Bunny, page 5
It wasn’t Silas. She watches his mouth – it’s closed. He’s watching TV intently. She can tell he’s pointedly not noticing her looking at him.
The third time she hears it, Silas’s eyes flick towards her for just a second as if she has said something. Not me, kid. TV static. She fiddles with her crucifix pendant as she lets her mind drift. Her mug empties, she fills it up, her mug is half empty, she fills it up, she leans forward, the mug is full, she drinks, she fills it up, the bottle is empty – another one in the fridge, she fills her mug. Jonathan used to watch Seinfeld.
The static interrupts her drifting mind again. She listens for the origins of the sound and notes it descending from the stairs. I know what it is: Lou left her radio on. Somewhere between all the refills and her wandering mind, Silas has fallen asleep.
Put him to bed? No, let him be. She stands and stumbles, catching herself on the couch’s worn-down arm with a whoopsie-daisy snort.
She walks down the hallway and up the stairs, following the static-like noise. It’s like the call of a conch shell willing you to listen to its internal ocean.
She tops the landing and sways lightly, full of wine and warmth. She steps forward and stops, her left toe hovering above the wooden floorboards.
The noise has stopped . . .
The deep, monkey part of her brain squirms. She intuitively knows that upstairs is empty and not empty.
Her heels edge over the lip of the top stair, wanting to step down and run. Leave, leave, leave, she thinks, or does she say it aloud?
‘Who’s there?’ she whispers.
A sudden gentle pressure on her breastbone forces her to lose balance and fall backwards. She braces for pain – waiting for her body to slam into the wooden staircase below. But something catches her. It squeezes her tight as the lights go out.
‘A visitor,’ it whispers.
2018
SPINACH
Silas turns off the tarmac and onto a ragged gravel driveway that snakes through the trees. Thick pine trunks that are four men wide – the forest here is old – engulf their small car until sparkles of sun flare into Silas’s eyes as the trees thin out to a clearing. Nestled in the centre stands a house that resembles a simple cabin, but much larger. Handsome double-storey windows peep out from the unpainted wooden clapboard of the New England saltbox. A large porch stretches the length of the front of the house (which is atypical of the style – Christ knows why or how Silas knows that, but he does).
A lone figure sits on the front porch in anticipation. She stands, waving madly as the car approaches.
‘Gird your loins,’ Silas mumbles as he pulls up and cuts the engine.
The woman hops down the porch towards them while expertly balancing a highball in one hand.
‘Holy fuck, Ms DuBois broke out of the asylum again,’ Silas says to himself. Rose, forever on self-imposed diplomacy duty, turns back towards Goob to laugh.
‘See that? Down the steps and not a drop spilled,’ Silas states with a bada-bing! flair. He deals with anxiety by occasionally turning into a poor Rodney Dangerfield impersonator: project enough energy outwards and hopefully nothing gets back through it, and onto you.
Rose gets out of the car and opens the back door. Goober bounds out to appraise exotic scents.
‘Darlings!’ Lou Lou exclaims. She halts at the car as if she were the lead in Anthony and Cleopatra (which she performed in high school – as the lead). ‘My God, look at you!’ she says, arms outstretched.
Rose swiftly moves to greet Lou Lou as Silas instinctively shirks away from the maternal clinch. She effortlessly falls into the space Silas has vacated like a choreographed dancer, hugging Lou Lou with enough enthusiasm to move them all past the awkward beat. ‘Lou Lou, how are you? It’s been a while, huh?’
Lou Lou holds Rose out at arm’s length and breathes her in. ‘Rose.’
‘Thank you so much for letting us stay for a while. We really appreciate it.’
‘How could I say no? You two stay as long as you need.’
Whenever Rose spends time with his mother (which has only been a handful of times when she has come into the city), Silas is always struck by how every affected utterance seems to be performed for the benefit of some unseen audience. As if at any moment a bullhorn might holler ‘CUT!’ and a director who talks with his hands too much will appear from behind a tree, mince up to them and suggest that Rose could be smiling more, while encouraging Lou Lou to go even bigger . . . ‘Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives’ indeed.
