The Uncanny Reader (51 page)

She said, “If you don't like it, then I'll keep it. Look at you, look at those sleeves. You look like the emperor of Japan.”

They had already colonized the bedroom, making it full of things that belonged to them. There was Catherine's mirror on the wall, and their mahogany wardrobe, their first real piece of furniture, a wedding present from Catherine's great-aunt. There was their serviceable queen-size bed with King Spanky lodged up inside it, and there was Henry, spinning his arms in the wide orange sleeves, like an embroidered windmill. Henry could see all of these things in the mirror, and behind him, their lawn and Tilly and Carleton, stapling grass into their notebook. He saw all of these things and he found them good. But he couldn't see Catherine. When he turned around, she stood in the doorway, frowning at him. She had the alarm clock in her hand.

“Look at you,” she said again. It worried her, the way something, someone,
Henry,
could suddenly look like a place she'd never been before. The alarm began to ring and King Spanky came out from under the bed, trotting over to Catherine. She bent over, awkwardly—ungraceful, ungainly, so clumsy, so fucking awkward; being pregnant was like wearing a fucking suitcase strapped across your middle—put the alarm clock down on the ground, and King Spanky hunkered down in front of it, his nose against the ringing glass face. And that made her laugh again. Henry loved Catherine's laugh. Downstairs, their children slammed a door open, ran through the house, carrying scissors, both Catherine and Henry knew, and slammed another door open and were outside again, leaving behind the smell of grass. There was a store in New York where you could buy a perfume that smelled like that.

*   *   *

Catherine and Carleton and Tilly came back from the grocery store with a tire, a rope to hang it from, and a box of pancake mix for dinner. Henry was online, looking at a JPEG of a rubber-band ball. There was a message, too. The Crocodile needed him to come into the office. It would be just a few days. Someone was setting fires, and there was no one smart enough to see how to put them out except for him. They were his accounts. He had to come in and save them. She knew Catherine and Henry's apartment hadn't sold; she'd checked with their listing agent. So surely it wouldn't be impossible, not impossible, only inconvenient.

He went downstairs to tell Catherine. “That
witch,
” she said, and then bit her lip. “She called the listing agent? I'm sorry. We talked about this. Never mind. Just give me a moment.”

Catherine inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled. If she were Carleton, she would hold her breath until her face turned red and Henry agreed to stay home, but then again, it never worked for Carleton. “We ran into our new neighbors in the grocery store. She's about the same age as me. Liz and Marcus. One kid, older, a girl, um, I think her name was Alison, maybe from a first marriage—potential babysitter, which is really good news. Liz is a lawyer. Gorgeous. Reads Oprah books. He likes to cook.”

“So do I,” Henry said.

“You're better looking,” Catherine said. “So do you have to go back tonight, or can you take the train in the morning?”

“The morning is fine,” Henry said, wanting to seem agreeable. Carleton appeared in the kitchen, his arms pinned around King Spanky's middle. The cat's front legs stuck straight out, as if Carleton were dowsing. King Spanky's eyes were closed. His whiskers twitched Morse code. “What are you wearing?” Carleton said.

“My new uniform,” Henry said. “I wear it to work.”

“Where do you work?” Carleton said, testing.

“I work at home,” Henry said. Catherine snorted.

“He looks like the king of rabbits, doesn't he? The emperor of Rabbitaly,” she said, no longer sounding particularly pleased about this.

“He looks like a princess,” Carleton said, now pointing King Spanky at Henry like a gun.

“Where's your grass collection?” Henry said. “Can I see it?”

“No,” Carleton said. He put King Spanky on the floor, and the cat slunk out of the kitchen, heading for the staircase, the bedroom, the safety of the bedsprings, the beloved alarm clock, the beloved. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits, or else it can be a man in his late forties who works too much, or it can be an alarm clock.

“After dinner,” Henry said, trying again, “we could go out and find a tree for your tire swing.”

“No,” Carleton said regretfully. He lingered in the kitchen, hoping to be asked a question to which he could say yes.

“Where's your sister?” Henry said.

“Watching television,” Carleton said. “I don't like the television here.”

“It's too big,” Henry said, but Catherine didn't laugh.

