Rabbit Cake

by Annie Hartnett

  One of Dad’s bowling buddies had died, a heart attack. Dad had stopped going to bowling night since the alley didn’t allow the parrot, but he insisted he was still part of the team.

  “Bernie’s wife died last spring,” Dad told us. “That happens to men; strokes and heart attacks the first year after their wife goes. My doctor gave me a pamphlet, how to keep stress low.”

  “Good thing Ernest gives you something to live for,” Lizzie said, but I think it was sarcastic.

  “Good thing,” Dad agreed.

  On Saturday, we walked through the staggered rows of gravestones to get to the plot near the back of the cemetery. I read the epitaphs, engravings that read Gone to Sleep with Jesus, or My Love Will Not Let Me Go.

  “I love the cemetery. It’s every holiday at once.”

  I saw what Lizzie meant. Some gravestones were decorated with Pilgrim hats and turkey drawings left over from Thanksgiving, which we hadn’t celebrated this year. There were Christmas wreaths looped around many of the headstones, and some were draped with strings of Christmas lights. Other more forgotten gravestones were decorated with little ceramic chicks and fake silk tulips for Easter, and there was an empty heart-shaped box of chocolates at the base of another grave, and a Mardi Gras mask wrapped around the statue of an angel.

  Dad was wearing a suit. Lizzie and I wore black dresses, and Lizzie held the helium balloons she’d bought at the grocery store that read I’m Sorry for Your Loss. “I can’t believe they sell those,” Dad had said, but he’d let her buy them.

  There were about twenty people at the funeral, sitting in white plastic chairs around the casket, which looked like it was made of balsa wood. Elvis Presley’s casket was said to have weighed 650 pounds and been too heavy for four men to lift.

  The groundskeeper drove up then on his riding mower. Boomer had picked up a little stuffed bear off the gravestone of a Vietnam War soldier, was shaking it violently between his jaws, but the groundskeeper was more upset by the balloons Lizzie had tied around her wrist.

  “No balloons in the graveyard,” the groundskeeper said, “and please don’t kiss the headstones.” On the walk in, I had been kissing all the headstones marking the graves of children. I noticed that lots of babies had died in the 1800s.

  “The balloons are for him,” I protested, pointing to the casket.

  “Balloons kill wildlife,” he said, taking off his workman’s gloves. I hadn’t thought of that. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a knife. Then he grabbed the balloon strings and stabbed the biggest blade on his Swiss army knife into each of the three helium balloons. He handed Lizzie their limp silver carcasses.

  “Let’s get started then,” Father Tillman announced to the crowd. He gave a speech, or I guess it’s called a sermon, and everyone said a silent prayer for the deceased. It was nice, I thought; we hadn’t had anything like that for Mom. There was music even, a shrill recording of bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace.”

  I decided then that I didn’t want to be cremated. I wanted to go into the ground, skin and all. I wanted a copper-lined casket, like Elvis Presley had. I wanted someone to come decorate my tombstone during the holidays, to leave silk flowers and Christmas ornaments. Maybe Lizzie could do it, if she outlived me.

  We went straight to Hog’s End Farm after the funeral, and the farmer said he was going to throw in a few jars of pickled feet as a thank-you for buying a whole hog. He said most people around here wanted bacon or sausage prepackaged now, and no one was buying whole pigs or even half pigs. He had a lot of extra pig feet on hand.

  The farmer gave us a tour of the farm, which had won several prizes in Butcher’s Paper magazine. A new litter of piglets had just been born, squirming and pushing one another with their tiny forked hooves, fighting for a space at their mom’s teats. The sow kept her eyes closed the whole time, flicking her short tail. There was a heat lamp set up in the stall, since the farmer said piglets born in December can get sick if they’re cold.

  “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” Dad said, in a horror show voice. It was the first line of Charlotte’s Web, Mom’s favorite book.

  The farmer helped Dad load the Saran-Wrapped pig into the truck. He explained that our hog would have to cook for twenty-four to twenty-six hours, which would mean roasting it overnight. He wished us good luck, and gave us each a jar of pig’s feet, and a big bag of dried pig ears for Boomer to chew.

