The Hare

by Melanie Finn

  Tony tried a number of times, and, at last, the machine accepted $750.

  “I’ll go to the bank, then come right back.”

  “You got a friend coming to give you a lift?”

  “Yes,” Rose nodded, smiled confidently. Tony went back into the garage, leaving her in the empty office. The problems were multiple, the car, the lift, the money, the lack of money, the bank, the rental car. She had once borrowed two hundred bucks from Ginny; she could not ask again because this would skew the one friendship she had. She couldn’t even ask Ginny for a lift, because Ginny was on the way to Hanover to mainline toxic chemicals. What about the book club ladies? Connie? To ask for help was to admit need; but with them it would be worse: she’d be admitting to all of them that she didn’t have anyone else to ask. She couldn’t possibly expose herself like that. Dumbly, Rose stared at her phone. She dialed the office.

  “Margie’s Farm Fresh Eggs,” came the cheery answer.

  “Nick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Rose.”

  “Heya, Rose. What’s up?”

  “My car, Nick, it’s broken down and I need a ride.”

  “Where’re ya?”

  She told him she’d need a lift first to the office, because she had to pick up her car insurance card which was in her desk, and then to the Enterprise car rental in St. Johnsbury.

  Ten minutes later, Nick arrived. His car — a late ’90s Subaru Outback — could not be street legal. White smoke farted from the tailpipe. The left rear window was duct-taped with clear plastic. She ran through the rain and got in. There was trash all over the floor. She carefully tunneled her feet inside the mass of soda cans and fast food wrappers. Sitting, she felt the engine’s vibration jarring up her spine.

  Nick smiled. “Like my rig?”

  “Hey, it’s moving. Which is more than I can say for mine.”

  They peeled out onto the road and Rose clung to her seat-belt, laughing despite herself. Nick turned up the volume on the radio. “I love this song!”

  Golden Earring’s “Radar Love.” Still playing decades later. She watched him singing, the tendons in his jaw visible beneath his skin. She watched his hands on the wheel, they were beautiful hands, like those of a sculptor. She watched the soft skin at the base of his throat rise and fall with his breath, his singing, and she felt her humiliation ebb and her feet warm with the furnace blast of the Subaru’s unsubtle heating. Soon, they were at the compound.

  He waited for her in the car while she rushed in to just grab my car insurance from my desk. “Hello?” she called out. No answer. For good measure, she checked Bob’s office. He wasn’t here, perhaps out grooming 12-year-olds. Which wasn’t funny. Rose was quick, she went right for the petty cash in the safe, she took nine hundred. She phoned the credit card company and begged Ivan, a reluctant customer service advisor with a Southern accent to extend her credit just this once for the car rental.

  Out the window, she saw Nick in the Subaru on his phone. He was in no hurry.

  “Let me speak with my supervisor,” Ivan told her, as she watched Nick in the car, laughing at something his friend was saying. All that life, all that joy. All that time. At long last, Ivan agreed, a temporary extension and Rose felt a flush of victory. She’d gotten the credit card company to give her more debt! Hurrah! She hurried back out, down the steps and through the rain. Nick was waiting for her. He has a fast car, she was thinking, fast enough for them to drive away.

  “Check it out!” He thrust his phone at her. “This new aging app, I can make myself your age and visa versa!”

  He showed her a photo of Bob. “But that’s your dad.”

  “Freaked me out! That is me in forty years.”

  Rose peered again: she discerned now, the difference, Nick’s nose was straighter than Bob’s. The app couldn’t quite capture what happened to your eyes, however, only the skin around them. The app didn’t show how the eyes dimmed and narrowed. The app didn’t show the cosmic skillet in the face that was life.

  Taking the phone back, he snapped her, then applied the app.

  “Here’s you at my age!”

  Rose regarded her image, the smooth skin and lustrous long hair. But the eyes told the truth: conversely, they were the tired eyes of a middle-aged woman, and in the face of a 17-year-old, they became the eyes of a girl who’d suffered immeasurable trauma.

  “You were a babe,” Nick said.

