Rabbit Cake

by Annie Hartnett

  “This one’s not a Jesus,” I interrupted, holding up what looked like a wooden dog.

  “That’s a lamb,” the kid said. “Self-portrait.” He then extended his hand to Mom. “My name’s Soda.”

  “I’ve got big plans for you, Soda,” Mom said. “Masterpiece plans.” She always knew what people needed to hear.

  I wished Mom had stuck around long enough to see the Jesus statue. I lifted it and dragged it into the house. I could carry it on my own without much of a problem; the statue was lighter than it looked. The torso was made of papier-mâché. I took it all the way upstairs.

  “What in the hell is that?” Dad asked, meeting me at the top of the stairs.

  “It’s Mom’s statue,” I said. “It cost seven hundred dollars.”

  “Sheesh,” he said. “That is ugly.”

  Dad wanted me to leave the Jesus statue in the hallway, where someone was sure to trip over it in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom. I volunteered to keep it in my room.

  “You’re sure? It’s creepy,” Dad said.

  “It was Mom’s.”

  In the dim light of my room, Jesus did look creepy, so I arranged a pile of stuffed animals around the cross-legged statue. I thought I was too old for toys, but Dad wouldn’t let me throw the stuffed animals out and I was secretly glad I still had them. I couldn’t find my favorite, Mr. Tequila the orange tabby, so I put another stuffed cat near the top. I’d read that felines could ward off evil spirits. I wished we could have a real cat, but Dad was allergic. Our fifth-grade class was on a campaign to get Ms. Powell to bring her cat into school for a day. Langston was an elegant tortoiseshell cat, named after a poet. He had his own website.

  Even after I’d hidden most of the Jesus statue, the whole pile was disturbing. Many of the animals were missing their plastic eyes. Boomer liked to chew those off, leaving white cotton stuffing spilling out of the sockets.

  That night, I lay awake staring at the wallpaper, my back to the statue. I thought about Jesus biting into my neck with his plastic rake teeth. I thought about his fish-head fingertips running down the length of my body, measuring me. Maybe he’d want to crawl into bed. “Scoot over,” he’d say. “I’m chilly.” He’d press his cold toes against my ankles. Jesus’s feet were two stuffed rainbow trout, one fish bigger than the other. My left foot was half a size larger than my right too; I usually wore an extra sock to balance it out in my shoes.

  I got out of bed and lifted up Jesus by his overall straps and moved him into Lizzie’s empty room. Ocean Jesus wasn’t my savior. Maybe he was just another thing Mom had left behind to haunt us, like her voice in the parrot, like her unfinished book.

  18.

  Dad and I had started getting takeout fried chicken and biscuits almost every night, since no one was around to tell us how unhealthy that was. Dad let me watch the Animal Network as we ate, and we’d watch TV until Dad fell asleep in his chair, Ernest nestled in his lap. I always walked Boomer one more time before I went to bed.

  One night, when Dad came home with the yellow takeout box, I realized how much I’d been enjoying these nights, and I felt really guilty. I wondered what kind of food they served at St. Cloud’s.

  “I bet the food’s pretty good,” Dad said, when I asked him. “It should be, for what they’re charging me.” He handed me the box of chicken and turned on the TV to the Animal Network. Ernest pecked at his buttered biscuit.

  Wildlife Encounters with Dr. Lillian Stone wasn’t on that night, so we watched an hour-long program called Animal Wars, a show that I usually avoided because of how violent it was. It filmed animals as they hunted. A lion attacked a zebra, a mongoose decapitated a cobra, a barn owl swooped down on a mouse. I covered my eyes each time something bad was about to happen, and asked Dad to tell me when to open. Dad said I shouldn’t feel too bad for the victims, because not many animals die of natural causes anyway. That was something Mom had told him once when he was upset after running over someone’s pet poodle.

  After a string of commercials, we watched a troop of chimpanzees cannibalize another primate. The group of chimps ambushed the red colobus monkey, a cuter and fluffier primate species. The chimps used their fingers, trying to tear the little monkey apart. I shut my eyes again.

  “Lizzie is going to be okay,” Dad said then.

