Rabbit Cake

by Annie Hartnett

  “A few years ago.”

  “What was it like?”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” Ms. Bernstein said, but I could tell that she was lying. Vanessa had told me that people look up and to the right when they lie. “Elvis, I want you to keep this brain tumor theory to yourself, okay? Your father doesn’t need this right now. I want you to forget about it.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. “That’s fine.” I needed more proof before I could tell Dad anyway, if he was going to believe it.

  “Elvis?” she said, when I was halfway out the door. “Don’t trust your sister, or her friend. You’re smarter than that.”

  I didn’t know what Ms. Bernstein had against my sister, and I liked Vanessa; she didn’t seem that mentally ill to me. She asked Dad about Carpet World and me about school, and she knew every single fact about Tom Cruise, even his favorite color. When she saw the Guinness World Records on the shelf, she said she knew someone who had a world record for most tennis balls held in a human mouth. The record was three, although a dog in Texas could fit five.

  “You can make a record for almost anything,” Vanessa said, as she flipped through the book. That got Lizzie’s attention, and by the end of the night they’d decided they’d be world record holders by this time next year.

  “Record holders in what?” I asked.

  “We’ll think of something,” Vanessa said.

  “Yeah,” Lizzie added.

  “I think it’s a great goal,” Dad said. “Something to shoot for.” Vanessa reached over and put her hand on Dad’s knee.

  Late that night I heard noises in the kitchen, and I thought Lizzie was having another sleepwalking episode. I tiptoed down the stairs, a disposable camera in my hand, wanting to make sure I had proof.

  But it was Dad who was out of bed, and Vanessa too. I froze on the last step, and peeked around the corner into the kitchen. Dad’s shirt was off, the parrot perched on his bare shoulder. Vanessa was wearing one of Lizzie’s bikini tops and her SpongeBob SquarePants boxer shorts.

  “Close your eyes,” Vanessa said, moving closer to Dad. “I can be your wife.”

  “Close your eyes,” the parrot repeated.

  Vanessa unhooked her bikini straps.

  “Vanessa, stop it,” Dad said.

  She pulled her boxer shorts down to her ankles. She had freckles on her butt cheeks, as if she’d been naked out in the sun.

  “You’re a kid,” Dad said. “Put your clothes back on.”

  “I’m old enough.” Vanessa took the last two steps between her and my father. I was about to scream.

  But it was Ernest who shrieked first. He flew up off Dad’s shoulder toward the ceiling fan, then dive-bombed Vanessa’s head. He attacked her gnarled lumps of hair, beating her face with his wings.

  I dropped the Kodak camera. It flashed when it hit the floor.

  22.

  Vanessa left on a Greyhound bus in the morning; she said she had an aunt she could stay with. That afternoon, Lizzie gave one of her pills to the parrot. I saw her do it, but there wasn’t time to stop her. I ran to Ernest, and tried to make him spit it out. He opened his beak, as if he wanted to show me that the pill was already gone.

  I raced into Dad’s room, where he was fumbling with a tie in the mirror. He hadn’t worn a tie since Mom was alive; she had always tied them for him, every morning. It hadn’t occurred to me that he didn’t know how to do it himself.

  “Lizzie,” I gasped. “Lizzie has been bad again.”

  Dad threw his hands in the air, dropping the tie onto the ground. But I knew there was something in his gesture that was jubilant too, before he knew her victim was Ernest.

  We called the local vet, but she was not helpful. “I have no experience with that medication,” she said. “And I’m a dog-and-cat-only veterinarian. Rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, sometimes.”

  So I called Pamela, and she gave me the number for the zoo’s exotic animal vet. I introduced myself into the phone receiver in one giant breath, and Dr. Rotherwood said he remembered me from when the ZooTeens did a backstage tour of the zoo’s animal hospital.

  “Thanks for the tour,” I said, and then launched into the list of the pill’s side effects in humans.

  Dr. Rotherwood said the parrot would be fine, but I could speed passage of the pill through Ernest’s digestion track if I gave him milk of magnesia, five to ten drops in his beak. “You can bring him to the zoo on Monday, if you still want me to check him out,” Dr. Rotherwood offered, before he hung up.

