Rabbit Cake

by Annie Hartnett

  “What if she sleepwalks?” I asked. “She might knock your teeth out.”

  He shrugged. “We won’t try to wake her up.”

  After we fetched Lizzie from the truck, we took the elevator to the twelfth floor.

  “One room?” Lizzie asked.

  “One room.” He nodded. Dad said he had to get to work immediately. He had an antique carpet he wanted to auction, and he was looking for some more contemporary stuff for the store. He left us some cash and permission for reasonable room service privileges. He left Ernest in his cage in the corner, and put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door so that housekeeping wouldn’t come in.

  There was an art museum and a planetarium near the hotel, but Lizzie said those were the worst ideas she’d ever heard. She was sprawled on the bed like a starfish.

  “We could walk to the ocean,” I suggested.

  “Okay,” Lizzie said. “I guess.” She grabbed her jean jacket off the desk chair.

  It wasn’t a long walk to the water. No one else was on the beach except for a bunch of seagulls. I bent down to pick up a dead crab, missing its claws, the meat picked clean from the shell.

  “What do crabs eat?” Lizzie asked.

  “Dead things,” I said. “Which is called carrion in the nature world. They’ll eat fish, worms, anything dead. They’ll eat their own species.”

  “Oh.” She bent down to trace her name in the sand. I dropped the reddish-white crab shell into my pocket.

  “There’s one crab species, I forget which one,” I said. “The female crab only mates once, but she’ll produce millions of eggs during her lifetime, from that single mating.”

  “Phillip loved the ocean,” Lizzie sniffed.

  “His motel wasn’t even on the ocean,” I said. “You can do better, Lizzie. You’ll do better next time. Mom had lots of boyfriends before she found Dad, and a few even after that.”

  She must have thought I was talking about Soda, because Lizzie let out a yelp. She started running away from me, leaving a sneaker imprint in the sand over her name. She ran down to the water, but she didn’t stop there. She splashed right in, all her clothes still on, lifting her knees high, frothing up the waves. She didn’t stop running until she was swimming.

  I thought about going in after Lizzie, but I wasn’t supposed to take my back brace off, and I was worried it would be hard to swim with it on. I hadn’t been swimming since before Mom died, even though the heat had been unbearable in the summer.

  I threw pebbles off the beach in Lizzie’s direction. Some of them plunked near her, but three or four of them hit straight on. First she moved farther out, then she went underwater completely. I couldn’t see where I should aim. I took my shoes off and rushed into the water up to my waist. “Lizzie!” I yelled. I scanned the waves, but I couldn’t see her.

  She finally bobbed up, and I exhaled in relief. She swam in, emerging from the water like a sea creature, a string of seaweed wrapped around her neck. You could see straight through her T-shirt and her sneakers were probably ruined. I slapped her on the arm, as hard as I could.

  “Ouch,” she said.

  “You scared me.” My stomach was still in a knot.

  “I was just swimming.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But you scared me.”

  Back at the hotel, Lizzie took one of the white terry cloth robes hanging in the bathroom closet and wrapped herself in it.

  “Do you ever wonder what it’s like to drown?” Lizzie asked.

  I had, of course, but I was worried that Lizzie was serious about trying it. “No,” I lied. “Never.”

  “I read the last few minutes are peaceful, like going to sleep. Do you think that’s true?”

  “I know you miss Soda.” I gulped. “But that’s not a good reason to drown yourself.”

  “It was just a question.”

  “What did you see in him anyway?” I asked. “Even Vanessa thought he was a loser.”

  “He helped me.”

  “With your sleepwalking?”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking out the window to the parking lot below. “And with other things. He said we just needed to keep talking, that talking would eventually help.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “He understood why I feel so guilty about Mom’s death.”

  “It’s a normal stage of grief.”

  “Elvis,” Lizzie said. “There’s nothing normal about this family.”

  Ms. Bernstein had explained that abnormal grieving means that nothing changes in the patient, nothing improves. If what Lizzie said was true, if we were all abnormal, we would be trapped here forever, stuck to grief like it was flypaper.

