Rabbit Cake

by Annie Hartnett

  I woke up one morning on the floor next to Boomer, and his breath had gone raspy. The rest of the family joined me in a circle by Boomer’s doggie bed. Vanessa said she’d call the vet to make an appointment to have Boomer put to sleep, but she didn’t reach for the phone.

  “He wants to know if we’ll be okay without him,” Lizzie said. “He says, ‘Who will take care of you now?’ He knows how messed up this family is.”

  “He loves us,” Dad sniffed. We were all crying. I guess we had turned into a family of criers. “Boomer loves us exactly the way we are.”

  Lizzie wheeled herself into the kitchen and came back with the child-safe scissors, the ones that didn’t have to be locked up with the knives. She leaned down and took a clipping of Boomer’s fur. “In case we want to clone him later,” she said, and everyone nodded, picturing a house full of very good dogs.

  “It’s okay, Boom,” I said, rubbing my favorite ear, the slightly crooked one. “We’re doing fine now. You don’t have to stay.” I wanted him to stay forever, but I didn’t want my best friend to be in pain.

  “You don’t have to feel guilty about leaving us,” Dad said to Boomer. “We’ll be okay. Go take care of Eva now.”

  Dad always said he didn’t believe in heaven, but I guess he’d changed his mind. It was too hard to think that the ones you loved were gone forever.

  “Go see Mom,” I said. “Tell her we love her.”

  “Go Boomer, go,” Lizzie urged in a whisper.

  Boomer was a good dog. He listened.

  I didn’t have to go to school; Dad called the Three Rivers front office, explained that there had been a death in the family. Jackie brought me my homework, but I didn’t have the energy to do it. Vanessa made me grilled cheese sandwiches, but I couldn’t eat them. Lizzie got her casts off, and she showed me how strange her shriveled white feet looked, but I couldn’t laugh.

  “You okay?” Dad asked, opening my door every morning.

  For three days, I said no, and Dad closed the door behind him, leaving me alone. I clutched my pillow as I cried and cried. My snot dried all over the pillowcase, leaving a crust.

  On the fourth day, I got out of bed and took my first shower, changed my clothes. I called Ms. Bernstein at her house, and asked if I should start a new grieving chart.

  “Your grief can feel as heavy when you lose a pet as if you lost a human family member,” Ms. Bernstein said. “But you’re better practiced at loss now. Let your grief run its course and it will resolve itself, in time.”

  “Excellent advice,” Vanessa agreed. Vanessa had gotten an A on her test in child psychology, but she was a long way from treating patients, so that’s why I’d asked Ms. Bernstein first.

  After a week off from school, I felt well enough to go on Monday. I had to take only one break during the day to cry in the bathroom, after Jackie gave me a drawing she’d done of Boomer, a perfect likeness, only she didn’t draw the clouds in his eyes. Cataracts must be hard to do with colored pencils.

  Boomer was the first one of us to die of old age. My nana had been pretty old, but maybe if she hadn’t smoked cigarettes she would’ve lived longer. Boomer died because he was an old dog, no other reason. We didn’t know how old exactly, because we got him as a full-grown dog from the shelter, but we’d had him for almost eleven years. It was always strange to me that we couldn’t ever know Boomer’s birthday, didn’t know which day we should give him an extra scrap of people food.

  Dad wanted to go right out and get another puppy from the shelter to cheer us all up.

  “No replacements,” I said. “It’s healthy to be depressed after someone you love dies.”

  “I think that does sound healthy,” Lizzie agreed.

  Boomer died of old age, but I’d figured out by now that death never makes sense, no matter how someone dies: murder, accident, old age, cancer, suicide, you’re never ready to lose someone you love. I decided death will always feel unexplained; we will never be ready for it, and you just have to do the best you can with what you have left. That was what I’d finally pieced together, and I felt like I had solved a major mystery. I said something to Lizzie about it.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” she said. Lizzie could still be awful sometimes, but you can’t expect someone to change completely.

  I had wanted to bury Boomer in the cemetery, but it wasn’t allowed in our town, and the nearest pet cemetery was in Mississippi, so I’d let Dad send Boomer to the pet crematorium. When we got Boomer’s ashes back, the plastic baggie was identical to the one we’d once received holding Mom’s ashes.

