Bunny Boy and Me

by Nancy Laracy

  “You have full run of this house, Bunny Boy. Choose another room for the time being.” I playfully grabbed his fluffy tail. I got nowhere.

  Bunny Boy had no interest in hanging out in any other rooms. The lagomorph lounge was his fortress. He pounded the door a second time with his hind legs, startling both of us. He finally gave up and laid against the door, downtrodden.

  “The room’s fair game in the morning, Bunny Boy.”

  That night, I bribed him off the landing with a piece of banana and brought him to our bed. He swallowed the banana slice whole but refused my apology and dove onto Ward’s side of the bed defiantly.

  I slipped under the covers, foraged around for my rosary beads, and started to pray, acting as if I couldn’t care less that Bunny Boy had snubbed me. Bunny Boy rolled over playfully on Ward’s lap and looked my way, hoping to get my attention. So I kept praying. He tugged at the string on Ward’s pajama pants and binkied to the bottom of the bed. He thumped the thick down comforter and stared at me, desperately trying to get my attention.

  “Our Father, who art in—” I started but never got any further. Bunny Boy lunged onto my lap and snatched the rosary beads, attacking them. Within moments, the crucifix was hanging from his teeth and the beads were tangled around his neck and front paws.

  “Surrender the beads, Bunny Boy,” I ordered jokingly. He started shaking the cross, causing the beads to tighten.

  “The beads please, Bunny Boy?” I asked quietly, fearing his excitement might cause the beads to tighten around his fragile neck. Slowly, he put his front paws forward and his head down into the submissive position, admitting defeat and seeking my assistance.

  Ever so slowly and skillfully, Ward and I unwrapped the beads. Almost in gratitude, Bunny Boy nestled on my chest and purred.

  When I woke up the next morning, Bunny Boy was sitting on the landing, waiting again to be let in. I wondered if he had been there all night. I walked down the stairs slowly, taunting him.

  “Good morning, Bunny Boy. How long have you been sitting there, pal?”

  Bunny Boy started scratching at the door with a frenetic pace.

  “Do you want to go back in your room?”

  Bunny Boy flipped his hind legs and sprayed me.

  “Bunny Boy just adores you, Nance,” said Ward, who was watching from above.

  “I know he does,” I replied, rolling up the bottom of my pajama pants as if getting sprayed with urine was typical when you have a house rabbit who loves you. I opened the door and Bunny Boy tore across the room and sprung onto the sofa, scaling the back like a skilled rock climber. He plunged off the back headfirst, down into Julie’s laundry basket, which was full of her old, overpriced Beanie Babies, and sent them sailing across the floor with his back legs. Bunny Boy was in his glory, back on his protected turf.

  That day, my mother and I ventured out to buy spring flowers from Jake’s Place, our local garden center that doubled up as a pet store. With some guilt, we left Bunny Boy at home as there was no room in the car. Bunny Boy loved visiting Jake’s Place for its maze of corners and crevices he could explore, as well as for its namesake Jake, the store’s large, gentle resident golden retriever who tolerated Bunny Boy’s nosiness—and I knew he would be upset. When we returned home, Bunny Boy was waiting in the foyer, displaying some major bunny attitude with his body language. He hopped past me deliberately and sniffed my mother’s feet, looking up at her in adoration.

  “How’s my favorite grandson?” Mom said. Bunny Boy gamboled into the kitchen, stopping to look back at her, hoping she would follow. I chased after him, trying to make amends, when I stumbled upon a mess. Bunny Boy’s litter pan was flipped upside down and the contents were scattered all over. He flipped his hind legs up and plopped down on his side, looking at me as if to say, “Here’s why you shouldn’t have left me home.”

  “Come here, you silly old rabbit.” I whisked him up, my arms aching from lugging all those flowers around. When I rolled Bunny Boy over to give him a big raspberry on his belly, I gasped. His underside was bright red and shiny, like a newly polished sports car—and it was full of scratch marks. Bunny Boy’s beautiful white fur was gone. We ran up to the family room and found clumps of fur scattered around the freshly cleaned carpet.

