David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“I know,” Claudia answered, before correcting herself. “I mean I don’t. He used to buy Girl Scout cookies from me, but he never let me inside.”

“Really?” The scorpion hadn’t crawled back under its rock quite yet. “Come on,” he said, starting toward the back of the house. “We’re going.”

She didn’t move. “Going where?”

“Where do you think? He leaves the cellar door unlocked so the plebs can use his subterranean toilet.” Nick, already studying ardently for the SATs, enjoyed taking his new vocabulary out for a spin. “We can go up that way.”

“No,” she said firmly. The house had by that time lost much of its candy-coated appeal, but it had been a strong magnet for a long time: it still pulled. “How do you know he won’t come back?”

“I saw them leave.”

“Them? Alice never leaves.”

“She left today. They went all the way to Lake George to visit their older sister. Can you imagine how old their older sister must be?”

Seeing he’d won, that Claudia’s song-and-dance protest was exactly that, he took her by the hand and led her to the cellar’s wooden hatch. Five rickety steps and they stood wrapped in the cool, loam-scented dark. Nick took a knowing step and pulled a chain on a hanging bulb, which recast the room in swaying shades of long-shadowed, saffron-colored light. Even underground, the place was immaculate. The hot water heater looked more like a finely tuned instrument capable of space travel than the cobweb-shagged behemoth in her basement that Claudia occasionally witnessed Henry beating with a wrench. Shelves lined the walls on which sat jars and jars of preserves: peaches, tomatoes, asparagus, beans. The light ambered the liquid and made the contents swim like nascent life forms collected for scientific study.

At the foot of the stairs, Nick ordered her to take off her shoes as he flicked off his own. She shed her Keds obediently, then spun around to assess herself in a mercury glass mirror. Her outfit disappointed her — short jean shorts, a slouchy, off-the-shoulder shirt the color of a blueberry Icee that she’d pulled over her swimsuit. Nick stole a quick kiss and reminded her, “We’re not getting our pictures taken. Nobody’s here.” With that, he unbuckled his jeans and dropped them to the floor.

“Um. What are you doing?” she asked, grinning at him in the blousy blue boxers on which little fish swam.

“I don’t want to track paint,” he answered, as if she’d asked the dumbest question in the world, and turned to climb the stairs. They entered the kitchen first. The small but sunny room was somehow cleaner than the dustless basement, with starched, lace-trimmed curtains in the windows and a family of four porcelain rabbits ranged along the counter: flour, sugar, coffee, salt. Drawn to these, Claudia trembled slightly at the crime they were committing as she ran a finger along the brightly glazed ears of the largest one.

“If you pet every rabbit you see, we’re going to be here all day,” Nick warned.

From the kitchen, they climbed the back staircase to a warren of clustered and oddly shaped bedrooms. One had sloping ceilings that made it impossible to stand upright without hitting your head. Another was so small the only way to climb into the giant four-poster bed was to scramble over the footboard. All were filled with dark, impressively carved woodwork. All were clean and ordered as museum displays. And all were scattered with rabbits. Rabbits on the nightstands. Rabbits on the dressers. Rabbits on the hand towels in the guest bath. There were rabbits nibbling carrots, rabbits angling in a stream, rabbits riding big-wheeled Victorian bicycles, sleeping rabbits, standing rabbits, rabbits wearing brightly flowered hats. Some were plush and propped on pillows or painted on canvases that hung above the beds, but most were ceramic, lean and leaping cottontails and delicate, droopy-eared dwarves.

“Somebody likes rabbits,” Claudia said, moving toward a table to pick one up.

“I wouldn’t touch that. I get the feeling he’s like Felix Unger. Very anal retentive. He knows exactly where everything goes.” He approached her then, the veil of his ostensible purpose — a harmless house tour — tearing to shed light on what he’d really come for. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to him; his boner lifted the light fabric of his boxers.

“Cut it out,” Claudia said. His penis was still a novelty to her, but she had started to enjoy the mastery she seemed to hold over it: making it stand, making it fall. Still, she had the sense that the rabbits were watching her and pushed him away.

A gentleman in matters of thwarted seduction, Nick wrapped up his expedition of the upper floors, then led them down the front stairs with its wonderfully polished banister and considerable newel posts. At the landing, he instructed Claudia to close her eyes. Taking her by the hand, he led her across a floor that loosed a haunted cry under her weight. Her bare feet felt the cool hardwood give way to a soft expanse of rug. She dug her toes into the woolly fibers.

“Okay,” Nick said. “Open.”

The parlor — a mortuary stiffness in the room’s décor stopped Claudia from thinking of it as a living room — bore the stamp of high Victorian style. The furniture crouched heavy and ornate under lamps shaded in tasseled silk; there was even a harp in one corner, ready to sing the deceased to their final rest. All that separated this room from the receiving room at Dunn’s Funeral Home were the rabbits. Compared to here, the figures scattered throughout the house seemed like outliers. Here was the warren. Here, the richly appointed burrows. Nearly every surface, literally every shelf on every massive hutch, filled with rabbits.

Claudia clasped her hands together and laughed. Astonished and a little spooked, as if the figurines might twitch alive at any moment and come bounding toward her, she said, “I did a report on rabbits in fifth grade.”

“Who did you have?”

“Mrs. Vonstitina.”

“Native American Week?”

“You had her too?”

“My brother did. He chose a hedgehog. Not a lion or a wolf or even a deer. His spirit guide was a hedgehog.” He tapped his forehead sharply and said, “That should have been our first clue.”

“Rabbits symbolize luck. Obviously. And longevity, because they have a million babies. You know, like a long family line. And rebirth.”

Nick tightened the sharklike circle he made around her. “I don’t believe in rebirth,” he said. “When you’re dead, you’re dead. But I do believe in longevity. In a long family line. And I definitely believe in what gets you there.” He was close enough to her now that she could smell the day’s work on him, paint and sun and sweet, oniony sweat.

“Predictable,” she muttered.

Zeroing in from behind, he grabbed her tightly around the waist, put his lips to her ear, and asked, “What was that?”

“I said you’re predictable.”

His dick, hard again, was the only response he offered, rocking her back and forth against it as if their bodies were sticks that might catch fire.

“Just like a rabbit.”

He pulled back the sizeable mass of her hair and kissed her neck, then moved his hands, a bit mechanically, as if he were rehearsing each move in his head before he made it, to her breasts. Their lovemaking was more academic than passionate in those early days, as if they were trying to please Monsieur Prendergast with their conjugation of French verbs, but they were committed students and seized almost any opportunity to practice.

“What if they come home?” she whispered, realizing as soon as the words were out of her mouth that she’d made her concession.

“Lake George is fifty miles away,” Nick crooned. “Mr. Anselman drives, like, fifteen miles an hour.”