  I remembered Dad’s friend’s funeral, the one where there was a bagpipe recording of “Amazing Grace.” I thought there was something nice about that, something that felt right about a funeral. I researched funerals online to find the style that I liked, and then I made up invitations for everyone in the family.

  The morning of the funeral, I baked a rabbit cake, the first ever I’d made myself, since I wanted the day to be a celebration of Boomer’s life. I made it from a Funfetti mix, speckled with multicolored confetti; I didn’t want the cake to look realistic.

  We all dressed in black and Dad drove us down to the river. The cake was squashed in the Tupperware by the time we got there, but I put it out on the picnic table anyway. I’d used vanilla frosting because everyone knows chocolate is toxic to dogs. I placed the baggie of ashes next to the cake, and also Boomer’s red collar and one of his squeaky toys.

  Vanessa gave the sermon, since she knew the most about how to do it. I’d found a prayer online that I wanted her to say, from Prayersforpets.com. I made her change a few of the words, because I knew Dad would think it was too religious, but I thought the message was good.

  “Oh heavenly God,” Vanessa said, and we all bowed our heads. “We feel that it is with understanding that you look down on a scene like this today, when one who was so loved is gone. As Boomer was unto his caretakers, ever loyal, ever faithful, may we, as we leave this river, this place of solitude, resolve to find strength to be more loyal and faithful to one another. Thank you for entrusting us with a devoted dog. Thank you for letting him teach us unselfish love.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ernest said, after everyone else said “Amen.” I wondered if the parrot really was sorry for all the times he’d called Boomer a bad dog. But it was easy to forgive the parrot for that, because I was sure that Boomer knew he was a good boy, the rest of us told him that all the time.

  “Now we will lay our loved one to rest,” Vanessa said.

  I put a spoon of Boomer’s ashes in the water, and passed the baggie down to everyone else. It felt good to mix Boomer into the river, knowing that Mom and her beloved dog were together now. I guess that’s why people are buried in family plots, so there’s something about the end that feels like coming home.

  Like Mom, Boomer had loved to swim, even though border collies aren’t a real water breed. There was one time, a few years ago, when Boomer wouldn’t get out of the river after the rest of us had already toweled off.

  “Boomer boy, time to go,” Mom had yelled from the bank. Boomer had slapped his paw against the water, making a splash. He’d barked, urging us to come back in.

  Dad had said, “Let’s leave him here. He’ll follow us home.”

  Mom had thrown her towel on the bank and dove straight back in. “You can leave us both here,” she’d said, when her head reemerged, her smile wide as an alligator’s. “We’ll be fine.”

  48.

  January, February

  Lizzie’s Cosmopolitan magazine was wrong when it said the only way to get over someone is to get under someone new. I’ve learned that waiting it out is the only way to get over anyone. We’re not going to get a new dog to replace Boomer, not for a long time anyway, and we’re not much closer to having a stepmother, even if Dad has said there are a surprising number of single women in this part of Alabama.

  Lizzie wouldn’t poison a second girlfriend, either on purpose or accidentally. She’s not ang
ry anymore, or guilty. She’s sleeping a lot better too, which probably helps. Dad has decided that Lizzie will be sent to a private school in Georgia, since public school wasn’t working for her. She’ll be starting during their spring term. It’s called the Pine Mountain Culinary Academy; Dad found it online. The program doesn’t have regular grade levels, so Lizzie won’t have to repeat sophomore year. She’s been cooking up a storm to get ready, both dinners and desserts.

  We came into some money; that’s why the spot at Pine Mountain isn’t going to be a financial problem. Dad also started a college fund for me.

  It happened after Dr. Lillian responded to the email I’d sent last summer, when I’d asked if she knew where I could get a grant for research to help finish my mom’s book. She wrote that she missed Eva dearly, that she was so sorry to hear about her death. Dr. Lillian said the manuscript was impressive, and she suggested selling it to the Animal Network since no one really reads books anymore. In fact, she’d already taken the liberty to forward it on to the television execs. She hoped I didn’t mind.

