Playgroung of Lost Toys

by Exile

  “No rabbit?” my mom says.

  “Mom, that cage has been empty for years and years.”

  “Is it empty then?”

  Isabella pops up from the floor and brushes off the front of her dress, releasing dust motes into the air. “Was there a rabbit?”

  A furrow appears on my mom’s forehead. “Your mother used to have a pet rabbit named Patches. But I was never sure if he was real.”

  Isabella stands on her tiptoes and waves for me to bend down. I lean over, giving her my ear. “I think Grandma’s da-men-see-ya brain is acting up again,” she says.

  “Hush,” I whisper.

  My mom laughs like leaves skittering across the ground. “When your mother found that cage it was out for garbage pickup. She hauled it down the street and all the way up the stairs. She had such an imagination.”

  “Mom, not this story.”

  “I want to hear about the rabbit!” Isabella’s voice matches the highest note she can hit on her pennywhistle.

  “Fine.” I don’t want to upset her and delay our progress even more.

  “As I was saying, when your mother was a child…”

  When I was a child, a bunny magically popped into existence. This is the way I remember it, or maybe falsely remember it, or maybe dreamed it.

  After I place the last box in the back of the U-Haul, I turn for a last look at the old house. It is charming with its faded blue paint and wrap-around porch. The scalloped edges that decorate the bottom of the roof make it look as if it belongs in a fairy tale. The house is still owned by Uncle Charlie, at least for the next two days until the buyers move in. I can’t imagine someone new living there, doing renovations, ruining the way it’s supposed to look in my childhood mind. Uncle Charlie had been very kind to let us live there when Mom had been out of work for so long that she had stopped making payments on the house we lived in before. This had been a good house. As soon as I think that, my brain whispers “liar.” For me, this was a lonely house. My memories seem from another life, isolated bubbles floating to the surface. Many memories are of colouring, scribbling broken crayons over anything I could find – coupons, food wrappers, Kraft paper secreted from school. I probably shouldn’t have felt lonely. My mother tried so hard to make me happy. Even after spending hours away from the house, searching for a job, when she got back she would sit at the kitchen table and talk to me.

  She would ask me how school was. She would answer my questions about how to play chess or the meaning of poems. Tired, she would find energy to say something, anything, like “Play chess how you think best” or “I don’t know much about albatrosses. Why don’t you look it up?” Sometimes she just stared, right through me, through the drywall, past the enormous wooded lot that was our backyard where I spent countless hours building tree-branch shelters that were doomed to collapse, and exploring the forest for signs of magical folk. I wondered what she saw.

  Now, my mom comes outside with Isabella, locking the front door with care. Isabella is carrying a box of “inventions” that Grandma is letting her keep – a “squirrel trap” built from a pencil with no lead and a silk leaf, a fairy house made from an old Mason jar and a dollhouse chair with three legs.

  My mom places her hand flat on the window, saying goodbye to an old friend. I’m surprised to see such a serious gesture. I remember when we lost our first house she didn’t even react, like it wasn’t real. I cried for three days. Her expression was vapid, and when I said to her that now it felt like we had nothing of our own, she smiled slightly.

  “Into the car, everyone,” I say. “We have a long drive.”

  We nestle into the front seat of the truck, all three of us in a row with Isabella in the middle.

  As soon as I hit the ignition Isabella starts right in with, “Is it true you had an imaginary rabbit? That’s so silly.”

  I put on my most serious face. “I’ll have to think about it.” And as we drive, I do give it thought.

  It was a summer long ago when I sat down beyond the park, past the soccer field, in the tall grass making dandelion chains for my toy rabbit, as usual. Patches was a vaguely yellow, threadbare bunny covered in faded pieces of mismatched fabric.

  It was later in the summer, I remember, because most of the dandelions had turned to fluff. A single note floated in the back of my mind, then another, then another, until the sequence came pouring out of me in perfect pitch, like a secret aria composed by a master, as if I had rehearsed it since the day I was born. It was such a strange composition, coming from the girl whose singing was as imperfect as the rest of me. It was a song that pulled from my very centre, the place inside my heart where wishes come from.

