The Rabbit
You can keep someone forever, except they will be a little different...
Alison Bull is the author of the serialized story Theda’s Time Machine, found here. The Rabbit is spooky fiction for October.
“The baby is going to love this!” Misty touched her abdomen, where no baby was growing. She had fallen in love exactly three times: the first was at the sight of her future husband, Jake, leaning on his ‘45 Cadillac with a pack of cigarettes rolled in the sleeve of his white t-shirt. The second was today when she laid eyes on the kitchen wallpaper of wild strawberries and blossoms in her future house.
The third would be when the baby arrived, but that date was still a mystery.
Misty wrinkled her nose as the realtor stomped her Ford Fairlane’s brakes in front of the brown cedar shake with too-small windows. But the minute she stepped through the yellow doorway and into the kitchen, a sensation settled around her heart that had only one explanation: she was home. Misty’s hand drifted toward the checkbook in her purse. The realtor, Doris, while pretending to rearrange the plastic bananas and oranges in a fruit bowl on the kitchen table, saw the checkbook reach and mentally added to the positive side of her sales spreadsheet.
Doris eyed Misty’s flat stomach. “When are you due, dear?”
Misty laughed. “Oh, I’m not pregnant. Soon, though!”
“I see a highchair right over here,” Doris swept an arm toward the picture window, but a cold cloud touched her. She’s jinxed now. Never talk about a baby who isn’t here yet!
Misty and Jake moved in a month later. On closing day, she jingled the keys over her head and did a little witch doctor jig and Jake grabbed her up and carried her over the threshold with his hand up her skirt. In front of the whole neighborhood! She giggled.
The neighborhood, named Valley Woods by some simpleton, consisted of seven near-identical houses on perfectly angled plots along the horseshoe-shaped street. On their third Saturday at home, Jake set out early in his Ford pickup truck and two hours later swung into the driveway with two cherry trees poking from the trunk, which he planted equidistant from their front door. Later, a pot roast in the oven and two Tom Collins’ going down smooth, they stood at the bay window with Jake’s arm draped over her baby blue cashmere cardigan. He puffed on a Lucky and said in five years those trees would produce buckets of cherries and in twenty years they’d be tall enough for good shade. Misty stared at those little sticks with a cowlick of leaves and willed them to never grow. When the baby comes, he’ll be twenty when the cherry trees shade the front yard. That’s 1974! I want the baby, and I want it to stay like this forever. Her hand slid up Jake’s white t-shirt and the pot roast burned.
Two months later, Misty roamed the neighborhood and dropped a hand-written rose-scented invitation addressed to the lady of the house into each mail slot, requesting her presence to Saturday luncheon on the first of October. At five of one on October the first, a crow skimming the neighborhood noticed the ripple of front doors expelling skirted ladies with pearl chokers and kitten heels who shimmied out and elbowed the doors shut, balancing food dishes with both hands. The crow, who had been working the neighborhood since before Valley Woods, knew the look of food predators when he saw it, and knowing there was nothing to gain by landing, dropped wing and pointed his beak toward the town dump where a meal was guaranteed.
Misty opened the door only once and in they filed, chirping over her smart taste in fabrics and admiring the new wooden television set, its antenna neatly tucked away for company. Soon the oval dining table bloomed into a smorgasbord: a green Jell-o mold with suspended banana slices that didn’t stop jiggling even when no one was close to it. A hamburger casserole bubbling with scorched cheese that blistered a few mouths. A salmon cream cheese spread in the shape of a fish with crackers as scales. A tallow-colored cold gelatin mold encasing shredded meat which next-door neighbor Sandy Nell spit into a napkin when she thought no one was looking. And two logs of red and green rolled finger sandwiches, even though Christmas was months away.
