Sure it is. You should have seen us, after—After. You weren’t here. You
don’t know.
I couldn’t help not being here, Buddy.
Yes, you could have.
How?
I don’t know how. Somehow.
Is that really what you think?
Yeah, that’s really what I think.
Oh, Buddy.
Then he was sitting in the front seat of his truck at two o’clock in the morning, sobbing.
Bunny was afraid of the dark. She’d never admitted that to anyone, not even to Shirl, but it was true. Whenever Hack was away, she slept with the hall light shining in her eyes like a beacon. Tonight even that wasn’t enough. She lay in bed as clenched as a fist, rigid with despair. Hack wasn’t coming home, and he might never be coming home again. She’d tried to prepare herself for this moment for sixteen years, more strenuously in the last six months, and here it turned out she still wasn’t ready.
If she’d kept her mouth shut this afternoon on the telephone, would it all have worked out differently? Probably not. Even if the blowup hadn’t happened now, it would have been soon. He’d been coming apart for months; she’d seen it day by day. His step was a little heavier, his smile a little tighter, even sex was a little flatter, like he’d lost the joy of it—and it had always been his joy, even in bad times. When he was younger, he used to whoop like a rodeo rider when he came, lusty and transported to someplace where Bunny couldn’t follow but didn’t mind, because he was inside her, and that was worth something too. She used to come home all the time with abrasion burns from the thin, starchy sheets at the Patio Courts over in the Valley when Hack was especially keen, but she hadn’t minded that, either. As long as she could do that for him, he would stay. When had she first forgotten that? Jesus, how could she have forgotten something like that?
Without Hack, who would she be? Who had she been, years ago, before Hack, before JoJo even? She’d just been Shirl’s kid, Fanny’s little sister. She was nobody at all, a student who wasn’t good enough or bad enough to be noticed in school, nobody’s girlfriend for the longest time, until nasty little JoJo started to come around, and even that wasn’t worth much. The night Vinny was born, JoJo never even showed up, so Bunny had had the baby alone except for a pair of mean obstetric nurses and a doctor who’d arrived after the show was over. Maybe he’d been drinking at the same bar as JoJo. He’d stunk of whiskey, shoved his hand up inside her like she was some kind of cow, and withdrawn it only when one of the nurses cleared her throat extraloud and told him the child had already been born.
And Jesus, having Vinny had hurt. Bunny had pushed and pushed and pushed against this stranger who hadn’t wanted to leave, who’d wedged herself in Bunny’s birth canal for the longest time, hours and hours.
Push
, the nurses kept snapping at her, like it was all her fault, and she pushed, and they told her,
Push harder
, and she pushed harder, but it was only when she started cursing JoJo at the top of her lungs that the baby had finally uncorked herself and shot from between Bunny’s legs like a cannonball.
That was the last time in her life that Bunny had really been in the limelight. Right from the get-go, Vinny had been prettier than Bunny ever was. Shirl told Bunny that; Shirl’s mother, Mayette, told her that; Bunny’s father, Jack, told her too:
God
almighty, girl, your head looked just like a squash when you come out of
Bigger, there. I never saw anyone living or dead who looked uglier. Course,
after a while you got better
. Vinny had been everyone’s darling, a pleaser who learned early how to ask for things and get them. Bunny had always had to fight like hell for what she wanted.
At one o’clock in the morning she got up, turned on all the lights in the house, and went into her sewing room. She was working on a fairy godmother rabbit, one with spectacles and a white mohair wig and a little magic wand. It was a variation on a figure she’d created over and over, a kindly soul whose job it was to fix other rabbits’ problems. Who knew? Maybe it was God Himself in disguise. Bunny didn’t know much about God, and none of that firsthand, but she certainly believed in some force that was out there granting incredible good fortune to people with flimsy prospects. How else did you explain why some people won the lottery, beat terminal cancer, reunited with long-lost twins or parents, stumbled upon fame? Call it magic or luck or Jesus, but it was real. She pieced the rabbit together with tiny stitches and the greatest skill she could muster, the muslin parts trembling in her hands like living things. She stuffed the limbs, rouged the cheeks, looped the wire spectacles behind the bunny ears, and as she worked, she offered up a fervent prayer: Allow me to keep my life, O Lord,
and I will put joy before envy, adoration before need, and love before
judgment
.
At six o’clock in the morning, the telephone rang. Bunny nearly came out of her skin. She’d fallen asleep with her head on her sewing table, a rabbit arm still grasped in one hand to keep the stuffing from coming out. She picked up the wall phone in the kitchen, her heart in full flight.
“Do you know where Mom and Dad are?” It was Doreen, and the girl sounded panicky. “They aren’t here. I don’t think they’ve been here since yesterday. Did they tell you anything?”
