Rabbit Cake

by Annie Hartnett

  “Is that a police boat?” I asked. “Do they have those?”

  “Yeah,” Soda said, putting his hands into his pockets. Boomer was still in the driver’s seat, wearing his lemon-yellow life vest, only now he was barking.

  Our dad had called the police when he got home from work and saw we were gone. I was surprised that he did it; he didn’t usually care if we were out of the house during the day, but he said later that Ernest had been acting weird, reciting some prayer over and over, and that was enough to make Dad nervous. Dad always listened to the parrot.

  The police had looked through our phone history at the house and found Soda’s number. They plugged that into Google and his phone number was listed on the motel’s website. It was the number you’d call if you wanted to book a room, so it was easy enough to find us. The police handcuffed Soda right there on his own motorboat.

  Before the police boat took us back to land, Lizzie and I wrote down exactly what had happened on the yellow legal pads the officers gave us. We were asked to rate Soda’s dangerousness on a scale from one to ten, with ten being the most dangerous. We both gave him a two.

  Dad wasn’t in the police boat, but the officers said he was waiting for us back on the dock. Once we were on land, Dad hugged both Lizzie and me like he’d thought he’d never see us again. He had already taken Ocean Jesus out of Soda’s car and propped him up against a dock piling. The parrot sat on the statue’s shoulder, pecking fish scales off of Ocean Jesus’s face.

  “Get that bird off the art,” Soda said, wiggling in his handcuffs.

  “He’s a member of the family.”

  “I’m sorry, man,” Soda said, turning his shoulders to face Dad. “I’m so sorry about Professor Babbitt. I wanted you to have the Jesus statue anyway, but now I need it back for this one art show . . .” Then a police officer pushed Soda into the back seat of the cruiser. Lizzie waved as they drove away. Soda couldn’t wave back because of the handcuffs, but he smiled.

  While Dad filled out more paperwork, Lizzie and I waited inside the front office of the Silver Sand Motel. An elderly woman, one of Soda’s employees, asked if we needed a room, didn’t seem to notice the police cars outside. We said we didn’t, so she went back to her romance novel. Boomer hopped right up onto the couch, and we didn’t scold him even though he was wet and there was sand in his fur and he’d get the cushions dirty. There was a rack of brochures for places to see in Alabama. Lizzie took one of each.

  The office was decorated with taxidermied animals, wall-to-wall. It was mostly mounted fish, but there were also several squirrels and rabbits, a fox, three mounted deer heads, and, above the computer, a small black-green alligator. Its marble eyes stared down at us, its mouth a permanent grin.

  25.

  Soda wasn’t charged with kidnapping, since we had gone with him willingly, but he was sentenced to eight weeks in state prison for the amount of marijuana the police found in the rooms of the motel. Lizzie was upset about the charges, said the police should spend more time arresting real criminals.

  “He is a real criminal,” I mumbled. I didn’t really believe that, but I didn’t like that Soda did drugs.

  Dad wasn’t concerned with the case; he was more concerned with how freaked out he’d felt when he’d found the house empty that afternoon. He insisted on having family dinners every night, and told Lizzie he’d do the cooking. He made pimento cheese sandwiches, shuffling around the kitchen in Mom’s old fuzzy leopard-print slippers.

  Dad was bending over backward to keep Lizzie occupied. He ordered her three new rabbit cake pans off eBay, so she could quadruple her production. He rented the extra walk-in freezer at the butcher’s, and Lizzie and Dad transported the cakes down there twice a week. Lizzie began filling out the application for a world record holder.

  “Projects kept your mother happy too,” Dad told her. “That’s why The Book was so good for her.” Dad started to cry then, and Lizzie told him to go into the bathroom if he was going to do that. “So much like your mother,” he sniffed.

  I’d been neglecting work on The Book. I started going to the public library after school to work on it, since I could no longer work in the library at the zoo. When I tried to work in Mom’s office, Lizzie would come in to read aloud another article on the war on drugs and prison sentences, or ask me to proofread one of her letters to the editor of the newspaper about marijuana legalization. I needed quiet to focus on Mom’s book. I was stuck on the chapter on hibernation.