  On the drive home, Dad stopped to buy a new set of sharp knives to remove the fat from the pig. He also needed a half-dozen bottles of barbecue sauce and yellow mustard to rub on as a marinade, and a few rolls of aluminum foil. The farmer had recommended injecting the pig with apple juice, but Dad had no idea where to get a meat syringe.

  “Pigs are as smart as three-year-old children,” I said, while Lizzie, Boomer, and I waited in the back of the truck in the Stop ’n’ Save parking lot.

  “I’d eat a kindergartener.” Lizzie smiled, slapping the hog on its side.

  “Ew,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

  “You’ve always been the good sister.”

  “You’re the brave one,” I said. “And the pretty one.”

  “I’m not so brave.”

  “You are.”

  “Remember how you asked me after we left the morgue if I was scared?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m scared now,” Lizzie said, stroking the pig next to her.

  “Of what?”

  “That I might do something really bad in my sleep.”

  “Worse than the poison gout cake?” That was what we’d started calling the slop she had made earlier in the week. It had almost become a family joke.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Worse.”

  We could see Dad coming through the parking lot then with his hands full of groceries. “Don’t tell him,” she whispered. “Pretend everything is fine.”

  “Okay,” I said, and we pinkie-swore on it.

  That night we sat in lawn chairs, all bundled up in blankets, watching the black barrel of the smoker. Lizzie snuck me a beer, my first beer ever, although I knew Lizzie had been taking Dad’s Bud Lights for years. I didn’t like the taste much, but the bubbles popped yellow explosions on my tongue.

  13.

  In the morning, I felt better than I had in a while, more clearheaded after sleeping eight hours. I decided I’d tell Dad about what Lizzie had said in the truck, that she was scared. I’d pinkie-sworn I wouldn’t, but she seemed like she really needed help. Dad was our remaining parent; he should be the one to deal with it.

  But when I went into Dad’s room, he grabbed me into a bear hug. He was wearing a holiday sweatshirt with a Santa on the front, and the house stunk of bacon grease. Boomer’s tail wagged so hard his whole body wiggled. I had not seen either Dad or the dog that happy since before Mom died. I didn’t want to ruin it.

  We went into Lizzie’s room together, and Dad jumped up and down on her bed like a little kid. He yanked off her covers, but Lizzie snatched them back. She was half-naked under there, so Dad looked away fast. She told us to leave her alone, said we could go check on the pig without her.

  “It still has a few hours to go,” she mumbled, pulling her covers back from Dad. “Wake me up then.”

  “Okay, grumpy,” Dad said. “Let’s go, Elvis.”

  I’d never seen Lizzie that tired. She was almost always out of bed before Dad and I were, usually in the shower or making breakfast. Maybe Lizzie remembered a sliver of the night before. Maybe she had a new strange taste in her mouth, something lingering on her tongue. Maybe she wanted just one more minute of rest before Dad and I would see what we saw.

  Brilliant blue feathers were dusted around the kitchen. Dad grabbed a feather off the counter and screamed.

  Dad stormed back toward Lizzie’s room. I didn’t try to stop him, didn’t hold on to one of his legs. I turned on the sink and tried to wash a cluster of feathers down the drain. I saw that she’d plugged the oven in; I dreaded what I would find in there.
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  “Hello,” said Mom’s voice from inside the trash can, followed by a rapping. “Hello, hello.” I opened the silver lid. Ernest was sitting in the trash, plucked half-bald, not a scratch on him. If Lizzie had a taste in her mouth that morning, it was only the fluff of parrot feathers, or the copper taste of her own blood.

  Later that afternoon, a Pepto-Bismol-pink van with a fluffy white cloud painted on the side showed up in our driveway. Dad had felt bad after he’d found out that Ernest was still alive, but he still made the phone call to the hospital.

  “Two months is no time at all,” Dad promised, as the two men restrained Lizzie. They’d had to take the hinges off the bathroom door to get to her; she’d locked herself in. When they opened the door, she looked like a wild, cornered raccoon.

  The website said that St. Cloud’s specialized in addictive disorders and depression. Lizzie would be put in the girls’ ward, which was for ages twelve to seventeen. I didn’t know what they did with crazy girls under twelve; maybe real craziness set in later.

