“A bird set free in her brain,” I repeated, after I read the card out loud to Dad.
Lizzie hadn’t been home when Mom had her seizure that one time, but it had looked like that: a bird flapping madly around in her body. One minute Mom was standing in the kitchen, and the next she was flailing all over the ground. Mom stayed overnight in the hospital, and the next morning she came home fine.
“The doctor wasn’t sure what happened. He thinks it was stress-related,” she explained. “So someone else can do the dishes tonight.”
A bird in the brain was a much more interesting diagnosis than high stress levels. I knew it couldn’t be a real bird, but I kept picturing juncos and finches, swallows and ravens, and birds even larger.
Ms. Bernstein had said once that Lizzie’s handwriting was the mark of someone severely disturbed. I wanted to know if it was showing any signs of improvement, so I brought the postcard to our next meeting.
“How is your sister?” Ms. Bernstein asked, as I sat down in the leather chair facing her.
“Fine,” I said. I showed her the postcard.
“Did the girl die?”
“She didn’t say.”
“It seems like important information.”
I shrugged. I told Ms. Bernstein I’d seen Megan Sax at the Coffee Shack, where she worked, and that her jaw had healed completely.
“Are you afraid of your sister?” Ms. Bernstein asked.
“No,” I lied, or at least it felt a bit like lying.
“Are you afraid of becoming like your sister? Or like your mother?”
It seemed like a dumb question when she knew the options were
1. crazy, or
2. dead.
I knew I didn’t want to be dead. But I also knew I wanted to be like Lizzie, at least in some ways. Lizzie had once had lots of friends who loved her, before she’d broken her best friend’s jawbone. I bet Lizzie had made friends at St. Cloud’s. I bet she wasn’t lonely without me.
“I think you’re afraid of developing your sister’s mental problems, and we need to eradicate that fear or you’ll never feel in charge of your own life,” Ms. Bernstein said, setting the clipboard aside. “Can I tell you a secret, Elvis?” She looked at me straight on. She made excellent eye contact, which they probably taught her in therapist school.
“Okay,” I said, tracing my fingernail through the white sand of Ms. Bernstein’s tabletop Zen garden.
“I live alone,” she said. “I’m divorced, I’ve told you that.”
“I know.” Ms. Bernstein had seen Mr. Bernstein and her pregnant sister at the Laundromat, and she had cried throughout our meeting last week. I had suggested she buy a laundry machine for her house, so she wouldn’t have to go to Fat Betty’s Wash & Dry, but she’d said I was missing the point.
“Listen, Elvis.” Ms. Bernstein leaned toward me. “Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and hear a noise, and I’ll think that a serial killer or a burglar has broken in. I’ll panic for a minute and then I think—what’s the worst that could happen? They’ll kill me. I’ll die. That’s it. As soon as I imagine the worst, I can go right back to sleep. Works like a charm.”
“They could torture you,” I offered. “That might be worse.”
Ms. Bernstein then requested that I meet with her every day, not only once a week. She said it seemed like I had a lot on my plate.
As I tried to fall asleep that night, I listened for a serial killer or a burglar, and wished I were afraid of the same things Ms. Bernstein was afraid of.
Without Lizzie, it was so quiet I could hear the bones of our house creak in the wind. I turned on the radio and closed my eyes, but could still see the neon-green glow of the clock in the cracks of my eyelids. A doctor hosted the radio program, and he was taking medical questions from callers. I fell asleep as the doctor soothed a hysterical woman with a strange tumor growing on her ribs. The tumor had grown long black hair, and the woman was sure she could feel a tooth in the mass.
That was the way Mom should have died, by some strange and incurable cancer. She shouldn’t have died doing the same thing she did on countless other nights, something part of her regular routine. It wasn’t like her, and that bothered me.
In the morning, I knew there was someone I needed to talk to, and her number was still taped next to the phone in our kitchen.
“Hello, welcome to Miss Ida’s psychic hotline,” said a robot voice. “The charge is three dollars a minute.” I entered Dad’s credit card number, and the phone started ringing again, and a real person picked up.