  From the library computer, I wrote to some of Mom’s old coworkers at Magnolia Community College asking if they had any advice on where I could get a grant for my research. I even wrote an email to Dr. Lillian Stone. I found Dr. Lillian’s contact information listed on the Wildlife Encounters website, and I attached Mom’s draft of the book. I got an email back immediately that read: Due to the high volume of mail we receive, Dr. Lillian cannot reply personally, but you should try to catch her on her next book tour! Thank you for the support.

  And not one of Mom’s old coworkers responded to my email, and then Lizzie insisted on coming with me to the library, which I knew would make working impossible. Lizzie asked the librarian a ton of questions about the law books, and complained they really should have more books on criminal law. Lizzie finally bugged Mrs. Reasoner so much she made Lizzie go out and wait on the porch until I was ready to go.

  On our bike ride home, Lizzie and I went by the river. Some girls in my grade were there, splashing around in the shallows. Jackie Friskey was wearing a floral bikini and she had gotten braces, her mouth shining silver when she laughed. She looked like a real teenager. She waved when she saw us, and Lizzie took one look at her and said Jackie had definitely already gotten her period.

  I only had a few weeks left as a student at Beaver Elementary, and I knew middle school was going to be terrible, even before I saw Jackie Friskey in a bikini. I wished there was some way I could feel better prepared for the sixth grade; maybe I could spend all summer growing a pair of boobs. I’d read you could eat more dairy to make puberty speed up a little, because of the growth hormones they give to cows.

  Lizzie was not at all prepared for what came in the mail in a manila envelope: she hadn’t passed the Alabama homeschool evaluation, so she’d have to go back to public school in the fall and repeat her sophomore year at Freedom High.

  “No,” she said quietly, as she read the letter.

  My sister had been suspended from Freedom High four times before, in only one year. The school had a six strikes policy; after that, students were expelled for good. Dad said there was no way he could sell enough carpets to afford private school.

  “Be my little spy,” Dad urged, giving me the thumbs-up, after Lizzie went upstairs to sulk. Freedom High and Three Rivers Junior High were right next to each other; they shared a football field and a track. Lizzie and I would take the same bus.

  After the initial shock of it, Lizzie wasn’t as mad about going back to school as I thought she’d be. I waited for her to take out the Drano from under the sink again and threaten to drink it, but she turned happy for some reason and was sweet a lot of the time. She let me beat her a few times in poker, and I won back part of my allowance.

  “It’s going to be fine,” she said, when I asked her what junior high would be like, but I could see in her face that she wasn’t telling the truth. It wasn’t going to be fine.

  I already knew Three Rivers Junior High was a big disappointment for any nature lover, because there was only one river in town and the Chattahoochee wasn’t all that near the school. There was only a small marshy swamp behind the gym, which separated the middle school and the high school. Lizzie told me that science classrooms were sometimes allowed to collect tadpoles from the marsh for dissection, but otherwise students were not supposed to go back there. She said there was a rumor that the high school principal had set free a bunch of water snakes in the marsh to keep kids out. “Cottonmouths?” I asked. Cottonmouths, also known as water moccasins, are the o
nly venomous aquatic snake in North America. Lizzie said she wasn’t sure.

  “You’re in fifth grade for two more weeks and then you’ve got all summer,” she said. “Don’t worry about middle school now.”

  I was happy I’d have all summer to do research for Mom’s book, and to continue poking around into the details of her death. And soon I can go back to work at the zoo, I remembered. Pamela had called and said Serengeti was short-staffed in the summer with so many people on vacation, so if I was emotionally ready for it I could come back to volunteer after school let out. I’d already gotten an invitation to the unveiling of Harrison the giraffe’s memorial statue, and I was thankful not to have been forgotten.

  26.

  We were nearing the anniversary of Mom’s death and the end of my fifth-grade year. I didn’t have proof that Mom had killed herself, but I’d read that undiagnosed brain tumors were found in 2 percent of routine autopsies.