After the food was eaten and nips of booze were tipped into gold rimmed cocktail glasses, the ladies kicked off their kitten heels on the shag rug and Sandy Nell offered to help Misty with the coffee and Danishes. Against the muted backdrop of female chatter that floated through the yellow kitchen doorway, Sandy Nell lit a Virginia Slim and pushed the iced Danish into decorative patterns while Misty monitored the perking coffee. When the coffee reached a boil she turned down the gas and used Sandy Nell’s lighter to fire up a Kool.
The ladies smoked in comfortable silence by the kitchen window and a thought popped into Misty’s head that seemed to come from outside. These are the good times. She was about to comment on the deliciousness of the food when a black 1935 Ford Tudor sailed down the street, peeking in between the Valley Woods houses and drove to the far corner of the horseshoe where one house stood against a backdrop of red maples. It had a triangular roof and large front porch with those old-fashioned ornate wooden curli-q’s that Misty refused to even look at when the realtor suggested a house with them. The old Ford sailed up the driveway and to the back of the house and out of sight.
“Shame, isn’t it,” Misty blew smoke heavenward. “I don’t mean to be cruel, but that house sticks out like a sore thumb. I dropped off an invite to her, but we haven’t spoken yet.”
“That’s Mrs. Roberts,” Sandy Nell stubbed the smoke out into a ceramic ashtray with the Elk’s Club insignia. “She’s been here even before me, before we let the old house go and took one of these new ones. She keeps to herself mostly.”
“She’s a strange bird,” Helen, a tiny blonde with pointy bra under her fuzzy sweater, sailed through the bright yellow doorway balancing a pile of dirty dishes. Her foot hit the trash can and the lid popped up, and she proceeded to scrape the plates, that savory meat gelatin overrepresented among the food waste. “She won’t sell that old hulk on the hill. Not for any price. I heard that the builders offered her almost double, but she flat out refused.”
“Her property. Guess she can do what she wants with it.” Sandy Nell shook out another Slim and misfired her butane twice before the flame caught.
“No disputing that.” Helen slipped the dished into the sink one by one, each plop! causing the sudsy water to threaten to overflow. “But I know why she wouldn’t sell. It’s because of the rabbits.”
Sandy Nell waved her hand in dismissal, knocking the ashes onto the floor. “She’s just old and can’t even think of leaving her house.”
Helen dropped the last dish and dried her hands on a dishtowel. “You got it wrong, Sandy Nell! There’s rabbits under her porch. More than one. They don’t say multiple like rabbits for nothing, right? I’ve seen her drop vegetable greens off to them. Right out her back window! And there’s nothing left by morning. Seen her put water out, too. You know they’d bulldoze the house and bury those little bunnies in the dirt if she sold out. She won’t sell with the rabbits there. That’s for certain. Rabbits more important than ruining the neighborhood with that eyesore.”
“Her son died in the war! Kindness makes a difference. You ought to try it sometime, Helen.” Sandy Nell said, still smoking.
“I am kind, Sandy Nell! Just practical. It’s not her son. It’s the rabbits.”
“Seems funny to care so much,” Misty said, tying on an apron with lemons dancing across the skirt. “The bunnies would run away, I bet, before anything happened. Silly to worry about them so.”
“I’ve got to run, Misty,” Sandy Nell dragged and stubbed. She said her thanks and pecked Misty on the cheek and went out the back door, cutting across the newly planted grass to her own house.
“That woman worries like I’ve never seen,” Helen plunged her arms up to her elbows in the suds. “Ever since little Howie joined the Army, she’s been on edge. Not like he’s going to Korea! Best to have at least two, Misty. Then you don’t hang the world on the one.”
But Misty wasn’t listening. She watched Sandy Nell bypass her own back door and walk up the hill.
Six months later there was still no baby, and not for lack of trying. These things happen, her mother had said, patting her arm lovingly. Misty held out seeing the doctor because that would make the problem real, so she busied herself around the yard and tried to push the baby fever from her mind. It was April now, and the little cherry trees blossomed. The yard was a blank canvas and Misty bought graph paper and plotted her planting schedule for both the front and back of the house.
