His eldest sat at the lake’s edge now, dangling feet just above the water, tapping the surface of the lake gently with her shoes.
She looked up at him, the wide smile she’d had just moments before suddenly gone. The shadow of a cloud stole the sun from the sky.
“What is it?” Nathan asked her. “What’s wrong?”
She hesitated a moment, and then she said: “When is she going to tell you about the rabbits?”
And then Nathan jerked awake.
He was wide-eyed and startled in the cool gloom, tangled in the sheet. Sammy’s arm was sprawled across him in her sleep, but she was moving it away —
No. Something inside the arm was moving away.
Nathan never got back to sleep that night, after seeing it, after watching the shadow he was sure was his daughter slide away unseen. He wanted to call out her name, but remembered, now that he was awake, that she’d never had one.
He didn’t understand what she’d said to him. Didn’t understand why it had startled him badly enough to wake him up. But the words kept echoing to him the whole next day:
When is she going to tell you about the rabbits?
It sounded at first like nonsense, like a phrase his mind had just pulled randomly into his dream. Like something from an old book he’d read in college — “Tell me again about the rabbits, George” — but he didn’t think that was it. That wasn’t it at all.
The next day was Saturday, and after spending the morning trying to come up with some excuse to slip away from Sammy, he realized in the end he didn’t need one. He just left while she was singing in the bath, and spent all afternoon and all evening at the library, reading everything he could find about rabbits; using their computers, setting search engines into motion.
By the time he got home that night, he felt like his mind was boiling. If Sammy noticed he’d been gone, she didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say to her. He watched her silently, watched the way she moved and held herself, and all his suspicion boiled down to certainty, all his unnoticed resentment cooling into anger. It would keep cooling, he knew, to hatred, if he let it.
The next week, he realized, nearly forgotten by both of them, was their anniversary. He surprised her by announcing a spontaneous trip, the two of them, alone, out to a cabin in the woods. Far away from everything.
Their evening was nearly perfect, up in the rented cabin. Nathan had to admit that. They shared a simple cold meal, meats and bread and cheeses and wine, like when they’d been dating, perfect little slices with the knife set and bread board she’d bought him their first Christmas, and it all brought back memories, sweet ones. They talked, more in a night than they had in months. She laughed that night, and for a change, she was laughing for him; her eyes were huge and dark and deep and his candle-lit image danced inside them as she laughed. All of it nearly perfect. This was what he’d hoped, wanting to draw her out, to get her to talk to him.
He hated to ruin it.
He nearly asked a dozen times, but the moment never seemed right. Then, as she was laughing at something he’d just told her about something that had happened at work the week before, it just slipped unbidden from his lips, exactly the wrong moment:
“When were you going to tell me about the rabbits?”
In that second, even up to the last, some remaining part of his rational mind expected — something else, expected her to look at him blankly, or quizzically, to ask him what he was talking about.
Instead, her eyes widened, startled and trapped, and her arms curled reflexively, protectively, around her waist. No pretending and no going back.
She sat down on the cabin’s small bed, arms still around her waist, looking little and lost. The look on her face was sad and anxious, and he’d seen that expression just the other night, in his dream — he’d never noticed, before, how much his dream daughter looked like his wife, how similar was the set of the mouth and the eyes.
For a moment, neither one of them said a word. Silence waited in the room like a witness. Then she said:
“When I was five years old, my mother wanted to get away from my father for a while.” Another pause, and Nathan wasn’t sure she was going to say anything else. Then, “She took me out her parents. My grandparents — they lived on a farm. I loved it. I loved all the animals and I never wanted to leave.”
She wouldn’t look at him. Her eyes were fixed on some distant point, firmly in the past. “I still remember catching the rabbits in their pen and holding them and petting them. I asked Gramma if it was true rabbits had lots of babies. I wanted to take some home with me, I guess. That was when she told me. That sometimes …. ” Her voice trailed off.
He finished for her. “Sometimes they don’t have babies,” he said. “If there’s not enough food, or it’s too crowded — ”
She nodded. “A momma rabbit can just reabsorb the baby before its born. If it’s not a good time for babies.” She saw the look on his face, his slow horrified nod, and said, “It’s not so strange.” Her voice was a little defensive. “Other animals do it, too, sometimes. Deer do it.”
“People aren’t supposed to be able to,” he said, trying to say it gently.
“I know,” she said distantly. “I don’t think I did it right.”
This is insane, he wanted to say. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation, he wanted to say. He knew all the things he was supposed to say, he knew the script he’d need to follow to take the lead in the conversation, bring it back to the realm of the reasonable and normal.
All he managed to say instead was, “I’ve seen them.”
She finally did look up at him then, meet his eyes for a moment, and then just went back to staring at nothing, nodding.
“Can — ” His throat seemed too dry for speech. “Can I see them now?”
She turned and looked at him again. A faltering smile played across her lips. “All right. Turn on the lights.”