“I haven’t heard from them, honey,” Bunny said, coming instantly awake. “I saw your mom yesterday morning, and she didn’t say a thing about a trip.”
“Well, they’re gone,” Doreen said, and started crying. “I can’t take this. First Danny and all his crap and now this.”
“Are you sure they didn’t leave a note?”
“I’m sure.”
“You looked everyplace? Did you look in the refrigerator?” Anita had left a note for the girl once inside the refrigerator, put it there when she was assessing groceries and then forgot to take it back out.
“Everywhere. I’ve looked everywhere.”
“Is the car there?”
“No. They better not be gone. If they’re gone, I’m going to just lose it. I am. What am I supposed to do with Crystal? It’s Saturday. There isn’t even Head Start. I have to be at work in an hour.”
“Is Crystal still asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I don’t work today, so I can take her if your mom’s not back when you need to leave. I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”
“Shit,”
Doreen said, and hung up.
Bunny set the receiver in its cradle gently and sat down at the kitchen table, where she noticed that she still had a rabbit arm clenched in her fist. Maybe the whole world had just gone crazy.
Two hours later Bunny heard the garage door open. She held her breath until she heard Hack’s truck come all the way inside and the garage door close behind him. Crystal was watching
Sesame
Street
on television and didn’t even look up when Bunny left the room.
She and Hack reached the kitchen at the same time, each from a different door. He looked like hell, and so did she. They both stopped just inside their doorways and stared at each other across the no-man’s-land of the kitchen floor.
“Looks like a shoot-out at high noon.” With the greatest effort, Hack managed a smile.
“I don’t see any guns.”
“Well,” said Hack, “it never was about guns.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then what was it about?” Bunny said, feeling her way.
“Ghosts,” Hack said. “It was about ghosts.”
chapter seventeen
Bob had taken it slow yesterday, steering the old car down the logging road at fifteen miles an hour to avoid the ruts and potholes. It had been late afternoon, the time of day when a drunken man could forgive himself his lesser sins, knowing he still had hours to drink away the greater ones. Anita slumped on her side of the car, wrapped in an afghan she had made a long time ago, during one of the kids’ bouts of chicken pox or the flu. It was a soft and stretchy thing, shapeless after how many years and knitted with odds and ends of yarn bright as a carnival. He remembered her knitting it, sitting in a chair by the window— which window? which house?—listening to her children breathe in the night. He recalled the click of the needles in the darkness—she knitted by feel and sound alone—safe in the knowledge that she was watching over them.
Now she was precious cargo, breathing heavily in the seat beside him. He’d told her he had a surprise for her, and at first she’d protested, but he’d worn her down. He fed her toast and aspirin and bundled her into the car. He’d found an old spool-turned rope bed at the thrift store just the day before yesterday, and a mattress with hardly any wear that fitted it just right. The house was ready at last to receive her.
When he rounded the final turn in the logging road, he whispered her name, but she’d fallen asleep, and he had to shake her shoulder gently to bring her around. Her forehead and cheeks and chin were livid pink. Her fever was on the rise.
“Nita,” he said again, and pointed. The homestead was laid out below them like a dream, neat and tidy, half of it still glowing with sunlight, the other half already in the shadow of the steep valley wall.
“Where are we?” Anita had said, groggy with fever and sleep.
“Home,” Bob said. “We’re home.”
“No. This?”
“Yup,” he said proudly.
“What?”
“I’ve been working on it for months, darlin’, just for you. Me and Warren fixed it up some when we were kids, but not like this. Not finished like this.” Bob’s voice caught with emotion. “It’s yours.”
Anita just looked at him with fever-dulled eyes. This wasn’t the reaction he’d anticipated for so long and so often, but he’d show her the inside, and then she’d recognize his accomplishment. He pulled into the yard, rounded the car, and helped her out, looping the extra length of the afghan over her arm like the train of a wedding dress.
“I’m so sick, honey,” she said. “Take me home.”
“I have.”
“I don’t know this place.”
“You will, though.” Bob opened the front door for her and led her in. She saw now; he watched her see.
She looked at the furniture he’d found, and the walls and floors and windows he’d whitewashed and sanded and cut and installed with so much love, and said, “We aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Sure we are.”
“It’s Weyerhaeuser land.”
“That’s the beauty part.” Bob lied nimbly. “I told them this homestead had been in my family for seventy years, and they said in that case we could just go right ahead and live here as long as we wanted.”
Anita bought it. She walked through the front room, the kitchen, the little bathroom—not fancy but adequate, judging by the fact that she closed the door gently and peed into the sickroom commode he’d brought in just yesterday. Bob listened to the sound and felt a lump rise in his throat. He had done this. He had done all this for her, and now she was here.