  I didn’t mind, and neither did Dad, not once the Animal Network came knocking with its elephant-sized checks. They’ve already started filming The Sleeping Lives of Animals and Larry, the sleepwalking beagle in Wyoming, will get a starring role and Dr. Lillian is narrating. Mom’s name will be mentioned several times in the credits, and mine will be listed twice.

  When a naked mole rat becomes a queen, her spine lengthens, the vertebrae separating during her pregnancies. Her length makes it easy to distinguish the queen naked mole rat from the rest of the colony, before you even observe their social behavior. She is much larger than all the other mole rats in the colony, larger than the warrior class, the worker class, even the breeder males.

  During my last checkup, the Three Rivers Junior High nurse said my spine looked totally normal.

  “It’s possible that you were just slouching in your exams before,” she said. “I can never really tell unless we get an X-ray.”

  “I don’t have scoliosis anymore?”

  She took the plastic brace from me and threw it on top of a pile of back braces in the closet. “You’re cured. It’s a miracle.”

  Cured is a funny word: sometimes you’re better completely, and sometimes you think you’re better and the disease comes back.

  Lizzie isn’t cured of sleepwalking, but she’s not tortured by it either. She hasn’t eaten anything in her sleep in months, and her doctor said she probably just grew out of it; he said that’s what happens with the majority of eating disorders. We thought it was strange that it was called an eating disorder, and not a sleep disorder, but now we don’t have to worry that Lizzie will be poisoned. And she says she doesn’t feel guilty about Mom’s death anymore, so I don’t think she’ll climb up onto the roof again. That’s good enough, at least for now.

  I think we are mostly cured of the sadness following Mom’s death. Even if we aren’t a completely normal family, and our mom wasn’t just anyone, I don’t think our grief has turned abnormal. We have more rabbit cakes than ever before and have still found things to celebrate, like the new jungle gym Dad bought for the rats. Dr. Rotherwood did our spaying and neutering of the rats for free, after Dad said we didn’t need to start an inbred rat farm. Dr. Rotherwood didn’t ask where we’d gotten the rats.

  Most things are pretty good, other than that I don’t have a dog to sleep on my bed or welcome me home from school. At Three Rivers, everyone stopped talking about Jackie Friskey’s STD, and she could have gone back to Stephanie’s lunch table, but she’s still my friend. My sixth-grade English teacher recommended that I start taking some eighth-grade-level classes. I added Latin and switched to eighth-grade English, and school is more interesting. When I come home, Vanessa helps me with my math homework, and Lizzie is always there with a plate of fancy French cookies. She says the recipe still needs tweaking, so she’s making a slightly different batch every day.

  Of course, there will always be things I wish Mom was around for, like when I got an A-plus on my first Latin test. Dad says Latin is a dead language and he wasn’t really impressed, he wants me to take Spanish instead. Languages become dead after people stop using them. I still use Mom, the things I learned from her. I imagine all the time what she would say if she were still around. I use her scribbled notes on pages of The Compiled Studies of the Naked Mole Rat; I’m studying more about the animal’s resistance to cancer. Lizzie and Dad still use Mom’s clothes; Dad says her bathrobe is so comfortable he’ll never go back to men’s pajamas. And the parrot still uses Mom’s voice, even though we found out he can also imitate Dad.

  “Come on, be a team player,” Ernest said the other night, in Dad’s exact voice. Then Ernest let out Mom’s big chuckle while the rest of us choked on our dinner.

  So Mom doesn’t really feel gone, but she’s no longer here either. I’ve thought about it a lot, for almost two years, and I don’t believe in reincarnation, in one spirit fitting perfectly into a brand-new body. It’s a nice hypothesis, but it makes death too simple when it’s not neat and tidy that way.

  Still, every time I hold Brigitte Bardot the rat, Beebee for short, I can’t help but wonder if there is a scrap of Mom’s spirit inside her. It isn’t even the rat’s gapped teeth, it’s more about a feeling I get. Mom would have remembered the time I asked her about being a lab rat in her next life, and how she said she wouldn’t be a lab rat forever. She would have thought it was a pretty good joke to show up as a rat, especially a rat that Lizzie would save.