*   *   *

Henry dreams he is the king of the real estate agents. Henry loves his job. He tries to sell a house to a young couple with twitchy noses and big dark eyes. Why does he always dream that he's trying to sell things?

The couple stare at him nervously. He leans toward them as if he's going to whisper something in their silly, expectant ears. It's a secret he's never told anyone before. It's a secret he didn't even know that he knew. “Let's stop fooling,” he says. “You can't afford to buy this house. You don't have any money. You're rabbits.”

*   *   *

“Where do you work?” Carleton said in the morning when Henry called from Grand Central.

“I work at home,” Henry said. “Home where we live now, where you are. Eventually. Just not today. Are you getting ready for school?”

Carleton put the phone down. Henry could hear him saying something to Catherine. “He says he's not nervous about school,” she said. “He's a brave kid.”

“I kissed you this morning,” Henry said, “but you didn't wake up. There were all these rabbits on the lawn. They were huge. King Spanky–sized. They were just sitting there like they were waiting for the sun to come up. It was funny, like some kind of art installation. But it was kind of creepy, too. Think they'd been there all night?”

“Rabbits? Can they have rabies? I saw them this morning when I got up,” Catherine said. “Carleton didn't want to brush his teeth this morning. He says something's wrong with his toothbrush.”

“Maybe he dropped it in the toilet, and he doesn't want to tell you,” Henry said.

“Maybe you could buy a new toothbrush and bring it home,” Catherine said. “He doesn't want one from the drugstore here. He wants one from New York.”

“Where's Tilly?” Henry said.

“She says she's trying to figure out what's wrong with Carleton's toothbrush. She's still in the bathroom,” Catherine said.

“Can I talk to her for a second?” Henry said.

“Tell her she needs to get dressed and eat her Cheerios,” Catherine said. “After I drive them to school, Liz is coming over for coffee. Then we're going to go out for lunch. I'm not unpacking another box until you get home. Here's Tilly.”

“Hi,” Tilly said. She sounded as if she was asking a question.

Tilly never liked talking to people on the telephone. How were you supposed to know if they were really who they said they were? And even if they were who they claimed to be, they didn't know whether you were who you said you were. You could be someone else. They might give away information about you and not even know it. There were no protocols. No precautions.

She said, “Did you brush your teeth this morning?”

“Good morning, Tilly,” her father (if it was her father) said. “My toothbrush was fine. Perfectly normal.”

“That's good,” Tilly said. “I let Carleton use mine.”

“That was very generous,” Henry said.

“No problem,” Tilly said. Sharing things with Carleton wasn't like having to share things with other people. It wasn't really like sharing things at all. Carleton belonged to her, like the toothbrush. “Mom says that when we get home today, we can draw on the walls in our rooms if we want to, while we decide what color we want to paint them.”

“Sounds like fun,” Henry said. “Can I draw on them, too?”

“Maybe,” Tilly said. She had already said too much. “Gotta go. Gotta eat breakfast.”

“Don't be worried about school,” Henry said.

“I'm not worried about school,” Tilly said.

“I love you,” Henry said.

“I'm real concerned about this toothbrush,” Tilly said.

*   *   *

He closed his eyes only for a minute. Just for a minute. When he woke up, it was dark and he didn't know where he was. He stood up and went over to the door, almost tripping over something. It sailed away from him in an exuberant, rollicking sweep.

According to the clock on his desk, it was 4:00
A.M.
Why was it always 4:00
A.M.
? There were four messages on his cell phone, all from Catherine.

He went online and checked train schedules. Then he sent Catherine a fast e-mail:

Fell asleep @ midnight? Missed trains. Awake now, going to keep on working. Pttng out fires. Take the train home early afternoon? Still lv me?

Before he went back to work, he kicked the rubber-band ball back down the hall toward the Crocodile's door.

*   *   *

Catherine called him at 8:45.

“I'm sorry,” Henry said.

“I bet you are,” Catherine said.

“I can't find my razor. I think the Crocodile had some kind of tantrum and tossed my stuff.”

“Carleton will love that,” Catherine said. “Maybe you should sneak in the house and shave before dinner. He had a hard day at school yesterday.”

“Maybe I should grow a beard,” Henry said. “He can't be afraid of everything all the time. Tell me about the first day of school.”

