The Hare

by Melanie Finn

  “A pretty low bar, right? Don’t tell him. He thinks it’s because he was so good in bed.” They laughed together, walking on until they crested the ridge and stood on a granite slab overlooking Victory Bog. Below them a burred conglomeration of trees and marsh.

  “It’s so wild,” Ginny said, inhaling. “I wish I was like you and could just plunge into it and not immediately get lost.”

  “I’ve been lost plenty of times.”

  “You always found your way out. Me, they’d have to come in with dogs and helicopters and they’d find me twenty feet from the road. I’m hopeless.”

  “You help people find themselves. That’s your job.”

  Ginny shrugged. “Maybe. Though I think it’s a self-sorting process. The people who come to me aren’t the ones who are really lost. Those who are just carry on, moving helter-skelter through life like those big shit spreaders that fertilize the hay fields, just spraying shit everywhere.”

  Rose could see Bennett at the wheel of his giant shit-spreader, veering wildly from side to side.

  She said: “Look at fiddleheads coming in.” They stooped to admire the intricacy of the delicate green curls just breaching the dark earth. “I used to collect these all the time. I should come up here with a bag tomorrow. They’re so delicious with butter.”

  “I was always worried I’d pick the wrong kind and poison myself and Larry.”

  “Look at the shape — they come up earlier than a lot of the other ferns. And they have this delicate little gold gift wrapping. There’s another fern that looks similar, but the wrapping is much thicker and coarser. Once you know, you don’t forget.”

  Rose thought of Billy, who’d first shown her these insistent coils of green, suddenly there among the dead leaf litter. The woods’r a lahda.

  “A long time ago,” Rose began, and considered changing course. It wasn’t too late to make the story about fiddleheads and morels. She was less sure when she continued, speech was almost a bodily process she couldn’t quite control. “A friend of mine was killed.”

  There. She’d said it. Ginny glanced at her, intent.

  “I knew the man who did it.”

  Minutes passed in silence. The wind swept up from the bog.

  “Killing someone — not by accident — he planned it, not like going to the hardware store and buying duct tape and rope, but with clear intention. I think it was a kind of revenge.”

  “Was it frightening?” Ginny asked in her quiet therapist’s voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not just to lose someone you cared about in a violent way but to be in proximity to the person who took your friend’s life? We think we know people.”

  Rose often thought about what would have happened if Bennett had lived. He might have killed her and taken Miranda. He might have vanished and haunted them for years — he’d be haunting them still, unsettling their lives with unexpected visits, his random shit-spreading. There certainly would have been no round of Happy Families. Now, Rose contemplated the possibility that Bennett had been capable of killing — not just in the broken end, but all along. The body in the road had been a pattern not an aberration. Killing Billy wasn’t the culmination but a direction. She felt cold and pulled her jacket around her.

  “Are you OK?” Ginny asked.

  Rose was surprised to find her fists bunched in her jacket pockets, and part of her breath seemed lodged under the diaphragm. She exhaled, smoothed her palms on the front of her jeans, and then worried that Ginny would note her tension. “We should get back.”

  Ginny put her hand on Rose’s shoulder for a moment as they entered the woods, then let it drop when the path narrowed to single file and Rose went first. The tall trees created an intense sense of the vertical, Rose felt very much surrounded, not in a fearful way, but of being among or within. This early in the year, the sky was still visible above them, pale and feathery with light cloud. Way up there, the leafless branches swayed gently in the wind that Rose couldn’t feel down here. It was so still, she could hear her breath and even Ginny’s.

  At length, they came out into the fields and the wind found them. Ginny pulled her coat down tighter. “There was these two teenage boys from somewhere around here and they murdered a couple in Hanover. A lovely couple, professors at the college. The boys slashed their throats open. And when the police began investigating, they realized the boys had this whole story they’d told themselves, about how they were going to get money and move to Australia. They’d ordered knives. They’d staked out this couple’s home for days. And yet to meet them, you’d think they were just average kids. And probably they were, in one part of themselves. ‘A’ students, on the soccer team. But in the shadow, they’d found another set of clothes.”

