reached them. She had this ridiculous urge to open her window and yell, like the town crier, warning mothers to keep their children safe; to beware of rabbits.

Rhonda turned away from the cheerfully oblivious swimmers with their bright towels, umbrellas, and coolers, and checked the messages on her blinking machine. Only one from a man on the Lake Champlain research team, wanting to know if there’d been a mix-up about the time of her interview and offering to reschedule if she was still interested in the position. Rhonda erased the message. On the way out, she stopped in the hall to glance in the mirror. Behind her were two of the dissection drawings she was so proud of: the squid and the rabbit. Rhonda loved her biology classes and was particularly fond of the dissections. She enjoyed drawing the accompanying diagrams—labeling the parts and sketching the map of organs, going back later with a colored pencil to turn the heart red, the spleen purple, the liver green. She had dissected a sheep’s eye, a pig fetus, a pigeon, a cat, a squid, numerous frogs, and a rabbit. She was so pleased with the drawings she’d had them framed and hung them on the walls of her apartment, where some other woman might put family portraits, maps, or posters of babies in sunflower costumes.

Her eye caught on the backward image of the rabbit in her mirror, skin pulled back, muscles and chest wall cut away to reveal the organs. She blinked, grabbed the keys from the table under the mirror, and headed out the door.

TOCK ALWAYS GOT
naked before getting in the hot tub, and Rhonda hated it. She hated that the other woman was so slim and muscular, so totally unashamed of her body. Tock peeled off all her clothes as nonchalantly as someone taking off a pair of sunglasses. Peter wore blue swimming trunks. Rhonda wore a black bathing suit, and even in that, she felt too exposed and put a T-shirt on over it.

The hot tub was homemade, as was nearly everything in their small, off-grid A-frame house, which sat on twelve acres of land fronted by a stream at the dead end of a three-mile-long Class 4 dirt road. The road wasn’t maintained by the town, so it was up to Peter and Tock to plow and grade it each spring. Rhonda, who didn’t have four-wheel-drive, knew better than to attempt a visit in the winter or during mud season.

Tock and Peter had built the house together three years before, giving careful, woodworker’s attention to each detail, making the house more like a work of art than a home. They heated with wood, got electricity from solar panels and a bank of batteries with a gas-powered generator for backup.

Rhonda and her father came to help with the house-building on weekends. Rhonda’s contribution (aside from entertaining Suzy and keeping her out of harm’s way) was measuring and marking boards. Rhonda was afraid of all tools, of the images they inspired—images of herself reaching down to touch the spinning blade of the table saw, of letting the circular saw slip and hit her thigh, of how easy bleeding to death could be; how easy to be marked forever in the way her father was marked.
“All it takes,” her father used to say when telling his story, “is one second.”

Rhonda knew the story of her father’s accident by heart, and over the years had heard not only his version but Aggie’s, Daniel’s, and Dave Lancaster’s. Dave had been boss at the mill then and was also Aggie’s uncle. Clem and Daniel worked part-time at the mill through high school, doing everything from bucking the logs to delivering finished lumber. They both went to full-time after graduation. Aggie Lancaster had come up from Maryland to work for her uncle that same summer, having just graduated herself. It was the end of that summer that Clem lost his fingers.

When Dave told the story, usually after a few beers at a family barbecue, he’d swear it hadn’t been an accident.

“Daniel didn’t fall into Clem,” Dave insisted. “He sure as shit pushed him.”

Daniel claimed to remember nothing of the accident: one minute he was beside Clem helping him guide the hemlock into the saw, the next he was waking up on the concrete floor, covered in Clem’s blood.

Clem always shook his head after hearing Dave’s version. “It was seizure,” Clem said. “Daniel fell against me on his way down to the ground.”

The rest of the story everyone agreed on. Clem jerked his hand away, spilling blood everywhere, but the first thing he did was drop to his knees to check on Daniel. Dave shut down the saw and screamed for Aggie, who was in the front office across the lot.

When Aggie came over, she saw Daniel thrashing and foaming, Clem crouched over him. She saw that Daniel’s shirt was covered in blood, but did not understand where it had come from.

“Watch his head!” Clem shouted, having been through the seizures a hundred times, knowing he should not hold his friend down but should do everything possible to not let him bash himself against anything. Daniel’s head was near one of the metal
legs of the saw table, and Aggie bent down and gently rested her hands on Daniel’s jerking head, keeping him from harm. She had never seen a seizure before, never seen so much blood. And only then, when she had her hands resting on Daniel’s head, tangled in his sweaty hair, did her gaze fall on Clem’s hand.

“Jesus! Your hand!”

Clem looked down at his hand, at the pumping blood, and furrowed his brow as though not quite understanding what he was seeing. He then fell gently backward, still frowning in mild confusion, the color drained from his face. Dave wrapped Clem’s hand in a flannel shirt, helped him to the flatbed truck, and gunned the engine all the way to the medical center.

