Rabbit Cake

by Annie Hartnett

  When Dr. Rotherwood dropped me off that evening, our driveway was empty. Ernest had been stuck in his cage all day.

  “Traitor,” I snarled at the yellow-and-blue bird, angry at his clownish face.

  Ernest continued cracking macadamia nuts with his beak. “It’s what macaws eat in the wild,” Dad had insisted. The nuts were ten dollars a pound, and couldn’t be cracked with a regular nutcracker, but Ernest’s beak was built for it. Parrots have a bone in their tongue. Whenever another nut split open, Ernest would spit the shell onto the floor, letting out Mom’s long happy laugh.

  32.

  It was easy enough to find Dr. Paul Debbie online, and I called his office when it opened on Monday.

  “Oh right, the one with the headaches,” Dr. Debbie said. “She never came to see me. She missed her appointment and she never rescheduled. How is she doing?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  “Thanks for the help,” I said, and hung up. I guess it was rude, but I was frustrated. I dialed Lizzie’s cell phone; I wanted to tell her about Mr. Debbie, but of course she didn’t pick up, she never did. Her mailbox was full, so I couldn’t leave a message.

  I went online to research articles about women who cheat on their husbands. One website said as their children grow older, women turn more vulnerable to affairs, as they have more time on their hands. The article suggested that women with older children should work to develop hobbies and get more involved in their church.

  It was hard to picture Mom going to church, even though she’d ordered a Jesus statue, since she used to say it was nothing more than a fashion show. But when I looked up reasons to go to church, it seemed like many people thought church was a helpful place to deal with their problems. The church near us, Our Lady of the Valley, had a bunch of support groups; there was one for people with diabetes and one called Widows Supporting Widows. I wasn’t sure I really wanted a support group, but I wanted to know what a holy place was like. I wanted somewhere I could go to think.

  “Will you drive me to church?” I asked Dad the next morning when I went downstairs.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I’d like to try it.”

  “On Sunday?”

  “Today’s fine.”

  “It’ll be empty, you know,” he said. “I guess God will be there.”

  I didn’t laugh.

  He said he respected that, and that he’d drop me off there before he did a home carpet fitting, but he couldn’t come into the church with me. Churches gave him the heebie-jeebies. “The smell weirds me out.” He shuddered. “That strange incense.” Dad wasn’t religious. He had been raised Catholic by his parents, had been an altar boy, but he’d fallen out with the church sometime since. If anyone asked, he called himself an “atheist with a capital A.” Before Mom died, I’d heard Dad say he believed we rotted in the ground when we died, food for worms—nothing mystical about it. But sometimes I heard him calling the parrot Eva, so maybe he’d changed his thoughts on reincarnation, or maybe that was just old habits dying hard.

  Dad dropped me off at Our Lady of the Valley, said he’d be back to pick me up in an hour, asked if that was enough time. I walked up the stone steps and opened the heavy door. The church was empty. There were two rows of wooden benches below a Jesus hanging off the cross, several of his wounds bleeding. It made me sick to think they really used to nail people up like that, and it wasn’t only Jesus who had died that way either.

  I didn’t know what I believed about God or the afterlife. I didn’t believe Mom could be gone completely when there was so much of her left everywhere. There was her voice in the parrot, her sleepwalking in Lizzie, and now Dad asked me questions like if I was wearing sunscreen or if I’d had enough to eat. Mom showed up in parts of me too: I had her scientific mind, and now, without her, I was Boomer’s favorite person in the family.

  There was a sign over the church door that said: Jesus Is in Us All. Maybe we do breathe in a dead person’s leftover spirit, like Soda had said. That’s why there were parts of Mom still in the house, and parts of her in the river, parts left in Lizzie and in me. Maybe a spirit evaporates like vapor off the bag of frozen peas you steam in the microwave: the droplets go everywhere, settle wherever they land.