  “He was a very busy rabbit while we were out,” Mom said. “And he clearly had an allergic reaction to the carpet cleaner. You better get him to the vet.”

  Bunny Boy spent the car ride over to Franklin Lakes Animal Hospital licking himself, irritating his skin even more. Sheri, one of the technicians we had come to know, was standing behind the front desk when we barged in.

  “And why is Bunny Boy here today, Mrs. Laracy?” she asked, referencing the fact that we came to visit more often than most pets did.

  “He ripped out the fur on his chest. I believe he had a bad reaction to some carpet cleaner.”

  She looked at me, aghast.

  “This is relatively minor,” said Dr. Welch once she examined him. “Bunny Boy’s one tough rabbit. I’ll give him a shot of steroids to stop the allergic reaction and some cream to put on his stomach.”

  I felt worn out. I thought back to his broken jaw, which hadn’t been his fault, much like the carpet cleaner.

  “There’s no charge for this one,” Dr. Welch said. “Try to relax, Mrs. Laracy.”

  Bunny Boy was hyper for the rest of the day. I should have recognized the familiar signs. On the ride home, he circled the seat of the car like a dog chasing its tail, hopping from the seat to the floor and back up again. At the house, Bunny Boy dove out of my arms and started racing around, skidding into everything, darted from one piece of furniture to the next, sniffing the wood, licking the fabric, and pawing wildly. Julie and Chris egged him on, chasing him around and wrestling him on the carpet until he should have collapsed from exhaustion. But Bunny Boy didn’t let up.

  I tried to start dinner, but the fun and chaos from the living room drew me back in. When I walked through the archway leading into the room, I saw Bunny Boy fly at least eight feet from the sofa across the living room, as if he had been shot out of a canon. He was panting heavily, and his nose was twittering faster than I had ever seen. His whiskers flapped wildly. His eyes looked like they might bulge right out of his head. Bunny Boy looked possessed.

  “We have a jacked-up rabbit!” I yelled to the kids, once it dawned on me. “Dr. Welch gave Bunny Boy a shot of steroids.”

  Julie and Chris looked at each other, then at Bunny Boy, then at me. They knew what they were witnessing. They had seen me when I was on steroids. Dirty laundry that was left on the floor was thrown out the back door. Bedrooms got torn apart. Backpacks flew. Homework was marked up and sent back for revisions. Shoes got polished. Food that wasn’t clearly marked became my property.

  I, too, had been accused of looking possessed.

  On top of the sofa, Bunny Boy pounced back and forth as if he was mirroring the movements of a pacing tiger. He looked at the hardwood floors on one side and the carpet on the other, weighing his choices.

  “We need to get him down before he jumps,” I said, as if we were luring him down from committing suicide. Finally, we cornered him and Bunny Boy leapt onto Chris’s shoulder, balancing there on his haunches like a parrot.

  “Calm down, little man,” Chris whispered, gently petting his head.

  “You’re going to be fine, sweetie,” said Julie, rubbing noses with him.

  I wished I had a camera and a tape recorder nearby. When I went on a steroid rage, I never heard those words; instead, I heard hostile voices: “Calm down, Mom. You’re acting insane!”

  But Bunny Boy was incapable of calming down. He flew off the chair and crashed dangerously into the coffee table. Then he leapt up to the back of the sofa again, skipping the seat.

  I quickly called Dr. Welch.

  “Just keep Bunny Boy safe. The drugs should wear off by morning.”

  “Safe? How?”

  We removed the table and chairs from th
e kitchen and closed off the doorways with old baby gates. I camped out with Bunny Boy for the night. We were getting good at that.

  At least for the next few hours, the bunny show was great.

  Chapter 24

  I had always enjoyed warm weather, even before my health challenges, but for a short while, it became my nemesis. I was sweating almost constantly for weeks on end, an anomaly for me; I typically only got the sweats when I experienced an adrenaline rush from a stressful trigger or when I was sick or had a flare up.

  I was also sleeping less than usual. My energy had plummeted like Wall Street during a bear market. Sweaty sheets and laundry piled up, and many a night was spent hanging out with Bunny Boy watching chick flicks. He didn’t seem to mind the fact that I was exceptionally irritable.