  “Really? You think so?”

  “Didn’t you look in the mirror?”

  Rose urged: “We’d better get to the rental place, they have weird hours.”

  “The tap’s still leaking.” Miranda stood with her hand on the offending item.

  “It’s the washer, I keep forgetting.” Rose was plumping cushions, even though they would never be plump enough for Miranda. Miranda’s entire adult life was a reprimand to Rose — to show her how single-motherhood could look if you did it right. There was no concrete evidence of this, apart from Miranda’s success. The rebuke was insidious, like an odorless toxin that kills families while they sleep. Rose could not fault her daughter. She was dutiful, she checked boxes. She called, she sent photos of Anika, and invited Rose to stay, and Rose went to the show-off house overlooking the sea in Marblehead, the en suite guest room, the thick cream carpeting. Once a year, Miranda and Anika came to visit Vermont. They stayed at the Darling Hill Inn because Rose’s house was too small, though it was the same house Miranda had grown up in. Miranda didn’t want to be a burden, and Anika loved the animal sanctuary behind the inn. So they came, but didn’t really come, they ate out, they slept elsewhere, for two nights only.

  Rose would watch her daughter in the house — she usually agreed to come for tea or coffee. Checking that box. Miranda would hesitate upon entering, Rose was sure she sensed disbelief, the way she appraised the shabbiness she saw. People live like this! My own mother! My own former self! No matter how hard Rose worked to hide what was broken or breaking, Miranda would find the house’s weakness. The tap, the roof. Or, “Have you thought of having the house insulated with this new cellulose stuff? It would stay so much warmer.” Sure, Rose silently replied, with ten spare grand I’d love to insulate my house with cellulose.

  Anika, only five, picked up on these cues. “Your house smells funny, Grandma.” Mold spores, dust, dead mice, live mice. Anika was terrified of the noises in the walls. “Those are the mice,” Miranda would say. “It’s really their house, but they let Grandma live here.”

  Rose prepared the tea, she had bought eclairs from the organic baker in East Burke at huge expense — half her food budget for the week; worth it, though, for even Miranda approved of them. Anika was outside picking dandelions. “Leave her,” Rose urged, for it was lovely to see a little girl in the garden again. “How’s everything?”

  “Busy.” Miranda was always busy, CFO of a tech firm outside Boston, God-knows what they did, though Miranda had calmly explained it to Rose a number of times, something about wearable medical devices. Miranda was on a plane half the time, she had an excellent nanny with a salary twice Rose’s, plus benefits. She also had a housekeeper to vacuum the cream carpeting. Miranda had a sense of noblesse obligée toward these women, she valued their hard, simple work for it allowed her to do her own hard, complicated work. Miranda sipped her tea. “And you, Mom?”

  “Yes, everything’s fine.” No mention of the car, the melting credit card, the humiliations — no proof for Miranda of her mother’s incompetence.

  Miranda shifted, pursed her lips. Rose guessed, then, there was a specific reason for the visit, and why Anika should be left to the dandelions.

  “I want to ask you about my father.”

  The bad penny. Rose pointlessly rearranged the eclairs.

  “We don’t know 100% that he’s dead,” Miranda said.

  “Well. Legally, he’s dead.”

  “That was you.”

  “Because no one had seen or heard from him for a decade. It seemed likely.” />
  “But he might not be dead.”

  Rose watched Anika, the bright posy in her hands, she’d gathered so many dandelions and Rose wished she’d stop because the bees required the flowers. Rose considered: what is it Miranda needs now? What is it I must pluck from my wallet like a silk scarf, the magic trick of ski lessons or the field trip to Montreal? What is it I must give without a hint of the cost?

  With one hand, Rose smoothed the frown line that tended to tighten between her eyebrows. Her voice was careful, practiced: “I think it was difficult for you not having a father.”

  “That’s not the point,” Miranda said. A fly buzzed against the window pane. “I’m hiring a private detective.”

  “If that’s what you need to do.” Another fly, then three. Bluebottles. Rose thought about the mouse trap she’d set — and forgotten — in the pantry. “It’s your money.”