  I rode my bike to the coroner and went to the reception desk.

  “Most states do not require you to report brain tumors found after death,” I said. “But I deserve to know. I am Eva Babbitt’s daughter.”

  The receptionist went to get someone, and a man in a lab coat came out. He was the one Lizzie and I had run into in the morgue. I was surprised when he agreed that I deserved to know what happened during my mother’s final examination. He pulled out Mom’s file and told me to sit down.

  “I didn’t check for a brain tumor. We didn’t do a full autopsy.”

  “Why not?” I asked, horrified.

  “A full autopsy is expensive and time-consuming. It’s very difficult to prove what happened with a water death, especially if the body has been submerged for some time,” the coroner explained. “So we usually assume it’s death by misadventure, and after what your dad told me about her sleepwalking . . .”

  “Misadventure?” I slammed my hands on the table. “It wasn’t an adventure.”

  “It just means it was an accident.”

  “But anything could have killed her, if you didn’t do an autopsy. She could have committed suicide.”

  “Your father said she wasn’t depressed.”

  “People commit suicide for other reasons than depression.”

  “Do they?”

  I ignored him. “What about murder? Could she have been murdered?”

  “I think it’s most likely that she drowned by accident,” the coroner said.

  “What do you know,” I spat. “You didn’t do a full autopsy. You didn’t even do your job.”

  I was so mad when I came home from the coroner but I couldn’t tell Lizzie or Dad what had happened there. Dad would be angry that I’d ridden my bike on the highway, and neither of them knew about my brain tumor theory yet. I didn’t have any evidence to present, and I wasn’t sure Lizzie could handle it if I did. The St. Cloud’s doctors said that patients often relapsed after four or five months, that we should keep a special watch over Lizzie.

  “She seems good,” Dad told the doctor when he called to check in. “She’s baking.” Lizzie had baked 413 rabbit cakes so far.

  “What’s the record?” I asked Lizzie.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, piping white icing along the edge of one of the rabbits.

  “I mean how many rabbit cakes did the current record holder bake?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure it’s an official record,” Lizzie said. “How many do you think Mom made?”

  In her whole life? I didn’t know. Mom had owned that cake pan for a long time. I wondered how many world records had gone unrecorded. How did you really know yours was the world record and not just the only one someone had bothered to write down?

  “You snooze, you lose,” Lizzie said, when I asked her that question.

  Lizzie heard back from the Guinness World Records office by email. They said to notify them immediately when she finished her project, and they wished her the best of luck in reaching her goal. The email suggested that Lizzie finish the one thousand cakes as quickly as possible, so that they could feature her in next year’s book. That meant Lizzie wanted to speed things up, so she said I could help.

  “The designated froster,” Dad called me, pounding his fist into his open palm as if it were a baseball glove. Lizzie decided that not all the cakes should be frosted, but most of them should be. I researched frosting ideas on the American Rabbit Breeders Association website. The ARBA listed the possible colors of rabbits: black otter, sable marten, blue, tricolor, champagne, fawn, lilac.

  “I’ve never seen a lilac rabbit,” Lizzie said, peering at my notes. “Or a blue one.”

  I found that, in ARBA terms, blue wasn’t a sky or cobalt or turquoise blue but rather this rich, silver-gray color. A lilac rabbit was a softer gray, a shade that was popular in some of Dad’s contemporary rugs, the ones imported from Sweden. Dad had a lilac-gray rug in his bedroom.

  I wanted to try out the different tones of gray on the cakes, but Lizzie gave me only three bowls of frosting to work with and told me not to muck them together: a chocolate brown, a cream-cheese white, and a buttercream frosting dyed black. There was pink piping for the ears and nose, but not enough to cover a whole cake. I rolled a few cakes in coconut shavings, to give them that fuzzy Angora look.

  While we worked, I thought about something Ms. Bernstein had said in a recent meeting. “Have you thought,” Ms. Bernstein had said, pushing back her glasses, “that Lizzie is trying to replace your mother? She’s baking like her. She’s dressing like her.”

