Rabbit Cake

by Annie Hartnett

  “Have what back?”

  “The statue.”

  “What?”

  “Jesus. I sent it a long time ago, but I want it back now. I need to borrow it for something.”

  “Uh.” I wasn’t sure whether I should hang up.

  “The Jesus made out of fish? And clay? This is the artist, the sculptor. My name is Soda.”

  “I remember you.”

  “Awesome,” Soda said. “I’m outside.”

  “Outside?” Jesus’s invisible fish fingers tickled up my spine.

  “I’m in the driveway. Can I talk to your dad?”

  “Hey,” Lizzie said. “Who’s on the phone?”

  “It’s Mom’s artist guy. He made the Jesus statue.”

  “So? Tell him to shove off.” Lizzie took the phone from me. “What do you want?” Soda must have told her, because then she said: “And what will you give us for it?”

  “It cost seven hundred dollars,” I reminded Lizzie.

  “What do you mean you’re in the driveway?” Lizzie said into the phone, and then went to open the door. Soda was there in the driveway. He was taller than I remembered, skinnier too. He was wearing a T-shirt that said Phish on it, and stained beige cargo pants and Birkenstocks. He was wearing a rope as a necklace. I wondered if he had finished with community college, if he’d moved on to Auburn University, like Mom’s smartest students did.

  “Whoa, it’s a mini-Professor Babbitt,” he said when he saw Lizzie. “I’m sorry for showing up like this. I didn’t think I’d have the guts if I didn’t just come here and talk to your dad in person. I was going to knock on the door, but I chickened out. Your dad scares me.”

  “Why?” I asked, because no one was ever afraid of my dad. He was the hometown hero.

  Soda ignored my question and explained that he wanted the sculpture back for an art show, one he was doing next month. He said it was the best thing he’d ever made, that our mom really brought something special out in him.

  “That’ll be seven hundred dollars,” Lizzie said.

  “I don’t have any money,” he said, holding his palms up as if to show us how poor he was.

  “Well, we need something,” Lizzie said. “We don’t give out favors.”

  “We don’t?” I asked.

  “I have a boat,” he offered. “I can’t give it to you, but I could take you out on the boat. We could go fishing. I could show you where I caught the fish for the Jesus statue.”

  “Interesting,” Lizzie said.

  The Gulf Coast was only an hour and a half away from our house in Freedom, but I hadn’t been to the ocean since before Mom died. It didn’t seem like a good idea, but I really liked the ocean.

  “What do you think, Elvis?” Lizzie asked.

  “Can we bring the dog?” Boomer was on the couch in the living room, chewing on one of the pillows, which he did when he hadn’t been getting enough walks.

  “Sure, if you bring the Jesus too,” Soda said. “I’ll help you carry it, no problem.”

  “No boys in the house,” Lizzie said, and then she winked. “We’ll get it for you. We’ll be right back.”

  “So you’ll come?” Soda asked.

  Lizzie shrugged. “We’ve got nothing better to do.”

  We left Soda in the driveway, closing the front door behind us. “He’s kind of cute,” Lizzie said. “Jesus Christ protect me from porn, fornication, and lust. A girl at St. Cloud’s taught me that prayer. That’s only part of it, but I forget the rest. Something, something, Holy Ghost, amen!”

  “So you think we shouldn’t go?”

  “Of course we should go,” she said. “That prayer is a joke.”

  “Dad would—”

  “I’m the babysitter, we’re going.”

  “I’m not a baby,” I said, and I knew now I had to go. I did want to see the ocean.

  Lizzie and I carried Ocean Jesus down the stairs. The parrot wouldn’t shut up, racing back and forth between the perches in his cage. Dad hadn’t brought him into work that day because the office had to be fumigated for carpet fleas. “Bad dog,” Ernest rattled. “Clever bird. Wow. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

  Soda put Jesus in the front seat and strapped him in. The back seat was full of buckets of seashells, and it smelled like rotten fish in there. Soda left the buckets in the driveway to make room for us, but the smell wasn’t any better. “Pull your T-shirt over your nose,” he suggested.

  Boomer sat on my lap to stick his head out the window. Lizzie stuck hers out too, to escape the stench that had soaked into the vinyl seats.