“Miss Ida speaking.”
“It’s Elvis,” I said, as quietly as I could. Dad was upstairs doing his stretching exercises.
“Babbitt or Presley?” she asked, as if it were a serious question.
“Babbitt,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. “This again.”
“What?” I’d never called Miss Ida before.
“Lizzie called me already.”
“When? Why?”
“She was very upset about sleepwalking.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her that she was working through both her worst fear and greatest desire.”
“What’s her worst fear?”
“Becoming your mother.”
“And what’s her greatest desire?”
“Becoming your mother.”
I remembered why I called. “Miss Ida, do you know how my mom died?”
“Well, she drowned, didn’t she?”
“What about the coffee grounds? You predicted Mom’s death would be a suicide, that’s what we were supposed to be ready for.”
“Plenty of people have committed suicide by drowning.”
“So it was a suicide?”
“Or it was an accident. Or a murder.”
“A murder?”
“The point is, we can’t be sure.”
“So the coffee grounds aren’t accurate?”
“We can always change our fate. Everyone’s life has several possible paths.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I once saw a vision of your mother’s name on a television screen, listed in the credits. So even though Eva was never an actress, she could have been if she took a different life path. It makes sense. She was very beautiful.”
I thought of Dr. Lillian Stone, and wondered if that really could have been Mom, if things could have been different. “Miss Ida, do you know what really happened that night?”
“I can’t look into the past, and I can’t talk to the dead. I’m not that type of psychic.”
What type of psychic are you then? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t. I’d been the one who liked Mom’s stories about Miss Ida, about how she could read your aura or voodoo an old boyfriend. “What do you think happened?” I asked instead, because Miss Ida must have had an inkling. “Do you think it was an accident?”
“Most times, people die and it’s no one’s fault,” Miss Ida said. “We will always wish there was something we could have done. Elvis, that’s natural.”
There those words were again, natural and unnatural, normal and abnormal.
“You can believe whatever you want about that night. It won’t bring your mother back.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said, before I hung up.
I couldn’t believe that Lizzie had called Miss Ida, and that she hadn’t told me about it. I wished I could ask Lizzie, in person, not in a letter, but she was at St. Cloud’s. I wished Lizzie hadn’t hidden things from me, that she had trusted me. Then again, I had never told her about Mom’s affair with Mr. Oakes. I had secrets too.
Another postcard arrived. It was, again, written in crayon, but this one was more legible. I’m in heaven, she wrote. Can I come home?
“If she’s in heaven, what does she want to come home for?” Dad asked, reading over my shoulder. I didn’t understand either, and I wouldn’t get it until a long while later. Dad put the postcard on the fridge underneath a magnet, l
ike it was something to be proud of, a report card or a drawing. He hung the card glossy side up, a photo of a brick building that looked like a prison. St. Cloud’s Hospital for Women, it read. Rebuilding lives and families since 1878.
The DSM for Kids! claimed suicidal tendencies were genetic, passed down the same way sleepwalking was, or blonde hair and blue eyes. In the week before Mom disappeared, she’d acted completely normal. We’d gone to the farmers market and bought seed packets; she had said we should start planting more vegetables, fewer flowers in our garden. She was making plans for the future, which the DSM for Kids! said was a good sign. But maybe she was suicidal, like her father. Miss Ida had admitted it was a possibility. Mom could have committed suicide, staged it to look like an accident.
I’d pretty much forgotten how our grandfather had died, since Mom had never really talked about it. He’d shot himself in the middle of his own sixty-fifth birthday party, and now I realized we had a family history of causing our own deaths, and that meant Lizzie was high risk. I’d seen Lizzie nearly poison herself with Dad’s medication, but I hadn’t considered that a suicide attempt.
I called St. Cloud’s front desk and said I thought Lizzie Babbitt, a patient in the girls’ ward, should be placed on suicide watch.
“Who am I speaking with?” the woman on the other end asked.