He did, and she stood up, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra. Ran a hand over her stomach, back and forth, a long practiced stroking gesture. It brought them drifting up to the surface.
He stared, fascinated, no longer caring if any of this was real or not. “Those are our daughters?” he whispered, reaching out and hand to touch them.
She looked up at him oddly, the obvious question — how did you know they were girls? — left unspoken. Still smiling shyly, she nodded.
They moved, and his hand followed. Drifting out of sight behind her breasts, resurfacing near her shoulder, slowly spiralling down her arm to meet him.
There you are, he thought, blinking back tears. There are my girls. She kept you all to herself all this time, but there you are.
They didn’t talk much more after that. The earlier mood of the evening was broken, the mood that had felt so much like the beginning of their relationship. She was quiet again, now, carrying her secret, but now she would sometimes smile at him instead of to herself. The expression was knowing, conspiratorial, and he wasn’t sure he liked it.
He didn’t come to bed when she asked him to, and if she was hurt by that, he didn’t show it. He stayed up and sat by the window in the moonlight, finishing the bottle of wine, staring out at the trees and at the long winding road back to civilization. When the wine was gone, he broke out the second bottle he’d brought for tomorrow’s dinner, and started on that, and soon finished it, as well.
Long past midnight, he shook her awake.
“What is it — ?” she asked.
“I want to see my girls.”
“All right — ”
“I want to hold them. I want to hold my girls.”
Sammy didn’t understand what he meant. In the dim moonlight from the window, she just barely saw the knife as it came gleaming down.
Nine days after, and Nathan was in a hotel room, somewhere halfway between the cabin and home, but it was the furthest away from home he’d ever felt. He didn’t have the television on. He’d turned its glass face to the wall,
in fact, after it had shown him his own face one too many times.
The police had found the cabin, found Sammy, found her body. He hadn’t meant to kill her. He honestly hadn’t, or at least, he didn’t think he had. He was just too uncertain with the knife. He didn’t know what he was doing, how to set them free.
He stood now, naked, in the bathroom. He was all over the news, splattered all over it, and he didn’t know how long he could stay here, quiet and ignored, even in this place where they took only cash and asked no questions. His face was everywhere on the news. So was Sammy’s, so were the pictures the police had taken. He hadn’t thought they could show pictures like that on television and he’d barely been able to eat since he saw them.
The room was filled with steam from the hot bath. The girls were swimming now, in water as hot as he could keep it.
Something had broken. He hadn’t just cut into Sammy’s skin, he’d somehow managed to cut through the flesh and membranes between his waking and dreaming worlds.
He dreamed all the time now, dreamed awake as he would walk down a supermarket aisle in the middle of the night, his girls alongside him looking soft and candle-lit under the harsh antiseptic fluorescent glare. His older daughter pushed the younger one in her stroller as he looked for medicine, bandages, anything, and he could see them and smile and reach down and pat his daughter’s curls and that was real, even though he knew his daughters were really in a bath at the hotel and that was real too. He tried not to think about it any more — just let it all wash over him and accept the truth of everything.
But the truth he couldn’t accept was that he didn’t know what to do now.
He didn’t know how to take care of his girls. They were small and soft and red and wrong, and he didn’t know what to do with them and he was afraid of everything, of bruising or breaking them, of each little scratch they might get, each infection. Their breathing was shallow and erratic; their eyes refused to open. He didn’t take them to a hospital — he couldn’t. A hospital wouldn’t know what to do with them either, and worse, a hospital would take them away from him. He couldn’t stand that.
“We’re going to die,” the oldest had told him, and he refused to believe it. She talked to him, told him the truth of it, that they didn’t know how to survive out in the world, that they couldn’t live without the safety and shelter their mother had given them, and he would lie curled on the bed, listening to her, crying, holding on tight to the dream of her, asking what he could do.
She finally told him last night.
He stood now, in the warm bathroom, naked and waiting, his breathing panicked, his heart calm. They swam in the tub, and they stood right next to him, even the littlest — she’d taken her first steps the night before, and now she clung to his leg, as her older sister looked up at Daddy and held his hand and told him everything was going to be all right.
He held tight to the knife.
She reached up with one finger, and with a fingernail that was both impossibly long and impossibly sharp for such a little girl, she traced a line across his abdomen, and showed him where to cut.
LIFE STORY
David woke up on the floor, something running sticky down his mouth and chin, curled up tight on his side, his whole body wrapped protectively around the cramping fist that help a scrap of paper.
For a minute, he couldn’t remember where he was or what he'd been doing. His head felt like it was going to crack open and he wiped at his mouth with his hand — blood, his nose had been bleeding, and standing up made him feel like he was going to fall right back down.
He stared at the piece of paper in his hand. He couldn’t quite bring it into focus, and he sat down hard on the bed. Bedroom. This was Mark’s room, not his. What was he doing in here? Hell, what time was it? Why wasn’t he still at work?
