chapter seven
I circle the stuffed rabbit. The fur around his neck is worn so thin that it’s a net stretched over cotton. His head is flopped
to the side. His tail is a matted gray tuft. He looks like the toy I remember.
Which is impossible, of course.
I lost Mr. Rabbit at the start of college, either in packing or unpacking. In a fit of maturity, I proclaimed it a sign that
I was moving on, outgrowing my childhood talismans. Of course, I cried after Mom drove away, and I wished I hadn’t lost him.
And now he’s found.
Mr. Rabbit watches me with his one cracked eye. As a teen, I tossed him against the ceiling one too many times, and his left
eye shattered into smooth shards that catch the light from the window so that he looks as if he’s winking. Only a few threads
hold the eye on. He lost the right eye in the washing machine. Maybe his lost eye is here somewhere, too.
I want to laugh. I clamp my teeth together so that I won’t. If I laugh, I’ll cry. And I don’t want to cry. I squat in front
of the rabbit. My heart thumps fast inside my ribs, as if my old toy is a grenade. “Are you what I lost?”
He doesn’t speak, which disappoints me. Says something about the kind of day I’m having that I expect this dirty lump of cotton to spew out answers, or at least a few prophetic riddles in rhyme.
But he’s silent. Everything is as silent as dust. I don’t hear wind or birds through the open window.
I continue to talk into the silence. “Even if you were, I’d need the Missing Man to send me home, right?
” Sitting, I wrap my arms around my knees and squeeze.
I feel as if I’m five years old again, pouring out my fears to my scruffy, germ-ridden, favorite toy.
“So I’m supposed to believe it’s all true.
Every crazy thing that every crazy person said to me today.
The motel clerk selling suitcases. The waitress in the diner with the broken phone.
The man looking for his lucky penny . . .
Did he really sail here? And Peter? Who is he? What is he? Can I trust him?”
He still doesn’t answer.
He’s in a patch of sunlight that’s pouring in the open window. It’s low angled so his shadow streaks behind him across the
wood floor. Low angled light means the sun will set soon, and then it will be dark. I think of the broken windows downstairs
and wonder if it’s safe to sleep here. Not that I have much choice.
“You know this is completely fucked,” I tell the rabbit.
Claire pipes up. “That’s not a nice word.”
I jump to my feet. I hadn’t heard her come up the stairs, but here she is, staring at me with wide, round eyes as innocent
as a doll. She’s not holding her bears. Or her knife.
“Just talking to Mr. Rabbit,” I say. “He’s heard that kind of language before. He knows not to repeat it in public.”
Claire nods as if this makes perfect sense.
Leaving the rabbit, I cross to the window. The sun is fat and low, and the reddish shadows make the clumps of brush and cacti
look burnt. I shut the window. Lock it. Don’t feel safer. “Do you think we’re safe here?”
“Are you asking me or Mr. Rabbit?” Claire asks politely.
“Mr. Rabbit has a limited understanding of the concept of safety. Unless someone comes at him with scissors, he’s unfazed. Plus, he’s a rabbit of few words.”
Claire stands next to me, looking out the window at the endless sienna desert and the sunset-rose-wine-stained sky. She slips
her small hand into mine. The bones in her hand feel so fragile, but she has calluses on her palm. I wonder exactly how much
she’s practiced with that knife. “Most people don’t leave town,” she tells me, “especially not at night when you can’t see
where the dark stops and the void begins. So we should be okay so long as we don’t turn on the lights. You can see lights
from a distance.” She doesn’t sound like a kid. She sounds more like a soldier, assessing the situation.
I find that oddly comforting.
I nod as if it’s perfectly normal to spend the night somewhere you fear to turn on the lights. No night-light for me. “Just
in case, I want to board up the broken windows downstairs, the one in the front door and any others with holes large enough
to crawl through.”
“Okay.” Releasing my hand, Claire pivots and traipses downstairs without any further questions or conversation. Following
her, I leave the stuffed rabbit in the patch of dying sun.