  “And they put them on,” Rose said.

  Ginny nodded. “There are many mechanisms of denial and emotional subterfuge.”

  Rose imagined that right now she’d tell Ginny the story. All of it. That Rose had her own set of secret shadow clothes and that Bennett was buried in the cellar. What would such a confession feel like? And what purpose might it serve? For Ginny to deliver atonement? Would Ginny justify her action — or tear down the justifications? Ginny would wonder, “Why didn’t you just call the cops?” No phone. Fear of Bennett. Self-protection. All these were viable. But Rose knew why she’d killed Bennett, and Ginny might guess. It was like getting rid of mice.

  Instead she said, “I was with him in a car once, and he ran over someone on the road. It was late at night. He didn’t stop.”

  Ginny made a small, thoughtful frown. “And you, what did you do?”

  Rose watched her breath cloud the air, the heat of her interior meeting the cold exterior. “It felt unreal, it wasn’t happening, and even afterward — even now — it feels like it didn’t happen. And yet I know, I know that it did.”

  “Were you the driver?”

  “No.” Then more emphatically: “No.”

  “Do you have a question, then, for yourself about your culpability? Your guilt?”

  “I was young. Is that an excuse?”

  “If it’s an excuse you want, then sure. We’re young, we’re so incredibly stupid. We don’t have the data to make informed decisions, so we make bad ones.”

  “Miranda wouldn’t have sat there like I did in the passenger seat, so passive, so weak.”

  Ginny smiled. “Take the credit then, you raised her. Miranda kicks ass.”

  “Is that it? Everything comes back to our childhoods?” Rose burst out: “We’re nailed there!”

  “Oh, I don’t think we can admit defeat that easily. Despite my profession, or maybe because of it, I’m a great believer in free will. I see it all the time.” Ginny put her hand on Rose’s arm. “It’s the point, isn’t it? Of carrying on, of bothering at all. To get to the place where you can at last say, ‘I’m truly myself.’ And like that person.”

  “Look,” Rose urged, pointing to the human-baby print of a yearling bear.

  “I love how you show me these things,” Ginny said.

  They followed the scat for several hundred yards before the bear turned off into dense undergrowth. Their path now bled into the top of Rose’s road, and their talk turned to Ginny’s son’s difficult transition out of a long-term relationship. The girl didn’t want to let go and Ginny was afraid she’d “accidentally” get pregnant.

  “Ironic, isn’t it, this equipment we have,” Rose said. “We think we can weaponize it. But we can’t really, we’re the ones left with the crying baby and the lost opportunities.”

  Rose was surprised to see a car parked outside Billy’s house. A young couple came around from the back, talking excitedly. He had a dark beard and coal-black eyes, she was round-faced, apple-cheeked, her hair in dreads. They both had various piercings. Rose tried not to judge, but still she did, wondering if they’d regret the holes in their skin when it began to sag and wrinkle. “Hey,” the girl said. “D’you live around here?”

  “The house
next door.”

  “Wow. Cool. D’you like it? Are you happy? This place has great feng shui.”

  “It does?”

  “Sure! The river, the mountains, everything is, like, in alignment with ley lines. It’s really powerful.” Then she allowed a small frown. “The only thing is the road, being too straight, it can carry money away.”

  Rose nearly burst out laughing but she merely nodded and made a non-committal, “Huh.”

  “We’d have to put in, like, some really powerful plantings, a garden right in front of the house and maybe even a fish pond to make sure our profits don’t get carried away.”

  “Maybe I should have done that,” Rose murmured.

  “You’re a gardener, then?” Ginny queried.

  “Hemp,” the boy said. “We’re doing CBD.”

  “How long have you lived here?” The apple girl turned to Rose and Ginny. “You live together?”

  “No! Ginny’s just my friend. But I’ve lived here for over 30 years.”

  “So you know what happened to the guy who used to own this place? Billy someone.”