  My annual checkup shed some light on the matter. I was in full-blown menopause. I had chalked up the heart palpitations and adrenaline rushes to raising two teens and Bunny Boy’s antics. The loss of my monthly cycle, I assumed, was from the gamma globulin infusions. It had happened once before, though temporarily. It had never occurred to me that the Enbrel injections I had started using this past winter could have been the culprit. Basically, my body had been shocked into menopause. I had had a five-year loss of estrogen in less than six months.

  “Premature menopause can be quite debilitating,” said my ob-gyn, Dr. Nicosia. “I’m surprised I didn’t hear from you sooner, Nance.”

  While I was going through some significant changes, everyone else was growing up or growing old. Chris was in eighth grade, juggling a difficult course load, playing on two basketball teams, and still finding time for the video game Halo, which we had stood in line at midnight to purchase. Bunny Boy would pace back and forth on the sofa as Chris played, enjoying the graphics. Chris also arranged poker games for his friends, using the new table top I had lugged home from the mall, causing me to throw my back out. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for my children.

  The third season of spectacular girls’ tennis had wrapped up, and as a high school junior, Julie won All State, All League, and All County. She had also fought competitively on the debate team, bringing home the school’s first team trophy. In between her activities, we had also started looking at colleges.

  My mother was approaching eighty years old. Her degenerative arthritis in her back and hip pains were slowing her down. She drove less and rested more, but rarely complained. Ward would turn fifty in the fall, though he didn’t look a day over thirty-five. Daily workouts and healthy eating for most of his adult life had paid off.

  And Bunny Boy was over five years old—geriatric, according to most sources I had read. The changes in his fur were more pronounced. Strands of brown were strewn throughout the base ginger color, as if he had a reverse highlighting. The fur on his belly was sparse. He moved at a slower pace and used more caution when hopping on and off furniture. His trips up to the bedrooms became less frequent. I tried to convince myself that he was being more careful due to his broken jaw, but who was I kidding?

  When I clapped my hands to ignite the bunny game, Bunny Boy tore around with the same sparkle in his eyes, but with less gas. He also just hung out for a larger portion of the day, though he kept his crepuscular routine in the evening, settling in the lagomorph lounge around dusk with his toys and human playmates. Once Ward walked over at ten o’clock sharp to say “Goodnight, Bunny Boy,” he knew I would be headed up to bed within the hour. He would binky over to wherever I was sitting and use any tactic to keep me from going to bed—tugging at my socks or pants until I chased him around or nudging his wicker ball in my path playfully, nearly tripping me. Ultimately, we would end up nesting on the recliner. I would whisper, “I love you more than life itself, Bunny Boy,” or “What would I do without you, little buddy?” It was so easy to express my deepest feelings to him. We would rub noses or he would lick my cheeks and earlobes tenderly.

  When I would finally start up the stairs to bed, Bunny Boy would sit on the landing and thump, demanding me to come back. Most times I did. If only for a short while.

  • • •

  “California is definitely out of the question.” I said emphatically. “It’s too far.”

  With Bunny Boy strategically tucked in my arms, I handed Julie a list of top-notch colleges I had compiled that were within three hours’ driving distance of Bunny Boy. We all used him as a pawn at one time or another.

  We had begun narrowing down college choices for Julie, and one of her criteria was warm weather all year round, not just in the summer. I raised the issue of college being situated close to Bunny Boy, but, really, I was also focused on Julie being close to me!

  During spring break, we visited eight southern schools on the East coast due to their temperate weather and the fact that all of them were less than a ten-hour drive away. Though I dreaded the long hours in the car, which I knew would dramatically affect my pain for the worse, the trip ended up being some of the best family bonding time for us in a long while. We played games and sang silly songs—Julie put on her deep guttural voice as she pumped out tunes, in stark contrast to the candy-coated voice she used whenever she sang to Bunny Boy. We also vigorously discussed virtually every topic under the sun, including the upcoming 2008 election, where a female and black candidate were fighting for the top seat as the president of the United States. During our time away, Kelly, one of the technicians from Franklin Lakes Animal Hospital, made house calls to give Bunny Boy penicillin shots and bandage changes for a new, small abscess on one of his hocks. I called Kelly at the same time every day to check on him. She usually sounded out of breath when she answered the phone. Despite his geriatric status, Bunny Boy would make a mad dash for one of his many cozy spots in the house whenever Kelly showed up, reluctant to receive his shot from someone other than Ward. She tried bringing along her two toddlers to lure him out, with little success. It became a game of cat and mouse.