  The grass started to rustle and the weeds stirred until a wind swirled, bending the tall blades. The dandelion fluff rose into the air, like a horde of tiny hot-air balloonists lifting my toy bunny. They started to take shape around it, becoming a fluffy mass. And then, the fuzzy floating ball dropped right into my lap. The weight of it shocked me, since Patches didn’t weigh too much, and the dandelion seeds were mostly air and gossamer. Then the clump started to shake like a wet dog drying off. Hundreds of dandelion gliders took off into the breeze. When they cleared, I saw a black and white bunny sitting in my lap, looking as though he had always been there.

  “…she found a cage, curbside for garbage pickup.” At Isabella’s request, my mom is telling the story again. “Your mother hauled that thing down the street and all the way up the stairs, and her face got red like a tomato. She put it in the corner of her room.” This is how my mom remembers it. There was no delight for her when my bunny turned real. The first thing she remembers is the appearance of the beat-up cage.

  “How old was she?” Isabella asks.

  “That was nearly twenty years ago,” my mother says. “I suppose she was about your age.”

  “Oh good.” Isabella smiles. “Seven is the best age to be.”

  She looks to me for confirmation of this fact, and I give her a reassuring nod. Seven most definitely is the best age to be.

  All those years ago, when the real bunny fell into my lap, I took him home and told Mom that I’d found him and he must be someone’s abandoned pet and, please, could we keep him because he had no one else to love him and he’d die in the wild. I knew we couldn’t afford the things he needed like a cage (so I found one) and a constant food supply, but even though I understood money was short, it had no real meaning to me. Keeping the bunny was what mattered. Mom gave a reluctant yes. But we had to put up “lost bunny” posters first. When I got the official word from Mom that I could keep him, I felt better. And I started having the nicest dreams. I don’t think she ever noticed that the toy Patches had disappeared.

  It seems a lifetime ago when the world was so different, full of the wonder and strangeness of childhood. But now, driving through my old town, things don’t seem much different at all. In fact, the neighbourhood hasn’t really changed. Except the restaurant that used to be Tony’s Pizza is now a sushi joint, so maybe things are getting more progressive. Here, time has stood relatively still. It’s so different from Toronto.

  “Your mother doesn’t do things like that anymore. That’s what happens when you’re doing a Ph.D. in protein chemistry.”

  “That’s not true,” I protest. “Protein chemistry is just an easier way for me to invent myself some friends.”

  Isabella and my mom exchange a knowing look, sharing pity for my awkward sense of humour. I roll my eyes.

  “Do you know any more stories about when Momma was a kid?”

  “Loads. Let me tell you about the time she took apart my radio to make it a communicator to signal aliens!”

  Isabella squeals with delight.

  “I had only been gone for maybe an hour to get groceries…”

  Mom is in one of her quirky moods. Telling half-truths. The sun is starting to set and I notice the dandelions have turned to fluff. Fireflies light up the sky like tiny dancing lanterns. They make me think of fairies; so
mething my mom used to joke about. Be careful which ones you catch. At night it’s impossible to tell the fairies from the fireflies. And the fairies bite.

  We drive down the main road in Thamesville; it’s number twenty-one, but the locals call it old number three. I race past the greenhouses, through the flat farmland growing soybeans and onto the 401 North to Toronto. My mom continues to spin yarns and I continue to think of my childhood.

  Patches was a good pet. I found an old cat leash (also curbside) and took him for “walks” in the front yard. He ate a lot of clover and I carried him a lot as well. Sometimes the kids in the neighbourhood would pause on their way by, pedalling slower on their bikes, but they never came over. So Patches and I had parties by ourselves. I gave him water in a teacup and told him stories about all the adventures he had with his friends – the dog across the street and the cat next door – when I wasn’t looking. He’d ask me to tell him more stories. I told him ones from my dreams, about red and white toadstools big enough for golden-haired princesses to live inside in lands where the princess was a friend with all the creatures but big fences kept out the mean people of the neighbouring land. He looked at me with his big rabbit eyes, then looked at the empty bowl in front of him. I’d give him a little rabbit food, but we couldn’t afford much. The poor thing was starving. Which probably explains a lot of what happened next.

