A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  After a minute or so I decided to go ahead, to try and lift him out. I reached in and pulled him out, a hand on either side of his chest. Even through the gloves I could feel the fragile rib cage, the heart pounding inside.

  I held him in front of me, his legs hanging down, his paws out as if he were floating across the room in some sort of dream, and I was amazed at his weight, at how Mr. Gadsen must have fed the thing.

  Slowly I lowered him toward the box, but before its hind legs even touched the Plexiglas it began thrashing and squirming. The growling began again, growling so loud I knew it must have been heard by the other three, and for a moment I pictured a polygraph gone wild, rabbits blinking away at the loud, cold, sharp sound coming from this animal, and in that moment, my mind on something else for an instant, the rabbit craned his head straight back, then to one side and the other. Its mouth opened wide, gaping open to reveal pink gums, pink as raw flesh, its incisors sharpened yellow fangs. It shot its head at my left hand, those teeth sinking into the canvas glove, through it, and into my hand just below my index finger.

  All this in a moment, this searing heat and growl, all without leaving me enough time even to react, for my eyes to signal my brain that some movement, some evasive measure needed to be taken to keep from happening what had already happened: its teeth into my flesh, the rabbit now shaking its head as if it were a dog with a bone, tugging at my hand.

  Still its feet kicked, and for another moment I was calm, trying to figure how I could get this rabbit latched onto my own flesh into the Gormezano box and the bottom cabinet drawer.

  But then the moment was gone, and I screamed at the pain, at the heat, at the suddenness of this, and with the scream I tried to throw the rabbit away from me. I took hold of its head and tried to squeeze open its jaws, the rest of its body hanging in the air, thrashing, kicking in free space, kicking so hard that, finally, with one fierce last kick, the rabbit broke its own back, the snap so crisp yet quiet it could have been a small branch broken outside a window. With that snap the rabbit stopped squirming and released its grip on my hand. It hung on my arm a moment longer, and then its squeals began, the opposite of the low growl, a sound like a baby’s muffled, long screams. A sound more common than the growl, but it frightened me more, and I shook the dead weight off of me, watched it drop to the floor.

  Anger began to well up in me, anger at an overweight and spoiled animal. I held my hand, felt the pulse shine through my wrist. There was no blood anywhere, and for a moment I thought that perhaps it hadn’t broken my skin.

  Things around me began to pop, waver, so that the edges of the room and things around me began to lose distinction, the gray filing cabinet becoming an ugly black coffin on end, the plywood boxes on the cart dancing, shaking, and just then, light and soft, someone brushed past me, went quickly to the rabbit. It took me a moment, but then I recognized Mr. Gadsen’s corduroy shirt and scuffed Army boots, the smell of whiskey once again. I saw him kneeling over the rabbit, the rabbit still squealing, and he turned and looked up at me, his hat off, the shiny scalp covered with age spots, his eyes clear and wet, his mouth wrinkled up in pain as he said to me—it must have been to me—Merciful God, Merciful God, it’s my fault, mine. She slipped into the batch. The wrong cage. This girl’s pregnant. She’s about to give birth, and then he turned from me back to the rabbit.

  I looked at the rabbit as best I could, saw it lying there on the floor, huge, growing larger each second as things around me continued to shut down, to give over to gray rectangles and squares that grew and popped. The rabbit’s belly was huge. It could have been nothing but pregnant, and I had let it kick itself to death.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, and then thought better of it, the squares multiplying in the darkness my eyelids created. I opened them again, and this time looked at my hand, the one I held, the one with the holes pierced through the canvas of the glove. I held it, watching it, wondering what it would do if I let it go. Then a line of blood, thick and red, slipped from inside the glove and down my wrist to meet with the white of the lab coat. Once there the blood blossomed, seeping into the weave of the white cotton sleeve, and I watched as it spread, amazed at the intricacy of it all, at each single thread soaking up the blood to give it a strange and new pattern.

  Another line of blood fell, and another, until I stood staring at this bouquet of blood, my own, on the sleeve of my lab coat, each moment the circling squares of moving gray closing down on me until there at the center was only a red-and-white sleeve, caused by a pregnant rabbit I had let kill itself, and then the gray took over, and I fell into darkness.