Rose is already being gently steered aside so Lou Lou can get to Silas. ‘And congratulations on the writing! I can’t wait to read it!’
Silas grimaces – the script is titled Evisceration and is about a visiting reporter sharing a last meal with a man on death row (for going to his ten-year high school reunion and killing everyone). Much of the story recounts his dysfunctional upbringing with two alcoholic women in a secluded house in the woods. In the end, the prisoner’s last-minute appeal to avoid the death penalty is granted. He celebrates by plunging the steak knife that came with his wagyu beef into his temple.
Silas nods. ‘Yeah, uh, when it’s finished.’ And when we’re living interstate.
Lou Lou darts her eyes to both Silas and Rose and finally goes in for a full maternal embrace. He hugs her for as short a time as is polite.
‘Oh.’ Lou Lou leans forward as the hug breaks, before Silas can move away, and she presses her face into his and kisses him on the lips.
Rose looks like she’s just seen a person shitting on a sidewalk.
Silas inhales sharply and catches a pungent whiff of gin as Lou Lou exhales; he instinctively recoils. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘Oh, darling, I had to! You look so much like your father used to. It was like kissing him again . . . before he changed.’ Her face hardens, her mask slips for just a moment; behind it is a bitter rage, simmered for too long, that has eaten through the iron pot and run out over her soul like molten glass into a vulnerable eye.
‘I’m not your ex-husband, I’m your son.’ Silas has always had a visceral reaction when being pulled into the narrative of his mother’s life. How effortlessly she manages to do it. After all these years, he still didn’t see it coming until he was once again a part of it all.
‘Don’t do that again.’
Lou Lou seems not to hear him. He knows she did, but her longstanding pathological lack of boundaries has caused the spectrum of behaviour that she deems normal to become so irreparably skewed that it trivialises other people’s negative reactions to it. She could knock your teeth out with a brick, then call you melodramatic when you bent down to look for them.
‘Last I heard, he was marrying that man. By now they’re probably both dying of AIDS. They get that, you know.’
Silas doesn’t take the bait. He has found the trick to surviving is to ignore most things. If you don’t, you’re likely to exhaust yourself in her whirlwind – which is what she wants: attention at any price.
‘Wouldn’t know. Last time I saw him, I was six years old, Mom. Remember?’ He lets the rhetorical question linger for a while before remembering that that sort of subtlety never works on her. You have to trade bricks for bricks.
Goober trots up to Lou Lou and affably sniffs her foot. She bends down to stroke him. ‘Who is this?’
‘This is Goober,’ Rose says as she kneels and scratches his furry rump. ‘We’ve had him a couple of years now.’
‘Wonderful! He’s adorable. What breed is he?’
‘Not sure,’ Rose says, smiling down at the little guy. ‘Just a mix from the shelter.’
‘Oh.’ Lou Lou slowly withdraws her hand. ‘How nice.’
Rose looks a tad confused, unsure what the sudden frost is all about.
Silas knows – when he was a kid, the regional animal shelter had filled up and run an adoption drive. Silas had asked if he could get one of the puppies. He promised to take care of it and offered to pay the nominal adoption fee out of his own pocket money.
‘We don’t take other people’s trash,’ Lou Lou had said before offering to take him to the pet store in the city. As a small act of defiance, he had feigned total disinterest in having pets after that.
Lou Lou stands and wipes her petting hand on the back of her lime capris.
‘Come say hello to your housemate!’
‘Wait, what?’ Silas stammers.
‘Aunt Bunny,’ Lou Lou replies as she turns, beckoning them to follow.
Silas steps ahead of her. ‘Mom, Bunny better still be living in the lake cabin.’
‘No, no, the cabin burned down last winter. I told you,’ she says placidly.
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Of course I –’
‘No. You didn’t.’
The only reason Silas even considered coming to the house with Rose and Goober in tow was because Bunny was in the cabin on the lakeshore. Away from the house. Away from them. Away from him.
