Rabbit Cake

by Annie Hartnett

  “I’ve never heard a banshee,” Lizzie said in a way that let me know I was annoying her. We unpacked the cakes in silence, stacking them on the shelves in neat rows. It was a huge walk-in freezer, and I could see how it would fit 1,000 cakes someday, if she ever made it that far.

  I wanted Lizzie to be in a good mood again, because I wanted her to buy me an ice cream at Suzy Sundaes. “Lock me in,” I suggested. It seemed like we’d been having fun just a minute ago. She’d been telling me her secrets. “Lock me in, like you did with the chest freezer.”

  “Okay,” Lizzie said, her face brightening. “Okay.”

  I stepped up into the meat locker, and stood on the red rubber mat. When Lizzie closed the door it was darker than it ever was in my room at night. I blinked slowly, to see if my eyes would adjust. With my eyes closed, I could hear the rabbits. They weren’t screaming, but they were making a lot of noise. Not cake noises either, real rabbit noises. They were snuffling around the corners of the freezer, digging against the walls, gnawing on the wooden shelves. I felt whiskers against my leg, a tiny-clawed paw on my sneaker.

  I heaved my full body weight against the freezer door and tumbled out onto the pavement, gravel digging into my knees.

  “Jesus,” Lizzie said. “I didn’t get it locked.”

  “They’re alive,” I gasped.

  “What?” Lizzie asked, wrinkling her brow.

  I told her what had happened, but when we looked back into the freezer, the rabbits were just cakes again.

  “You’re such a little freak,” Lizzie laughed, and locked the padlock on the freezer. Then she turned and walked into J&M’s Meat Market, a bell jingling on the door to signal her arrival.

  We left the car where it was and walked over to Suzy Sundaes. I was still shaken up from what had happened in the freezer, and then we ran into Megan Sax and three other girls whose names I couldn’t remember. The four of them were wearing their Coffee Shack uniforms. They were all smoking cigarettes, except for Megan.

  “Hey Looney Tune,” one of the girls snickered as we approached. “How’s the nut house?”

  Megan Sax looked down at her pink-and-white sneakers, but she laughed with the rest of them.

  “Hey Megan,” Lizzie said, loudly but not screaming. She pulled a raw sausage out of the brown bag she was carrying from J&M’s Meat Market and held it up. “I heard this is what your dad’s dick looks like.” Lizzie took a bite of the red speckled sausage and then spat it out into the dirt.

  The other girls laughed, but Megan’s face puckered and she started to cry. Lizzie walked right past her, and I followed, wishing I’d never asked for ice cream.

  When we got home, I flipped frantically through the DSM for Kids! I was upset about what Lizzie had done with the sausage, but I was also worried that I had seen the rabbit cakes come to life. I didn’t want to be crazy too.

  I found the “Hallucinations of Loss” chapter in the grief section. If it was completely normal to see the ghost of Mom, could that explain the cakes coming alive? I felt more afraid than I would have if I’d seen Mom’s ghost; I had no idea if this was normal or abnormal. The DSM for Kids! didn’t have the answer.

  I made Boomer sleep on my bed that night. He was supposed to stay on the floor and off the furniture, but it was a rule not even Dad obeyed. I’d seen Boomer kill a squirrel once. He broke its neck by shaking it back and forth in his jaws before he disemboweled it, and then he rolled in its guts. I figured he could do the same to a rabbit, but I slept fitfully.

  In the middle of the night, I heard Lizzie’s footsteps in the hall, her feet loud as hooves. She was sleepwalking again.

  28.

  I didn’t want to break it to Lizzie that the sleepwalking had started back up. Maybe she already knew, by a feeling she had in the morning, but I wasn’t brave enough to ask.

  “Why are you so mad at Megan?” I asked her instead.

  “She abandoned me.”

  That sounded pretty dramatic, but I guess Lizzie probably did need her best friend in the months after our mom went missing. I had played fetch with Boomer for at least an hour every day that summer.

  “You broke her jaw,” I reminded her. “In three places.”

  “She deserved it,” Lizzie said. “You should have heard the things she said to me.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like what?” Lizzie imitated me. “Why do you have to know everything?”