  Though I could not sleep that night, I could not come awake, and so I spent those hours in the dark, in my bed, moving, moving, my eyes unable to open as I tried to force them. I could feel Tom in bed next to me, the warm curve of his body, his pulse, but I could do nothing. Only move, dreaming.

  I had dreams of things that made no sense, dreams of deep forests, foliage so thick I could see in only a few feet, lush trees that let in no light from above, and in my dream I wondered how anything could grow in such darkness. Then I dreamed the forest was gone, and I stood on a high desert plateau, only scrub brush around me, a hot wind breaking across the mesa, my hair lifted by the wind so that I felt as if I might fly. Then I tried to open my eyes there in my sleep, and the wind died. The desert shook, broke into pieces, and I felt Tom still next to me. I had fallen back into my bed, still unable to awaken.

  I had another dream, too, one not so much a dream as a recollection of what had happened that morning, the images so real before me that they were more frightening than anything I could imagine.

  There was first darkness, and then light, light from the long fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling. Here was Mr. Gadsen’s face above me, saying nothing, only moving back and forth as if dodging my eyes. His mouth was open, the corners drawn up, and I could see his teeth, rotten and gray and dead. I wanted him to move away from me, wanted him to stop blocking out the light I could have from the bulbs above, but he would not leave me. I smelled his whiskey, and watched as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Mr. Gadsen looked away from me a moment, and here was Will, his face even closer to mine. He spoke to me, let out my name, and it came to me as if from a great distance across water, my name drifting toward me on cold air and settling down into my ears. I started listening, thinking perhaps he could tell me something I needed to know, but all he did was speak my name. I heard the squeals of the rabbit again, the wail, and I began rocking my head, the ceiling and those two faces swaying above me.

  I said, “The rabbit,” though I couldn’t hear myself, only knew that those were the words my brain was gathering, the words my tongue in my mouth and the air across my larynx meant to form. Will tried to give a smile, his eyebrows and forehead wrinkled. I did not believe him.

  My left arm did not exist in the dream, I realized. I tried to move it, but nothing happened, and I thought that someone had already come along and had cut it off at the shoulder.

  Finally Sandra’s face was above me, her eyes nearly closed, her mouth pursed as she glanced at my face, down to my left, then back to my face, and here was Wendy, and Paige, faces all floating above me like leaves on water, floating and bobbing, some speaking, some not; at one point Sandra leaned close, said, I guess this means no lunch date, and gave a forced smile, and I remember trying to do the same myself, and remember nothing happening. This is what a newborn must feel like, I thought, faces above it, words falling down, unable to move itself from its back as it lay there, eyes still and unfocusing, simply looking, looking. This is how I felt in my dream: a newborn, helpless, and waiting for help.

  I sat up in bed then, my back straight and stiff, my left arm limp at my side. The bedroom was dark, but someone was in there, someone other than Tom and me, and as my eyes took in the shadows around the room, I saw them.

  There were three children next to my bed, a boy and two girls. The boy, the oldest, I k
new, stood in the center, the girls at either side. He was five years old—of course he was, I knew—and had a pageboy haircut, the soft, moonlit silver hair falling in straight lines from his crown to his forehead and ears. The girls—the youngest farthest away, her head just above the edge of the bed—were wearing little white dresses that encircled them like tutus, the sleeves all puffy, the embroidery around the sleeves little flowers of thread even whiter, glowing there in the darkness.

  Of course they were my children. Our children. What we had created.

  I reached to touch them, first the girl closest to me, my middle child. She clasped her hands in front of her as if she were saying prayers. I reached for her, reached, and then she opened her mouth to speak, and what I saw terrified me: her mouth became an empty, black hole, nothing there but black and black, an endless hole off into space, and from that mouth came the sound of wind, dark and cold against my face.

  The other two opened their mouths as well, even the smallest one, my little girl on tiptoe down near the footboard, her hands grasping the edge of the bedspread. Their mouths opened to abysses, black pits, and the wind increased.