  That night, Lizzie had one of her worst night fits I’d ever seen. She was biting, tearing at Dad, trying to rip his hair clean from his scalp. She was screeching and growling.

  I don’t know how he managed it, but Dad got Lizzie into the hotel bathroom and held the door shut. We heard her tear the shower curtain right off its rings. She flushed the toilet again and again.

  “There’s nothing in there she could hurt herself with,” Dad said. “I didn’t bring my shaving kit.”

  “What about the shampoos?” I asked. “What if Lizzie drinks those?” I’d seen a news segment once on people who ate bath salts, and I guess all that soap made them crazy.

  “She’ll be fine in the morning,” Dad said. “Help me use the bed to blockade the door.”

  In the morning, we found Lizzie in the bathtub. The sight of her there reminded me of Mom when she was mourning Nana. We drove back from Charleston in silence, a whole stack of new carpet rolls in the back of the truck.

  At the house, there was a voice mail waiting for Lizzie. The Guinness World Records office was asking for an update on Lizzie’s project. A lot of people start world records, but not a lot of people finish them, and they wanted to know whether they should keep her on their list. They wondered if she could be done by the end of the year, they really wanted to include her in this year’s book.

  “I’m almost done,” she said, when she called them back. “I have seven hundred and fifty-seven cakes, but I’ll get to a thousand.” I guess she was ready to start baking again, even if she was heartbroken. “I’m not going to be one of those people who almost has a world record,” she said. I was surprised to hear she was already in the seven hundreds, but Lizzie said she had baked quite a few cakes at the Silver Sand Motel and Marina, and Soda had taken them to the butcher’s freezer for her. Those months hadn’t been completely lost.

  “What about school?” I asked. She wasn’t cleared to be homeschooled this year.

  “Let Lizzie finish her cakes,” Dad said. “Then we’ll talk about school.” Dad was still rattled by how bad Lizzie’s sleepwalking fit had been. At least she wasn’t eating in her sleep this time around, which was a good thing. We had rabbit cakes spread all over the house, and if she had eaten those, it would have been a major setback.

  I didn’t know where Lizzie had read that drowning was a peaceful death. I had searched what is it like to drown, and I’d found a story on a message board about near-death experiences: a boy who had almost drowned in a pool in his backyard. As the water filled his lungs, all he had seen was the color purple. No tunnel of light, just purple everywhere, like he was swimming in grape juice. He had wanted to scream, but he couldn’t make a noise.

  He didn’t say drowning felt like going to sleep, but it didn’t sound that bad either, as far as dying went. I had looked up brain tumors, and deaths by kidney failure, the way Soda’s mother had died, and those kinds of deaths sounded much more horrible. I would rather drown, given the choice, based on the information I had.

  Of course, the boy in the story didn’t drown all the way; he had only started the process. His mom had been there to pull him out, had given him puffs of air through CPR. But if Mom had drowned because of a brain tumor, I reminded myself, nothing could have been don
e to save her. CPR wouldn’t have mattered; not even a doctor could have helped.

  37.

  October, November

  Lizzie baked through October, and by November, seventeen months since Mom’s death, she was doing better. She was back to showering first thing in the morning, and I didn’t even have to turn the faucet on for her. She wasn’t crying. She was baking all day and making our dinners at night, no more boxed macaroni shells. Lizzie had started her own routine, and it seemed healthy. I thought we were moving in the right direction, even if she was still sleepwalking.

  One morning before school, there was a pan of brownies on the counter. Lizzie had left them out uncovered, and I wondered if she’d been eating them in her sleep. I cut a large brownie to eat for breakfast, since we were out of Pop-Tarts.

  In the middle of second period, my math teacher, Mr. Reed, carried me to the principal’s office after I told him I couldn’t work my legs. Both limbs had gone tingly. Mr. Reed left me on the floor of the office until my dad could get there. The carpet was such nice quality, I bet it had come from Carpet World. I stroked all the carpet’s little red hairs.

  “Elvis,” Principal Stuart said to my father, “is noticeably impaired.”

  “She’s always been a little different,” Dad said. The whole room was fuzzy, not just the carpet.