  As we walked the sprawling lawns, quads, and bluestone walkways lined with magnolias and cherry blossoms while the sun shown overhead and the temperatures hovered in the seventies, it didn’t take me long to decide I wanted to go to graduate school in the south—with Julie! As she and I skipped, arm in arm, I reminded her of the time she was in kindergarten when I told her a bedtime story about the Care Bears going off to college—to help her fall asleep.

  “Can you be my class mother when I go to college?” she had asked with childhood innocence. That cherished moment was as clear to me as if it had been yesterday.

  • • •

  Wake Forest University was the final stop on our southern expedition. Its folder, containing the materials from the admissions department, had a picture of Bunny Boy taped to the front and a large red circle with a line drawn diagonally across it. In other words, don’t go here. Geographically, it was the furthest school from home. I thought I was being subtle. Wake Forest was also the most academically challenging and conservative school on Julie’s list. Right-wing views were the norm, politically and socially. I knew it was not a good match for Julie, our screaming liberal. Living just outside of Manhattan, our geographic area lent itself toward left-wing politics and morals. Our children were very open-minded when it came to issues like race, nationality, and religion, a value we instilled in them from an early age.

  The morning of the Wake Forest tour, Julie walked out of the bathroom, almost unrecognizable. Her long, flowing brown hair was pulled back tight in a clip, and faux pearls replaced her Betsy Johnson dangling spider earrings. She was wearing khaki shorts and a light blue Lacoste collared shirt instead of jean shorts and a T-shirt with a witty slogan, her usual attire.

  “It’s my Wake Forest outfit,” she announced. “I borrowed it from Amanda.”

  She looked lovely. Her conservative attire sat perfectly with me.

  We walked the stunning Wake Forest campus. The girls wore Lily Pulitzer sundresses and strappy sandals with designer bags slung across their shoulders, while the men wore chino pants or shorts, col
lared golf shirts, and Docksiders. They looked like an advertisement for J. Crew. The campus was crawling with rich Caucasian kids, exactly what Julie was trying to escape. Chris put it simply: “If you need to borrow clothes to go here, Jules, it’s not the school for you.”

  The sneeze cemented the thought. We were trailing behind our group, listening to the flawless, enthusiastic presentation of Miss Wake Forest Ra Ra, former prom queen, senior class president, and Most Likely to Succeed, when Ward sneezed. A Laracy sneeze could run a turbine or give someone a heart attack. The first time baby Julie sneezed, she nearly rolled off her changing table. That is a fact.

  Our tour group spun around and glared at us with great disdain. You would have thought Ward had said he wanted to burn the American Flag. Julie ducked behind me, trying to hide. Ward went one step further.

  “What can I say—if I hold in my sneeze, my head explodes,” he declared.

  I bent over laughing. Chris gave Ward a high five. Julie was so appalled she ran from our group and never looked back. We fled the campus, returning to the north where we belonged.

  By the time we crossed the border into Pennsylvania, seven hours later, it was forty-one degrees outside and raining. Julie woke up from her nap and touched the ice-cold car window.

  “I’m definitely going south for college, guys.” Could I blame her?

  We returned, tired and a little edgy. Bunny Boy was waiting at the top of the stairs when we walked in. He kicked his hind legs into the air playfully and took turns sniffing everyone’s feet. There was a note on the counter from Kelly welcoming us back, signed with a happy face.

  • • •

  For the rest of the spring, we changed the bandage on Bunny Boy’s paw daily, using bandages in bright spring colors—light pink, yellow, lavender, and mint green. Ward gave Bunny Boy his penicillin shots. And every time the sky had a hint of gray, rain fell, or the temperature dipped into the fifties, Julie gave me the latest weather report for the south.