Rabbit Cake

by Annie Hartnett

  Sometimes Mom would pick us up at school in the middle of the day; she’d get Lizzie first and then come for me. She would pull up into the SCHOOL BUSES ONLY driveway in her station wagon and lean on the horn until someone from the front office went down the hall to retrieve me from my classroom. The Beaver Elementary principal had said this was disruptive behavior, and had given Mom a talking-to about it. Mom had argued that we were her kids, and she could do whatever she wanted with us, wasn’t that true?

  “Within reason,” Principal Witherspoon said.

  Mom liked to take us to abandoned farmhouses, ones on the side of the highway with the roof about to fall through. She would pack a picnic, a basket stuffed with pimento cheese sandwiches and potato chips, sparkling cider and brownies, or a rabbit cake if there was something to celebrate. We’d lie in the middle of the barn on our picnic blanket, looking up at the sky through the rotted-out gaps in the roof.

  “I love you, my little chickadees,” she’d say, sitting up with a stray piece of straw in her hair. “If this barn fell down on us right now, we’d die happy, wouldn’t we?”

  “Yes,” we’d agree, but I’d always cross my fingers when I said that. I didn’t want to be crushed to death by a barn, not even during a moment when I was feeling happy.

  I would have told Ms. Powell about rainy days, when Mom built forts with me, using the kitchen chairs and the clean sheets. And then there was the time that Lizzie and Mom and I showed up at Dad’s carpet store dressed as burglars with nylon stockings pulled over our faces and squirt guns for weapons. Dad hadn’t thought it was funny at all, especially since there were customers in the store.

  Mom always said Dad worked too much, that he was a workaholic. She blamed that on his mom, the grandmother we’d never met. That grandmother had run off with another man right after our grandfather got sick, and soon Dad was left with the house and the store and no family at all, until he found Mom.

  “He’s always taken the job too seriously,” Mom said sometimes. “He should have gone to Sewanee, and he would have if it weren’t for that witch.”

  “But then he wouldn’t have met you,” I reminded her, since they’d met in Alabama.

  Dad’s mother wasn’t dead, she only lived in Texas, but Mom claimed she might as well be because she was rotten to the core. “She’s only still standing,” Mom had said, “like the dead elm tree out back.”

  Dad had wanted to cut that tree down, but Mom hadn’t let him because she liked the patterns the beetles made in the bark, their tunnels and elaborate mazes. Mom said everything was weird if you looked at it closely enough, like how sound waves could snuff out a fire, how worms could live when you cut them in half, how oysters made pearls with their tongues, and how someday science would help people live for hundreds of years. She’d said if we had the money now, we could clone Boomer and have a whole house full of identical border collies who were all very good boys.

  I would have explained to Ms. Powell about Mom’s psychic. We never told Miss Ida Mom had drowned, but I’m sure she already knew.

  I would have told Ms. Powell that my mom was supposed to commit suicide, about what Miss Ida had seen in the coffee grounds. I wouldn’t have been able to explain to Ms. Powell, or to anyone, why Miss Ida had been wrong.

  In their phone calls, Miss Ida had given Mom instructions on everything: from how to cut her hair to how much exercise to get. She had taught Mom how to put leeches on her body to reduce anxiety, had told Mom to put herself upside down every day in a headstand.

  Miss Ida had dictated what color we painted the rooms in a house she had never seen. About a year before Mom drowned, Miss Ida mailed another paint sample and Mom painted the master bedroom a deep dark green, almost black.

  “It’s my terrarium,” Mom had declared, when she finished the job. She put plants around the floor beside the bed, on the bookshelves, and on the windowsills. Every plant died within the following month, except for one lonely philodendron. “I never did have a green thumb,” she’d sighed. Mom always kept the curtains drawn in her room, and there hadn’t been enough sunlight. I thought a scientist with a PhD should understand about chlorophyll.

  Even if she couldn’t keep a plant alive, Mom would have known what to do about Lizzie. She would have stopped the sleepeating in its tracks. Then again, I was pretty sure that Lizzie was sleepeating only because Mom wasn’t there; Ms. Bernstein said that Lizzie was stuffing herself at night because she missed our mom. I felt jealous that Lizzie missed Mom so much that something physical was happening to her. Nothing was happening to me, nothing had changed, at least nothing noticeable. Ms. Powell hadn’t known I had a dead mother until someone in my class told her, and she was my favorite teacher.