One morning after Jake had left for work, she wandered into the garden with a hand shovel and a pack of poppy, marigold and daisy seeds. Burnt orange and red marigolds would rim the stone walkway, and poppies and daisies would make lovely beds in front of the deck.
When the twelve o’clock whistle blew, Misty sat back on her heels, the seeds safe under a blanket of dirt. She half smiled. And looked up into the eyes of a brown rabbit.
The rabbit sat upright, nose twitching, ears far forward, its paws pulled up off the ground and it watched Misty without movement. She half smiled. It was a dear little thing. But then she remembered the damage one rabbit could do to the lily bulbs and she raised her hand to shoo it, but it was already turning away. Then Misty gasped.
The skin on the rabbit’s back was almost all peeled off. Its tail was missing, and the raw flesh underneath resembled the skinned carcasses the hunters brought back for stew meat when she was a child.
Pity softened her. You got not much time left, little friend. Fox gonna smell you and that’ll be it. Best thing, really. Must be so painful.
But as the summer waned, no fox caught that rabbit, and as Misty washed endless dishes her eyes would catch at snippet of brown outside the window and the rabbit would hop away just when she raised her eyes.
October 1955.
A knock at the back door.
Old Mrs. Roberts with an empty measuring cup.
“Oh, hello, dear,” she smiled, raising the cup. Her teeth were beautifully white and even. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m smack in the middle of baking and I’m short one cup of sugar. Would you have some to spare?”
Misty opened the screen door so the elderly lady could enter. During the past year they had established their awareness of each other by waving and smiling. That’s it. A wave when the old Ford, paint peeling and engine coughing, puttered past Misty bringing groceries in. A smile across the horseshoe street when brooms were sweeping autumn leaves from front porches.
Misty offered coffee and the elderly woman accepted, sitting at the round kitchen table and placing her arthritic hands on the ochre Formica.
“Would you like cream? Sugar?”
“You’ve seen the rabbit.”
Misty startled from where she was removing the glass milk bottle from the icebox. “Well, I’ve seen a rabbit.” She set the milk on the table. The sugar bowl was already there.
Mrs. Roberts nodded. “That’s good. I was wondering if he’d been over in your yard. No pets over here. Good place for him, I suppose.”
“Yes,” Misty poured the hot coffee into a mug, glad to look away from the odd conversation.
“Thought I’d see a cradle here,” the old woman said, glancing over Misty’s shoulder. “But there isn’t one.”
Now Misty was getting annoyed. She had not passed one word with this woman until five minutes ago and she was speaking to her like her own mother wouldn’t even speak to her. “No, not yet,” and the tears that were always close to the surface over this subject sprang into her throat.
“Every woman dreams of a child,” the lady said, dropping a teaspoon of sugar into the cup and stirring. “What do you dream, dear?”
Misty sat opposite. Her brave and upbeat face, the one she pasted on before she turned the doorknob to the outside world or when Jake came home from work, melted. “I just want a little boy,” she rasped, relieved.
“Of course you do, dear.” She patted Misty’s hand, and instead of the annoyance she felt when her own mother, who had five children, did the same, a warm sense of security came over her. This lady knows. She knows how this feels.
“My husband was a swimmer,” Misty said. “A collegiate swimmer. He won medals. He just missed being in the Olympics.”
“And you’d like an athlete.”
“Yes. But I’m asking too much. I just want a baby. I’m greedy,” she finished in a whisper.
“Only the weak say such things. You have the right in this world to ask for what you want,” she said kindly. She opened the sugar bowl and poured the contents into her measuring cup. It filled it perfectly. “Would you mind lending me a dishtowel to put over this? I know I’ll spill some.”
Misty rose and fetched the dishtowel. As she was doing it, a long black car passed the window and stopped in front of Sandy Nell’s house. The doors all opened at once and soldiers emerged, replacing their caps. “Who is that?” Misty asked, handing the towel to Mrs. Roberts.
