“You know this is completely fucked,” I tell the rabbit.
Claire pipes up. “That’s not a nice word.”
I jump to my feet. I hadn’t heard her come up the stairs, but here she is, staring at me with wide, round eyes as innocent as a doll. She’s not holding her bears. Or her knife.
“Just talking to Mr. Rabbit,” I say. “He’s heard that kind of language before. He knows not to repeat it in public.”
Claire nods as if this makes perfect sense.
Leaving the rabbit, I cross to the window. The sun is fat and low, and the reddish shadows make the clumps of brush and cacti look burnt. I shut the window. Lock it. Don’t feel safer. “Do you think we’re safe here?”
“Are you asking me or Mr. Rabbit?” Claire asks politely.
“Mr. Rabbit has a limited understanding of the concept of safety. Unless someone comes at him with scissors, he’s unfazed. Plus, he’s a rabbit of few words.”
Claire stands next to me, looking out the window at the endless sienna desert and the sunset-rose-wine-stained sky. She slips her small hand into mine. The bones in her hand feel so fragile, but she has calluses on her palm. I wonder exactly how much she’s practiced with that knife. “Most people don’t leave town,” she tells me, “especially not at night when you can’t see where the dark stops and the void begins. So we should be okay so long as we don’t turn on the lights. You can see lights from a distance.” She doesn’t sound like a kid. She sounds more like a soldier, assessing the situation.
I find that oddly comforting.
I nod as if it’s perfectly normal to spend the night somewhere you fear to turn on the lights. No night-light for me. “Just in case, I want to board up the broken windows downstairs, the one in the front door and any others with holes large enough to crawl through.”
“Okay.” Releasing my hand, Claire pivots and traipses downstairs without any further questions or conversation. Following her, I leave the stuffed rabbit in the patch of dying sun.
Claire is out the front door without pause. She scrambles onto the junk pile as if she’s part-cat, scaling the side with ease. But I hesitate on the porch. A heap like that could hide rattlesnakes. Or poisonous spiders. Or rabid wildebeests that like to rend the flesh of the recently lost. Certainly there are sharp rusted objects. But none of that stops Claire from scurrying over a broken tricycle, a dozen twisted coat hangers, an old microwave, and mildew-coated cardboard boxes that could hold anything from books to bandicoots.
As Claire climbs to the top of the heap, she disturbs a desk drawer with her foot, and paper clips tumble out in a metallic waterfall. They spill onto the ground, which is already littered with buttons and pennies and nails. It sounds like rain.
At the top, Claire lifts up a stop sign. It’s nearly as tall as she is, and she wobbles as she holds it. “How’s this?”
I want to yell at her to duck down. Anyone could see her, perched on top of the pile. But I don’t. I could startle her, and she could fall. Or someone unfriendly could hear my yell. Besides, she wasn’t the one who’d attracted the pissed-off mob. It’s me they want. Then again, they saw her rescue me... Keeping as low as possible, I creep up the side of the pile and take the sign. She scrambles off the heap past me and holds the front door open as I carry the sign inside. I prop the sign against the living room couch and study the window. I think it’s been broken for a while. Dust and debris have blown in, and the floor feels like a beach after a storm. “We’ll need to nail it over the window.” I hadn’t thought about the mechanics of boarding up the windows. It’s not something I have experience with doing. I need tools...
“Be right back.” Claire scampers outside again. Examining my sign, I wonder if there’s a street somewhere experiencing terrible accidents due to the lack of a stop sign. Before I can decide whether or not this is something I need to feel guilty about, she returns with an armful of tools—hammers, wrenches, clamps, an assortment of nails and screws and washers, and a car jack. She dumps them on the couch.
“That was quick.”
She beams at me as I select a hammer and a few nails. “People lose tools a lot. Much harder to find other things. Like cupcakes. No one ever loses cupcakes. I miss them.” Her smile fades. “We used to have cupcakes on our birthdays. Our neighbor Mrs. Malloy baked them. She put sprinkles on top. But she died, and I saw her sprinkles in the trash.”
A howl rips through the air.
I feel every hair on my arms stand up. My fingers tighten around the hammer. Claire, perched on the arm of the sofa, swings her legs back and forth, seemingly unconcerned. “You sometimes find lost cookies. People drop those behind couches and stuff. And I’ve found tons of French fries. But not cupcakes. Or ice cream.”
“Did you hear that?” I ask. It lingers in the wind, the howl stretching out like the tail of a comet, fracturing and eventually dispersing.
“It can’t hurt us,” Claire says. She considers her statement, her face screwed up as if she’s making intense calculations. “At least, it can’t after we seal the windows.”
“Right.” I lift the sign up and examine it. It has holes where it was bolted to its post. I position the holes over the window frame and nail it on, using washers to widen the size of the nail head, which makes me feel clever. The sign covers about a third of the bay window and nearly all of the section without glass. I face the “Stop” side out, in case any of the predators can read.The human ones can,I think. “Maybe we should board up all the windows.”
Claire shakes her head. “Then we can’t see them coming.”
Her statement makes me think of a half-dozen zombie movies, which is not comforting. “You need to work on your bedside manner.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Continuing to hammer, I try not to focus on how this isn’t where I’m meant to be, how I should be home with Mom in our familiar apartment with its functional window locks, and how surreal and wrong all of this feels to the point where I wonder if I am having some highly vivid nightmare brought on by too much kung pao chicken. But I’ve never had a nightmare like this.
I have nightmares about Mom. In them, she’s in the hospital again with tubes stuck in her and a monitor counting her heartbeat as if it’s counting down to zero. Standing beside her, I feel a choking weight in my throat, but I can’t scream or cry or speak.
The thing that’s most horrifying and sad about my nightmares is that they’re banal, like scenes from a bad TV movie, fraught with melodramatic sadness and entirely generic. There’s nothing truly Mom in them. Lying in the crisp white bed, she’s in a washed-out pale blue hospital gown, and all the color is faded from her face and hair and eyes. On the windowsill there’s a row of bland sympathy cards beside a vase of plasticlike calla lilies. In real life, she hates phony cards and fake flowers. She loves to grow her own flowers: fat peonies that droop on their stems, roses that are riddled with holes from bugs, daffodils that shrivel within a week. When she moved into my apartment, she could only bring a fraction of her plants, but still her flowers have overrun the apartment and the tiny corner of the yard that the landlord granted us. She also loves handwritten notes. She keeps stationery, rich thick ivory paper, that she fills with her swooping handwriting any time a card is called for. Thinking about her ridiculous notes makes my throat constrict. I swallow hard and follow Claire outside again.