  I wasn’t sure why the monkeys had made Dad think of Lizzie, but Ms. Bernstein had warned me that Lizzie might not be okay, as if I didn’t already know that. Every time I went to our meetings, Ms. Bernstein asked about the girl who had the seizure at St. Cloud’s, the one Lizzie had written home about. She said it sounded like a drug overdose.

  “You need to be ready for when Lizzie comes home,” Ms. Bernstein said. “She may be a very different person. It’s a good idea to find out what things are like for her now. If she’s seen someone die, that would be very traumatic.”

  “We saw Mom,” I said. “At the coroner.”

  “Someone Lizzie’s own age,” Ms. Bernstein said, as if she was annoyed.

  Three days before Lizzie’s release from St. Cloud’s, Dad asked me to clean her room, since it badly needed dusting, vacuuming, fresh sheets on the bed. I hadn’t spent any time in Lizzie’s room while she’d been at St. Cloud’s, except to move the Ocean Jesus statue in there. Ocean Jesus smiled his rakish smile at me when I entered the room. One of his fish fingers had fallen off so I threw the lacquered herring into the trash.

  I filled a bucket with warm soapy water and rubbed a sponge on the wooden surfaces. I alphabetized the books on her shelf. I made Lizzie’s bed and fluffed her pillows. The girls weren’t allowed to have pillows at St. Cloud’s. They were listed as both an unnecessary luxury and a possible safety hazard since pillows could be used to suffocate another St. Cloud’s patient. I was sure that Lizzie had missed pillows.

  She must have missed her clothes too, since she had been allowed to take only three changes of clothes with her and she had packed in a rush. Her closet was full to the brim. I ran my fingers over her corduroy jacket, her summer dresses. If she never came back, all these nice clothes would be mine, I thought, for one ugly second.

  When I went downstairs to get more Clorox wipes, I found Dad in the living room reading Mom’s unfinished manuscript in my red binder. I must have left it out.

  “You’ve been working on her book,” he said when he saw me. “I hadn’t realized.”

  “Just a little.” I blushed. The only really good thing I’d added to The Sleeping Habits of Animals was a study on dolphins.

  “She was so proud of you,” Dad said, dabbing his eyes.

  Researchers had found that whales and dolphins sleep with one eye open, with half the brain shut off, the other half awake, so that the mammal can go to the surface to breathe every fifteen minutes. When a dolphin gives birth to a calf, the mother doesn’t seem to sleep at all for the first month—keeping both eyes open at all times, watching out for predators. I knew Mom would have liked that research; it showed what mothers sacrifice.

  She had been a really good mom, that was why we missed her so much. That was another thing that didn’t add up: if my mother had killed herself, she had gone against her maternal instincts. Mothers don’t abandon their young that often, not most mammals anyway.

  “She was proud of Lizzie too,” Dad said. “She was so proud of both of you.”

  Sibling rivalry is a big part of the natural world, in many mammals and birds too, and I hoped that explained why there was a part of me that didn’t want Lizzie to come home.

  Before Lizzie was discharged, the St. Cloud’s doctor warned us not to talk about Mom too much. He said that it would stir up some bad feelings.

  “Of course it brings up bad feelings,” I said. “Our mother is dead.”

  I wanted to ask Lizzie about the phone call with Miss Ida. I wanted to know if Lizzie thought Mom might have killed herself, and I wanted to know if Lizzie felt at all suicidal. But the doctor gave us a list of things we shouldn’t discuss with Liz
zie while she was in what he called a delicate state. Suicide was second on the list, and death was listed first.

  When Lizzie arrived home, she promised Dad that she wouldn’t sleepwalk again, not ever. “Cure-all,” she said, poking a fork into her Styrofoam cup of noodles. She had cut her long blonde hair off into a bob, or her roommate at St. Cloud’s had, and they’d gotten in a lot of trouble for stealing scissors from the therapist’s office. Lizzie’s hair was uneven on one side. “I hadn’t noticed,” she said, when I pointed the lopsidedness out.

  19.

  February, March

  I waited for Lizzie to lash out. I waited for her to tell me that she hated my guts for letting Dad send her away, or maybe she would say that she’d missed me. But she didn’t say much of anything. Instead, she slept on the couch most of the day.