  “Mr. Babbitt,” Principal Stuart said, “your daughter is very, very stoned.”

  “Am I going to die?” I asked. Dad picked me up off the floor.

  I was suspended from school for a whole two weeks for drug use. That was a longer suspension than Lizzie had ever received. I was trying to be mad, but everything seemed too funny and I was starving.

  “I didn’t mean to leave them out,” Lizzie swore. “I didn’t know Elvis would eat them.”

  “Where did you get the dope?” Dad asked. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “No one calls it dope, Dad,” she said, and he gave her the worst look I’d ever seen from him. She said she didn’t have any more, but Dad found the rest of the marijuana when he ransacked her room.

  Dad asked her if she had gotten it from Soda, but she wouldn’t say. “I’m in over my head,” he said, as if this was the first time he’d noticed. He went upstairs to his room with the baggie of leafy marijuana and his laptop. Ernest hurried after him, flying for a few feet.

  I shoveled my hand into an open bag of potato chips, but Lizzie snatched the bag away.

  “This isn’t a vacation,” Lizzie said. “I need help with the rabbit cakes. We’re on a deadline.”

  I told Lizzie I would assist with the cakes every day except for the days when I was on the volunteer schedule at the zoo. Dad said I could still go to Serengeti Park, I wasn’t being punished since I hadn’t meant to take drugs; it had been all Lizzie’s fault. Lizzie was grounded, but she never left the house anyway.

  On Wednesday at the clinic, Dr. Rotherwood looked tired, and I knew there was a lot he was stressed about. The scheduled building of the orangutan exhibit had been delayed due to budget cuts, which left all the employees nervous about their next paycheck. As a volunteer employee, I had nothing to worry about, but I didn’t like to see the rest of the staff on edge. The animals could sense fear, and it made many of them harder to handle.

  Then there was the sad day that Nacho, our California black bear, had to be euthanatized. Nacho had emphysema caused by his years of smoking cigarettes in the circus, and he was having too much trouble breathing. I was worried about Yoyo, the female. The bears had been together for most of their lives. On the other hand, now Yoyo had the waterfall in the exhibit all to herself.

  Vanessa knocked on our door while we were on our 889th rabbit cake. Her eye makeup was smeared all over her face, and her lip was split.

  “I had a fight with Father Tillman,” she said.

  “He hit you?” Lizzie asked.

  “No. I crashed the church van.”

  “Is that what you fought about?” Lizzie asked. “The van was a piece of junk anyway.”

  “No, the fight was before the crash. The crash happened a minute ago, the big tree at the end of your driveway. I was crying so hard, I guess I shouldn’t have been driving.”

  We went out to see the tree. It was missing a big chunk of bark. Glass from the windshield was sprinkled all over the ground.

  “We’ll have to sweep this up,” I said. “I don’t want Boomer stepping on glass.” Vanessa nodded.

  “So what happened?” Lizzie asked.

  Vanessa said Father Tillman had kicked her out of the nuns’ apartments after he’d found out that she had been telling children in the Sunday school that the rapture was coming, and that only the good kids would get zapped up to heaven.

  “Vanessa, that’s so messed up,” Lizzie said.

  “I was trying to make them all behave. I’m sorry I said it, but it’s too late to take it back. What am I going to do now?”

  “You’ll live here,” Lizzie and I said at once.

  It wasn’t hard to convince Dad. He felt bad he’d kicked Vanessa out in the first place when she had nowhere else to go, and I’m sure he remembered how good Vanessa had been with Lizzie before.

  This time around, Vanessa kept her distance from Dad, and got undressed in the bathroom. She didn’t complain about the lumpy couch. That week, we were baking more than a dozen cakes a day and Vanessa made the baking more fun, somehow. I think we were all glad to have Vanessa around.

  While rabbit number one thousand was baking in the oven, Lizzie stood up on the couch to give her acceptance speech. Vanessa, Dad, and I applauded and the parrot yelled, “Encore, encore,” which he always did when people clapped their hands. The Guinness World Records office called to congratulate Lizzie on completing her goal, and said they’d send out the world record adjudicator in a few weeks to verify the existence of the cakes and take a few photos.

