The Cave Dwellers

by Christina McDowell

  Bunny has moments where she forgets that she’s hidden her real identity from him, and she feels guilty, sick to her stomach, even if she had to do it to get in to see him. She wants to tell him that she knew Audrey would flash her money and privilege around for everyone to see, that Bunny even enjoyed it sometimes—being accepted into Audrey’s circle of popular girls even if she never really felt comfortable there—that being discriminatory about people and places isn’t who she really is or wants to be, the shame and guilt she feels for never having stood up to Audrey, or up for anything she believes in, never confronting herself about any of it, until now. And she wants to ask Anthony if he thinks that’s why the Banks family was murdered—because of greed? Because of race? Both?

  But “they” are listening and she can’t.

  “I can’t stop thinking about what you told me about your dad.… Has anyone else been to see you?”

  “My mom,” he says, “but she’s not doin’ too well, her mental state is declining. Too much stress…”

  Bunny thinks about her mother pulling dead roots from under the dying poplar. “Do you have siblings?” she asks.

  “I got a sister—hey, how is this relevant to my case?”

  Bunny quickly pulls out her journal so as to get into character, having forgotten once again who she’s pretending to be. “It’s important, you know, for context, to know who you really are so people can understand you.”

  “Who do you work for?” Anthony asks, catching Bunny off guard. “I realized I didn’t ask you before.”

  Stumped, Bunny thinks fast; seizing on half-truths, she says, “Myself—I’m independent, which is why it’s better to talk to me.” A good and fast recovery, she thinks.

  Anthony studies her through the monitor. “Uh-huh,” he mutters, still skeptical. “You’re young,” he says.

  “So are you,” Bunny replies.

  Anthony swivels around in his seat.

  “If it’s true, Anthony, I—I really want to talk more about your dad.”

  “Of course it’s fucking true,” he says. Bunny can feel his anger seething through the screen.

  “When did he start working for the Banks—for the chemical plant?”

  Anthony clenches his jaw, but doesn’t turn away.

  “Please,” she says.

  He takes a breath and racks his brain. “I was probably about nine or ten, because that’s when Mom wanted a divorce.”

  “Why did she want a divorce?”

  “She’s always been moody, but Dad going away, commuting way out to Virginia for the job, was hard—but she says it was because he fell out of love with her. But I know it was about money, always is.”

  “I know it’s rude to talk about money, but—”

  Anthony bursts out laughing. “You fuckin’ people,” he says, shaking his head.

  “What? What do you mean?” Bunny doesn’t understand why that would trigger him.

  “Nah, that’s just an excuse for you not to reveal how much money you people actually make compared to the rest of us.”

  Bunny takes a moment to think about this: a revelation. “Huh. That’s a good point,” she says. Anthony appreciates the admission, leaning back in his seat.

  She considers what her mother said at her birthday, Anthony’s challenge against the things that are being passed down to her uninvited, it’s rude to talk about money. “How much did they pay your dad at the chemical plant?” Bunny asks, knowing she’ll have little to compare the answer to. The limits of her identity reduced to a birthday check of $100,000.

  “Well, I guess it seemed good in the beginning, you know, like a salary he was getting, maybe around thirty thousand, but the commute got hard so he ended up just moving to the town nearby. Once the divorce was finalized, we just saw him on weekends, you know, if we could afford a bus ticket or whatever.”

  “What did he do for them?” Bunny asks.

  “He was a security guard, letting employees in and out of the gates. He didn’t have the kind of engineer training and education you needed to work inside the plant.”

  “I see,” Bunny says. “I don’t know much about the Bankses’ business, you know, I just know they… had a lot of money.” She fishes for more from him, about money, his thoughts on money, his thoughts about the Banks family.

  “Man, they got enough money to feed an entire town they be killing! People out there are dying, and they’re flying around in their private jets and shit.”

  Bunny wonders if he’s referring to Audrey. Did he see her Instagram page? Did he find her? Will he find me?

  “How do you know they had a private jet, did you see it?” she asks, on the edge of her seat.