  Monday was two days away. Ernest lay like a baby in Dad’s arms, his gray talons curled in.

  “It was good enough for me,” Lizzie said from her roost on the couch.

  For the rest of the weekend, Dad was in the armchair cradling Ernest, feeding the bird squirts of water with an eyedropper. I thought Ernest might be faking it, remembered how easy it had once been to get Mom to think I had a fever just by putting a hot towel on my face for ten minutes. The bird liked tummy rubs.

  Lizzie stayed in her room for two days. I made peanut butter and jellies for everyone, doled the sandwiches out separately. Dad gave most of his to Ernest, tearing the bread up into tiny pieces so he wouldn’t choke on the peanut butter.

  I thought it was clear by the end of the weekend that Ernest wasn’t going to die, but Dad still dropped me off at the zoo early Monday, along with Ernest in his carrier cage. It was a good reason to skip school, I thought. I went to the vet hospital, a little red house behind the stables. There was a sick camel out front, his legs folded under him. Dr. Rotherwood wasn’t in yet.

  I walked toward the giraffe-viewing tower, since I had two bananas in my backpack. There was a yellow construction crane parked in the middle of the exhibit, peering over the trees like a mechanical giraffe. When I reached the tower, I saw Harrison lying sideways on the ground, a blue tarp wrapped around him, a harness fastened to his chest. I held the carrier close and ran down the stairs to the front gate.

  Dr. Rotherwood was there to let me in, swinging open the metal fence. He didn’t try to stop me when I bent to sit by Harrison’s head, or when I stroked his bumpy face. The older a male giraffe gets, the more lumps grow on his forehead, formed by calcium deposits.

  “Whatcha doin’?” Ernest asked, chewing on the bars of the cage.

  “Harrison’s body starved him,” Dr. Rotherwood explained to the newspaper reporter who was already there. “His stomach wouldn’t let him absorb the nutrients in food. He could eat and eat and eat but it wouldn’t matter at all.”

  “Peracute mortality syndrome,” I said. “Wasting disease.”

  “Star student.” Dr. Rotherwood pointed at me.

  Ernest made clucking and whistling sounds.

  “Will the other giraffes miss him?” the reporter asked.

  “We know elephants and chimps mourn their dead, that’s what they say. But the female giraffes were out there this morning, nudging him, licking him.”

  I put my ear to the ground and lifted Harrison’s whiskered lips to look at his black-purple tongue. Like bongos, giraffes have no top teeth, only a row of grooved bottom front teeth and their cheek teeth far in the back. I closed his mouth, and then I kissed him, right on his velveteen nose.

  After the newspaper reporter left, Dr. Rotherwood and a few workers used the mechanical crane to lift Harrison’s body over the fence, but then they needed to fit him in a truck in order to drive to the crematorium. An entire giraffe doesn’t fit in a truck, not even a Dodge Ram.

  One of the workers took out a chainsaw and that’s when I lost it. I climbed on Harrison, gripping around his neck with my hands and my legs, and screamed that they’d have to saw me apart first before they chopped up Harrison. It took Dr. Rotherwood and two other men five minutes to pull me off since I kept biting at their hands. Once they’d pried me off, I spat on Dr. Rotherwood. I was aiming for his face, but I hit his lab coat, a big foamy loogie on his breast pocket right above the stitching of his name.

  23.

  Pam
ela said they’d welcome me back with open arms in a few months, once everyone cooled off a little. They said I needed some time to rest, to recover from what I’d seen. Pamela said everyone understood, everyone had been emotional that day. She said there was no reason that I should have had to be there that morning.

  So after school, I was left home with my sister, which was okay. I didn’t feel ready to see Harrison’s empty pen, and I knew someone probably should be keeping an eye on Lizzie. Dad had taken her in for an appointment, and the doctor said we could lower her dosage.

  “What if I start sleepwalking again?” she’d asked the doctor. He’d closed the door to the exam room, and I didn’t hear the rest of their conversation. Lizzie wasn’t sleepwalking again, not yet anyway. After a week, she was much more alert. Her reaction time was better. You could toss something to her and she would catch it.