RHONDA AVERTED HER
eyes from Tock’s naked form (no stretch marks, even!) and took a deep breath, trying to concentrate on the feel of the water around her, which was almost unbearably hot. Peter had spent a summer during high school working at a vineyard in upstate New York, where he had picked up the huge wooden barrel they were soaking in. The water was heated by coils that ran through a woodstove. The three of them bumped knees as they sat on the narrow ledge Peter had built into the side of the huge cask. Tock had just put Suzy to bed.

Whatever else Rhonda could say about Tock, she could never criticize her parenting skills. Tock seemed to be the perfect mother—creative, fun, patient, firm, and always seeming to know the right thing for Suzy.

Tock had moved in with Peter just after graduating from high school and, soon after, announced she was pregnant. Everyone thought they were foolish—too young to start a family. And there went Tock’s chance at college, and her so smart! But Tock hadn’t wanted college: she wanted Peter and a baby and to build her own house in the woods. She never seemed to have a moment of regret.

Tock leaned over and grabbed a beer from the table beside the tub. She was between Rhonda and Peter in age, one year older than Rhonda and two younger than Peter, and was in better shape than both of them. She wore her hair cropped short, a tight little chestnut-colored cap—she had, Rhonda thought, the bone structure to pull it off. Peter wore his shoulder-length curly blond hair back in a ponytail. At twenty-six, Peter had the look of a man descending quickly into middle age. His hairline was receding and he’d developed a potbelly. He was looking more and more like Daniel every day. All that was missing was the mustache.

Neither Peter nor Tock liked it when Daniel’s name came up, and as a general rule, Rhonda tried to keep him out of conversations. But that night, lulled by the hot water, steak, and beer, by the way her knees bumped against Peter’s, she couldn’t help herself.

“So seeing the rabbit today reminded me of that Easter…remember? When Daniel dressed in the rabbit suit and we were all chasing after him in the woods, looking for eggs.”

Tock narrowed her eyes. Peter stared down into the neck of his beer bottle.

“I’m gonna go get some weed,” Tock announced, jumping out of the tub, steam rising off her lean flanks. Tock grabbed her robe and went through the sliding glass doors into the house.

Rhonda took in a breath, relieved to be alone with Peter but a little panicked by it, too.

She leaned back, her head resting against the edge of the wine cask, her eyes fixed on the stars.

“So do you remember it? You stole the head of his costume and he chased you all over the dining room.”

“No,” Peter mumbled solemnly. He reached over to get a cigarette from the pack on the table.

“We followed the rabbit through the woods looking for eggs full of clues.” Rhonda glanced over at Peter and searched his face
for some sign of recognition. There was none. She leaned back against the wall of the tub, closed her eyes, and let the images of that Easter continue to come.

“Lizzy was last to find her basket,” Rhonda said, “and when she finally came back into the yard, she was riding high up on the rabbit’s shoulders, swinging her basket, playing with his ears.” She opened her eyes and looked over at Peter. “How can you not remember any of that?”

He shook his head and said only, “It was a long time ago.”

They were quiet a minute, Peter staring down into his empty bottle, turning it in his hand like a kaleidoscope while he smoked his cigarette. Rhonda studied his face, trying to imagine the way it had looked that Easter so long ago, searching for a trace of the boy she’d run through the woods with, chasing after the elusive rabbit. She thought of Peter’s sister, Lizzy, whom, like Daniel, they hardly mentioned anymore. She remembered Lizzy and Daniel straggling into the yard, the last to return from the woods that Easter. Looking back, Rhonda thought perhaps it had been a sign, an omen, showing that one day they would both be gone, as if they’d walked into the woods for the egg hunt and never come back.

“I’m sorry I brought it up,” Rhonda said. “It’s just that I’d forgotten all about it until this afternoon. It’s not every day someone sees a huge white rabbit.”

“Or a kidnapping,” Peter added, leaning over to stub out his cigarette, seeming relieved at the chance to change the subject. He still didn’t look her in the eye. Rhonda slouched, sinking deeper into the tub, her chin resting on top of the steaming water.

“I feel guilty as hell sitting here drinking beer when that little girl is out there somewhere because I let the rabbit take her,” Rhonda said.

“What were you supposed to do, Ronnie?” Peter asked.

“I don’t know. Beep the horn. Get out and yell. Call 911—that’s
why I have the frigging cell phone, right? Notice the license plate. Anything. I just sat on my ass. I felt…I don’t know…drugged or something. Hypnotized. Like the bunny put some kind of spell on me. And I was scared, Peter. I mean, it wasn’t until they drove off that I even realized I’d been holding my breath the whole time. My heart was racing.”

“Of course you were scared,” Peter said.

“And now I’m just sitting here soaking in this fucking tub when I should be out there doing something.”