  7.

  I thought Dad would stay morose forever, until the afternoon that he came home with the bird, a hyacinth macaw. The parrot was perched on his shoulder like Dad was a pirate, and had already pooped down the back of Dad’s gray suit jacket. I recognized the parrot immediately: the blue-and-yellow bird had been in the front window of Debbie’s Petland for years; I thought Mr. Debbie owned him. His name was Ernest Hemingway. I raced to the cabinet for a box of saltine crackers.

  “What’s this?” Lizzie asked.

  “Hello,” the bird said, in Mom’s voice.

  Boomer growled, the fur bristling up on his spine. I’d never seen him growl at Mom.

  “Holy shit,” Lizzie said.

  “I know.” Dad was bug-eyed.

  “Holy shit,” the parrot repeated, still using Mom’s voice. “I know.”

  Mr. Debbie had called Dad’s office at Carpet World. Mr. Debbie said the bird was good at imitations, and it was one of the reasons Ernest had been returned to the pet store three times, but this was a new thing. The bird was using Mom’s voice. It was a little suspicious, but Mom did get Boomer’s food from Debbie’s Petland.

  “You should at least hear him,” Mr. Debbie had insisted over the phone. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  So Dad had gone to the pet store with the green awning and the glass cages of puppies, one of the few stores in the Freedom town center, besides the Coffee Shack, the butcher’s, the hardware store, and Suzy Sundaes. The bird had whistled when Dad walked in.

  “Gimme kiss,” said Ernest Hemingway, and my dad passed out cold on the tile floor of the pet store. When he woke up, he tried to pay for Ernest, but Mr. Debbie gave him the parrot free of charge.

  “So the bird is possessed?” Lizzie asked.

  “Something like that,” Dad agreed, as the bird shifted his weight from foot to foot, bobbing his head.

  “Mom did love going to Debbie’s Petland,” I said. Sometimes we went after school just to look at the puppies, and we’d always stop to say hello to Ernest when we first came in the door.

  “That’s true,” Dad said.

  “Want a cracker?” I asked Ernest, and he bobbed his head.

  After Dad said I’d given the parrot enough saltines, I went upstairs to the bathroom. None of the reincarnation books said what you had to do to return as a hyacinth macaw.

  But of course I knew that the parrot wasn’t Mom reincarnated. Ernest Hemingway was already seven years old, it was written on the papers Mr. Debbie had given Dad. Macaws can live for sixty years.

  I could hear Dad in his room, talking to the parrot behind the closed door.

  Dad was growing attached to the bird.

  “He’s really a sweet pet,” Dad said, on our third day with Ernest.

  It only took a week before Dad started bringing Ernest into work with him.

  “Isn’t that illegal?” Lizzie asked. “Against health code?”

  He argued that the parrot gave Carpet World a new credibility; hadn’t we seen Aladdin? Wasn’t there a parrot in The Arabian Nights? Dad said he knew that Ernest would help the Persian rug sales go up.

  Dad always insisted we get Boomer the cheapest dog food, the kind Mom said was made of dehydrated horsemeat, but he came home with bags of gourmet bir
dseed. He built Ernest a perch next to the headboard of his bed.

  “See how easy it was for him to replace her,” Lizzie said. She snapped her fingers. “The merry widow.”

  “I think men are widowers,” I said, but it was true that Dad had become completely enamored with the parrot.

  I liked the parrot, I just didn’t like the way Dad was acting. He was smitten. And it made me feel mixed-up when I listened to Ernest, both happy and sad. He said some normal parrot words and phrases like cracker and pretty bird, but some were things Mom might have said, like hurry up, or I’m ready, or dinnertime, or I love you.

  “There are African grays that know thousands of words,” I told Dad at dinner, watching the hurt spread across his face.

  “Ernest is smarter than most people,” Dad said.

  “Her body’s not even cold,” Lizzie grumbled, which didn’t make sense because Mom had been cremated. She didn’t have a body anymore, not even a skeleton left. But it was true that Mom hadn’t been dead for that long, even if sometimes it seemed as if she’d been dead forever. It had been four months.