  “My dad’s dressing like her too sometimes,” I’d reminded her.

  I didn’t think Lizzie was trying to be my mother; she wanted to be a world record holder. She wanted to do something in a way no one had done it before. There were lots of other world records about cake, but Lizzie wasn’t impressed by the world’s tallest cake, the world’s smallest cake, or the world’s most expensive cake. Lizzie said anyone could make a single cake. “Who wants to be anyone?” she asked, and she had a point.

  I received my elementary school diploma, and both Lizzie and Dad came to the ceremony. Everyone else in my class had new clothes for the event, the hems of pink dresses and polka-dotted bow ties peeking out from underneath the black graduation gowns. I had decided I’d wear Mom’s old bathing suit underneath the gown, since it was bound to be hot in the auditorium.

  “Are you naked under there?” Ms. Powell whispered, stopping me before I processed across the stage.

  “No,” I said, and showed her the straps of the suit. Ms. Powell was still my favorite teacher, but it wasn’t much of a contest. Most teachers I knew seemed hardly to like kids at all.

  We got takeout chicken for dinner that night, since Dad knew it was my favorite. It was my favorite, but I felt guilty about it, remembering when Lizzie was in the mental hospital and Dad and I were eating takeout.

  Lizzie dropped a wing bone in Boomer’s dish.

  “Mom says he’ll choke on those,” I said, trying to pull the bone out of Boomer’s teeth. He clenched down as hard as he could, but rolled over onto his back, which he did whenever he knew he was being naughty. I straddled his belly, trying to wedge the gray bone loose.

  “What do you think wild dogs eat?” Lizzie scoffed. “Boneless chickens?”

  “Fine,” I said, releasing Boomer’s jaw. “He’s not a wild dog, but fine.” I looked up, and Dad was crying.

  “What’s wrong?” Lizzie asked.

  “Mom says,” Dad said. “Elvis said Mom says.”

  At my last guidance session, Ms. Bernstein and I had checked off May on the grieving chart together, eleven black Xs since Mom had been dead.

  Ms. Bernstein had given me the tarantula snow globe as a parting gift. She’d given me a quick hug too, even though she’d always said there was a strict no-touching policy in her office.

  27.

  May, June

  On the first day of summer vacation, I found a letter in the mailbox from Alabama Men’s Penitentiary, elaborate doodles all o
ver the envelope. It was addressed to Lizzie. The next day, another letter arrived. Lizzie didn’t seem surprised by either one.

  “How many have you already gotten?” I asked.

  “So I’ve got a pen pal.” Lizzie shrugged. “Big deal.”

  She asked me if I wanted to drive down to the butcher shop with her to fill the walk-in freezer with another batch of rabbits.

  “Sure,” I said, “if we can get ice cream after.” Lizzie wasn’t supposed to drive without Dad in the car, but we were only going a mile away, to J&M’s Meat Market in Freedom town square.

  As we loaded the car, Lizzie admitted that Soda had been writing her daily letters ever since she’d sent him some photocopied pages out of one of the criminal law books from the library.

  “He’s great,” she said. “He’s really smart, and funny. He tells me what Mom was like as a teacher.”

  “Don’t forget he’s a drug addict.”

  “Give me a break, Elvis. I didn’t know you were a moron.”

  That hurt my feelings, so I didn’t say anything else to her as we finished loading up the rabbits, but I don’t think she noticed. Lizzie drove a little too fast to the butcher’s, and she parked in back of the shop. It was a 97 degree day; my forehead trickled with sweat as I watched Lizzie fumble with the padlock on the walk-in freezer behind the butcher’s shop. Lizzie wore the key around her wrist like it was a charm bracelet.

  “Have you ever heard a rabbit scream?” I asked. I wanted to remind Lizzie that I wasn’t a moron, there were lots of things I knew about that she didn’t. Rabbits scream when they are in fear for their life, and the rabbits at the zoo used to shriek whenever a zookeeper walked Susie the bobcat past their cage. Susie walked well on a leash; she didn’t even seem to notice the rabbits until they screamed. “They sound like a banshee.”