  I’d had the bunny for a while before that night when I woke up. Patches’ eyes shone in the darkness. There was a glow coming from his mouth. I crept forward to get a better look. There was a fragment of something like wiggling paper in his teeth; it rolled in compressed waves. On the strange gelatinous paper, a familiar image glistened in front of me. It was a bright orange water balloon. They’d had them at my cousin’s birthday party a few weeks before. I’d called them water cocoons and imagined aqueous butterflies hatching when I popped them. Now, Patches took a nibble of the undulating picture. And the image burst. A mass of wings and water came fluttering at me. It hit my face with a splash, drenching the front of my pyjamas.

  That’s when I knew. The bunny was eating my dreams.

  And I felt a sense of relief. The loneliness of the party, sitting in the corner splatting water balloons while my cousins gossiped about boys and called me names when they thought I wasn’t listening, was lessened.

  It occurs to me now, that this should have seemed incredibly strange, and perhaps scary. But I understood. Money was tight. We bought Patches the cheapest food there was. It looked like pellets of compressed sawdust. Patches was no longer the robust bunny he’d been when he’d dropped into my lap.

  Reflecting back, taking into account all the things I’ve learned, I suppose the bunny was a coping mechanism. At least, that’s what my undergrad psych professor would contend. Real or not, he ate my pain. He ate the lonely dreams and only left the good ones. He made my real memories feel less painful. Now, still having a sense of such a lonely childhood, I wonder how bad it really was. What I have been spared. Or maybe just suppressed. But if the bunny wasn’t real I don’t know how to explain my memory of what happened the next night.

  I dreamed of Patches. I was petting him at first, and we were in one of those “pick your own” paradises full of berry-covered bushes. Then Patches dashed off. He stopped in front of a blueberry bush. He devoured it, leaves, branches, and all. And he kept on eating. When he had devoured the entire row of blueberry bushes, he hopped over to the raspberries, not seeming to mind the prickliness. I watched him bound from the raspberries to the strawberries, his appetite insatiable. Despite the ridiculous amount he’d consumed, he looked like he had barely gained an ounce.

  When he had eaten everything in the farmer’s field he continued to hop off toward the horizon. I was on my feet, chasing after him, curious to see where he would go. He hopped out of the empty field, past more barren country, where the ground was too rocky to grow food. We came to the edge of my dreamed world, and I stared at the boundary, the translucent inside of a gigantic bubble reflecting in miniature the landscape of everything that was behind me. Patches was nibbling at it. He was chewing his way out of my dream.

  Soon, there was a hole with alligator scissor edges. I went over and peered through. There were other bubbles floating in space. All with waving images. Some were pleasant – ice cream shops, princess ballrooms, and snowflakes that changed to flowers as they fell. Some were terrifying – birds with worm tentacles spewing from inside unhinged beaks, flapping clouds carrying screaming bodies into the night.

  And there was the bunny, floating light as dandelion fluff among them. Eating his way through dreams that reminded me of loneliness; empty bleachers, an old bicycle in the corner of a garage, a little girl opening brightly wrapped presents with nothing inside them.

  When I woke up, I was covered in sweat and I was aware of a pain in my head and my chest. Patches’ cage was empty.

  At the breakfast table that morning, my mom’s eyes were red, her cheeks blotchy. I’d assumed she’d been crying over bills again. I’d told her that Patches was missing. “Is he?” she said, her voice much too composed. “Perhaps he decided to go live in the woods where the fair folk will look after him.”

  I took a bite of my grits.

  Mom cleared her throat. “I have good news. I got a job offer.” She put on her best smile.

  I smiled back because it seemed like what she wanted me to do.

  “Things are going to change around here, Shauna.” She leaned over and pulled a small bag out from behind the fern. She handed it to me.