  I found a section of the DSM for Kids! called “Hallucinations of Loss.” It said over 60 percent of kids who have lost a loved one will experience a hallucination, most often the ghostly image or the voice of the deceased. It’s a common reaction, the book said, although more likely to happen during times of stress.

  I wondered if that was why we were hearing Mom’s voice in the parrot, but that didn’t make sense, since Mr. Debbie had heard her voice too. The pet store owner wasn’t grieving Mom, or at least I didn’t think he was.

  I wished I could see Mom’s ghost, I wished that could be my physical symptom of grief. I thought maybe it could happen on Halloween, Mom’s favorite holiday. She used to do whatever she could to make our house look haunted; there were still fake-blood stains on our porch that wouldn’t wash out.

  But Mom’s ghost didn’t show up on Halloween and Lizzie decided we weren’t going to go trick-or-treating that year. She said we were too old for it and she started dinner. I wanted to remind her that I was five years younger than she was, but I decided not to say anything.

  When Dad came home, he was carrying a huge bag of candy. He was wearing the mask from my costume from The Sound of Music, the musical that we had put on the year before in school. I had been a mountain goat, a nonspeaking, nonsinging part. Mom had tried to get me recast as a nun or a von Trapp, but I’d insisted I wanted to remain a goat.

  “Smells delicious,” Dad said, pushing the goat mask up on his face. He always dressed up for the staff party at Carpet World.

  “It’s a Cajun chicken casserole.”

  “See, some birds aren’t so lucky,” Dad said to Ernest, tickling him on the chest.

  “I bet parrots are delicious,” Lizzie said, setting down the casserole dish and taking off her oven mitts.

  “Shush,” Dad said.

  “You started it.”

  We all sat down at the table, with the parrot perched in an old high chair from the attic. “Doggie want a cookie?” Ernest asked. He dropped a piece of okra onto the floor, and clucked when Boomer didn’t touch it. Boomer wouldn’t come within six feet of the bird.

  “Isn’t this nice,” Dad said, digging into the casserole. “I think things are really starting to come together for this family.”

  “Everything still seems pretty shitty to me,” Lizzie said.

  “Eat your dinner,” Ernest said, the way Mom would’ve, and it was Dad’s turn to whistle then.

  8.

  October, November

  On the date of Lizzie’s appointment with the sleep specialist, Dad packed up Ernest in his carrier cage, and we all drove together to Birmingham. Dr. Monroe gave Lizzie a full examination plus an MRI scan, but he didn’t find any physical problem. He read his diagnosis checklist aloud.

  “Are you depressed?” he asked.

  “My mother died,” Lizzie said.

  “We’re all depressed,” Dad added, even if that wasn’t totally true, not for him, not since the parrot had arrived.

  “Are you bulimic?” the doctor asked. “Anorexic? Do you have heartburn, indigestion? Any allergies?”

  In the end, Dr. Monroe prescribed Lizzie an antiseizure medication that he said had been proven to help with nocturnal eating. “I know she doesn’t have seizures,” he explained, “but drugs don’t only cure the things they were designed to cure.”

  “Mom had a seizure once,” I said. “Are those genetic too?”

  “Sometimes.” The doctor nodded. “But that’s not Lizzie’s current problem.”

  “Any other suggestions, doctor?” Dad asked.

  “No television before bed,” Dr. Monroe said, peering over his glasses, giving Lizzie a half smile. As we walked out, Dr. Monroe gave Dad a business card for St. Cloud’s Hospital for Women, in case things got any worse.

  Dad and I stayed up together to watch Lizzie that night, but again he fell asleep in his armchair. When he woke up with a stiff neck, he told me he was going to bed.

  “Don’t wake her up,” Dad said. “I tried to wake your mother up once. She scratched my cornea. I had an eye patch for a week.”

  “Wake up,” the parrot repeated, nuzzling into Dad’s neck.

  So I stayed up alone, and Lizzie didn’t even get out of bed. Sleepwalkers don’t sleepwalk every night, I’d known that before, but I still wanted to keep watch. I drank almost a liter of Mountain Dew, played solitare on the laptop, and continued my research on Mom’s book.