  I was by myself in the church for about ten minutes when someone walked in to sweep the floors. She looked familiar somehow, but I didn’t really recognize her until I saw the rattlesnake tattoo wrapped around her neck. Her brown dreadlocks were gone, a short bleached-blonde pixie cut in its place. She had a new tattoo of a sailboat on her forearm, the black outline of one, not colored in yet.

  “Vanessa,” I said. She blinked a few times, hard and slow, and rubbed her temple, like she was trying to remember who I was.

  “Elvis,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Talking to God,” I said, which wasn’t really true. I had just been sitting there thinking.

  “Ah,” she said. “Cool.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  She looked at the ground. I think she thought she had a lot of explaining to do. She apologized profusely for hitting on Dad; she said she had only wanted to stay at our house. She said Lizzie was like a sister to her.

  “He said you could stay as long as you wanted,” I said, because we’d both heard my dad say that. A mean part of me wanted to say that Lizzie wasn’t her sister; Lizzie was mine.

  Vanessa said it was her stepfather’s fault, and that I really didn’t get. She said her real dad died when she was a kid and her mother remarried, only to also die soon after, leaving thirteen-year-old Vanessa behind with a stepfather who had never legally adopted her.

  “He was a total creep,” she said.

  She said the next morning, my dad had dropped her off at the bus station and bought her a ticket to Charleston, where she’d said her aunt lived. The only problem was, she didn’t have an aunt to stay with. She had lied because she didn’t want Dad to call her stepfather. Vanessa had intended to board the bus, but there were too many choices, too many stops between here and South Carolina. It was overwhelming. So instead, she went across the street to the homeless shelter. Lizzie knew where she’d gone; they talked on the phone.

  “You pulled your hair out?” I asked, remembering Vanessa’s hair-plucking disease.

  “Nah.” Her hand rose to touch her short hair. “Father Tillman made me shave the dreads. I bleached it so I wouldn’t look too boring.”

  Father Tillman ran the homeless shelter. He liked Vanessa and had hired her to help with running the church. Vanessa was in charge of ordering and maintaining flower arrangements and cleaning, and she also ran a support group for troubled teens. She lived in one of the vacant nun apartments. It wasn’t easy to find nuns, and Father Tillman hoped Vanessa would consider the profession.

  “Enough about me,” Vanessa said. “What’s going on with you?”

  For some reason I trusted Vanessa. I don’t know if it was because she was Lizzie’s friend, or because we were in a church, or because I’d always liked her, but I spilled everything. I told her that Lizzie had run away and she nodded, that was something she already knew. I told her about my mom’s affair with Mr. Debbie, and about the parrot, and about sixth grade starting soon. Vanessa listened with her head cocked slightly, like Boomer did when he was trying hard to understand. Vanessa was a really good listener, I realized.

  “I just wish Lizzie was around to help me figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “If my mother killed herself. If she did it on purpose.”

  “What do you mean? Did you find a note?” Vanessa asked.

  “No, but I’ve been looking for something like that, proof of some kind. I think she may have had a brain tumor, so she killed herself.”

  “Where did you get this idea?” Vanessa said slowly, carefully.

  “It’s a feeling I have.” I wished I had more proof, but Dr. Paul Debbie had been a dead end.
r />   “I think it’s a feeling you want to have,” Vanessa said. “You want someone or something to blame for your mother’s absence in your life.”

  “How do you know that?” My mouth felt dry. I swallowed.

  “My mother died when I was about your age,” she said. “I remember what it was like.”

  “No one knows what it’s like,” I said. “No one knows what it’s like but me and Lizzie.” I started to cry then, and I couldn’t stop. I crumpled off the wooden bench and onto the floor, sitting on the red carpet in the aisle. I gulped for air between sobs. I tried to think of Mom telling me how we weren’t a family of criers, but I couldn’t stop even then. “I need to get Lizzie back.”

  “We’ll think of something,” Vanessa agreed, and pulled a pack of tissues from her purse.

  When Dad pulled up in the Dodge and honked his horn, Vanessa didn’t duck back into the church like I thought she might.