A few hundred yards from the house, the terrain begins a gentle decline to a lake, where a small cabin once huddled on the shore. The lake itself is appropriately named Long Lake, as it is not much wider than a football field in most parts. It stretches north and snakes its way up the valley for approximately ten miles before braiding into tributaries. The southern end is near the house and cabin, then it slowly widens to a teardrop surrounded by reed-covered wetlands. Although narrow, the lake is deep, reflective and remains cold all year; partly due to the pines surrounding its edges keeping it shaded for much of the day. The cabin started life as a boat shed, but was little used when Silas’s father was there – and not at all after he left. Years ago, Lou Lou put an end to the small boat inside by filling it with all the belongings Silas’s father had left behind, dousing it in gasoline, and pushing it out towards the middle of the lake before drunkenly screaming homophobic slurs at it. Then she fired roman candles at it until she finally managed to hit it. Silas’s ol’ dad received the first and probably only pre-humous hillbilly-Viking burial.
There are no other structures on the lakeshore as it is, frankly, not a very pleasant place to be. Fishermen and duck-hunters tend to frequent other lakes in the region as Long Lake is inexplicably devoid of the usual fauna – and the dense reeds mean mosquitoes in summer. In Silas’s final year in high school, Bunny had abruptly insisted she move out to the cabin. Lou Lou indulged her, which, after viewing a segment on Oprah starring Nate Berkus, prompted new flooring and a mains power line that was run out to the boathouse by local tradesmen with an aversion to civil paperwork and permits. Silas had welcomed the move.
With Bunny ensconced in the ex-boathouse – now more Swiss chalet than cabin, thanks largely to Lou Lou’s divorce settlement money that paid for the design challenge – Silas saw appreciably less of Bunny.
Lou Lou would sit most evenings with her in the new cabin and drink. Silas spent his final year before college blessed with bubbles of solitude in the main house. It was in one of those precious bubbles that he had decided he would leave home on his final day of high school. He took a rucksack of clothes to school with him and called Lou Lou from the bus stop, a one-way ticket to New York City safely secured in his front jeans pocket.
‘I’m sure I told you about the fire,’ Lou Lou says, with great concern.
Silas slowly shakes his head and holds her gaze.
‘Well, last winter,’ she begins, ‘last winter there was a fire.’
‘Where did it start?’
‘We don’t know what happened.’
‘Well, what did the fire department say?’
‘Oh no, we didn’t call them, it burned out on its own,’ Lou Lou says as if she’s discussing whether she prefers peach or pecan pie. ‘It happened at night. I didn’t see it burning. I woke up in the morning and Bunny was out in the backyard; she was sitting in the snow, just staring at the smoke. She’d been out there for hours, poor thing didn’t want to wake me.’
Silas looks over at Rose. Silas can see she’s willing him with her eyes to stay calm.
‘She’s living in the house again,’ Silas says to himself.
Lou Lou mistakes it for a question. ‘Yes, in her old room.’
‘Across the hall from my room.’
At his sides, his hands are alternately balling into fists and opening wide like he’s working two giant, invisible stress balls. I’m gonna get Rose and Goober back in the car and drive in any direction away from this place until the gas runs out.
The car keys are in his hand and he’s drifting back to the driver’s door when Lou Lou speaks again:
‘She’ll be quiet, darling. She spends most of her time gardening now.’ Lou Lou blinks back tears – hard to tell if they’re crocodile or not. ‘She isn’t the same as she was when you left us, Silas. She’s had a problem with drink for a long time now.’
Silas’s eyes flick down to the perspiring glass in Lou Lou’s hand. She notes the glance and shifts self-consciously before continuing, ‘You might get a shock when you see her. She won’t be how you remember. The doctor says she has liver failure, but she won’t stop drinking. She’s in a bad way.’
‘She must be thrilled,’ Silas says. She’s been trying long enough.