  “You’ll get gravel in your eyes,” I scolded. “You’ll get beheaded by a stop sign.”

  “No I won’t,” she said, squinting her eyes in the wind.

  Soda turned up his music then, so we couldn’t talk much. He drove us to the Silver Sand Motel and Marina, which was on Lake Guntersville, forty-five minutes away. The motel was painted pink and blue, and every room had its own potted plant hanging down in front of the door.

  “I thought we were going to the ocean,” I said. “You didn’t get those fish from a lake. Those are saltwater fish.”

  “Next time,” Soda promised. “The boat’s here now. And I did catch some of the fish here. All of the fingers, in fact.”

  “Is this a love motel?” Lizzie marveled at the motel’s sign. “A pay-by-the-hour place?”

  “No way, man,” Soda said. “It’s eighty dollars a night, ninety if you want a kitchenette. No pets allowed, sorry, and no AC units left. Clean carpets, clean sheets.”

  “You work here or something?”

  “Yeah, yeah I do. I inherited the place from my parents. Front desk, shuttle driver, maid service: I’m an all-around motel man. Big weekend coming up, NASCAR race.”

  “I thought you were an artist,” Lizzie said. “What a letdown.”

  “It’s really nice,” I said, though I was disappointed too.

  “I’m a young business owner. Well, my uncle owns it, officially, but he’s never around, he lives down in Florida. It’s not all mine until I turn twenty-one.”

  “So you do have money,” Lizzie said.

  “Not much,” Soda said. “Not seven hundred dollars for the statue I made.”

  Soda parked in a staff parking spot. He said we’d have to leave the statue in the car, because Jesus might dissolve if he got wet. We left him buckled in.

  Soda led us down to the docks. His motorboat was at the end, the smallest one. He asked us to put on life jackets, including the dog. The carpet squished under our feet when we jumped in.

  “A leak,” Soda apologized. “Carpet’s got mildew. But it won’t sink, scout’s honor.”

  He gave us both fishing rods. We’d never been fishing before but he said it wasn’t hard. He would cast for us, and then it was just a waiting game.

  We drove the boat out, bouncing against the waves. We were going so fast that Boomer’s lips pulled back and showed his teeth, or maybe that was a real dog smile.

  Soda slowed the boat and turned off the motor. He threw the anchor down, and then looked over at Lizzie. She had put her legs up on the side of the boat, sunning them.

  “You really look a lot like your mother,” Soda said.

  “Yeah,” Lizzie said. “I’ve heard.”

  “What happened to your eyebrows?”

  Lizzie had a rash of acne where her eyebrows were just starting to grow back in.

  “My roommate shaved them,” Lizzie said. “She likes cutting off hair.”

  Soda looked at me.

  “I’m not her roommate. I’m her sister. She had a roommate at the mental hospital where she lived for two months,” I explained. I didn’t see why Soda shouldn’t know everything.

  “Ah,” Soda said. “My mom died too, a few months ago. I got a tattoo of her.” He pulled up his pant leg. There was a tattoo of Marilyn Monroe on his calf. “I know it looks like marlin,” he said, pronouncing it like the fish. “But my mom really looked like that, when she was
young. She died in the motel, room fourteen. I’ll show you when we get back.”

  “She’s still there?” Lizzie said. “Is this like that old scary movie?”

  “No, no, no,” Soda said. “It’s only the bed. The hospice bed, not the motel’s one. It’s a rental. The company keeps calling to ask for it back. Mom was also missing her eyebrows by the end.”

  “I’m not dying,” Lizzie growled.

  “It’s good that you feel that way, man,” Soda said.

  “Did your mom name you Soda?” I asked.

  “Nah, Phillip is my given name,” he said. “My friend named me Soda because I’m always dispensing advice like a goddamn advice-giving vending machine, that’s what he said. But you know, I’ve been taking advice now, I’m more open to that.” Soda tugged on our fishing lines, which hadn’t been nibbled on. “You know what my friend says—my friend Bill, who moved into room twenty-two after his wife left him—you know what he says? He says the only way you get over somebody is if you don’t sleep where they’ve slept. Too much is absorbed during your sleep, and if you’re breathing in their leftover spirit, you’re not gonna move on.”