  “Hi Frank,” she said, when Dad opened his door. Ernest was perched on the steering wheel.

  “It’s Vanessa,” I said, because Dad looked confused. “Lizzie’s friend. She stayed with us, remember? She likes Tom Cruise.”

  “I know,” Dad said. I wondered if he could tell I had been crying.

  Vanessa said Lizzie would be home soon, she was sure of it. She was talking to Dad like nothing weird had ever happened, like he’d never seen her pull down those SpongeBob boxer shorts to her ankles.

  “Okay,” Dad said. He was staring at Vanessa as if he’d seen a ghost.

  I got in the truck, and Dad started the engine. “Jesus Christ,” he said, as we pulled out of the church parking lot. “Why is Vanessa at the church? She looks terrible.”

  “She’s working for Father Tillman,” I said, and that seemed to make Dad feel better. “Dad, why don’t we go get Lizzie?”

  He was keeping his binoculars hung around his neck at all times.

  “She’s not a little kid anymore,” Dad said. “She has to want to come home. I can’t make her.”

  “Maybe she’ll come home dead like Mom did,” I said.

  “Elvis,” Dad snapped.

  I wished for the thousandth time that I could talk to Mom about all this. I bicycled down to the Chattahoochee River, down the road to the bank where Mom used to wade in. I hopped off my bike and squatted where we had once found a pair of abandoned swim goggles.

  “This is the place my mother drowned,” I said to no one, pointing out at the water, although it could have been miles from that spot. She could have swum a long way before she drowned.

  The river didn’t look so dangerous now. When Mom drowned, the Chattahoochee had overflowed the banks and risen onto the street from all the rain we’d had that spring. It was why Mom’s body had floated so far away, why she hadn’t gotten tangled up in the rocks sooner. White-water rafting companies usually gave the Chattahoochee River a Class II difficulty level, but that June they’d upgraded it to a Class V, which meant expert only, rafters beware.

  I don’t know when I started crying sitting there on the riverbank, but I sobbed and sobbed. I didn’t worry about my face looking ugly, and my chest filled with fresh air as I gasped. I’d turned into a little crybaby, but so what? Who was there to see?

  When my tears finally slowed, I blew my nose with a leaf. I stood up and mounted my bike. It was Lizzie who had taught me to ride it, years ago. Mom had given her twenty dollars to teach me; it was one of her tricks to get us to spend time together. Lizzie hadn’t let me use training wheels, had held the back of the seat to help me balance as I pedaled. I had trusted her not to let me fall. One day she had let go and I went straight into the trash cans, but Lizzie had said that was part of learning.

  When the phone rang later that afternoon, I hoped it would be Lizzie, but it was Vanessa on the other end.

  “Can I come to the zoo with you tomorrow?” she asked. “I’ve never been and I have the church van all day, I can drive us.”

  I told Vanessa that the zoo was closed to visitors for the week. I didn’t feel like seeing anyone. I wanted to be alone, or I wanted to talk to Lizzie.

  “It’s open every day except Christmas,” Vanessa said. “It says on the website.”

  Even on Christmas, the zoo wasn’t really closed. Someone had to come in and feed the animals every single day of the year, so it wasn’t too much to have someone in to man the ticket booth as well. Still, no one ever visited the zoo on Christmas. Everyone always had someplace else to be, a family to spend the day with.

  “I have a plan to get Lizzie to come home,” Vanessa said.

  “Fine,” I said. “Pick me up at eleven. Wear closed-toed shoes.”

  33.

  As Vanessa and I walked toward the part of the zoo called Australian Outback Adventure, she explained about statutory rape. In most states, she said, the age of consent was eighteen. That meant: the age a person could legally have sex. People got into trouble when they had sex with people younger than themselves; it was something you could go to jail for. I remembered a case like that, a teacher in Florida in love with her student.

  Vanessa asked if I knew how old Soda was.

  “Nineteen,” I said, or maybe he had turned twenty, I’d never asked when his birthday was. “That’s not that much older than sixteen.”