  I wanted to ask Lizzie about Mom’s death again. I didn’t want her to start shivering, but I had to talk to her about it. “The coroner didn’t do a full autopsy of Mom.”

  “What?”

  “I went down there to ask questions. He doesn’t really know what happened to Mom. He just guessed.”

  Lizzie gave me an irritated look. “The police said it was an accident.”

  “Since when do you trust the police?”

  “Leave it alone, Elvis. You’re beating a dead horse.”

  I knew that expression, I’d looked it up years ago when Mom used it. It meant to keep working on something that had already been resolved. Another way to say that, an older phrase, was to slay the slain. I really didn’t like that idea. I didn’t want to kill Mom over and over again.

  I wasn’t going to tell Dad about the coroner, not when it had gone so badly with Lizzie, and I wasn’t going to tell him about Lizzie’s sleepwalking either. He might notice on his own, but I wasn’t going to be the reason she was sent back to St. Cloud’s.

  Luckily, Dad’s mind was on other things. He was “focusing on himself,” he said. He saw a new therapist on Wednesdays and then, every Tuesday and Friday after work, he applied a homemade honey-oat facial and let it set while he watched Dr. Lillian Stone with me. He let Ernest peck off the dried oat flakes.

  “We’re compadres,” Dad said, ruffling the bird’s feathers, which had finally grown back. Ernest dropped a fleck of oatmeal into Dad’s forest of chest hair.

  Dad’s new therapist, Dr. Judy, was encouraging him. She said it was okay if he wore lipstick sometimes, whatever helped him feel less alone. “It’s called psychological resilience,” Dr. Judy explained during a family therapy session, one Dad had requested. “It means how well someone can go on after tragedy or trauma.”

  “I am going to get back into the dating game,” Dad announced in the middle of the session with Dr. Judy. “I think it’s time to get back out there. I have opened an online dating profile,” he continued. “You won’t have to meet anyone unless it’s serious.”

  Dad did have a new computer, a silver laptop. He’d been spending a lot of time on the computer, that I’d noticed already. I remembered Mom’s personal ad, the one Mr. Oakes said she’d put on Craigslist. I’d gone to the website to try to find it, but Craigslist took the old ads down.

  “That’s great, Dad,” I said.

  Dr. Judy gave me a rainbow sticker. “It’s wonderful that you can recognize that your father is a person too, someone with needs.”

  I wondered if Dr. Judy and Dad would end up dating.

  “I think we’re all doing really well.” Dad smiled. “Given the circumstances. Everyone’s being a team player.”

  “Everything seems pretty shitty to me,” Lizzie said. I agreed, but I didn’t say anything. I looked down at my rainbow sticker instead.

  At least I would be going back to the zoo, I remembered. Serengeti planned to unveil the giraffe’s memorial statue at a big party on Saturday afternoon, and I was invited. Everyone was invited really, anyone who wanted to spend forty-five dollars for a ticket, with 50 percent of the proceeds going to giraffe conservation. But I got to go for free, and after that I would go back to volunteering. I could wear my orange ZooTeen T-shirt again, my photo ID badge looped around my neck.

  Lizzie and Dad were both coming to the unveiling, had bought tickets; Dad’s therapist thought it would be a good opportunity for family bonding. I warned them both in advance not to embarrass me in front of my colleagues. Dad laughed when I said that, but
Lizzie crossed-her-heart-and-hoped-to-die that she wouldn’t. It was one of her good-sister moments.

  The morning of the unveiling, I went downstairs for breakfast. I could see Dad from the window, gardening out back, wearing Mom’s straw sun hat.

  “I need a ride to the zoo,” I yelled out the door, and Dad sprayed the hose in my direction.

  “Are you wearing sunscreen?” he yelled back, and I knew a year ago he wouldn’t have thought to ask.

  Dad dropped me off an hour before Harrison’s party started, because I wanted to walk around the park first. I had been worried that some of the animals would forget me. Susie the bobcat was very particular about who she would accept her dead mouse and bowl of kitty chow from, but she rubbed against the bars when she saw me, pressing her forehead against the cage so I could scratch between her ears.