  I wouldn’t be twelve years old until after month eighteen on the grieving chart, and that was a whole year away. Then again, it had been six months already, so the year might go by quick.

  “It’s going to help her,” Dad said. “It has to. She’s a danger to herself and to others.”

  We were in way over our heads; I knew we needed a last resort. I just wished we had something better than to send her away to St. Cloud’s. Lizzie wouldn’t even look at us when they carted her off.

  I hoped Lizzie wouldn’t stay mad forever. Maybe like an otter pulled from an oil spill and then drenched in Dawn dish soap, she hadn’t known she was being saved.

  PART II

  Months 7 to 12

  14.

  December, January

  We weren’t allowed to visit Lizzie, weren’t allowed to call. We could write letters and send care packages, but there was a long list of things we weren’t allowed to send: toenail clippers, shoelaces, razor blades, sharp or heavy objects of any kind, magazines or books, photos or baked goods, anything that might remind her too much of home. Flip-flops had recently become off-limits, after one girl had tried to use the rubber straps to hang herself.

  Lizzie didn’t respond to any of Dad’s letters, but she sent me doodles that she made in her art class; there were several sketches of Boomer.

  “Why would she draw Boomer?” I asked Dad. “She doesn’t even really like Boomer.”

  “He’s her dog too,” Dad reminded me.

  She sent a self-portrait, one of her and Boomer together. In the drawing, Lizzie is feeding Boomer a huge steak. Why are you doing this? Boomer thinks, in a cartoon bubble.

  I pinned Lizzie’s drawing on the wall next to my grieving chart, but I didn’t know what she was trying to say. The Beaver Elementary art teacher said not all art had meaning, but I knew Lizzie meant something by the picture. I just couldn’t figure out what.

  Dad was still wearing Mom’s lipstick when he thought nobody would notice. He wore her bathrobe around the house too, changing into it as soon as he got home from work. He carried Ernest around in his arms; the half-naked parrot was always looking for a warm spot. Dad asked one night if maybe I could make Ernest a sweater. “A late Christmas present?” he asked.

  “I can’t knit.”

  We had not celebrated Christmas. It had come and gone like any other Monday, except with more pork sandwiches.

  Dad went out the next day and bought an argyle sweater at Debbie’s Petland. It was meant for a miniature Yorkshire terrier or one of the smaller Chihuahuas. “But look!” Dad smiled. “Look how well it fits!” Ernest toddled in a little circle.

  New Year’s Eve came, and New Year’s Day, and then my birthday on January 8th. I turned eleven, and there was no rabbit cake for the first year ever. I waited for Dad to say something that morning, but he went to work with the parrot dressed in his new tiny sweater, his wings poking out through the sleeves. Dad wiped off his lipstick before he left the house, using some of Mom’s cold cream. I felt sadder and lonelier than I ever had before. Mom would have woken me up with cake and presents, and Lizzie would have at least remembered.

  The morning newscaster on TV wished Elvis a happy birthday, but she meant Presley. I didn’t see the point of celebrating a dead person’s birthday. We hadn’t celebrated Mom’s when it had come in the fall. I pinched my arm and wondered if I really had been Elvis Presley in a past life, his soul trapped in my skin. Mom used to say that I could expect challenges, consequences that came with possessing Elvis Presley’s former spirit. Some mornings she used to fill a plastic pill canister with M&M’s and Skittles. She’d tell me to remember to take the whole bottle or else I’d get the blues.

  “You’ll give her diabetes,” Dad had warned as Mom sorted out the yellow candies. She always said yellow was the happiest color, said that was a fact proven by several studies. I was supposed to eat the yellows first.

  I didn’t know if I was depressed now, but I did miss Lizzie. I had let Dad send her away without a fight; I’d probably pay for it once she got home.

  At school, we were building a life-sized sarcophagus of King Tut. Lucy Wiggins and I were in charge of the gold paint. Lucy had long red hair, and a birthmark over her left eyebrow that looked like a butterfly. When Lucy brushed her hand against mine, a shiver ran up my spine, but it was a good feeling, a good shiver. It felt nice to be touched. Lucy’s mother let her wear makeup to school, and she was wearing this plum-purple lip stain that made her look like a dead person.