  “Billy was a woman.”

  “Oh? I heard some weird story.”

  “To be honest, I’m surprised the house is on the market,” Rose countered. “It’s been empty for years. It’s barely standing up.”

  “I’m good with my hands,” the boy held them up as proof. “We reckon we can fix it up, we’re in no hurry and it’s got good bones. We’ll restore it bit by bit. We’re going to start with the barn so we can grow inside all year ’round.”

  “I hope it works out for you.” Rose smiled, began to turn away, Ginny drafting in beside her. “It will be great to have young energy here.”

  “Thanks,” smiled the boy.

  “And about the Billy person,” the girl persisted.

  Rose glanced back.

  “It’s just the vibe, or something. You know, someone dies, they die, you can, like, deal with the spirit, even if it’s restless, you can call it up and talk to it. You can help it get some peace. But when someone disappears? Like, what is that? Like, that person just vanished? Super creepy.”

  “I’m sorry I really don’t know what happened,” Rose told her.

  They left the young couple to leap like puppies back toward the house: they were talking about the best color for the front door — lucky turquoise.

  Then Rose suddenly turned, called out to them: “Billy would be happy that you’re here. She was the most beautiful person I’ve ever met.”

  The girl smiled, put her hands together in prayer and made a little bow.

  “Look how old we are,” Ginny laughed as she and Rose walked on, arm-in-arm. “Young people are now growing pot for a living, and it’s totally legal. All those years Larry and I spent hiding our joints in the coffee tin!”

  “Want to help me plant a big garden and giant pond and then we’ll buy a sweepstakes ticket?”

  They giggled, tilting toward each other, as they turned into Rose’s driveway.

  The bed was the shape of her, the depression in the mattress bore her exact dimensions. Rose lay on her back in the dark, wide awake, her eyes dry, gritty, and her heart pattering noisily in her chest like a restless mouse under the floor. Billy. She thought again of her friend, and felt the loss with the same shock and intensity. Billy would be in her sixties. She’d seemed ancient to Rose at the time — but she’d only been a decade older. The finality of death was still incomprehensible, like trying to understand infinity. There remained the stubborn burr of doubt that a mistake had been made and if Rose phoned the old number Billy would pick up, tentatively, for the phone was a new and strange device, “Yep?”

  And with the memory of Billy always came the rush of alternatives, avenues of possibility pin-wheeling off from the hours around her death. If Bennett hadn’t come home at all. If she had surrendered to him — submitted — and moved to Maine. If she’d found some other language, a new and sweet tongue, to speak to him and persuade him to leave. She couldn’t quite pinpoint the chronology — when, exactly, the gears slid into place and she decided to stay and raise the gun and shoot to kill. These possibilities tailed back into the distant past. If she’d never met Bennett, if she hadn’t gone to MoMA that Sunday. If she could undo the knot of time and place.

  If she was an entirely different person.

  Rose had never returned to the graveyard where she’d left Billy; all she could imagine was the rotting corpse, the infestation of beetles and maggots, the tearing decimation of the small, light body. And how she herself was an agent for that ruthless thanatopsis. There should have been a search party, if anyone had cared or if Rosie had given the cops any doubt or prompting. But she didn’t. She let the narrative prevail: Billy had taken her own life, she went into the woods with her gun. Miranda hadn’t been able to understand the idea of self-obliteration and she had insisted that Billy had been happy, Billy had been her friend, didn’t Billy know that, how could Billy be sad when she was loved?

  “How could she shoot her dogs, Mama?” Miranda had demanded. “She wouldn’t do that, she just wouldn’t.”

  Sometimes, Rose could see right through her ceiling, through her roof to the obsidian-dark northern sky. The sky hangs above as a vast fabric, the dark banner of heaven, and the sky will one day come unpinned, the cloth drooping, dropping, the weight of it bearing down on the earth, this vast, heavy blackness, smothering, smothering and everything ending.