  Clink went the cup on the tray. Miranda exhaled. “It’s not about money. It’s about my father.”

  Of course this conversation had to be had, it had festered for years like the dead mice. “Is there something specific I can tell you about him that will help you?”

  “Oh, Mom.” A patient sigh. “That’s part of the problem. I only know him through what you’ve said about him, which isn’t much. I mean lacrosse, he liked books. That’s not much, is it?”

  “He was secretive. And I was very young. I didn’t ask the questions I should have.”

  Miranda only half-listened. “Plus, I don’t know why he left.”

  “He didn’t leave, he went to prison.” Rose poured another tea. She was drinking fast.

  “And when he got out? Did you try to find him?”

  Rose pressed her lips together. “No. I was glad he was gone.”

  “Not a letter, nothing? I mean, you were just OK with not hearing from him?”

  “He’d made life so difficult for us. You don’t remember.”

  “Is it possible he decided not to come back?” Miranda interjected. “Maybe — that’s it, maybe he thought we didn’t want him.”

  For a long moment, there was silence. Rose ate the eclair, the cream inelegantly spurting out the far end. Surreptitiously, she wiped her sticky hand on the couch. “You think he decided not to come back because I was unwelcoming?”

  “Maybe, Mom, maybe. He was ashamed and he thought we didn’t want him. And if he made that decision, he could still be alive, and I can find him.”

  “Find him?”

  “Why not? It’s easy to find people these days.”

  “I don’t think —”

  “It’s possible, Mom. It is just possible that my father is alive.”

  Rose nodded, trying to give the impression of calm attentiveness while scurrying around her brain to see if she should or could concoct a different, new story that might satisfy her daughter — not just satisfy but alleviate. Alleviate the belief that someone was to blame, perhaps Miranda herself, the two-year-old child she’d been that last time she saw her father, the brief trial, the sentencing, the unbelieving, incredulous man in shackles being taken away. Oh: they hadn’t loved Bennett enough. Hadn’t welcomed him with confetti and bunting. Rose summoned conviction: “He would have come back if he could. For you. For you. He loved you. He adored you.”

  “Then why didn’t he come back?” It was almost a whine. Miranda suddenly seemed a child again, the trappings of her success were a dress-up, a costume.

  “I don’t know.”

  Miranda folded her hands, simply yet perfectly manicured. “I used to believe he was going to walk through the door. One day. And he’d take me in his arms and give me the biggest hug. There was one time —”

  Rose sat very still. She felt the hair raise on her arms.

  “— when I was sure he was home. I almost asked you. But I remember thinking you’d tell me if he was back. And it was right around the time Billy died and you were so sad.”

  A blob of eclair cream shimmered in Rose’s lap — too big to dab away discreetly. Should she take the blame — Yes, that’s it, I told him to stay away and he did. It was, ironically, the lesser lie. But entirely insufficient. She knew her daughter to be willful — take credit for it, you raised her, Ginny had said.

  “I’ll do whatever I can to help,” Rose spoke quietly. “But I’m concerned for you, for your expectations.”

  Miranda slipped back into her form-fitting CFO-skin. “They’re my expectations. Mine.”

  “You’re right, they are.”

  “We should go.”

  “No. Don’t. I haven’t even seen Anika.”

  But Miranda was standing, she was hugging Rose, and Rose found herself still incredulous that she came only to her daughter’s shoulder; Miranda had Bennett’s height. Rose wanted to hold on, for the hug to last and deepen, so she could smell her daughter, so that some layer of her might stay on the surface of Rose for days to come. Yet Miranda stepped back, she always did. She was so elegant, so matching in navy blue and white. “It’s not about you, Mom, it’s not about anything you did wrong.”

  There was silence. And then the drip of the tap, that ruthless metronome.

  Rose stood watching their car recede and she felt a sudden panic; she must run after them and call them back and find the words, the sentences that could be bundled into a sufficient and sensible explanation. Yet the car kept going.