  I pulled my hand away, felt a scream form in my throat, but no sound came, my throat hard and taut, as if I’d never breathed before. I tried to scream, to do anything to replace the vast blackness I saw in my children’s faces, but nothing happened, and I brought my hands to my face to cover it, to block out what I saw. But still I saw them, my hands transparent, I imagined, until I saw that my hands had been severed, were merely bandaged stumps. I could feel the sutures beneath the bandages, the black threads laced across my wrists to keep my blood inside.

  Wind filled the room, edges of the sheets lifting up, flapping in the wind, and still my children’s faces were black holes. Now their hair swirled around their heads, the white cotton dresses lifted by the wind, dancing around the girls, dancing on the wind in my room. Then they were in the air, my three children lifted by their own wind, tossed about the room, above my bed, swirling and moving, and they fell in on themselves, disappeared into their own abysses, and were gone, the wind suddenly dead, the room still, empty.

  I screamed, finally, the sound cracking through my head and arms and body and into the room, and I awoke, shot open my eyes.

  I was alone in bed, the room light now, morning.

  I rolled onto my back, looked at the ceiling a moment. I listened, and heard the faint pop and hiss of the coffeemaker in the kitchen, heard Tom moving around in there.

  I lifted my left hand, and looked at the bandage. My hand shook with the dream, the fear still in me. White gauze had been wrapped across the palm and back of my hand, the dressing itself on the back of my hand between thumb and forefinger. It had taken seventeen stitches to sew up the wound.

  I remembered then the drive from the lab in Mr. Gadsen’s van, Sandra in the passenger seat, Will and I in the back, a couple of cages next to us, the smell of animals inescapable. Will held my hand with both of his, applying the pressure as best as he could, and I, still dizzy, leaned against him. Sandra, Will, and I said nothing the entire trip, but Mr. Gadsen had gone on and on, apologizing for the mixup, for the mistake, his voice high-pitched and cracking. From where I sat I could not tell if he were crying or not, but twice he wiped his eyes with the palm of one hand, the other on the wheel, maneuvering us through the campus parking lots and past security gates to the University Health Center.

  “I was awake all night,” he said, “awake all night, and I couldn’t sleep because I knew something was wrong. That I knew, I did.” He sniffed. “I knew I’d done something wrong and now, Merciful God, this is what I did. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  We made it to the emergency room. He jerked the van to a halt, jumped out and came around to the van door, had it pulled open and slammed in place before Sandra had gotten out of her seat.

  He looked at me as I eased out of the van, scooting across the floor while Will, squatting next to me, still held my hand tight. Mr. Gadsen looked at me, started to reach out to help me, but drew back against the van, whispering, “I’m sorry,” once more. My right arm around Sandra’s shoulder, the other hand still held by Will, the three of us wobbled toward the building. The doors shot open, but I hesitated, looked over my shoulder back at Mr. Gadsen. He was still leaned up against his van, his head down. He rubbed his eyes, slowly shook his head.

  Then came the stitches, and the shots.

  Tom came into the bedroom. He was already dressed, and sat on the edge of the bed. He said, “How’d you sleep?”

  “Did I scream?” I asked. “I mean, did you hear anything?”

  He looked puzzled, said, “No.” He moved his hand to my face, ran his fingers back through my hair. “Did you have bad dreams?”

  I could still feel the hard knot in my stomach, could still feel my hands shaking, but I lied. “No,” I said. “Not at all. Just sleep.” I looked away from him. There was, I felt, nothing I could tell him. It was only a dream, my dream, drug- and anxiety-produced sleep laced with thoughts of children we’d never had.

  “Good,” he said. He put his fingers to my face, and I could feel the backs of them against my cheek, the wrinkled, bony joints, the nails just touching.

  He said, “Are you up to going out? Getting out of the house and going up to Chesterfield?”

  I whispered, “Sure.” I closed my eyes, opened them. I looked out the window. The sky was the same brilliant blue as yesterday. Clear and cool. “I need to get out of here.”

  “Fine,” he said, and leaned over and kissed the top of my head. He stood, and it seemed he had grown taller overnight, that he’d become a different, bigger man suddenly.