  “Nah, man, you just know, you just look at these people and you know. The way they carry themselves.” Bunny adjusts her body language, trying to settle into her seat more, not so erect and alert, like a real good girl, so polite, so manicured, so refined, so…

  She clears her throat. “Where did you work for them? Did you work with your dad?” Bunny looks around to see if any of the officers are paying attention to her.

  “Nah, I worked at a warehouse out near Fredericksburg, another one of their companies, and sometimes as a delivery guy.”

  “Okay, I did read that.… So when did you find out about your dad’s cancer?”

  Anthony scratches his head, the screen goes out.

  “Anthony? Shit.” Bunny slams the side of it.

  “Ma’am! Ma’am, you’re gonna be asked to leave the next time you touch that monitor,” a security guard says, walking over to her.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.… Anthony?”

  “Yeah, I hear you.” He comes back into focus. “About eight months before he died.”

  “Only eight months?” Bunny says, heartbroken for him.

  Anthony coughs into his fist. “Yep.” He can hardly look at Bunny, withholding his emotion.

  “Were you able to get any help or medicine to try and treat it?” she asks. Bunny doesn’t know to ask about health insurance because she’s never had to think about it.

  “I’m still paying for it,” Anthony says.

  “What do you mean? You had to pay for it?”

  “You think they gave him benefits?” Anthony laughs maniacally. “He wasn’t working inside the plant.”

  “Did you have any savings?”

  Anthony leans back. Exhausted from her questions, exhausted from her place in the world, the color of her skin, the assumptions she makes.

  “I—I’m sorry, I know I’m asking a lot of questions, but—”

  “Savings,” he says at her. “Savings…” nodding his head at how out of touch she is. Bunny is beginning to pick up on this—that savings are a privilege, not a right.

  “I’m sorry, I… think I see.”

  “You wanna see how much debt I’m in for tryin’ to save my dad? Huh? You wanna know what that feels like, having the creditors calling you, threatening to sue your ass while your pops is throwing up blood in the bathroom, nearly passing out from not keeping any food down, which we can’t afford?” Anthony reins in his emotion and throws the phone receiver against the screen, leans back, folds his arms. Abandoning Bunny for a few moments, the phone still clutched in her hand, her furrowed brow—she can’t feel that she needs to breathe; the only thing she knows is that she’s in too deep to back out now, to not do something. Still holding the receiver tight against her ear, looking at Anthony to let him know that in this moment she is with him, she’s not leaving.

  Anthony slowly leans over, grabs the phone back, and puts it to his ear. He looks down at the ground. “I don’t have connections, I don’t have power, I don’t have help, and my lawyer fucking doesn’t give a shit about me. What I got is information.… The company’s rich, and the people who make the company are poor. It’s not right, it’s not right, and you fucking know it. I can see it in your eyes. I don’t deserve to be here, someone else does. I need a good lawyer, I need a real fuckin’ lawyer, Grace! Please, can
you help me get a good lawyer?”

  “Okay, okay, I—I’ll see what I can do. But if you didn’t kill them, Anthony, then who do you think did?”

  “That’s not my fuckin’ problem, is it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Bunny ducks under the electronic gate of Georgetown University Hospital’s entrance, climbing the steep driveway in her red peacoat. A NO WALKWAY sign is inked in white paint along the gutter, and she remembers the story her mother loves to tell about the morning she was born: “When your dad pulled up to the parking attendant at the gate so we could leave, he couldn’t find his stamped ticket. You were bundled in the backseat with me, Dad frantically searching his pockets, the glove compartment. ‘Come on, my wife just had a baby!’ he pleaded, thinking it would work, but the man would not budge! So he revved the engine and drove straight through the gate, snapping it in half. That’s the Volvo you drive, honey Bunny. Let’s just say being a new dad was unnerving for him. That’s why they don’t have an attendant anymore, it’s just a machine.”