Claire is out the front door without pause. She scrambles onto the junk pile as if she’s part-cat, scaling the side with ease.
But I hesitate on the porch. A heap like that could hide rattlesnakes. Or poisonous spiders. Or rabid wildebeests that like
to rend the flesh of the recently lost. Certainly there are sharp rusted objects. But none of that stops Claire from scurrying
over a broken tricycle, a dozen twisted coat hangers, an old microwave, and mildew-coated cardboard boxes that could hold
anything from books to bandicoots.
As Claire climbs to the top of the heap, she disturbs a desk drawer with her foot, and paper clips tumble out in a metallic
waterfall. They spill onto the ground, which is already littered with buttons and pennies and nails. It sounds like rain.
At the top, Claire lifts up a stop sign. It’s nearly as tall as she is, and she wobbles as she holds it. “How’s this?”
I want to yell at her to duck down. Anyone could see her, perched on top of the pile. But I don’t. I could startle her, and
she could fall. Or someone unfriendly could hear my yell. Besides, she wasn’t the one who’d attracted the pissed-off mob.
It’s me they want. Then again, they saw her rescue me . . . Keeping as low as possible, I creep up the side of the pile and
take the sign. She scrambles off the heap past me and holds the front door open as I carry the sign inside. I prop the sign
against the living room couch and study the window. I think it’s been broken for a while. Dust and debris have blown in, and
the floor feels like a beach after a storm. “We’ll need to nail it over the window.” I hadn’t thought about the mechanics
of boarding up the windows. It’s not something I have experience with doing. I need tools . . .
“Be right back.” Claire scampers outside again. Examining my sign, I wonder if there’s a street somewhere experiencing terrible
accidents due to the lack of a stop sign. Before I can decide whether or not this is something I need to feel guilty about,
she returns with an armful of tools—hammers, wrenches, clamps, an assortment of nails and screws and washers, and a car jack.
She dumps them on the couch.
“That was quick.”
She beams at me as I select a hammer and a few nails. “People lose tools a lot. Much harder to find other things. Like cupcakes.
No one ever loses cupcakes. I miss them.” Her smile fades. “We used to have cupcakes on our birthdays. Our neighbor Mrs. Malloy
baked them. She put sprinkles on top. But she died, and I saw her sprinkles in the trash.”
A howl rips through the air.
I feel every hair on my arms stand up. My fingers tighten around the hammer.
Claire, perched on the arm of the sofa, swings her legs back and forth, seemingly unconcerned.
“You sometimes find lost cookies. People drop those behind couches and stuff. And I’ve found tons of French fries. But not cupcakes. Or ice cream.”
“Did you hear that?” I ask. It lingers in the wind, the howl stretching out like the tail of a comet, fracturing and eventually
dispersing.
“It can’t hurt us,” Claire says. She considers her statement, her face screwed up as if she’s making intense calculations.
“At least, it can’t after we seal the windows.”
“Right.” I lift the sign up and examine it. It has holes where it was bolted to its post. I position the holes over the window
frame and nail it on, using washers to widen the size of the nail head, which makes me feel clever. The sign covers about
a third of the bay window and nearly all of the section without glass. I face the “Stop” side out, in case any of the predators
can read. The human ones can, I think. “Maybe we should board up all the windows.”
Claire shakes her head. “Then we can’t see them coming.”
Her statement makes me think of a half-dozen zombie movies, which is not comforting. “You need to work on your bedside manner.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Continuing to hammer, I try not to focus on how this isn’t where I’m meant to be, how I should be home with
Mom in our familiar apartment with its functional window locks, and how surreal and wrong all of this feels to the point where
I wonder if I am having some highly vivid nightmare brought on by too much kung pao chicken. But I’ve never had a nightmare
like this.
I have nightmares about Mom. In them, she’s in the hospital again with tubes stuck in her and a monitor counting her heartbeat
as if it’s counting down to zero. Standing beside her, I feel a choking weight in my throat, but I can’t scream or cry or
speak.