The old woman’s eyes were hooded. “Those are men in dress blues. I’m afraid Sandy Nell is now getting terrible news. Please go to her, dear. She’s going to need a friend. Thank you for the sugar.” She raised the cup and opened the door, letting in Sandy Nell’s screams of anguish.
Midnight.
The only light on was the one over the sink. Misty removed the two coffee cups from the morning and wished she were back pouring that coffee, before finding out little Howie was dead. It had been the longest and most terrible day of her life, but it was nothing compared to Sandy Nell’s day. Korea’s over. Not even a damn war, and her son gets run over by a truck with bad breaks. Why? Why did that happen? She picked up the sugar bowl and shook it. Empty. Might as well clean it. She lifted the lid.
Inside was a small bundle of dried flowers tied together by a black string. Misty wrinkled her eyebrows. She knew she had certainly not put it there. She brought it to her nose and smelled oregano and marigolds. She turned it and it pinched her fingers painfully. Ouch! In the middle of the flowers and herbs was a small stalk from a thorn bush. Mrs. Roberts? But why? She didn’t have the energy to puzzle it out. She threw the tiny bundle in the trash and headed to bed. Jake was half asleep but as soon as she slipped under the covers, he rolled over and lifted her nightgown.
These were the good times.
The little boy, who was named after his daddy but called J.J., grew up bathed in a golden light. From his first steps to the first time Jake took him to the YMCA for swimming lessons, he was a delightful boy, quick witted and humorous. By 1966, his talent in the swimming pool was already being noticed. To his mother, this was all just icing. He was her third and final love.
As for Valley Woods, in 1957, Jake raked the leaves in the front yard when he noticed a dead rabbit in the street. He removed the carcass and buried it in the backyard by the leaf pile. A month later, Sandy Nell packed up and moved to Florida. It was only a matter of time Misty shook her head to Jake. He didn’t tell her about the rabbit. There was no reason to.
Sandy Nell’s house was soon sold to a family with a boy exactly J.J.’s age and they became the best of friends. Funny how well things work out, Misty had remarked to Jake, watching the two boys run down the marigold-rimmed stone pathway.
On a winter night not long after, the lights remained dark at Mrs. Roberts’s house. They were dark the following night, as well. It would be five nights before Helen, who had noticed the absence of lights the first night, finally called the police, who broke through the back door and found Mrs. Roberts dead in the kitchen, a handful of beet greens in her fist. This according to Helen, who had been sleeping with the police chief for the last two years. “Feeding those damn rabbits. I knew that’d kill her eventually,” Helen said during one of their trysts.
The Valley Woods developer, who had been waiting for years, bought up the property for a fraction of the cost at auction. The house was knocked to the ground. The rabbits fled to the woods and were seen no more.
Misty blocked these sad stories out because these were the good times, and she intended to enjoy them as the decades turned and finally it was the year 1976, the Bicentennial, and Jake hung an enormous American flag between the two full grown cherry trees. The wild strawberry and blossom wallpaper now looked terribly old fashioned to a kaftan wearing, cigarette in long holder smoking, long haired, Tab-drinking Misty, so she had it papered over with a lovely pattern of avocado and burnt orange. J.J., her star swimmer, was twenty years-old and bringing a girlfriend home for the first time, and Misty needed the house to be welcoming and perfect.
And it was. Right up until the person-to-person phone call from the Dean who informed her that her son, who was a favorite for the USA Olympic team, had drowned while swimming in a lake off campus. Drinking, he said before Misty dropped the phone and started screaming. They were all drinking and the water was cold. So, so cold.
