“… look so hollow-eyed, dear. Don’t you sleep well at night?”
I shake my head the way Calvin does. Tears spill from my eyes. I’m not crying, though. Before anybody can see I wipe my face with both my hands.
In the infirmary the nurse removes my shoes and pulls a blanket up over me so that I can sleep. I’m shivering and my teeth are chattering I’m so cold. I hold myself tight against sleep but it’s like the bulb in the cellar suddenly switched off and everything is dark and empty like there’s nobody there. And after a while somebody else comes into the infirmary. Her voice and the nurse’s voice I can hear through the gauzy curtain pulled around my cot. One voice saying, “This isn’t the place for that child to sleep. Not at school. She’s missing her school work.”
The other voice is the nurse’s. Saying quietly like there’s a secret between them. “She’s the Malvern girl. You know…”
“Her! The one whose father…”
“It must be. I checked the name.”
“ ‘Malvern.’ Of course. The boy Calvin is in fourth grade. He’s fidgety and distracted, too.”
“Do you think they know? How their father died?”
“God help us, I hope not.”
Nasty things were said about Mommy. Like she’d been arrested by the sheriff’s deputies. That was not true. Mommy was never arrested. Calvin ran hitting and kicking at kids who said that, jeering at us. Mommy was taken away for questioning. But Mommy was released, and was not ever arrested. Because there was not one shred of evidence against her.
During that time Mommy was away a day and a night and part of a day, we stayed with Aunt Estelle. Mommy’s older sister. Half-sister. Mommy spoke of her with a hurt twist of her mouth. We didn’t have to go to school. We were told not to play with other children. Not to wander from the house. We watched videos not TV and when the TV was on, it was after we went to bed. In that house there was no talk of Daddy. The name Malvern was not heard. Later we would learn that there had been a funeral, Calvin and I had been kept away. Aunt Estelle smoked cigarettes and was on the phone a lot and said to us your mother will be back soon, you’ll be back home soon. And that was so.
I hugged Auntie Estelle hard, when we left. But afterward Mommy and Aunt Estelle quarreled and when Mommy drove us a thousand miles away in the pickup with the U-Haul behind she never said good-bye to Aunt Estelle. That bitch, Mommy called her.
When Mommy came home from what was called questioning her face was sickly and swollen and there were fine white cracks in it like a plaster of Paris face that has been broken but mended again. Not too well mended, but mended. You could hardly see the cracks.
Eventually we would cease seeing them. Mommy grew her hair out long to shimmer and ripple over her shoulders. There was a way Mommy had of brushing her hair out of her eyes in a sweeping gesture that looked like a drowning swimmer suddenly shooting to the surface of the water. Ah-ah-ah Mommy filled her lungs with air.
With a lipstick pencil Mommy drew a luscious red-cherry mouth on her pale twisty mouth. Mommy drew on black-rimmed eyes we had not seen before.
Mommy strummed her guitar. It was her guitar now, she’d had the broken string mended. Saying, “It was his own choice. When one of their own comes to dwell with them there is rejoicing through Hell.”
By Christmastime in this new place Mommy has quit her job at the discount shoe store and works now at a cafe on the river. Most nights she’s a cocktail waitress but some nights she plays her guitar and sings. With her face bright and made up and her hair so glimmering you don’t notice the cracks in Mommy’s skin, in the drifting smoky light of the cafe they are invisible. Mommy’s fingers have grown more practiced. Her nails are filed short and polished. Her voice is low and throaty with a little burr in it that makes you shiver. In the cafe men offer her money which she sometimes accepts. Saying quietly, Thank you. I will take this as a gift for my music. I will take this because my children have no father, I am a single mother and must support two small children. But I will not accept it if you expect anything more from me than this: my music, and my thanks.
At the River’s Edge Mommy calls herself Little Maggie. In time she will be known and admired as Little Maggie. She’s like a little girl telling us of the applause. Little Maggie taking up her guitar that’s polished now and gleaming like the smooth inside of a chestnut after you break off the spiky rind. Strumming chords and letting her long beet-colored hair slide over her shoulders, Mommy says when she starts to sing everybody in the cafe goes silent.
In the winter the rabbits’ cries grow more pleading and piteous. Calvin hears them, too. But Calvin pretends he doesn’t. I press my pillow over my head not wanting to hear. We don’t want to die. We don’t want to die. One night when Mommy is at the cafe I slip from my bed barefoot and go downstairs into the cellar that smells of oozing muck and rot and animal misery and there in the dim light cast by the single light bulb are the rabbits.
Rabbits in each of the cages! Some of them have grown too large for the cramped space, their hindquarters are pressed against the wire and their soft ears are bent back against their heads. Their eyes shine in apprehension and hope seeing me. A sick feeling comes over me, each of the cages has a rabbit trapped inside. Though this is only logical as I will discover through my life. In each cage, a captive. For why would adults who own the world manufacture cages not to be used. I ask the rabbits, Who has locked you in these cages? But the rabbits can only stare at me blinking and twitching their noses. One of them is a beautiful pale powder-grey, a young rabbit and not so sick and defeated as the others. I stroke his head through the cage wire. He’s trembling beneath my touch, I can feel his heartbeat. Most of the rabbits are mangy and matted. Their fur is dull grey. There is a single black rabbit, heavy and misshapen from his cage, with watery eyes. The doors of the cages are latched and locked with small padlocks. Both the cages and the padlocks are rusted. I find an old pair of shears in the cellar and holding the shears awkwardly in both hands I manage to cut through the wires of all the cages, I hurt my fingers peeling away openings for the rabbits to hop through but they hesitate, distrustful of me. Even the young rabbit only pokes his head through the opening, blinking and sniffing nervously, unmoving.
Then I see in the cellar wall a door leading to the outside. A heavy wooden door covered in cobwebs and the husks of dead insects. It hasn’t been opened in years but I am able to tug it open, a few inches at first, then a little wider. On the other side are concrete steps leading up to the surface of the ground. Fresh cold air smelling of snow touches my face. “Go on! Go out of here! You’re free.”
The rabbits don’t move. I will have to go back upstairs, and leave them in darkness, before they will escape from their cages.
“Ceci? Wake up.”
Mommy shakes me, I’ve been sleeping so hard.
It’s morning. The rabbit cries have ceased. Close by running behind our backyard is the Cuyahoga & Erie train with its noisy wheels, almost I don’t hear the whistle any longer. In my bed pushed against the wall.
When I go downstairs into the cellar to investigate, I see that the cages are gone.
The rabbit cages are gone! You can see where they’ve been, though, there’s empty space. The concrete floor isn’t so dirty as it is other places in the cellar.