  I pulled out the tissue paper and found a navy sash inside.

  “I can finally afford for you to join the Girl Guides. You can meet some new friends.”

  Later, I would go on to earn every single badge they had. I suppose I was a little less lonely then.

  Now, my attention turns to Isabella as her head flops onto my shoulder. She is snoring softly and there is drool running from the corner of her mouth.

  “And you can’t mix the dough too much or it gets tough,” my mom is saying, deep into her hebephrenic storytelling. “Juste assez pour que la pâte se détache des bords du saladier et puisse former une boule…”

  A roadside sign says it’s still 160 kilometres to Toronto.

  It is very late – two-in-the-morning late – when we reach my apartment. I carry Isabella to her bed, her neck cricked at an odd angle, then help my mom into my bed, and finally collapse on the couch, but I barely sleep. I toss and turn. I look at the clock in intervals of five minutes. Intervals of three minutes. Intervals of one.

  It seems very, very early when everyone gets back into the U-Haul and drives to the retirement home. Mom is quiet, opting to turn on the radio before Isabella asks for storytelling entertainment.

  Then the real work begins. After many hours of blocking out the protests of my lower back, Mom’s “suite” is filled with boxes. Her new place is very clean and the staff are friendly. Isabella says hello to every single person we pass and they all say hello back and how she is such a precious child. Mom’s suite is on the ground floor and has a sliding door that opens out to a lovely pond framed by willow trees. The lady who lives next door has already stopped by with a jar of homemade raspberry preserves. My mom’s face is a tight rubber band, but she is still smiling.

  I bring in the last box and set it on the coffee table.

  “And don’t forget the rabbit!”

  I ignore her and start taking the linens out of a box.

  Isabella is stretched out on the linoleum, her head under my mom’s bed. “There’s no rabbit. Not even a dust bunny!”

  “Well,” my mom says, and the tension in her face softens. Then she looks at me with piercing clarity. “Maybe he’s waiting for you at home.”

  It’s the end of the day and I’m exhausted. After helping Mom unpack, I dropped Isabella off at her father’s for the weekend. She always seems happy when she comes home despite my frowns when I ask her what she had for breakfast and she answers with somethi
ng like, “Some chocolate cake I found at the back of Daddy’s closet!”

  Even though I am way past tired, I am pacing. Worrying about what irresponsible things my ex is up to with Isabella. Chastising myself that she is a perfectly well-adjusted, social butterfly who couldn’t be more sweet if she tried. Worrying about finishing my dissertation. Chapter four isn’t quite right and I’m not sure how to fix it. Worrying about money. At least some things never change.

  A firefly flickers at the balcony window and I stop to look. The apartment is quiet. Not the pleasant kind of quiet like my spot beyond the soccer field where the silence had been rich and warm and full of life. This is a different kind of silence. A dead, cold, empty kind of silence. I stand there listening, eyes closed, and can’t imagine that any kind of life can be sustained here. Even Isabella’s withered fern can’t bear to grow. I want to go home. I want to go back to the wood behind the house Uncle Charlie let us live in and lie down in the grass with the fairies. I don’t want to be so lonely anymore. I want my bunny.

  I tiptoe over to the sliding door, not wanting to disturb the curse of emptiness in the apartment, not wanting to falter in my mission. I open the door and step out onto the balcony. Outside, I feel more relaxed as I leave the silent apartment behind. The sounds of the city bring life to the calm night air. I go to the lounge chair, tilting the backrest down so it is flat, and lie on it.

  My grown-up eyes are wet with the tears of childhood. Going through college, the more biology and chemistry I studied, the more I was sure the bunny had only been a dream. And the more I had become suspicious of what my mother might have done. Not that I would have blamed her. Money was tight. I’d tried asking her about it once, before she’d succumbed to the dementia, but she was evasive, as always. “Your bunny? I was never sure if he was real.”

  Now, I try concentrating on the dream, the farmer’s field, the vibrant red of the raspberries, and the smell of grass. Like maybe if I think hard enough about it before I fall asleep I can bring it back again.