“Please take me home,” she said, with him again. The afghan had slipped off all but one shoulder and was dragging on the floor. He draped it more securely and led her into the bedroom by the elbow. “We don’t have to,” he said, and patted the bed invitingly.
“Please.”
“You can lie down right here.”
“Does Doreen know where we are?”
“Sure.” He lied again. “Course.”
“I’m so sick, honey,” she said, and pressed the flat of her hand to her chest.
“I know,” he said softly. “I know you are, darlin’. It’s going to be all right, though. Papa’s going to make it all right.”
“I have to lay down, honey.”
“I know you do.”
“I guess I better see somebody tomorrow if I’m not better.”
“Sure,” he soothed, turning back the quilt and top sheet on the bed he’d made up with so much care. He helped her take her shoes off and pulled the covers over her once she lay down. “Now, isn’t that nice?”
She closed her eyes.
“You like it?”
“It’s real nice, honey,” she whispered.
“A house of your own.”
“I’m so tired. Maybe you can call Bunny and ask her to come get me. I’ve never been tired like this before.”
“It’s okay, though,” Bob said. “I’ll pour you a cup of tea.”
He opened the Thermos he’d brought, but by the time he’d poured a cup Anita was asleep, breathing heavily. He could feel the heat rising off her. Should he wake her up and give her more aspirin? She seemed peaceful enough, though. And it wasn’t like she was going to get better. She could go very quickly, Gabriella Lewis had said. That would be the best thing. Maybe in her final sleep she’d dream of him: a joyful dream, a love poem. She’d be young again and wearing her gown, but in this dream she would be Miss Harrison County herself and not a runner-up, and he would lead her down the aisle on his arm, the satin sash across her bosom, the tiara of brilliants threaded through her hair. She would be weeping, leaning against him in the momentary weakness of her joy. And he would steady her.
He pulled up an old cane bottom chair with a broken leg and ran his index finger over the pale veins in the back of her hand, veins he knew like a road map home. It was just the two of them now, him and Anita. It had never been just the two of them before. There had always been someone, Warren or Patrick or Doreen or Crystal. She hadn’t admired the place as much as he’d pictured, but she’d appreciated it in her own way, he was sure. She’d appreciated it and gone to sleep knowing him as a man of achievement. No one could take that away now. Once you knew something, you knew it.
As he watched and stroked and settled more deeply into the weary old bones of his chair, Anita passed into a deepening fever sleep, and her lungs sounded like they were full of dishwashing detergent, bubbly and thick. He pressed her hand to his lips, stroked her forehead gently now and then. He sat and watched the shadows gather in the room and thought about him and Warren and Anita and all that had gone wrong, and all that had gone right, and it seemed to him that it had mostly been good.
Anita was suspended in a well so dark and so deep she couldn’t tell which way was up, only that it was hot where she was, and airless. She sensed that she was drifting, but she wasn’t frightened by it, or even curious. She was working too hard to breathe.
She heard Bob talking. What was he doing down here? The man had never been reliable, and now he was saying things that made no sense.
It won’t be long before I’ll be there too, darlin’. And I’m
thinking it’s going to be a nice place, all white, maybe, and clean and new
and where all the walls and ceilings and floors meet without caulking, and
the plumbing’s brand-new and the windows fit absolutely perfect. You think
that’s how it’ll be, maybe, all white like that?
Then Bunny was in the well too, or at least her voice was there saying the same thing over and over:
Oh, my God
. Anita would have liked to open her eyes, to ask Bunny what she was doing in this place, but she couldn’t seem to lift her eyelids she was so tired. She could hear, and she could breathe, but that was all, and the breathing was getting harder. It was like the atmosphere was turning to glue. Why would she be down there in a hot, airless well full of glue?
Someone laid something cool on her forehead, cool and wet like paradise had arrived here on earth. Bunny. Bunny always knew what to do; her and Hack. So capable. So successful. You knew it just by looking at them. Not Anita, though. Not Bob. People like them had to struggle all their lives and still ended up in a dark, hot well, and she knew now that there wasn’t a damned thing she could have done to prevent it. She could have met Hack a thousand times over, and he would still have chosen someone else. She understood that from the time you were born you were given one thing to become—a great doctor, say, or a king. In Anita’s case, she was meant to love, even in the face of great trial. And so she had: She had loved Bob with all her might, through anger and disappointment, through famine and bitterness. She had done that for him, that one thing he needed so much. But she was finished now; she had been released in order to keep breathing. She heard someone weeping and felt the glue thickening in her lungs and fought for every single breath.
She fought and she fought, and she failed, and she was so sorry.
Then there was nothing. Nothing at all.