  Lizzie and Dad met me at the front gate at two o’clock, and we walked to the unveiling together. The bronze Harrison was life-sized, seventeen feet tall. He had a round belly; there was nothing starved-looking about him. He gazed down at us with an amused expression on his face.

  The zoo had ordered another smaller statue too, one for the prehensile-tailed porcupine who had passed away in March. Snuffles was only a minor attraction at the zoo, but the staff was attached to him.

  As everyone crowded around Harrison’s seventeen-foot statue, Lizzie and I ended up over by the bronze porcupine that no one else seemed to notice.

  Dad had gone off with Pamela; she was giving him a full tour of the zoo. I wondered what Pamela would be like as a stepmother. Strict, I thought, but fair.

  Lizzie stole a bottle of champagne from the refreshments table and poured splashes from the green glass bottle into our cups of punch. She sat on top of the stout porcupine, as if the memorial statue were a stool. She fingered the grooves of Snuffles’s nostrils. “It’s not a very good sculpture,” she said, looking between her legs at its spiny face. “Looks like a pig with quills. They should have commissioned Soda.”

  “The statue looks weird because it’s not a North American porcupine,” I explained. “Snuffles was a prehensile-tailed porcupine, native to Central and South America. You’ve probably never seen one.”

  “Oh,” Lizzie said. “So like a hedgehog.”

  “Hedgehogs aren’t actually related to porcupines,” I said, delighted that Lizzie seemed to be listening. “Hedgehogs are insectivores, and porcupines are herbivores. Porcupines belong to an order of rodent that includes guinea pigs, chinchillas, the naked mole rat. Those are their cousins.”

  “Cool,” Lizzie said. She was starting to have trouble sitting on Snuffles’s head.

  “Naked mole rats are cool,” I said. “They can’t feel pain.”

  “Sounds like our kind of animal.”

  “Lizzie,” I said, feeling loose after drinking half my punch. “Do you know you’re sleepwalking again?”

  “I had a feeling.” She sighed.

  “Are you going to have to go back to St. Cloud’s?”

  Lizzie started to cry. I’d never seen my sister cry before, and now she was crying in such a public place. “I wish there was something I could have done,” she whimpered. “Something I could have done to stop it.”

  “Are you taking your medication?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” She wiped her runny nose with the back of her hand. “I don’t think the pills are working anymore. I just feel so guilty.”

  “I feel guilty too,” I told her. “It’s a normal stage of grief.”

  “I don’t think you need to feel guilty about anything,” Lizzie said. She rubbed her eyes, and gulped down the last of the champagne.

  On the drive home, I understood why adults liked alcohol so much, and the champagne had tasted much better than the beer I’d had that winter when we were roasting the pig. It had felt so easy to talk to Lizzie after the punch had set in; she’d listened to me about the naked mole rats, about the different species of porcupines. I was glad she had cried in front of me, it felt healthy somehow. I thought Ms. Bernstein would approve.

  But when we got in the house, I passed by a rabbit cake frosted on the counter. It winked at me, and I wasn’t sure what Ms. Bernstein would think of that.

  Dad made stuffed shells for dinner, and by then I was feeling a little less loopy. I looked at the rabbit cake on the counter and it didn’t move.

  “It’s what Italian mermaids eat,” Dad said, spooning a pasta shell onto my plate.

  “I’m worried about you,” Lizzie said.

  “Because I have an active imagination? Or because I love ricotta cheese?”

  “Because there is glitter on your eyelids.”

  As soon as we’d gotten home from the zoo, Dad had given himself a full face of makeup.

  “Oh, Lizzie-bell,” Dad sighed. “It’s just an experiment. Dr. Judy says I’m understanding the female perspective.”

  “Dr. Judy is a quack,” Lizzie said. The parrot started quacking then. I had forgotten we’d taught him all the barnyard animal sounds.

  “Ernest, say moo,” Dad squealed. “With a moo moo here. Here a moo, there a moo, everywhere a moo moo,” he sang, dancing around the kitchen, and everyone laughed then.

  I had just gotten into bed that night, and was listening to Lizzie in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. It seemed like forever ago that she’d been sticking the handle of her toothbrush down her throat trying to bring up what she’d eaten in her sleep the night before.