  The name rang no bell. Rose stared at the package sent by C. Barrow, an address in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She guessed newsprint, magazines — perhaps some kind of solicitation? She almost threw it away.

  By now the rain had turned to snow, and there was a prediction of several inches overnight. It would be interesting driving the rental — a Ford Focus with summer tires — down the hill in the morning. Snow this late in the spring always made her fret for the birds who had just arrived, for the trees just daring to bud, and the creatures of the woods and earth who had already endured the winter and were frantically searching for forgotten stashes. Spring is more lethal than winter.

  Pouring another wine, Rose sat down at the kitchen table and opened the package. Photographs. Of her as a teenager. A dozen. And a note. From someone called Chris. Chris?

  Dear Rosie,

  I didn’t know I’d kept these, but somehow they have stayed with me through many moves (and lives) in an old shoebox. I am down-sizing, attempting Zen, and was about to throw them out. But I thought you might want them, or at least it should be up to you to do what you wish with them. I don’t know what I feel looking through them. Mostly old. Maybe a little bewildered by how much passes through us. I hope you are well.

  Yours,

  Chris

  The deck of pictures were from the days when people used film and sent the rolls away in their neat black canisters, the magic metamorphosis in a dark room, moments fixed in time, and returned in the bright yellow envelopes. Rose stared at herself in many attitudes — dress lifted in the breeze, clutching a hat, making a face with an ice cream, laughing. Beautiful. How had she not realized her own beauty when she’d had it? Yet, she could not remember believing herself beautiful. As Nick had said: You were a babe. Her high breasts, her brown skin and dark hair — it felt almost impossible that once she had been inside that body. And Chris was right — what to feel? Old, bewildered. As if dementia had already set in and she knew she should remember him precisely but only felt a wild, grappling — a kind of vertigo. What was lost, fallen away — how much passes through us. Chris? High school Chris.

  Re-reading the letter, she decided he’d taken time to write it, he’d wanted the right tone — to convey his care, still. As if the bright pieces of the past should be handled gently, polished like pebbles, even if merely decorative at this point. He hadn’t thrown out these pictures, these memories, but kept them through many moves. And many lives. Which meant, what? Different jobs, different women — children, griefs, divorce. But why send them to her — why the need to contact her? And how had he found her? Was it creepy, stalker-y — or just Facebook?


  It’s easy to find people these days, Miranda had said.

  Rose reached for the one photograph of Chris with her — skinny, young, as if he hadn’t had his growth spurt. Peering closer, now with her reading glasses, she recalled him more precisely, or rather an aura of him: comfort. He’d been funny and gentle and smart, qualities which made him unpopular. He’d wanted to be an artist — and that had been the plan, to go to Parsons together. But he’d changed his mind, something like that, and gone out West, one of those Californian universities — Berkeley, Stanford.

  Rose finished her wine, and went to bed.

  Yet she was writing a letter to him in her head, lying in the dark, composing and editing, so she got up and came back to the table, pen and paper.

  Chris, she wrote. Thank you for the package. I hope you are well, too. Wellness is increasingly important, isn’t it? I am well.

  She almost signed off. Then:

  If you ever come to Vermont, let me know. We could meet for a drink.

  In hopeful wellness,

  Rose

  Bob was busy shredding documents, Rose could hear the whir of the machine. He was hunched over it, she could just see the bald pate of his head, his soft, rounded shoulders. He’d been shredding for nearly ten minutes. She knocked and said, “Bob?” Knocked again, louder, and then finally hammered with the palm of her hand and shouted above the shredder, “Bob!”

  He whipped around with the exact look of a child caught out, it was such a caricature, Rose nearly laughed out loud.

  “Jesus Christ, Rose, I didn’t hear you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she made no attempt to appear so. “I just need you to sign a couple of checks for suppliers.”

  “Sure.” He pivoted his chair to face her, and the shredder fell silent. He was looking at her, and she was careful not to let her eyes slide to the shredder.

  “Just these three.”

  Bob signed, the onerous task of lifting a pen.

  “Great, thanks.” She turned the page of the checkbook. “And just these two more.”