Aggie squinted at him, put down the glass, and took the steaming mug. Rhonda’s father sipped at his own coffee, keeping an eye on Aggie the way you’d watch an unpredictable dog who might lunge and bite at the slightest provocation. He set down his coffee, reached into his shirt pocket for the unfiltered Camels, and lit one, using the three remaining fingers of his right hand as expertly as if the other two had been missing all his life.
When Rhonda was a little girl, she used to sit on his lap and ask him to tell the story of how he lost his fingers.
“It only took a second,” Clem would explain, Rhonda on his lap running her tiny fingers over the scarred nubs where his two missing digits had been.
“Daniel and I were at the mill, working on a big order of beams with Dave Lancaster.”
Rhonda would nod. She knew Dave. He was the boss at the mill. He’d once gotten into a wrestling match with a black bear, and if you weren’t careful, he’d offer to show you the scars, which were on his butt.
“I was guiding a piece of hemlock through the saw,” Clem would continue. “Daniel was behind me.”
“And he had a seizure,” Rhonda would say, having the story memorized.
“That’s right, sweetie. He fell against me and I wasn’t expecting it. My hand went right into the blade.”
“Did it hurt bad?” Rhonda asked.
“No,” Clem answered. “It happened too fast and then after, I was too surprised. I was in shock.”
“In shock,” young Rhonda would repeat back to him, thinking about electricity, how she was not supposed to go near outlets or play in thunderstorms because of shocks.
“It was an accident,” Clem would tell her.
“But what happened to your fingers?” Rhonda would ask, squirming on her father’s lap.
“I guess I don’t know,” Clem would answer.
Rhonda would imagine the fingers lying there in the sawdust on the floor of the mill, still warm.
“I think your fingers were lonely for your hand,” the little girl would say, and this would make her father—who once admitted that on some mornings he thought he could feel himself wriggling those fingers awake—smile a sad and longing smile.
RHONDA’S MOTHER, JUSTINE, shuffled into the dining room from the kitchen, her feet in worn pink slippers. She had on her usual outfit: a matching sweat suit; this time, for Easter, she’d worn one in pale lavender. She carried a fresh tray of cinnamon buns and placed it in the center of the table.
“Justine,” Aggie said, her voice thick with an alcohol drawl, “you’ve outdone yourself! Everything looks won-derful!”
Justine nodded and went back into the kitchen to make waffles and, no doubt, hide out in the breakfast nook with a cup of black coffee and a romance novel. Rhonda thought she should go help her mother, keep her company at least, but she found herself planted by the French doors leading from the dining room to the patio, scanning the tree line at the edge of the yard for Lizzy and the rabbit.
“Maybe they got lost,” Rhonda said to no one in particular. She turned back to see Aggie lean over and pull the cigarette from between her father’s lips and place it in her own, taking a long, deep, lung-killing drag.
Rhonda went back to looking out the window, breathing onto the cold panes of glass to leave a film, then drawing in the condensation. She drew eggs. And a crude-looking rabbit with uneven ears.
“There they are now,” Peter said. He’d come up behind her and rested his chin on her shoulder, his black-jelly-bean-scented breath hitting her cheek, making her feel warm all over.
Through the trees came the rabbit with Lizzy sitting high up on his shoulders, like an Easter queen in her yellow dress and shoes. She was laughing, swinging a pink basket full of candy as the rabbit jogged with her across the lawn, holding her legs against his chest with huge white paws.
Once inside, the rabbit set Lizzy down, then walked over to Aggie, whispering something in her ear and grabbing her rear end. She leaned back into him, wiggling her butt against him and laughing. She turned around to face him and tugged gently at his crooked white ears.
“Take this silly thing off, Daniel,” she said, and the rabbit took off his head, tucking it under his arm.
Daniel’s shaggy blond hair was sticking up at funny angles. He had a thick walrus mustache, which he’d had the whole time Rhonda knew him. It was the kind of mustache food got caught in. The kind that tickled when he leaned down to kiss your cheek or blow on your belly button.
Peter snuck up and snatched the rabbit head from him, dropped it over his own head. Daniel let out a howl of mock rage and chased Peter around the dining room table. Lizzy squealed with delight and took Rhonda’s hand to watch the chase. Justine came out of the kitchen, pink-covered romance novel in hand, to see what all the fuss was about. Aggie reached into Clem’s pocket and grabbed his pack of unfiltered Camels, shook one out, and lit it with a match from the book Clem kept tucked in the cellophane. She crossed her arms and watched the chase through a haze of smoke, her eyes focused not on her husband or son but on the French doors beyond them, which had been left open. Aggie looked out onto the patio expectantly, as if she was waiting for some uninvited guest to arrive. Or maybe, thought Rhonda, she was planning to make a break for it.
The oversized rabbit head shifted as Peter ran, turning him into a life-size bobblehead doll. When Daniel caught Peter, he held him upside down, shaking him while Peter bucked and squealed, “Enough, Dad! I give!” until the large rabbit head slipped off and landed softly on the thick beige carpet, mesh eyes fixed on the French doors, like it, too, was dreaming of escape.
The 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.
JUNE 5, 2006
BACK 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,” To
ck 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 apartments: 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 abou
t 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.
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