  She was baking at least three rabbit cakes a day, sometimes as many as six. She didn’t frost some of them, and I felt bad for those ones, looking like those hairless sphinx cats. Others were elaborately decorated, with marzipan eyes and soft pink ears and marshmallow fluff for tails. The rabbits were everywhere, on top of the microwave, in all the cabinets. The goal was to be in the Guinness World Records for the most rabbit cakes ever baked, which meant we didn’t get to eat them.

  “They need proof,” Lizzie explained. “I want to get to a thousand.”

  Dad loved the idea, and brought cake ingredients home from the Stop ’n’ Save every night; he said it was cheaper than sending her back to St. Cloud’s. After the first twenty cakes, Lizzie ran out of space to keep the cakes in the kitchen and started stacking rabbits in our bathtub. Dad went out and bought a chest freezer. He rolled it in on a dolly, and put it on the porch. Lizzie asked me to get inside to try it out. My whole body fit, and it wasn’t plugged in so it wasn’t cold.

  “A little-sister freezer, a fifty-rabbit fridge,” Lizzie chanted. “It’s perfect.”

  I no longer minded that Lizzie was using Mom’s cake pan. Lizzie was acting more like herself again, finally, so I told myself this was a new beginning, a lucky one. Baking during the day could be the thing keeping her from sleepeating at night. Maybe I never should have hidden the rabbit cake pan underneath the bed where Lizzie couldn’t find it; then maybe she wouldn’t have attacked the parrot in her sleep.

  “I’m sorry, Ernest,” I said to the parrot, giving him a shelled peanut.

  The constant cake smell in the house drove me nuts, and I wanted sugar all the time. Sometimes I’d microwave a Twinkie and eat it with my eyes shut, pretending it was a rabbit cake. I picked up a fork one morning and held it over a cake, one I’d named Lemondrop, but Lizzie snatched the utensil by its prongs and chucked it across the kitchen. Dad didn’t look up from his section of the newspaper, but I thought I saw him smile a little. He hadn’t liked to see Lizzie acting brain-dead any more than I had.

  While the rabbit cakes baked, Lizzie studied for her homeschool exams. The state sent the package of tests in the spring and you had three days to complete them and mail them back. She read her history textbook and the SparkNotes for Of Mice and Men. I was surprised to see her suddenly taking it seriously. Maybe it was because of Dad’s suggestion that he re-enroll her in public school for next year. “One year of homeschool might be enough,” he’d said. “Don’t you think?”

  Lizzie told Dad she’d rather drink Drano than go back to Freedom High, and she took the drain cleaner out from under the sink to show that she meant it.

  “Okay,” Dad said, his hands in the air as if Lizzie were pointing a gun at him. “You’re the boss.”

  Serengeti Park had six rabbits kept in a hutch behind the Safari Grill. We used them for the educational programs on Saturdays with the smaller kids, the youngest groups. Two of the rabbits, Steven Tyler and Oscar, were biters so they never left the hutch. Jessica Rabbit and Punk were the non-biters, so we’d take them into the air-conditioned barn and make the kids sit in a circle while the two bunnies cautiously crawled around. Rabbits will only really hop when they’re comfortable, otherwise they crawl or they dash away in a panicked zigzag pattern.

  There was a chinchilla kept in with the rabbits too, a sweet one named Fisher. Fisher was not a biter, not even when the hair dryer got too hot on his skin. It was my job to blow-dry Fisher whenever it rained, since a chinchilla’s fur is so dense that it’ll never dry on its own. Fifty strands of fur sprout from a single hair follicle on a chinchilla. For humans the ratio is one hair to one follicle. A wet chinchilla will grow mold.

  I was telling Dad about Fisher at breakfast when Lizzie said I could shut up already about the zoo, especially since I didn’t work there anymore.

  “You should look up what temporarily on leave means in your dictionary,” I huffed. “It might be on the homeschool exam.”

  “Be nice,” Dad warned.

  Ernest interrupted the fight with a loud squawk. “You bad dog,” he scolded. The dog lifted his ears. I was careful never to say bad dog to Boomer, and I never heard Dad or Lizzie say it either. But the parrot said it, sometimes directing it at the dog, or at Lizzie or me.