  Mom had been curious as to how prolonged darkness affects sleep, and she was planning to look into studies of the naked mole rat. An herbivore native to desert regions of East Africa, the naked mole rat lives in colonies deep underground, and almost never sees sunlight. Mom had ordered a whole book on the animal, a five-hundred-page brick, The Compiled Studies of the Naked Mole Rat.

  Naked mole rats have an extremely slow metabolic rate, less than half of other rodents, and they have a different kind of hemoglobin—a type more efficient at capturing oxygen. They need less air to function. A lot of the time, the tunnel system of a naked mole rat colony is sealed, with no hole to the surface.

  A person drowns because there is not enough oxygen in the body, in the brain. You could hold a naked mole rat underwater for thirty minutes, and the animal would be fine once it emerged.

  Mom could hold her breath for five minutes and seventeen seconds; I’d timed her in the bathtub once, sometime right after Nana died. I thought Mom could have held the world record for holding her breath underwater the longest, but I checked Lizzie’s Guinness World Records book, and the record belonged to a Danish man who had set the twenty-two-minute record in a fish tank full of sharks.

  Mom spent a lot of time in the tub after her mother’s funeral. For those weeks, after school, I’d sit on the toilet lid and read to her. I’d been in the advanced reading group in my first-grade class.

  “My heart hurts, Elvis,” Mom groaned, but she clutched her stomach, above her belly button.

  “Are you an octopus?” I asked, flipping through a magazine with a giant Pacific octopus on the cover. An octopus has three hearts, the article said; I thought maybe one heart was in the stomach.

  “I’m a submarine,” Mom said and slid under the water. If one heart failed, the octopus died.

  “Your mother will be better soon,” Dad said from the doorway. He walked up to the tub and Mom emerged for air. “Honey, you’re a prune.”

  “I’m a peach pear apple banana. Close the door.”

  Every morning, Mom would fill the bath with fresh water as she read the newspaper, dipping the bottom of the pages in the water, letting the ink run. She balanced her coffee cup in the soap dish. Lizzie and Dad had to take most of their showers in our outdoor stall, which we usually used only after we went swimming in the river and there was sand in our suits. But I was allowed to bathe with Mom three times a week. She’d wash my hair and hum this one song from The King and I that we had p
layed at Nana’s funeral.

  One Monday, when my bath time was over, Mom climbed out of the tub after me. She wrapped herself in two towels, one on her head and one around her waist, leaving her breasts exposed.

  “Your body only lets you hurt that much for so long,” she said.

  The next night, after a long afternoon nap, I stayed up again to watch for Lizzie. It was two in the morning when I heard the screen door slam. Lizzie had rarely gone sleepwalking outside the house; that was something Mom did. Maybe Lizzie was using the sleepwalking outside to feel closer to Mom, trying to act like her, an imitation. I hoped Lizzie wouldn’t go down to the river.

  I pulled my sneakers on and ran out to the driveway. It was pitch dark, and I had to go back inside for a flashlight; I hadn’t been prepared for her to go outside. I wandered through the woods waving my flashlight around, wondering if sleepwalkers could see better in the dark. A branch scratched my face, and I was about to give up and start back home when I heard screams coming from our neighbor’s backyard.

  I found Lizzie sitting in their chicken coop, the hens huddled in the far corner, squawking in alarm. I shined my flashlight on her, and she looked straight at me. She smiled, her pupils huge.

  “Lizzie, come out of there.”

  She cracked an egg in her hand; the yolk ran down her wrist.

  “Lizzie, I mean it,” I begged. “Lizzie, go back to bed.” It seemed stupid to say that, so far from her room, but I hoped it would work before our neighbor came out with his gun. “Come on, back to bed. Back to bed.”

  Then Lizzie licked the egg off her arm, like a bear would lick a paw soaked in honey. The egg’s mucus dripped from her chin.

  “Salmonella!” I cried. I opened the gate, got on my knees to crawl into the coop too, but Lizzie kicked dirt in my face. Then she threw an egg at me, it hit me in the eye, and I backed out of the cage. I wiped the yolk from my face as she laughed. You are supposed to gently lead a sleepwalker by her elbow back to bed, but how could I gently lead Lizzie anywhere? I shined the flashlight on her again. She broke another egg in her hand, made a loud slurping noise as she swallowed it. I gagged, hard, like a cat trying to bring up a hairball. It was too much for me.