No one picked the weeds that popped between the marigolds. Weeds and crab grass assaulted the ocean of once unmarred emerald lawn, but it was the marigolds that bothered her the most. When J.J. had gotten to the age where he was expected to carry a load of chores, he plucked those weeds, taking to the task as if he were eliminating enemy soldiers. Jake didn’t see the weeds anymore. Jake went to work, and he came home. And he went to work, and he came home.
Misty walked the path. A rabbit ran from under a bush, right past her feet and she stopped. At the end of the path were the purple lilies and she noticed they had been eaten down. Eaten down by those rabbits!
Rage. It waxed and waned like the evilest of moons since the day of the phone call and its name was ruination. She turned on one heel and barged through the back door and pulled the junk drawer so hard it disconnected from the counter, spilling scissors, rubber bands, tape and plastic daisies that stuck to the bathtub so no one slipped. She dug through the wreck until she found it. Wire. The type that you make a snare with.
The last time she made a snare was forty years prior, when her family was so poor that their only protein was whatever they pulled from the woods. There! She thought when it was done and the steak was rammed into the ground with a rubber hammer. Now come after my flowers! Now try to ruin them! Now take from me even more. And more. And more.
At daybreak the light filtered through the full-grown trees that separated her yard from the former yard of Sandy Nell. A dead rabbit lay in the middle of the path that sparkled with mica in the summer morning.
She marched outside, tying the belt of her green terrycloth robe so tight the pain gripped her sides. She picked up the rabbit by its back legs and pulled the steak from the ground. That’ll teach you to eat my lilies. Then she stopped.
The rabbit was soaking wet, but it hadn’t rained. The stones were bone dry, as was the grass. There had been a water shortage (along with a shortage of gas… a shortage of happiness) and county officials warned that a steep fine would be issued to anyone who dared to water a lawn. But this rabbit’s fur was plastered to its body, and dank water dripped to the dark gray space where the carcass had been.
She brought the dead animal closer to her face. Its eyes were blue. And then she smelled it.
Bourbon.
Florida.
The name of the panhandle town was circled on her map. The name of the street sounded tropical. The house number was odd and had no meaning.
Sandy Nell rinsed her white hair blue, and it matched the pattern of blue and green nylon weaving on the aluminum folding chair that heaved with her weight, its twin on the other side of a small table surrounded by scrubby grass worn down by orthopedic shoes. The two old friends watched the sun sink into the bay. Misty had shown up unannounced, but Sandy Nell had been waiting for her ever since the calendar had flipped to 1976.
Her friend’s sparkle had extinguished, and with skeletal fingers Misty lit a Carleton. Sandy Nell asked after the neighborhood. Misty left the news of Mrs. Roberts’s death for last and Sandy Nell knew why Misty was there. She knew. “You know why she fed those rabbits, don’t you?” Sandy Nell asked gently.
Misty stared at the bay. It was a sapphire. The sun burned her eyes. It was orange. Misty shrugged.
Sandy Nell went on. “I had seen the rabbit. Her rabbit. But I didn’t know. Then one day she came to the backdoor and asked to borrow a cup of sugar.”
Misty froze before the cigarette reached her lips. The last of the sun’s arc slipped in the bay.
“She asked about the baby that we were trying to make. And I think I’m telling you a story that you already know.” Sandy Nell glanced sideways.
“My mother came over one day. She had had the house before us, you see. Mrs. Roberts drove that old shebang down the street and my mother said shame what happened to her son. I had known he was dead, of course, but I asked her how. He was a gunner. One of those ones who are under the plane in a glass dome. He was shot down over France. Crew was dead when our guys finally found them.” She grabbed the Carltons even though she had quit in 1964 with the Surgeon General.
“Howie was playing in the yard. I was doing the dishes. I saw that damn rabbit sitting up, just about ten feet from him, watching him. That damn skinned rabbit. You know how I knew my son was a dead man? When my mother said that Johnny Roberts had crawled from the wreckage of that plane. Crawled at least fifty feet. How excruciating it had to have been, mother said, to have crawled all that way with half his skin torn off.”