  * * *

  Upstairs, Bunny peers into the window of Billy’s hospital room, tiptoes in. He’s asleep in a white bed, his veins pumping with fluids, hair tousled, stained polo from the night of the party slung over the rail. The room is dark with gray light. The windowsills are empty, and the television blares on the wall, headlines scrolling past on the news ticker at the bottom of the screen: Iceberg Twice the Size of Washington Melts in Antarctica in a Sign of Warming (Warning!) / Budget Plan Reveals Tremendous Fraud / Virus Death Toll Passes World Record.

  Bunny feels guilty for not bringing him anything. The flowers he gave her for her birthday, resting on the front hall table, are now dry and dead.

  “Are there still photographers waiting outside?” Billy asks, peering out of one eye.

  “I came in through the parking garage, I don’t know. I didn’t see any.”

  Billy lifts his other eyelid. “Nice of you to come visit. Sorry I ruined your party.”

  “You didn’t ruin my party.… I shouldn’t have bought all that molly.”

  “I partied hard with Stan before we got there.”

  “That’s obvious.”

  Billy smiles, but it comes off as forced.

  Bunny sits on the edge of his bed. She looks around at the empty room. “Where are your parents?”

  “Mom’s downstairs getting coffee in the cafeteria. Not sure where my dad is, probably in meetings.… But I’ll be out by the end of the day hopefully,” he says, trying to compensate for his father’s absence, allay the impending fear that comes with his silence even though they know what’s coming.

  “That’s good,” Bunny says, avoiding the topic of his father.

  Billy can sense Bunny’s withholding. “So how was the birthday anyway? You’re a legal adult now, woo-hoo.”

  “I mean, minus your overdose it was pretty solid. The ’rents gave me a hundred thousand dollars as a present. Guess it’s part of my inheritance.”

  “Damn.” Billy lets the $100,000 sink in.

  “I’m not supposed to tell anyone, but I don’t know. And I just feel fucked up about it now. I think I should give it away. I don’t need it. I’ll never need it. My dad has literally always told me, ‘Bun-Bun you’ll always be taken care of, you’ll never have to worry.’ So might as well do something good with it, right? Save the world. Maybe that’s what we should do.”

  Billy knows that he too will always be taken care of, under the condition he goes to the academy, because there will always be conditions. But Bunny is naïve to think they’ll have a choice of what to do with it.

  “Or you could give it back to them? Tell them you don’t want it,” Billy says, prodding Bunny’s hypocrisy.

  “Reject Meredith and Chuck’s gift? Hah! There has to be another way other than cutting off your nose to spite your face, if you know what I mean.”

  “Right,” Billy says, knowing he was right about her, but careful not to rub it in. He feels they’re much alike in a common understanding of familial circumstance and entrapment, but she’s unwilling to admit it fully.

  Bunny hops off the bed, paces around the room. “I’m thinking of giving it to Anthony’s family—the man who’s going on trial for Audrey’s murder. He told me his side of the story, and I’ve been doing all this research about wrongful convictions, and I am seriously telling you that it is so fucked up—his dad got cancer from the chemical dumping of the Banks family’s business! And they didn’t pay for it, and he threatened the dad.…” Realizing this isn’t sounding so good, she turns to Billy sitting up in the bed, neither amused nor surprised. “But I swear, I don’t think he did it. It was just easy for them because they wanted to hide all of the people that are getting sick and dying from the fumes and chemicals, and he doesn’t have a fighting chance because he doesn’t come from a family like ours, and if he has the money to fight an equal fight, we can find out who murdered them, and if—”

  “Bunny. Seriously, STOP.” Billy puts his forearm over his eyes, as if the sheer mention of Anthony is blinding.

  “You know, for someone who’s supposed to go to West Point, you’re acting pretty weak in the violence department.”

  Billy laughs, feigning shame. “Fuck you, Bunny.”

  “Aren’t you interested in any kind of truth, Billy, or—I don’t know—justice?”

  “Justice for who? Your fake friend or the man accused of killing her?”

  “She was not a fake friend,” Bunny says, covering up that she feels scared and conflicted, all of her resentments she never got to express to Audrey, that she wasn’t brave enough to confront her that time in the car, that Bunny has been complicit.