  The car had been making unhealthy sounds for some time and had nearly failed the last inspection. Something about the catalytic converter. Rose did not want to be one of those women, helpless in the face of the mechanical; she’d merely been hopeful. But at last the Tercel sputtered, coughed like a tuberculosis patient, and then began seizing. She edged it onto the shoulder. At that very instant, the rain began.

  For a long moment, she merely sat, the rain sloshing down on the windshield, slapping the sides of the car, urged by a vigorous wind. When the storm’s intensity increased, she opened the glove compartment and pulled out her insurance card, flipped open her phone and called the roadside assistance number on the back. A woman told her it would be 45 minutes. Rose waited. It was chilly, her feet were freezing, so she stamped them on the floor. Occasionally, other cars would pass, but they were blurred by the heavy curtain of rain. She was thinking about the women found murdered on the interstate. How a car felt so safe, gave you independence and mobility, you could lock the doors, you could drive away. But then, suddenly, it wasn’t safe, and you were far from help, you were too far out.

  At last, the tow truck loomed into view, the taillights smudging in the rain. The driver dashed out, exactly the man she’d expect a tow truck driver to be, generic middle age, overweight, ruddy complexioned. Should she be taking closer notice in case he was a murderer, and, escaping his clutches, she’d have to give a detailed description? Women needed to be vigilant at all times. She’d always wondered about those police sketches, watching cop shows on TV when the victim said things like, “His chin was wider, and his eyebrows a little closer together.” Rose therefore stared at this man, noting rheumy blue eyes, searching for any significant scars — Yes, officer, he had a jagged scar on his right cheek. But nothing distinguished this man. He was like her, utterly forgettable.

  “You gotta ride up front in my truck. I’ll hook ’er up.”

  Rose scuttled through the rain and climbed in the cab. A few minutes later, the driver joined her. “Ya know what they say about spring in Vermont. If ya don’t like the weatha, wait a minute,” he laughed. “Where we takin’ ya?”

  “Boudreau Automotive, you know it, on Village Road?”

  The prognosis was not good, replacing the catalytic converter was akin to a kidney transplant. Tony Boudreau sucked in his breath when he told her the estimate came in at just under two grand. He could do the work now, it would take a couple of days.

  Rose felt her gut tighten, as if someone was pushing her belly button all the way in until
it touched her spine. What could she do? She had to have a car.

  “Can I make payments?”

  It pained him, she could see that. He knew how people struggled with their vehicles, the tough inspections, the problems with rust caused by the salt on the roads in winter, the rough roads that stripped bearings, tore apart suspensions. He twisted his mouth left then right, and at last: “We can work something out for the labor. But I can’t take on the cost of the parts.”

  Which were going to be nearly $1500. Plus, she’d need a rental car for a couple of days. “OK,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

  “I have to take payment now, though. For the parts.”

  Because, obviously, he’d been screwed over before. Not by liars and cheats, but people just like her who couldn’t afford to fix their cars and couldn’t afford not to. She reached into her purse, lifted out her wallet and took out her credit card. Suddenly, she was wildly hot — heat surging up from her drying womb, through her chest, setting her neck and head on fire. Sweat prickled her scalp. Her face was burning.

  Tony noticed. “You need a glass of water?”

  “Just ah —” she fanned herself. “Hot.”

  “Yeah,” he gave her a gentle smile. “My wife’s the same. She suffers.”

  As the heat drained from her, she wanted to burst into tears. She wanted to lean against this big, kind man and have him just give her a hug while she cried and cried, the desire to sob was like thirst or hunger, a purely physical craving. But instead he tapped into his computer, and turned the credit card reader toward her. She slid in the card. Processing… it read mercilessly. Processing…

  “Can be slow.” Tony scratched his chin.

  Processing…

  Processing…

  At last the answer came. Declined.

  Rose frowned earnestly. “They must have not yet got my payment.”

  “You want to try for a smaller amount?”

  “Could you? Then I can get a cash balance from my other account.” This sounded plausible. My other account. Because she had a number of them, and she merely had to contact her banker and have him move some money around.