  “I’ll be ready,” she said.

  “We’ll be ready,” we chorused.

  “I think this is as good a time as any,” Dad said at the end of our celebratory toast, sparkling cider for everyone. “I wanted to tell you kids some news of my own. I’ve met someone.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Vanessa said. “Way to go, Mr. Babbitt.”

  “I met her online,” Dad said. “We’ve been talking for a while, and she lives in Texas. She wants to come visit in a few weeks, the first week of December.”

  I wasn’t sure what someone from Texas would be like. I pictured a woman who rode sidesaddle, smoked a pipe, someone who sauntered instead of walked regular.

  “What would Mom say?” Lizzie snarled.

  “If you really want to know, your mother would say, ‘Go for it, you old dog.’ Your mother always thought I should get out more.”

  “Get out more?” Lizzie asked.

  “We had a nontraditional sexual relationship. An open marriage, if you want a word for it. Your mother took more advantage of our arrangement than I ever did, but she had more free time.”

  So the secret I’d been keeping for over a year wasn’t even a secret. Dad wouldn’t care about Mr. Oakes and the trailer; maybe he already knew. But after I thought about it for a second, I believed it would hurt Dad if he knew about Mr. Debbie, about how Ernest got Mom’s voice. I’d keep that secret.

  “Your dead mother had other lovers,” Lizzie repeated. “Just what you want your dad to say on the best day of your life, the first day you’re a world record holder.”

  “It’s happy news,” Vanessa said. “I’m glad Frank shared.”

  “Shut up, Vanessa,” Lizzie snapped.

  “She’s coming to visit soon,” Dad said. “And you’re going to be nice.”

  “We’ll be nice,” I promised.

  “If you don’t like her . . .” Dad trailed off. If we didn’t like her, then what, I wanted to know.

  That night, Lizzie didn’t sleepwalk, but she screamed and screamed like her bed was on fire. She had started sleepscreaming as she walked around the house, but she also
screamed on nights when she wasn’t sleepwalking. She’d lie on her back, stiff as a board, shrieking at the top of her lungs. You could turn on the light in her room and watch her face turn red, then purple, then white. I worried she would choke on her tongue, but Vanessa said that never happened to people.

  “Let her scream,” Vanessa said. “Maybe it’s therapeutic for her.” Vanessa was reading lots of books on child therapy; she had decided she wanted to go back to school.

  Dad and I were keeping our doors locked, but I would get up in the night to pee. Vanessa was sleeping defenseless on the couch, and nothing bad had happened. We were standing in Lizzie’s room now, and she didn’t even know we were there.

  I looked down at Lizzie’s sleeping expression, her face frozen in a look of horror. Maybe she was only a danger to herself.

  In the morning, it was obvious that no one but Lizzie had slept. Even Boomer was tired. I didn’t know if it was really possible for a dog to have circles under his eyes, but I could have sworn Boomer did, underneath his black-and-white fur.

  I was exhausted, but I had to go back to school; my suspension was up. We were reading a new book in English class, and everyone had heard I’d been stoned in math. Suzanna Zebb asked me to sit at her table at lunch. Suzanna’s friends were known as the druggies, although I discovered when I sat with them that they’d never done any drugs, not real ones anyway. They said they’d huffed paint in Suzanna’s garage.

  “Is it medical marijuana?” they asked. “For your scoliosis?”

  “Yeah,” I said, although my crooked spine had never hurt me.

  “I’ve heard that shit is crazy,” said Glenn Lego, a scrawny friend of Suzanna’s. Some kids just called him Lego, but I didn’t know him that well. “Can you get us some?”

  “Sure,” I said, but I wasn’t paying much attention to Suzanna or Glenn Lego. I scanned the lunchroom. I looked for the security guard in the No Bully Zone, wondering who he would talk to about his two shih tzus now. I was surprised to see that Jackie Friskey, the former fifth-grade class president, was sitting with him. Jackie had always had a ton of friends; she didn’t belong in the No Bully Zone.