“Elvis,” I said.
“And I’m Elton John,” she said, and hung up. When I called back, the phone just rang and rang.
After I gave up on calling St. Cloud’s, I searched Mom’s office for a suicide note. I’d looked before, in the weeks Mom was missing, but maybe I hadn’t been thorough. I flipped through all of her books, in case she’d tucked a note in the pages. I felt a little guilty that I was digging in her personal belongings, but not that guilty. She had been the one to leave it all behind.
16.
January was National Shakespeare Month, and Ms. Powell wanted everyone in the class to memorize a sonnet. I decided I would perform a monologue from Hamlet instead, after I found the book in Mom’s office, some of the pages dog-eared. In the play, Ophelia falls into the river and drowns, but everyone thinks it was a suicide. It happens offstage, so no one can be sure.
“That’s enough, Elvis,” Ms. Powell said when I was halfway through my oral presentation, holding the human skull I’d borrowed from our storage closet. “They’ll read it in high school.”
So even Ms. Powell had her limits. She said I should stick to the assignment from now on.
We had the fourth- and fifth-grade winter concert, and during rehearsal the music teacher, Mrs. Cote, asked me if I would mind lip-syncing most of the words.
“Elvis is tone-deaf,” Lucy Wiggins said. “It’s not her fault.”
“She’s retarded or something,” Aiden Masters added.
“Her mother died,” Jackie Friskey said. “And she’s not retarded.” Jackie usually called the word “retarded” the “R-word.”
“She’s not singing,” Mrs. Cote said firmly, and she made Aiden Masters go sit in the hallway for name-calling, but she didn’t send him to the principal like she should have. I agreed to lip-sync, said it was no problem, and I felt happy that my classmates had defended me. I knew Mom would have stormed into Mrs. Cote’s office and demanded that I be allowed to sing, that I be given a solo, so I was glad, for one small moment, that Mom wasn’t around.
Before the concert, Jackie Friskey came up to me in the girls’ dressing room and gave me one of her red roses out of the dozen she had. There was a card on a plastic stick in the middle of the bouquet that read: We love you! xo Mom & Dad.
“You can have the card too,” she said when she saw me staring at it. “It’s not my mom’s handwriting. The florist did it.”
I clutched the single rose’s stem, noticed it had been dethorned. I thought of Mom’s handwriting, what I had searched for in the days before. A nice, neatly written letter that told me she loved me and Dad and Lizzie and Boomer, that she was sorry she was doing this to us.
“Thanks,” I told Jackie. “It’s great.”
I didn’t sing one note, just mouthed the words, and the parents gave a standing ovation at the end. After the encore, I found Dad in the front lobby by the bake sale table, surrounded by three divorced moms. Lizzie would have called them vultures if she’d been there; she said that about any women who talked to Dad. I pictured the moms pulling meat from Dad’s bones.
“Where’d you get the flower?” Dad asked, once I pulled him away. I had held the rose for the entire concert, but it hadn’t lost any petals or wilted.
“A friend,” I said, and hoped no one else in Ms. Powell’s fifth-grade class overheard. Everyone knew Jackie Friskey wasn’t my friend, including me. She was just trying to be a good class president.
“A nice friend.” Dad smiled.
I’d once overheard Dad tell Mom that he was worried that I didn’t seem to have any friends. “Really, Eva,” he’d said. “Don’t you think Elvis should spend more time with other kids?”
“I think that’s pretty common in kids who live in rural areas,” Mom had said. “That’s what you get for living in the middle of nowhere.”
Freedom, Alabama, wasn’t really the middle of nowhere. We had big fields and the woods, sure, and horses and cows, but if we drove half an hour to Auburn we had a mini-golf course, a mall, and both a Waffle House and a Red Lobster. We had a bowling alley and the water park, even if the water park had been closed last summer, and we had the second-largest zoo in Alabama. It wasn’t like we were Laura Ingalls Wilder or anything.