Bunny has casually threatened suicide for decades; at least annually, while Silas was still living there, a morning would start with a trail of congealed blood from the kitchen drawer where the carving knives were kept. The morbid trail would stain the wooden floor that led to her closed bedroom door. She would invariably be found in an alcoholic stupor with superficial vertical cuts up the inside of her arms. Pre-teen Silas had been horrified by these mornings. Late-teen Silas had stoically cleaned up the dried blood while Lou Lou wailed unintelligibly before retreating for a long walk through the pine trees.
‘Son, it’s a disease.’
Rose walks up to him and gently rubs calm into the small of his back before he moves the situation from awkward to unbearable. ‘I’m sure it will be fine. I’m looking forward to meeting her,’ Rose says diplomatically.
Lou Lou brightens at the olive branch. She wheels back around, beckoning them to follow as she trots ahead. ‘Coo-ee! Bunny!’
Silas won’t admit it, but deep under all the other feelings is a kernel of iron-taste-in-mouth fear of seeing the woman again. It has been almost thirteen years, almost as long as he lived in the house with her. Once he’d left, Lou Lou had had to come out to the city if she wanted to see him. He always had an excuse for not coming back.
They follow Lou Lou to the beginning of the gentle slope at the back of the house to find a terraced vegetable plot, roughly an acre in size.
Lou Lou respectfully stops a few feet from the rows. ‘Best to stop, let her come to us. She’s very particular about her garden,’ she whispers reverently.
‘Technically, it’s not really her garden,’ Silas mumbles. Rose stares him down before pinching his arm.
The garden’s size is impressive, but what’s more impactful is the bizarre state of it, rows upon rows of spinach – it’s the only crop planted. It grows tall, but looks unwell. The colour is green, but diffused, like the crop has been fed bleach instead of water. The earthen lanes between rows are a carcinogenic mulch of countless cigarette butts, all burned down to the charred filter. Empty gin bottles hang from the boughs above to chase away birds, like a crib mobile for adults who enjoy a tipple. The garden looks like an overgrown garbage heap with the gravity turned off. At the bottom of the slope stands a grimy, bald mannequin. Fucking weird scarecrow.
‘Coo-ee!’ Lou Lou crows again. The mannequin begins to move.
Silas’s face falls in disbelief. The decades since her husband’s death have turned a milky-skinned blonde woman (who looked like a young Farrah Fawcett impersonating Sharon Tate) into the person that now stalks through the rows of anaemic spinach towards them. Her head and shoulders slouch forward in a pre-arthritic tilt. The lack of muscle tone on her anorexic frame creates an effect where her movements seem to defy logic, like a life-sized puppet bobbing towards them on infernal strings. Her head is shaved; the once alabaster skin has, through years of solar abuse and dehydration, turned a pink hue. Sunspots blossom over the surface of her skin, which has the visual texture of crackling on an overdone pork roast. A burned-down cigarette butt hangs from her mouth, and her hand clings to the gold crucifix around her neck as she carries a mug in the other. A ragged pair of baggy shorts from the late nineties and a T-shirt with Huey, Dewey and Louie on it hang off her frame.
‘Her clothes burned in the fire, so I gave her your old childhood ones,’ Lou Lou whispers to Silas.
‘I see that.’
Though still at a distance, Silas sees her striking green eyes boring into him. In them is a boiling violence at odds with the serene arrangement of her other facial features as she lopes towards them. Two rows of diseased spinach are a welcome moat between them and her. She bends down to relieve herself of the mug she’s been carrying – it’s a large white novelty cup with a sassy statement on it, but a chip over one letter means it now reads:
I ATE MONDAYS
‘Welcome home, Silas.’ Her voice scarred and dry like an animal carcass in a drought.
The old woman in the diner said the same thing. Coincidence? What else was she supposed to say?
Bunny’s eyes flick to Rose as she cocks her head towards her like a bird of prey. ‘You must be Rose.’
‘Nice to finally meet you,’ Rose says warmly.
Bunny’s eyes crawl over her. ‘Well, I could just eat you up.’
Without warning, Bunny is over the remaining rows of spinach, embracing Rose like a long-lost love. Rose freezes, arms pinned at her sides. A wiry arm shoots out, roughly pulling Silas into the embrace. It ends as suddenly as it began.