  “Oh, bullshit, you guys didn’t hang until we started dating.”

  “That’s not true, we hung out when we were little—we were best friends!”

  “ ’Cause this is ALLLL about you, Bunny. I forgot.”

  “This is not all about me—I am trying to find out what really happened! And I think it’s more complicated than people want to assume, because everyone is so fucking scared of the truth.” Bunny stomps her heel on the floor.

  “What the fuck do you know about truth and justice? You think giving a hundred thousand dollars to an alleged murderer will help you find the truth? Will bring Audrey and her parents back? Will somehow make you feel safer in this—this fucked-up world?”

  “In case you didn’t know, nothing is just where we come from, Billy.” Bunny adjusts her jacket, oozing self-righteous indignation.

  “You know what I think? I think you’re acting like a spoiled brat who gives zero fucks what her family has given her and instead wants to play a game of woe is me, I know I don’t deserve this, so here, I’ll swoop in and save you, I’ll give it to an ‘innocent’ man so that I feel I’ve contributed to the world. Stop acting like a fucking martyr when you only care about yourself. It’s sick.”

  Bunny flings her arm up in the air, knocking over a paper cup on a metal hospital tray. “Oh, I’m sorry, are you talking to me or to yourself? And I’m not sick, you’re the one who’s lying in a fucking hospital bed!” Bunny tries to hold in tears.… “I can’t do this anymore, I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  “Fine,” Billy says, his chin quivering, holding back tears.

  Carol opens Billy’s door and enters holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee. There are dark semicircles under her eyes. “What’s going on in here?”

  “Nothing. Bunny was just leaving,” Billy says, looking at Bunny.

  Bunny wipes away a tear. “Hi, Mrs. Montgomery. I—I’m sorry, I have to go.… Lovely to see you.” Bunny brushes past her and out the door.

  Carol walks toward the empty chair. “What just happened? I could hear yelling from down the hallway, William.”

  “Nothing, Mom, it’s fine.”

  “Everything is not fine. You have embarrassed this family and your girlfriend has gone storming out of the hospital. You better get your act together—for your father’s
sake, for my sake. For this family. We are going through enough. How could you be so selfish, letting this happen?”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “Well, if West Point finds out about this, we’re in big trouble. Big trouble.” Carol checks her watch. “I’m going to go see when we can get out of here, this is ridiculous. What are they giving you?” She walks over to the nightstand. “What is this, water? I’m going to go get the nurse.” Carol turns away and stands in the doorframe. She stops a nurse in the hallway: “Excuse me, we’re ready to leave now, please unhook my son. I have to be on the road in an hour.”

  “Where you going?” Billy asks.

  “To the farm.”

  “Why? Is Dad going with you?”

  “No. He’s requested to speak with you alone tonight. And I need fresh air—Excuse me!” She tries to flag down another nurse. “Oh, and I saw your tattoo. Say your prayers tonight that I haven’t told your father.”

  Billy throws his head deeper into the pillow and closes his eyes, wishing that for once, his mother would protect him. Would find the courage to use her voice instead of hiding behind her husband’s.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Exhausted, Billy steps into the old rickety elevator. No one ever uses it except Bunny when she sneaks over in the night, but Billy feels compelled to get inside, in a masochistic sort of way, as if he might find her waiting there for him saying, Sorry, I didn’t mean it. He wonders if this time the elevator will get stuck, God’s way of punishing him, or maybe the cables will finally snap and he will plunge to his death. Instead, the elevator wobbles to a halt, releasing him into his childhood bedroom. Billy flips over a photograph sitting on his bedside table, of Bunny with her arm around his neck, kissing his cheek on the bleachers of the baseball field. Half of an Adderall pill crushed like children’s chalk is inside the bedside drawer; he presses his pointer finger on top of it so the chalky material sticks to it, then licks it, swallows the remainder without any water. This is what he thinks he needs to prepare him for the beating he’s about to take from his father.