  “It’s too old,” Vanessa clucked. “It’s the law.”

  “But how do you know they’re having sex?” I asked. “He said he was a virgin.”

  Vanessa looked at me with a sly smile. “Because,” she said, “of course they are.”

  So what Soda was doing to Lizzie was illegal, maybe worse than the drug use.

  “Very interesting,” I said, as we watched Kangaroo Bill bound across the grass. “Do you think it will work?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “But I don’t think she’ll come home on her own. She’s stubborn.”

  We walked to the African animals next, and I showed Vanessa the male lion, asleep on his side. Because of the Prozac he was on, Seymour had gained weight. An extra forty pounds doesn’t look like much on a lion. You could still see his ribs.

  “A male lion copulates over six hundred times a week during mating season, and with multiple lionesses,” I told Vanessa. “A male lion will kill all the cubs fathered by any other lion.”

  “Sounds something like my stepfather,” she said. “Did you know your dad sent Lizzie a letter every day when we were at St. Cloud’s? I always wished and wished I had a dad like that. My stepdad didn’t write me once, not that I’d read any letter he sent.”

  I knew Dad had written Lizzie, but I didn’t know it had been every day. Dad wasn’t much of a writer; he used to make Mom sign our Christmas cards. I wondered if he’d written to the Silver Sand Motel, if he’d told Lizzie he was watching her with Mom’s bird-watching binoculars.

  “I talked to Lizzie again yesterday and—”

  “You’ve talked to her? She won’t talk to me. How is she? What’s going on?”

  “She’s fine, Elvis. Well, she’s okay. The sleepwalking is getting worse, and I’m starting to worry. She thinks she’s doing your family a favor by staying away.”

  “A favor?”

  “She’s worried she’s dangerous.”

  “Is she suicidal?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “She thinks she’s going to hurt someone else while she’s asleep. She knows Soda can handle himself; his bunkmate in prison was a murderer.”

  I knew that wasn’t true; before Lizzie had left, I’d read one of Soda’s letters about his roommate who was in jail for not paying his taxes. I ignored Vanessa’s lie, because something more important was bothering me. “Why will she talk to you and not to me?”

  “I think there’s something Lizzie doesn’t want you to know,” Vanessa said. “I think she has a secret.”

  “About what?”

  “There was something that happened at St. Cloud’s.”

  “I don’t understand what happen
ed at St. Cloud’s,” I snarled. “They don’t allow visitors.”

  “That’s right,” Vanessa said. She put her hands on my shoulders. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  She steered me to a bench outside the zebra pen where we sat while she told me about St. Cloud’s. Lizzie and Vanessa were second-floorers—the floor where they kept patients with impulse-control problems: explosive anger disorder, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs, sex addicts. On that floor, violent video games, R-rated movies, pornography, those were all banned. They watched a lot of Disney movies, except for Mulan because there was swordplay in that.

  The first floor was for the jumpers, which was what St. Cloud’s patients called the girls who were suicidal, and also for any patients who used a wheelchair. The third-floorers were girls with eating disorders. That floor always smelled from vomit and the smuggled-in laxatives. Fashion magazines were banned on the third floor, as well as any movies with nudity, anything that promoted an unrealistic body ideal. The fourth floor was home to girls with anxiety disorders, those prone to panic attacks. And on the fifth floor, the girls who heard voices or saw hallucinations were kept.

  “Those girls are the spookiest,” Vanessa said. I thought of the rabbit cakes coming alive, the hallucinations of loss, and I worried about going crazy.

  “Most of us were candidates for more than one floor,” Vanessa went on. “Some of our floor placement was simply which rooms were available. It’s not so easy to label people one illness or another. We’re all different combinations of crazy.”

  Lizzie and Vanessa were roommates, assigned not picked. Lizzie had impulse-control problems with complicated sleepwalking issues, and Vanessa was a hair plucker and a compulsive liar. They’d gotten along immediately.