Winman, Sarah - When God Was a Rabbit

We’d planned this small garden together, planned the perfumes, the colours, the pots of densely sown lavender, the larkspur, the lemon myrtle in the shade beneath the kitchen, the overflowing squares of voracious red peonies, and the rows of white stocks whose scent said, Forever England; and of course the blue-violet rose, a repeating pattern that coiled and draped around the iron staircase and crept along the wall like a seductive tom; the rose that had bloomed so abundantly all summer, the envy of every guest whose green fingers suddenly paled against my brother’s haphazard and uninformed passion. He could create oases in deserts with the sole fertiliser of belief. He’d created a home out of his wanderings.

A helicopter swooped overhead. The rhythmic chopping of the air. The sound of a police siren, or an ambulance racing through the city. The something found, the identifiable at last; and then the devastating phone call to follow, but still, something to bury.

He’d been too lazy to deadhead the plants – never understood the point. ‘Let nature be,’ he’d said. I picked up a small bucket and started to prise the dried brown trumpets away from their hold. I could let nothing be. Music played next door. Bruce Springsteen. It had been Frank Sinatra before. Only the New Jersey boys allowed to crest the patriotic airwaves.

‘Your mum said something strange the other night,’ said Nancy, as she opened takeaway cartons of food no one had any appetite for.

‘What did she say?’ I said, reaching for a fork instead of chopsticks.

Charlie looked at Nancy.

‘What is it?’ I said.

Silence.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Ell,’ she said.

‘What did she say?’

‘She said that maybe Joe went missing, just took off and disappeared, you know, like people do, when accidents happen. Because they’re presented with the chance to start again.’

I stared at her.

‘Why would he want to start again?’

‘I’m just telling you what she said.’

‘It’s bollocks. He wouldn’t do that to us.’

‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ said Charlie, breaking open a fortune cookie. ‘He wasn’t depressed, he was happy.’

He said happy the way a child would.

‘It’s fucking bollocks,’ I said angrily. ‘He would never put us through that. He just wouldn’t. She’s going mad.’

We watched Charlie read his fortune. He screwed it up and we never asked him what it was.

‘Why the fuck would she say it?’ I pleaded.

‘Because she’s a mother. She needs to keep him in the world, Ell.’

We had little to say after that. Ate in silence. Ate in anger. My stomach hurt, I couldn’t digest. I tried to concentrate on a flavour, any flavour, to pick it out from all the others and exercise my sense, but all I could smell and taste was burning. Nancy got up and went to the kitchen. She said, ‘More wine?’ We said, ‘OK.’ Charlie finished the remainder in his glass. She didn’t come back.

I went to find her. She was bent over the sink with the taps running, her face contorted, the bottle on its side, the cork still embedded. She was crying silently. Small muffled sobs, hidden in the sound of falling water. She was ashamed to cry, crying was grieving, grieving was for the lost and she felt she was letting him down. I lay with her that night. She on her side; her hair damp around her neckline, her cheeks moist. Too dark to see her eyes. My father’s little sister. Holding his pain.

‘You are not alone,’ I said.

I got up in the middle of the night and went to my bed. I hadn’t taken his room, Charlie had his room; I took the bird’s-nest room, the last room we renovated, the room with the working hearth and the front-facing windows flicked by tree branches, their tap tap tapping pleading for entry. This was the room always left for me, the bed always made, my clothes in the cupboards, the one of every two that I always bought and kept here. I thought about lighting a fire, but I couldn’t trust myself to get it right; the rogue rolling cinder that might hide under a drape and count to twenty before making itself known. And I wouldn’t notice it, wouldn’t find it, not that night. Restlessness wasn’t vigilance. It was distraction. I was everywhere with him, just not here.

I heard the front door open and close quietly. It was Charlie. His footsteps echoed in the silent space, the space that held its breath for news. Footsteps in the hallway. The muted sounds of the television. Then off. Down to the kitchen. The running of water. Filling a glass. And then the footsteps climbing the stairs, the creak of the door to his bathroom, the flush of a toilet, the heavy thump of an exhausted body on the bed. That was the routine. But it changed that night; a minuscule variation. He didn’t come back up the stairs; opened the back door instead and went out into the garden.

He was sitting at the table, smoking. A candle flickered in front of him. He didn’t often smoke.

‘I can leave you alone if you want,’ I said.

He pulled out a chair and threw me his sweater.

‘I loved him,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘And I keep listening to messages he left me. I just want to hear his voice. I feel like I’m going mad.’

I reached for a cigarette and lit it.

‘I told him a few days before all this happened,’ he said. ‘Simply told him what I wanted. What I wanted for us . Asked him why he couldn’t make that jump, why he couldn’t be with me. I knew he loved me. What was he so frightened of, Ell? Why couldn’t he do it? Why couldn’t he fucking say, Yes? Maybe all this would have been different then.’

I let his questions evaporate into the darkness, where they joined the million other unanswered questions that hung above Manhattan that night; burdensome, and irredeemable; ultimately cruel. No one had answers.

The breeze seemed cooler as it filtered through the shutters. I emptied the box of photographs onto the floor and we edited for two hours until we found the one we all agreed on, the one that looked most like him, as we all saw him: smiling, with the pool at the Raleigh shimmering behind. It was the trip when he stole my pen with turquoise ink. Just last February. When we met in Miami for some winter sun. The most expensive kind of sun.

We chose the words and I went down to the print shop and made some photocopies and the man looked on respectfully. He’d seen hundreds of these and I was just one more. When I finished he wouldn’t take my money. The gesture made me cry.

I needed to see it for myself, and by myself, give the other two a rest because they’d seen too much, and so I went alone. Just walked south, kept going to where they used to be, marking the skyline. There was no preparation. I hid behind dark glasses and separated myself from hell.

Have you seen my husband?

My daddy was a waiter

My sister’s called Erin

My wife and I just got married.

She’s missing . . .

The downtown walls were plastered with verse and words and pictures and prayers, and they stretched into the distance like a grotesque fable, one of unprepared despair. People moved along slowly reading, and when a fireman or rescue worker passed by there’d be a moment of applause, but they wouldn’t look up because they knew. They knew there’d be no survivors. Had known before everyone else. And they wouldn’t look up because they were so tired and hadn’t slept, and of course they couldn’t sleep, they were surrounded by photographs saying, Find me, find me . How could – how would – they ever sleep?

I found a space next to a woman who had worked in the restaurant. She looked nice, she was a grandmother, and I put him next to her. I never expected people to find him, not really. I simply wanted people to look at him and say, He looks like a nice man, I wish I’d known him. Someone stood at my shoulder.