  Since she’d gotten back from St. Cloud’s, I’d been waiting for Lizzie to explode, but maybe it wasn’t going to happen. I heard Lizzie turn off the faucet after she finished washing her face, and then she shut out her light and crawled into bed, the mattress springs creaking. The walls between our rooms seemed extra thin that night, like I could punch right through them if I tried.

  “Good night, Jesus,” Lizzie said. She had started keeping Ocean Jesus right by her bed, had decorated him, draped gold necklaces around his neck. He really glittered now, between the fish scales and Lizzie’s costume jewelry, plus the glint of a few real gems from Mom’s jewelry box.

  I thought about knocking on the wall, getting up to tell Lizzie that she didn’t need to worry about sleepwalking, that we would figure it out. I wanted to tell her that I was crazy too; I could tell her that I’d seen a rabbit cake move again. I meant to get up, but my eyelids were much too heavy.

  “Have you seen your sister?” Dad said, first thing in the morning. “She’s not in her room.”

  Mom’s Honda wasn’t in the driveway, the keys taken from the hook in the hallway. Lizzie’s rolling suitcase was missing, her drawers empty, most of her dresses ripped from the clothing hangers. Ocean Jesus was gone too, leaving only a few stray silver fish scales stuck to the wood floor.

  I’m sorry El, she’d written on the bathroom mirror using one of Mom’s lipsticks, the shade Dad loved the most, Showgirl Red.

  PART III

  Months 13 to 17

  29.

  June, July

  Lizzie wouldn’t answer her cell phone, but we put it together pretty quickly that Soda had been released from jail, once I told Dad about the letters Lizzie kept in a shoe box underneath her bed. Lizzie had taken the shoe box with her, so I never found out how long they’d been planning it, but she must have picked Soda up from jail in the Honda. She’d just passed her driver’s test.

  Dad went out in the truck to look for Lizzie. As soon as he drove off, I dialed Miss Ida.

  “Hello, Elvis,” she said, after I’d put Dad’s credit card information in.

  “Lizzie is missing.”

  “Ah,” Miss Ida said. “She’s probably with that boyfriend she told me about. She wanted to know if he loved her.”

  “Yeah, we’re pretty sure she’s with Soda. What should we do?”

  “She’ll be home by September.”

  It was only July; I didn’t think we should wait until September. “That’s what you’re seeing with your psychic powers?”

  “Oh no,�
�� Miss Ida said. “The cards aren’t showing me much today. But Lizzie is a teenager. Flames burn hot, but burn out fast. She’ll come home brokenhearted.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Give it the summer. She’s not in any danger. Phillip is a nice boy.”

  I hadn’t told Miss Ida that Soda’s real name was Phillip, but maybe Lizzie had.

  Dad came home empty-handed after driving around for hours. Lizzie wasn’t at the Silver Sand Motel, at least not yet, and she wasn’t at any of her old hangouts, places she used to go with Megan Sax. Dad was about to call the police to report Lizzie as a runaway, until he saw online that if the state police found her, she could be held in a “secure detention facility” for an indefinite amount of time.

  “She could go to jail for running away.” Dad put his head in his hands, and when he looked up, his expression had changed. “Elvis, don’t tell anyone. She’ll come home soon, on her own.”

  Miss Ida had said to wait until September, but I was worried about what could happen between now and then. “Did you know she’s sleepwalking again?” I asked.

  “No.” He sighed. “I didn’t know that either.”

  Two days after Lizzie left, a postcard arrived with a laughing cartoon dolphin on the front. Greetings from the Silver Sand Motel and Marina, it read. On the blank side of the card, Lizzie had written I’m in love! in purple pen.

  After he read that, Dad went out into the garage and went at the punching bag, which I hadn’t seen him use since Mom bought it for him for Christmas years before.

  “At least we know where she is,” I pointed out, when Dad came back in, sweat all through his T-shirt, his knuckles bleeding because he hadn’t worn boxing gloves. The motel was a forty-five-minute drive away, too far to bike. Dad said he wasn’t driving to get her, he was too mad at her.