  “Do you think Ernest knows what it means?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Dad said. “Absolutely he does. You know he doesn’t like the dog.”

  I wondered if the parrot’s voice sounded like Mom’s to Boomer. Dogs’ hearing is sharper than ours, so maybe Boomer detected a difference in pitch. I hoped he knew that they weren’t the same. I didn’t want Boomer to think Mom had turned on him somehow, not when he had loved her the most.

  Mom had always argued that Boomer was the best dog he could be. We weren’t supposed to yell at him, he was too sensitive. “He’s trying to be good,” she’d say. “He’s making an effort.” Then she’d bury her face into his white tummy, weaving her fingers into his fur. Boomer’s tongue would loll out of his mouth, his eyes wild with pleasure.

  I wondered what Mom would think, about me getting kicked out of the zoo, about Lizzie refusing to go back to school, about the rabbit cake project. We are trying to be good, I thought.

  Without the zoo, I was at liberty, as Mom used to say during semesters when Magnolia Community College didn’t assign her any classes. With all this free time, I told Ms. Bernstein, I could do more research into Mom’s mysterious death.

  “It’s not a mysterious death,” Ms. Bernstein reminded me.

  Dad had made me an appointment with our family doctor for a checkup, and I saw that as an opportunity. After the nurse checked my blood pressure and weighed me, she left me in the exam room to change into a paper gown. I slipped into the hallway and went to the file cabinet, where I looked under B for Babbitt.

  “What are you doing?” someone asked behind me. It was Dr. Agee.

  “I have a right to know my medical history, and I want to see my mother’s chart,” I said. “Come on, Charlie.” Mom always called our doctor by his first name.

  “It’s not in there,” Dr. Agee said. “We keep the records of deceased patients in another room, and I’m not telling you where. Your father has seen the file. You can talk with him.” His eyes drifted to the waiting room, where Dad was reading a magazine.

  “You’ve seen Mom’s medical chart?” I asked Dad on the ride home.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Was she sick when she died?”

  “She was healthy as a horse.”

  So maybe Mom had gone to another doctor for diagnosis of the brain tumor. That would make sense. I’d heard Mom say once that she thought Charlie was kind of a dope.

  Every day after school, I did more research on brain tumors, on suicide rates for cancer sufferers. When it got too depressing, I went downstairs to watch Lizzie bake. She was using The Southern Cake Bible to try out new recipes: a hummingbird cake, a chocolate cake called Mississippi mud, and then she went on a red velvet kick for a while. She bought box after box of red food coloring.

  It was her sixteenth birthday on April 26th, and there were rabbit cakes
all over the house, but she said we couldn’t eat even one. She said first the rabbits would be in the Guinness World Records, and then someone would probably want to exhibit them in a museum, the Smithsonian maybe—she heard they organized new exhibits all the time. She said there was a 115-year-old wedding cake displayed in England, preserved in a box of silica gel, so she knew a long-term exhibit was possible.

  “But that cake smells so good,” I begged. I wanted to celebrate birthdays the same way we used to.

  “You’ll get over it,” Lizzie said.

  24.

  April, May

  When the homeschool exams arrived in the mail on May 2nd, Lizzie put commas in the wrong places on her writing composition. She was a terrible speller, and didn’t have the best memory either. Dad said I absolutely was not allowed to help her, and I’d be in major trouble if I did.

  Lizzie remembered very little about what had happened in World War I, other than that mustard gas had been used for the first time. In the biology section, I saw that she’d mislabeled the pancreas as the spleen on the drawing of a frog’s digestive system; she was supposed to have dissected a frog at some point during the school year. I would have let her use my virtual dissection software, but there was nothing I could do about it now.

  By Saturday, the homeschool exams were on their way back to the Alabama Department of Education, and Lizzie and I were playing poker. She had learned to play at St. Cloud’s and she was teaching me. Lizzie said we had to start betting for money right away or I’d never learn. I had my piggy bank out on the table.

  The phone had been ringing over and over all morning. Dad was usually the one who picked up, but he was at work doing inventory. The ringing didn’t quit, so I finally answered it as Lizzie shuffled the deck.

  “I’m calling about the statue,” the caller said. “I’d like to have it back.”