‘We'll talk about it later,” Catherine said. “Liz just drove up. I'm going to be her guest at the gym. Just make it home for dinner.”

*   *   *

At 6:00
P.M.
Henry e-mailed Catherine again. “Srry. Accidentally started avalanche while putting out fires. Wait up for me? How ws 2nd day of school?” She didn't write him back. He called and no one picked up the phone. She didn't call.

He took the last train home. By the time they reached the station, he was the only one left in his car. He unchained his bicycle and rode it home in the dark. Rabbits pelted across the footpath in front of his bike. There were rabbits foraging on his lawn. They froze as he dismounted and pushed the bicycle across the grass. The lawn was rumpled; the bike went up and down over invisible depressions that he supposed were rabbit holes. There were two short, fat men standing in the dark on either side of the front door, waiting for him, but when he came closer, he remembered that they were stone rabbits. “Knock, knock,” he said.

The real rabbits on the lawn tipped their ears at him. The stone rabbits waited for the punch line, but they were just stone rabbits. They had nothing better to do.

The front door wasn't locked. He walked through the downstairs rooms, putting his hands on the backs and tops of furniture. In the kitchen, cut-down boxes leaned in stacks against the wall, waiting to be recycled or remade into cardboard houses and spaceships and tunnels for Carleton and Tilly.

Catherine had unpacked Carleton's room. Night-lights in the shapes of bears and geese and cats were plugged into every floor outlet. There were little low-watt table lamps as well—hippo, robot, gorilla, pirate ship. Everything was soaked in a tender, peaceable light, translating Carleton's room into something more than a bedroom: something luminous, numinous, a cartoony midnight church of sleep.

Tilly was sleeping in the other bed.

Tilly would never admit that she sleepwalked, the same way that she would never admit that she sometimes still wet the bed. But she refused to make friends. Making friends would have meant spending the night in strange houses. Tomorrow morning she would insist that Henry or Catherine must have carried her from her room, put her to bed in Carleton's room for reasons of their own.

Henry knelt down between the two beds and kissed Carleton on the forehead. He kissed Tilly, smoothed her hair. How could he not love Tilly better? He'd known her longer. She was so brave, so angry.

On the walls of Carleton's bedroom, Henry's children had drawn a house. A cat nearly as big as the house. There was a crown on the cat's head. Trees or flowers with pairs of leaves that pointed straight up, still bigger, and a stick figure on a stick bicycle, riding past the trees. When he looked closer, he thought that maybe the trees were actually rabbits. The wall smelled like Froot Loops. Someone had written HENRY is A RAT FINK! HA HA! He recognized his wife's handwriting.

“Scented markers,” Catherine said. She stood in the door, holding a pillow against her stomach. “I was sleeping downstairs on the sofa. You walked right past and didn't see me.”

“The front door was unlocked,” Henry said.

“Liz says nobody ever locks their doors out here,” Catherine said. “Are you coming to bed, or were you just stopping by to see how we were?”

“I have to go back in tomorrow,” Henry said. He pulled a toothbrush out of his pocket and showed it to her. “There's a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts on the kitchen counter.”

“Delete the doughnuts,” Catherine said. “I'm not that easy.” She took a step toward him and accidentally kicked King Spanky. The cat yowled. Carleton woke up. He said, “Who's there? Who's there?”

“It's me,” Henry said. He knelt beside Carleton's bed in the light of the Winnie-the-Pooh lamp. “I brought you a new toothbrush.”

Carleton whimpered.

“What's wrong, spaceman?” Henry said. “It's just a toothbrush.” He leaned toward Carleton and Carleton scooted back. He began to scream.

In the other bed, Tilly was dreaming about rabbits. When she'd come home from school, she and Carleton had seen rabbits sitting on the lawn as if they had kept watch over the house all the time that Tilly had been gone. In her dream they were still there. She dreamed she was creeping up on them. They opened their mouths, wide enough to reach inside like she was some kind of rabbit dentist, and so she did. She put her hand around something small and cold and hard. Maybe it was a ring, a diamond ring. Or a. Or. It was a. She couldn't wait to show Carleton. Her arm was inside the rabbit all the way to her shoulder. Someone put their hand around her wrist and yanked. Somewhere her mother was talking. She said—