  Mom had slept in all the rooms in our house. She’d slept in my room when I was sick with a fever, and she’d done the same for Lizzie. She’d fallen asleep on the couch in our living room many times. She’d even slept in the hallway and on the kitchen floor when she didn’t make it back to bed after sleepwalking. Our entire house was full of her leftover spirit, but I would never want to move away.

  “I killed her,” Soda said.

  “What?” I jumped up in the boat. He was confessing to killing my mother.

  “My mother needed a kidney,” he said. “And it was my fault she died.” I realized I had misunderstood, and I felt relieved, but also disappointed. I thought we were going to solve the mystery.

  “You didn’t give her a kidney?” Lizzie asked. “Don’t we have two?” I was surprised Lizzie knew that, after the way she’d filled out her homeschool biology exam.

  “I had the surgery, I gave it to her. But her body rejected it and she died.”

  “So you didn’t kill her.”

  “I did. I didn’t mean to, but I did. I meant to save her.”

  “I wish I’d saved my mom too,” Lizzie said. “But at least you tried to. I didn’t do anything to save mine.”

  We were all quiet, and I stared at Lizzie. I had only heard her blame Dad before, never herself. I hadn’t known that she felt guilty too.

  “We had an affair,” Soda said, looking down at the boat’s spongy carpet. “Me and Professor Babbitt.”

  “No,” I said, putting my hands over my eyes.

  “I was her boy toy,” Soda said.

  “Soda,” Lizzie said, sternly. “Phillip. No one wants to hear the things you’re saying.”

  “I’m so sorry, I’ve been really sorry. I told your father in that letter I sent, but he never wrote back.” Soda started to cry big sloppy tears, and sat down on the bench seat at the back of the boat. “I wanted to talk to him about it.” It made sense now, why he’d said he was afraid of Dad.

  Lizzie and I moved away from Soda, toward the steering wheel. Boomer jumped up onto the driver’s seat. Dad had never mentioned the letter.

  “I wish we could catch a fish so we could slap him with it,” Lizzie said.

  Soda held his knees to his chest as he cried.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Nineteen,” he said to his knees.

  “Gross,” Lizzie said. “That’s way too young.”

  My father was at home breathing in Mom’s spirit at night like a spider creeping down his throat and I knew that Mom would’ve laughed if Lizzie slapped Soda with a fish, as its eyes bulged and its red gills throbbed. People were so cruel to each other I couldn’t stand it. I picked up the fishing rod Soda had given me and I threw it into the lake.

  Soda had stopped crying, but he was still mad about the lost fishing rod. He refused to give Lizzie the key to the boat.

  “I can drive,” Lizzie said.

  “Don’t make me swallow it,” he said, when Lizzie came after him for the key.

  “You couldn’t,” she said. “The keychain is huge.” He removed the key from the chain and held the key over his mouth.

  “It would mess up your intestines,” I said. “It could puncture your stomach lining. Lizzie, tell him.”

  “I’m an adult,” Soda sighed, putting the key into his pocket. “A small business owner. I’m not going to eat the key; I just need a minute. You owe me a fishing rod.”

  “Okay, sure,” Lizzie said. “We’ll get you another.”

  “Why don’t you tell us about your affair,” I said. Now that I’d calmed down, I needed to know. It might help me figure out Mom’s death.

  “If you really want me to . . .”

  I nodded, told him to go on. Lizzie fiddled with the crank on her fishing rod, as if she didn’t care whether he told us or not.

  “Well, after she ordered the statue, I used to go to her office with every new fish I taxidermied. The first ones weren’t very good, pretty messy. She said she liked to see my progress. And then we started talking, about my mom, about my classes, about a lot of things.”

  “Why did she want a statue of Jesus?” Lizzie asked. “Mom wasn’t a Christian.”

  “She was a spiritual naturalist,” I said, even though I didn’t really know what that meant. I knew she believed in reincarnation, and in a God of some form.

  “My mom wasn’t that religious either, not until she got sick, three years ago,” Soda said. “We started to go to church together. I got really into it, started making the Jesus carvings. After she died, the church really saved me.”