  “Do you know that narwhal is Danish for corpse whale?” I asked her.

  “What’s a narwhal?” Lucy asked, dipping her brush into the Dixie cup of gold paint.

  “You know, the whale with the horn on its head. Like a unicorn whale.”

  “My brother is crazy too,” Lucy said. “I think that’s why Ms. Powell paired us together.”

  “Girls,” Ms. Powell said. “King Tut needs more gold leaf on his forehead.”

  I was building up the courage to ask Lucy what kind of crazy her brother was when the bell rang. Everyone else rushed out to recess and I walked down the corridor for my regular meeting at the guidance office. Ms. Bernstein was napping when I got there, her nyloned feet up on the desk.

  “Ah,” she said, after she’d woken up and asked what I’d been up to. I told her I was still reading The Compiled Studies of the Naked Mole Rat. It was the longest book I’d ever read.

  “Naked mole rats can live for thirty-two years in a zoo or laboratory,” I told her. “And close to that in the wild.”

  “Oh yeah?” she asked. There was a little dried spit in the corner of her mouth.

  “They live in colonies,” I explained. “Sometimes up to three hundred rats. There is one breeding female, the queen, and then three breeder males. The rest of the naked mole rats are divided into two classes: warriors and workers. The social structure is like a beehive. That’s very rare for mammals.”

  “Let’s talk about your mother for a moment,” Ms. Bernstein said.

  “My mother wanted to put the naked mole rat in the book she was writing. A whole chapter for them.”

  “What did your mother do for a job?”

  “She was a biologist.”

  “She studied these rats?”

  “It’s a naked mole rat, not a rat. Entirely different animals. They aren’t rats or moles. They look like bald guinea pigs.”

  Ms. Bernstein nodded, writing down more notes on her chart.

  “A queen naked mole rat will regularly kill some of her workers,” I explained, “in order to assert her power. Every time a naked mole rat dies, the social structure of the colony shifts.”

  “How do the mole rats decide who is a queen?” Ms. Bernstein asked.

  “No naked mole rat is born a queen. Dominance must be won. It’s a fight to the death.”

  “Oh,” she said. The timer on her desk dinged, which meant our meeting was up.

  Going through Mom’s res
earch helped me feel close to her, especially after I discovered that the last hundred pages of The Compiled Studies of the Naked Mole Rat were scribbled with Mom’s handwriting. At first I thought that was strange, since none of the studies in the back of the book were about sleep, or about prolonged darkness.

  Scientists had found that naked mole rats do not get cancer, and some articles said that naked mole rats might be the key to curing the disease in humans. The research found that the cells of naked mole rats never clump into tumors because of a sugary goo produced by their skin called high molecular weight hyaluronan. It was pretty complicated, but The Compiled Studies of the Naked Mole Rat explained it pretty well, and Mom had already underlined the most important parts.

  “Did Mom ever have cancer?” I asked Dad at breakfast.

  “She had a mole removed once,” he said. “But it wasn’t cancerous.”

  Dad was wearing Mom’s bathrobe; he had finally stopped sleeping in his nylon swimsuit. Ernest was having trouble perching on Dad’s shoulder because the robe’s fabric was so slick.

  “Do you think I could get a copy of her medical records?”

  “Probably,” Dad said. “But I know everything about your mom, so just ask me.”

  I felt my face turn red, because Dad didn’t know everything about Mom. He didn’t know about Mr. Oakes, about her affair. Who knew what else she’d been hiding?

  15.

  A week went by with no mail and then Lizzie sent a postcard, her handwriting so small that Dad couldn’t read it even with his glasses on. It didn’t help that she’d written the postcard in red crayon either, the wax not as precise as a pen. The postcard said a girl had a seizure, right in front of everyone. Everyone was watching Finding Nemo when one girl fell off the couch and onto the floor, her mouth frothing, her whole body twitching, her eyelids fluttering back. Lizzie wrote: It was like a bird was set free in her brain.