He looked down at the paper again. Torn edge, some handwriting, small and cramped — Mark’s handwriting. His eyes shifted to the floor. There was a small notebook full of the same writing, sprawled open, a matching ragged edge to the page.
What was I doing?
He reached for the book. The room still felt like it was spinning, out of control, a fairground ride with stripped gears and parts missing behind the walls. As soon as he held it, he remembered:
A notebook. The notebook.
“You have to find it,” the old man had said. There was a wild look in his eyes that David associated with people raving about Jesus, or the government. But this guy was talking about —
“A notebook. It’s in your roommate’s bedroom. You have to find it. You have to go home right now and you have to find it.”
David couldn’t look the man in the eye. He’d thought he was just a panhandler, but this — why did the crazies have to get right in his face? “Please leave me alone,” David muttered, trying to find a way to get past him on the crowded sidewalk.
“You have to listen,” the man said. “You have to find it. Megan would have wanted you to.”
David’s head snapped up. “What — what did you just say?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what any of this means, but you’ll know. You need to find it and you need to keep it safe. You need to hide it from Mark.”
“Listen, who are you? How do you know Mark?”
The man grabbed his shoulders. “I don’t know him. I don’t know any of this. You told me to tell you this. You wrote it down. You have to — ”
Whatever David had to do was drowned out by the blare of a car horn, the squeal of brakes.
The car missed David by inches. The old man folded like a doll as the car hit him, as the car carried his body through the jewelry store window.
There were screams and cries of “my God, did you see that?” and the plate-glass window falling apart, and the car’s horn was stuck, one drawn out end-of-everything howl.
David should have stayed. He should have talked to the police. Instead, he dropped the sandwich and chips he’d bought, shoved his way through the crowd, and ran. Ran all the way home.
Mark’s room was a wreck. David had emptied out drawers, torn the bedding apart, and he could barely remember doing it.
He flipped through the notebook; it didn’t make much sense. It looked like a diary, but Mark was generally so neat and organized and methodical and this was anything but. It was looping and elliptical, full of footnotes and additions and marginalia.
He looked at the scrap of paper again. Just a tiny section of a page, and it read:
“March 12. David falls through rotten floor at old Sunderland house. Shatters bones in right leg. Never walks right again.”
He stared at it and frowned. That didn’t make any sense. It had never happened. He remembered the Sunderland house, a sprawling and abandoned old wreck; he and Mark used to play there a lot when they were kids, but nothing bad ever happened to them there.
He flipped through the notebook again. Everything else in there had really happened, it looked like, but why would Mark have made up just one thing? And why couldn’t he remember tearing it out?
Unless —
No. This was crazy. As crazy as that old man.
You need to find it and you need to keep it safe.
What if — what if this did happen? And now that he’d torn it out of Mark’s diary — now it never happened? He didn’t believe it. But he stared at the scrap of paper for a long time. Then he went over to the desk, emptied the jar of pens, and grabbed a black felt marker.
He flipped back through the pages until he found a date he knew by heart, eight years before. All Mark had to commemorate it was the terse sentence, “Megan dies.”
David’s eyes filled with tears. He still missed his sister, so much, every day. He uncapped the pen and drew a thick dark line through the words.
This is stupid, he thought, wondering if he expected her to walk through the door.
But then something happened —
The line he had drawn disappeared, the ink bled into the paper, dr
ied away to nothing.
He stared, then did it again, watching the new line vanish as well.
He thought for a second, then grabbed a ballpoint and wrote next to the words: “But David gets to say goodbye to her first.”
He felt lightheaded and strange. Why had he written that? Of course he’d had a chance to say goodbye to her; he remembered seeing her in the hospital.
Or did he only remember it that way now?
No. This is crazy. He reached a hand to rip out the whole page — then remembered how he’d woken up bleeding. Mark would be home soon. He needed to put everything back, back the way it was. Even this, he decided.
But first he flipped ahead.
Wait — this wasn’t just a diary. This went into the future.
Mark starting a software company. Selling it for millions. Running for senate. Running for president. Winning.
He took it all in with a weird half-smile frozen on his face. This was just like Mark, ambitious, full of dreams and plans. He’d always been like that.
But this was weird. Obsessively detailed. Unless it was real.
David found the page for today. Found a space in the margin and wrote, “Homeless man tells David about the notebook.”
He stared at that for a moment, nodded, and went back Mark’s bathroom. The whole medicine cabinet lifted right out of the wall — mirror and all — he remembered doing this, now, finding the book in its plastic bag. There was an inch or two of clearance between the back of the cabinet and the rough plaster. He put the notebook back where he’d found it and slid the cabinet back into place.
He had Mark’s room looking more or less the way he’d found it by the time Mark got home.
Dinner was quiet, takeout pizza in front of the tube, and Mark was exhausted from a long day at his job. He hadn’t asked David about his day, and David wasn’t going to say anything.
Slices Page 7