  It had been Lizzie who always ate the last piece of pie. It had been Lizzie who always got failure to cooperate comments on her report card. It had been Lizzie who stole beers from the fridge, Lizzie who hid an active wasps’ nest in the glove box of a car. It had been Lizzie who had to be sent away to St. Cloud’s for two whole months.

  But my new sister, or the girl who said she was my sister, washed the dishes, and she never broke them. She put her wet towel back on the rack after she showered; she didn’t leave it on the floor. She rarely went outside, and when she did, she always wore her shoes. She cleaned our parrot’s cage three times a week, and changed his water every morning. Ernest’s feathers were still growing in, but he chattered to Lizzie as she laid down fresh newspaper.

  “Sweetie,” he’d say, when she was done. “Don’t you bite!”

  In their monthly phone call, Ms. Bernstein explained to Dad that kids with after-school activities were less likely to fall into depression. I eavesdropped on their conversation from the phone upstairs, my hand over the receiver so they wouldn’t hear me breathing.

  “Elvis would also benefit from some time away from her sister,” Ms. Bernstein said. “She’s very caught up in Elizabeth’s mental problems. It’s not healthy.”

  “Her name is Lizzie,” I said into the phone, before remembering I wasn’t supposed to be on the line.

  So that was how Dad decided to sign me up for the volunteer program at the Serengeti Park Zoo.

  “You love animals,” Dad said, showing me a map of the zoo. “And I need you supervised.”

  I’d never been to Serengeti Park. It was only fifteen minutes away, halfway between Freedom and Opelika, but Mom had said she didn’t like it there so we’d never gone. She’d argued that while cages were fine for some animals, they weren’t okay for the wild ones. All animal species had been wild once, I’d reminded her. Dogs were the first animals to be domesticated by humans, which made perfect sense. Boomer liked other dogs, but it was clear he liked us best.

  “Unless . . .” Dad said, “you’d rather join a sports team or a club.”

  “It’s fine, Dad,” I said, crossing my arms, pretending not to be excited. I would have started acting depressed much earlier if I’d known I’d get sent to the second-largest zoo in Alabama every day after school and all day on Saturdays.

  On the first day of the Serengeti Park enrichment program, we got a prison-orange T-shirt that said ZooTeen on the back. Most of the ZooTeens were sixteen or seventeen, ordered there by a judge; Dad had gotten me special permission to be the youngest ZooTeen they’d ever had. There was a van that picked up the volunteers from the high school and junior high, and they had to make a special stop at Beaver Elementary just for me. The boys wore pants too big for them and the girls wore shimmery blue-green eyeliner, the color of a peacock’s tail. Our supervisor, Pamela, told us we’d have to write a three-page report on our experience, due by the end of the first ten weeks.

  Pamela showed us how to clean the tree kangaroo cages. Each cage was two inches deep with pine chips that needed to be shoveled out and replaced. The wood shavings stuck to my shoelaces. The tree kangaroos stayed curled in their hammocks while we cleaned.

  Then we fed broccoli sprouts to the bongos, a kind of striped antelope that lives in the jungle. Pamela explained that bongos don’t have top teeth, only cheek teeth and bottom teeth. She said you could put your whole hand in a bongo’s mouth and it couldn’t bite you so that it hurt. Their noses were soft and wet like a cow’s.

  I knew that Lizzie wouldn’t remember to take Boomer out during the day, and Dad would be at work, so I walked the dog for thirty minutes every Saturday morning before Dad drove me to the zoo.

  “You’re getting well versed in picking up poop,” Dad laughed, when he saw me swinging a plastic bag full of Boomer’s warm dung. In only two weeks at the zoo, I had learned that snake poop is white and runny, much like bird droppings. I learned that gorillas and rabbits eat their feces, so that they can better digest their food a second time. I knew that cleaning the waterfowl enclosure was the worst assignment at Serengeti. We had to drain the cement pond and hose it down and the smell was so bad we had to do it before the zoo opened.

  The ZooTeens learned about feeding too. We chopped vegetables, peeled hard boiled eggs, doled out bowls of ferret chow, mixed in live mealworms for special treats.

  “You should get paid for this,” Dad said, when I told him about the buckets of fish chum we fed to the crocodiles.

  “You signed me up,” I reminded him.