But maybe now it was normal that I didn’t have any friends. No one else in my grade had a dead mother. Maybe it was too hard to be friends with the bereaved, because Dad’s old high school football buddies never came over to the house like they used to, even though all of them lived nearby. Dad had quit the men’s bowling league. He didn’t have any hobbies after work at all anymore, except talking to the parrot and wearing Mom’s lipstick and her old sweaters around the house.
“It helps me feel close to her,” Dad explained about the clothes and the lipstick, when I asked him why.
After I finished Hamlet, I took Macbeth from Mom’s office. Lady Macbeth has a sleepwalking scene in the play, in act 5, and shortly after that she kills herself. Maybe suicide has always been more common in sleepwalkers. I couldn’t find anything on the internet to confirm whether that was true.
In Macbeth, the doctor says that the sleepwalking disease is “beyond my practice,” but that he knows that some sleepwalkers die “holily in their beds.” I thought that meant the rest of the sleepwalkers, the unholy, the ones like Lady Macbeth, must commit suicide. Of course that play was written a long time ago, but Shakespeare was a genius; everyone knows that.
17.
January, February
I was feeling defeated, as if I’d never find out any more information about the way my mother died, when I came home from school to a refrigerator-sized box on our porch. It was from a return address I didn’t recognize. I went into the kitchen and brought out the box cutter and sawed the cardboard apart slowly.
Inside the box, a statue of Jesus was sitting cross-legged, his hands on his knees. Each of his fingers was made of a small dried fish, a herring probably, pressed into clay. The statue was wearing blue jean overalls, real ones—OshKosh B’gosh. His head was tilted toward the sky, his eyes Coca-Cola bottle caps, his whole face covered in individual fish scales.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, when Boomer barked at the statue.
The Jesus statue wasn’t exactly a clue about Mom’s death, but I thought it was a beacon of hope, a sign that I would figure it all out someday. Jesus was considered to be a savior by a lot of people; he could be mine too.
The fish scales flickered when the light hit them. Jesus had a child’s blue plastic rake for a mouth, an abandoned beach toy. The rake’s teeth stuck out in a snarl. Did the real Jesus ever snarl? His nose was a red-speckled calico scallop shell, his ears two n
early identical moon snails.
To tell the truth, I only knew it was supposed to be Jesus because I’d been there when Mom bought it. She had been waiting for the statue ever since we went to the Magnolia Community College Craft Fair last spring.
At the fair, Mom had gone looking around the booths for someone who could build a sculpture she’d seen in a vision during her meditation class. She finally settled on a boy with hair down to his shoulders. He was selling wooden carvings.
“Hi Professor Babbitt,” the kid had said. “I’m in your Bio 101 class.”
“Oh.” Mom had twenty-four students in each of her two classes, and she had a policy against learning their names. She said it made her biased in her grading if she knew which of her students looked like idiots. “Do you work on commission?” she asked.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I mean, I haven’t, but I would. But it has to be Jesus. I only do Jesuses.”
“Or would the plural be Jesi?” Mom smiled.
“I’m not sure, Professor Babbitt, since there’s really only one. I’m a member of the College Christians Club. We’re going to Haiti on a mission trip for spring break, and we could use another faculty advisor, if you’re interested.”
She agreed the statue could be a Jesus, which surprised me. Most of the sculptures in our house were fertility statues, round-bellied, ample-breasted women, Venus of Willendorfs.
Mom kept talking. She described her vision to the sculptor. She said she wanted the man, the Jesus, to be made out of dried fish, seashells, gray clay, and beach trash. She wanted him to look as though he’d walked straight out of the ocean.
“That’s so weird, Professor Babbitt,” he laughed. “You’re awesome. I’ll definitely do it. I’m taking a class on taxidermy, so preserving the fish for the sculpture will be a piece of cake.”
“I didn’t know we taught taxidermy,” Mom said. “Fascinating.”
“Naturalistic Taxidermy 301,” he said. “It’s only offered in the fall.”
Rabbit Cake Page 7