Bunny stood at the foot of the bed, tears coursing unchecked down her face. If she and Hack had come earlier, right after Doreen’s phone call, they might have been able to save her. Should Bunny have sensed just how much trouble Anita was in? If a signal had come, it had been too weak for Bunny to hear over the din of her own troubles. Doreen had been frantic, but she’d been frantic before over things that meant nothing. It had been afternoon before Bunny finally asked Hack if he knew where Anita and Bob might be. To her surprise he seemed to know just where to go, and in minutes after dropping Crystal with Shirl, he and Bunny had been at the door of a small cabin way back in a lonely valley. She looked at Hack for an explanation, but he didn’t say anything, just pulled up next to Bob and Anita’s old car and, knocking, let them in the front door.
Bunny could hear Anita’s terrible breathing the minute they were inside. She must have already been in a coma by then, though Bunny didn’t know that at first, only that Anita’s skin was pasty, hair soaked and oily against the pillow.
“Jesus,”
Hack had said, rushing to the bedside, pressing past Bob. “She’s drowning. Sit her up.” He pulled Anita up and propped pillows and rolled bedding under her. She moaned and slumped to one side without regaining consciousness.
“Oh, my God,” Bunny said. “Oh, my God, oh, my God.”
Bob stayed exactly where he was, rocking himself gently in a little three-legged chair by the side of the bed, watching Anita sink.
“Cool her down,” Hack told Bunny. “Wet anything you can find. I’ll go find a phone and call an ambulance.”
Bunny pulled the quilt off the bed, rushed into what passed for a tiny kitchen, and pumped the hand pump in the sink. The water came out clear and cold. When she laid a heavy swath of wet cloth over Anita’s forehead, Anita’s eyes flickered under the closed lids. Bunny whispered, “It’s okay, honey. I’m here.”
But it wasn’t okay. When Bunny moved the wet cloth to put a new, cool length on Anita’s forehead, Anita twitched convulsively. Bunny jumped away, frightened.
“I believe she’s going,” Bob said quietly. He stood, lifted one of Anita’s hands to his lips, and whispered, “Honey, you make sure you save me a place, ’cause I’ll be there soon myself.”
Bunny laid her hand over Anita’s brow, as though she could will Anita to fight. For every labored breath of hers, Bunny drew three, fast and shallow until she started feeling faint. She held Anita’s free hand and keened a voiceless prayer:
Let her stay here
with me
. But it was no good. Anita exhaled a convulsive breath, and her chest never rose again. Instead her eyes flew open, staring at Bunny. “Oh,” Bunny cried out. “Oh, no. Oh, my God.”
Hack came around Bunny and closed Anita’s eyes with gentle fingertips. For the first time in years Bunny had no idea how long he’d been in the room.
Hack leaned against the cabin doorjamb, his back to the room and his arms folded tightly across his chest. He’d stood beside Bob for a minute, then pressed his shoulder hard and walked away. In a world ordinarily filled with his own noise, he didn’t have a thing to say.
High up on the logging road, a siren wailed. Hack had stopped at the first house he’d come to and called 911.
Now Bob fussed over Anita, crossing her hands over her bosom, turning her head slightly as though she were listening to celestial voices, straightening her legs. Bunny watched until she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Jesus Christ, Bob,” she hissed, “can’t you leave her alone? Just leave her the
fuck
alone.”
“Bunny,” Hack warned, coming back into the room ahead of two paramedics wheeling a gurney.
She walked out of the house and across the scrubby lawn to the little creek—Homesick Creek, Bob had called it.
When someonedies, the angels sing to guide their spirit home
, Shirl used to tell her when she was little, as though death were no more than a trip to Disneyland. Bunny knew now that that was a crock. No expression of wonder had filled Anita’s face, nor any glimmer of joy at being received at the Lord’s heavenly gates. Anita had simply left them, without drama, without moment, without recognition of her impending death. She died the way she had lived, underrecognized and without gratitude or celebration.
It was June and warm. There was a fog bank looming like a solid wall just over the hill, but it wouldn’t reach this far back in the valley. Bunny slipped off her shoes and stepped into the creek, gasping at the cold. Underwater her feet were white and pretty, the toenails painted bright red just that morning. Anita had always admired Bunny’s feet. Her own third and fourth toes were fused together and she’d always kept them covered no matter what the circumstance or weather. Bunny hadn’t thought they were so bad, but Anita held on to that one vanity even after she’d gained so much weight and let the rest of herself go. Bunny should say something to somebody so Anita was buried with her feet covered. Whom did you tell about something like that, that Anita wouldn’t want to go through all eternity with her toes showing?
The cold-water pain in Bunny’s feet was terrible, but she made herself stand it and stand it until the pain became unbearable and moved straight up into her heart.
“Are you riding in the ambulance?” Hack asked Bob.
“Yeah, I’ll ride.” He smoothed the sheet back over the bed. It had been tossed aside by the medics when they’d moved Anita onto the gurney.