  I remembered when Ocean Jesus had arrived in the mail, how I’d thought he would be my savior. Maybe Mom had wanted something to protect her from cancer, and that was why she’d ordered the statue. Or maybe she wanted someone to protect her family once she was gone. “Soda, did she ever mention any health problems?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Lizzie asked, turning to me.

  “No, she didn’t,” Soda said. “But we did talk a lot about my mom’s illness, about how dialysis works.”

  “Did my mom seem to know a lot about dying?”

  “Sure, she knew a lot about dying,” Soda said. “She taught biology.” He said that last part as if it were something I didn’t already know.

  Then Lizzie yelled that she felt a tug on her fishing line. She had her line dangling in the water, from when Soda had first cast it. Soda leapt up and grabbed the rod over Lizzie’s shoulders. He was hugging her, basically, his hands on top of hers.

  “It’s a big one,” he said. The rod bent forward as Soda cranked the wheel, fast as he could.

  “His mouth is getting cut up,” I said, but I knew Soda couldn’t just let the fish go, not until he reeled him in, otherwise the fish would have the hook lodged in his jaw forever. Lake Guntersville didn’t look that clean; it was probably not a good place for a wound to heal.

  The fish came out of the water all of a sudden, burst through the surface, flapping his tail madly back and forth. Boomer’s ears perked up in surprise, but he didn’t make a move toward the fish.

  “It’s a chain pickerel,” Soda told us, grabbing the fish in his hand. The fish was long and thin, a yellow silver, with sharp little teeth you could see when he opened his mouth. I waited for Lizzie to slap Soda with the fish like she’d said she would.

  “I’ve never caught a fish before,” she marveled, wiping her hands on her jeans.

  “Pickerels are nasty fighters,” Soda said, pulling the hook out of the fish’s mouth. “They eat each other. I’ve heard you can slice open a pickerel and find another pickerel in the stomach, and you can open up the eaten pickerel and find another. Man, so much for family, right?”

  “Can we see?” Lizzie asked. “Cut it open.”

  “Let him go,” I demanded. “Let him go now.”


  “I don’t eat pickerel. Too many little bones.” Soda tossed the fish back into the water and the pickerel swam away fast as he could, disappearing into the murky depths.

  “Thanks,” I said, though I only half meant it. I hadn’t forgiven Soda, not for anything.

  “Let’s catch another,” Lizzie said, excitedly. “One with bigger bones.”

  The sun was low in the sky and Lizzie hadn’t caught another fish. I tried to ask more questions about Mom, but Lizzie told me to stop bugging Soda and he didn’t seem to have the answers I was looking for anyway. Soda gave me bags of peanuts to eat; he had about a hundred tiny pouches stashed in the boat.

  Soda and Lizzie had moved to the back of the boat, were talking and laughing. They were taking turns smoking from a colorful glass pipe.

  “I thought you were a good Christian boy,” Lizzie said, when Soda first took out the bag of dried leaves.

  “From God’s green earth.”

  “Are those drugs?” I asked, but no one was paying attention to me.

  “You’re really funny,” Lizzie said, putting her hand on Soda’s shoulder. He was telling her about everything he’d ever found left behind in the motel after checkout, including a blow-up doll and a live goat.

  “She really had sex with you?” Lizzie asked.

  “Sex?” Soda said. “No, no, not sex. She kissed me.” He pointed his finger to the side of his mouth.

  “Yuck,” I said.

  “That’s not an affair,” Lizzie honked. “That’s not even a kiss.”

  “It was too,” Soda muttered. “I told her that I was giving my mother a kidney and she kissed me. She called me Superman.”

  “Are you a virgin?” Lizzie asked.

  Soda blushed and looked down at the water where the pickerel had swum away.

  I realized then that my sister was not a virgin. She must have done it with Dave, her first boyfriend. That was probably why she’d been so mad when Dave broke up with her right before he left for college. I’d read in one of Lizzie’s Cosmopolitan magazines that rejection after sex makes women crazy. It was no wonder that Lizzie had filled Dave’s car with wasps.

  I was on my third packet of honey-roasted nuts when we saw a motorboat headed toward us, cutting through waves so fast it was tilted high in the air. Sirens came on; blue lights flashed.