  He moved to leave the room, but stopped. From the corner of my eye I saw a bird fly past the window, slice through the blue. I turned to the window, but the bird was long gone. I looked back at Tom. He hesitated, then smiled. He leaned against the doorjamb, and said, “I forgot to tell you. Yesterday, Janet over in copyediting was typing in some report about a wreck on Route 9 and 47, there at the bend in Hadley.” He looked down, still smiling, and crossed his arms.

  Here was Tom again, winding up with another of his stories from work. It was something he’d started when we were dating, his telling me weird but true stories from the newspaper. He would bring me stories from his excursions around the Pioneer Valley, gossip from the office. He still did it, too, every time he thought I was down about something.

  “Janet got this little story about a wreck,” he went on, “and it turns out to have been her ex-husband who was in it. He’d been driving his Cavalier along 47 and hadn’t even slowed down to pull onto 9, and just slammed into some Smith girl on her way to the mall. Janet hadn’t heard anything about it.”

  I looked at him, said nothing.

  Still he smiled. “Janet’s ex only twisted his knee in the wreck, and the Smithy wasn’t hurt at all. But Janet went ahead and changed the story. She punched right into the machine that her ex had broken his neck, that the Smithy was dead, and that he’d been arrested on manslaughter charges.”

  The adrenalin was fading in me, and I couldn’t help but give a smile. Janet, whom I’d met at a Christmas party a couple of years ago, was small and nervous and talked a lot and, I knew, was still in love with her ex-husband; at the party she’d shown me his picture in her wallet, a Sears portrait that made the man look too happy, too clean to be the louse she made him out to be. Still, she kept the picture with her, even though they’d been divorced for three years by that time.

  I smiled, too, for my husband, for his attempt to cheer me, though I didn’t want it this morning. But I felt obliged in a way to speak to him, to acknowledge his attempt. I said, “You didn’t let her print it—”

  “No, no,” he cut in, smiling and shaking his head again. “We just circulated her copy around the office. Everyone down there knows about her and her ex. She just let it float around the office.”

  I nodded, still smiling, and then he lowered his head again,
a hand to his mouth, his fingers in a fist.

  I said, “What?”

  He glanced up at me.

  “Go ahead,” I said, waiting for this obvious change in topic.

  “Oh,” he said, and gave a little wave with his hand. “Nothing. Just nothing.” He started to move through the doorway, but stopped again.

  “It’s just that...” he started, and paused. He looked at me, then at the bedspread bunched around me. “Just that, well, Mr. Gadsen’s called. He’s called three times so far this morning.” He took in a deep breath and smiled at the bedspread. “I’m surprised the phone ringing didn’t wake you up.”

  He sat on the bed again and ran his hand across the mound of bedspread. He still wasn’t looking at me. “He says he’s sorry, and that he wants to talk to you. Mainly that he wants to talk to you.”

  Finally he looked at me. His hand was resting on my knee now, my knee buried beneath bedspread, blanket, sheet.

  He was looking at me, waiting, but I turned away. I said, “I know he’s sorry. But he’ll have to wait. I’m not ready to talk to him. Not now.” I paused. “Maybe not ever.” The words left me in barely a whisper, and I wished I hadn’t let them out. For a moment I thought of taking them back, of apologizing right then for having those feelings, and I thought of calling Mr. Gadsen and just listening to him fall all over himself to apologize. But the image of the rabbit came back, that pregnant animal hanging from my arm, and the snap and squeals, and I thought, No; even if it was an accident, it was his fault. Accidents happened, certainly, but I hated that word. Accident was a fake word, an excuse, I felt: things were traceable to a source, whether it be rain on an oil-slicked road or a gun left loaded in a hall closet. Or too much whiskey and dozens of rabbits to keep track of.

  I said, “Let’s just go. Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to talk to him.”

  The room was silent a moment, and I could hear the two of us breathing. Then Tom took a short, quick breath, said, “Okay.” He patted my knee, and stood. He looked at me. “But he’s sorry. That’s what he wanted you to know.” He turned and headed through the bathroom. A moment later I heard him in the kitchen, plates being pulled down from the cupboard.