  But I liked the zoo just as it was. The rest of the ZooTeens ignored me, so I could always sneak off to the wooden viewing platform at the giraffe enclosure. The giraffes could come over to the tower and be at eye level with you, seventeen feet up. It wasn’t open to the public, hadn’t been since the male giraffe, Harrison, had gotten sick. He had a disease that caused him to lose weight fast, dropping to 1,700 pounds, bone-thin for a male giraffe; a healthy one should weigh between 2,500 and 3,000 pounds. An article on Harrison had been in the newspaper and that had helped with fund-raising. The zookeepers were optimistic. I always offered Harrison a banana and sometimes he’d take it, wrapping his long purple tongue around my hand.

  There was always something to do at the zoo; extra volunteers were usually needed in Rodent Tunnel, the underground exhibit lit only by dim red light. The other ZooTeens said Rodent Tunnel was spooky, but I liked it down there. It wasn’t all rodents either; there was a den for the foxes and the skunk, and those animals had cages on the surface as well, doggie doors to connect them to their outdoor enclosures. There was a long row of mouse cages, and a few moles.

  I did try to avoid Rodent Tunnel on Wednesdays. The mice we had on exhibit in Rodent Tunnel bred too fast, so we fed them to the other animals, but that wasn’t the part that bothered me. It was the way we killed them that I couldn’t stand. The zoo had a no-live-prey policy because, on occasion, a mouse could kill a snake, or pull too many feathers off the kingfisher. We got most of our prey frozen in shipments from a company called Mice Direct, but it didn’t hurt to have extras.

  The instructions were to dump one of the mouse cages, shavings and all, into a garbage bag. You then squirted in some carbon dioxide from an aluminum tank, the kind you would use to fill up helium balloons for a birthday party. You tied the Hefty bag closed. Sometimes it took the mice hours to die; you could hear them peeping.

  When I found out about Wednesdays in Rodent Tunnel, I came home and told Lizzie. She was sitting on the couch, watching a reality show about teenage mothers.

  “It’s terrible,” I said. “They suffocate slowly.” I told her about the trash bag, and I started crying then, and I was so embarrassed; we weren’t a family of criers. But Lizzie didn’t even look away from the screen.

  “Can I watch Dr. Lillian?” I asked, once I stopped sniffling. “She’s on now.”

  “No,” Lizzie said. “I’m watching something.”

  She’s mentally ill, I thought to myself. Ms. Bernstein had said that should be my new mantra every time I tried to deal with my sister.

  I got up regularly in the night to check if Lizzie was still in bed. A habit
like sleepwalking is hard to break, harder than quitting smoking; that was what the self-hypnosis CD said, the one I’d ordered online. I’d listened to it while she was gone. Mom had never wanted to stop sleepwalking. She’d said it was good for the spirit, but she had thought all sorts of things were good for the spirit: pickled vegetables, stretching first thing in the morning, pretzels dipped in spicy mustard, and Dolly Parton’s records, especially the songs Dolly had written herself.

  There was a Halloween years ago when Mom had dressed both Lizzie and me up like Dolly Parton, with big hair-sprayed bangs and country music outfits, makeup heavy on our faces. Mom had to pick us up early from school that day, because of the socks in the push-up bras we were wearing.

  “Dolly Parton has a genius-level IQ,” Mom had screeched at Principal Witherspoon, who put his hands over his ears like he was a little kid.

  I wanted a genius-level IQ too, but I’d never been tested, other than the national assessment tests we had in school. Mom had said what really mattered was how hard you worked; Dolly Parton composed thousands of songs to get her career. I’d already written my ZooTeen supervisor three reports on the care of different species at the zoo, even though Pamela told me over and over that the after-school enrichment program only needed the one, and most people never completed theirs.

  The zoo had a small library where I could do my reports as well as my research for Mom’s book. I was in the middle of reading The Reference Guide to Porcupine Anatomy and Behavior when I came across a section of the book dedicated to relatives of the porcupine. A hedgehog is not actually a porcupine cousin, despite appearances, and the book got that right, but there was a text block about the echidna, or the spiny anteater, known in Australia for its four-pronged penis. The book was wrong there: the echidna is actually a closer relative to the platypus than to the porcupine, since both are egg-laying mammals, monotremes. Porcupines are rodents, and give live birth. They are bona fide cousins to the naked mole rat. I made a note to write to the publisher.