  When I pick Beebee up now, she looks at me, her whiskers twitching, and she licks my hand like a kiss. Our How to Raise Your Rat guidebook says that licking is a sign of acceptance and love.

  I stroke her belly with my pointer finger and she leans back in my palm, her tail wrapped around my wrist for balance. She blinks very slowly, her body relaxing. She closes her eyes for longer and longer moments, her eyelids pausing shut as if she is about to fall asleep right there within my grasp.

  Acknowledgments

  I am extraordinarily lucky to have many people to whom I owe a great deal of thanks, and here they are in no particular order (just kidding, I spent hours on this):

  A humongous thank-you to Katie Grimm, who is the world’s best agent, who loves Elvis as much as I do, who deserves so much credit for this book—I promise I’ll never go out of the country again without telling you first. I also owe a major thank you to the team at Don Congdon Associates: Annie Nichol, Kayla Ichikawa, and Cara Bellucci—your hard work and attention to detail are so much appreciated.

  An equally humongous thank-you to my amazing editor, Masie Cochran, for having a vision for the book, for making Elvis shine, and for your enthusiasm and kindness through it all. Thank you also to all the other wonderful people at Tin House: Nanci McCloskey, Sabrina Wise, Diane Chonette, Jakob Vala, and Meg Storey.

  To my teachers: Christopher Kennedy, Jonathan Strong, David Huddle, Kevin McIlvoy, Christopher Castellani, James Scott, Wendy Rawlings, Bebe Barefoot, Michael Martone, and Kellie Wells. This book would not exist without your guidance. Thank you also to Katheryn Doran, because before I was a fiction writer, I was a philosophy major. You will always be my role model and your leadership in college changed my life.

  Thank you to the Associates of the Boston Public Library for the crucial early support for the book and for giving me a home to write for a year. And to my friends at the bookstore: Mary Cotton, Jaime Clarke, Deb Handy, Jacqui Teruya, and Matt Denis—you are my people.

  Thank you to Tasha Graff, for reading every single draft. How lucky I am to know you, my brilliant friend. Also thanks to Jessica Schneidman, Lauren Foley, Winter Burhoe, Mackie Mescon, Marika Plater, Dave Goldstein, Ellen O’Connell, Caroline de Lacvivier, Jordan Wade, Susan Pienta, Lauren Fletcher, and Kenny Kruse. Most of you haven’t read the book yet, but I trust you’ll buy many copies if I put your names here.

  To Nancy Criscitiello (Mrs. Cris), my next-door neighbor growing up, thank you for giv
ing me my very first short story assignment. Your guidance and friendship have meant so much to me.

  Thank you to my parents, Liane and Paul Hartnett, for your unwavering support, love, and faith in me. Thanks to my brothers, Jake and Michael, for your love and friendship. And thank you to the extended Hartnett and Callahan families—I know only one of you has gotten a Rabbit Cake tattoo, but I’m sure more of you are soon to follow. Also to Leslie and Peter Linsley, Jeremy Linsley and Ariel Brumbaugh, my West Coast family, thank you for welcoming me into the fold.

  I tried not to thank my dog—really I did. Harvey, I know you can’t read, but I love you so much. Thank you for being the inspiration for Boomer, and for taking the job of Good Dog so seriously.

  Lastly, thank you to my husband, Drew. Thank you for always believing in me, and for your patience, kindness, brilliance, partnership, and love. You’re my tuna fish.

  PRAISE FOR

  RABBIT CAKE

  “Annie Hartnett’s Rabbit Cake is fantastically original, a story about loss that expands in such exciting, unpredictable ways that I found myself completely won over by the unique Babbitt clan. Hartnett has such a gift for absurdity without ever losing the essential heart of the story. With this novel, she’s become one of my favorite writers.”

  —KEVIN WILSON, New York Times best-selling

  author of The Family Fang

  “Hartnett has written a quirky, slightly magical coming-of-age story that will have your heart. Rabbit Cake is an engaging read and Hartnett is a writer to watch.”

  —HEIDI W. DURROW, New York Times best-selling

  author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

  “Heartbreak and dark comedy fuse together in this endearing story of family dysfunction and loss. I cheered for young Elvis Babbitt and the entire cast of quirky characters as they stumbled along a twisted path toward healing.”