The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin

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      Before the Pause, Noni often drove past the building, and always I would gaze at it with the fear and delight of a cowardly voyeur. During the Pause, Noni no longer drove, and so we had no occasion to pass the factory. But sometimes in bed at night, I imagined it: moonlight hitting the broken windowpanes, rats and cats and raccoons nosing through the interior, biting one another, fighting, scratching the furniture, defecating in empty rooms. I imagined a busy darkness, a dismantling that must be carried out under cover of night. The mysteries of the factory seemed to me similar to the mystery of Noni. Inside, invisible forces were at work, and they were full of a secret rage.

      Our friends receded that summer. We couldn’t walk to the old neighborhood. Noni had instructed us to use the telephone only for emergencies. And besides, it soon became clear that our friends had returned to their normal lives, lives where groceries must be bought, dinners cooked, television shows watched, where loved ones were bothersome but healthy and alive. We reminded them of the constant threat of calamity. How quickly it could all go to pieces.

      * * *

      ON THE MORNING of my fifth birthday, Noni emerged to bake me a cake. We all watched as she lined up the ingredients on the kitchen counter: an ancient tin of baking powder, a wrapped square of hardened brown sugar. We did not volunteer to help. It seemed too risky. To us our mother was an exotic animal, a gazelle perhaps, that might startle if we moved too fast, spoke too loudly.

      There was the soft drop of the sifted flour, the crack of the eggs, the steady buzz of the mixer, and then—ping—out of the oven came the cake, all golden and puffed up like my own private sun. We each ate a thick slab of cake, Noni, too, and then she kissed me and walked again down the hall, the thready hem of her bathrobe skimming the floor.

      She closed the door to her bedroom.

      I burst into tears.

      Renee, Caroline, and Joe exchanged looks. Caroline hid a smile with her hand.

      “Fiona,” Renee said, “Joe’s got a surprise.”

      Out the front door Joe disappeared, and when he returned, in his arms was a small rabbit. It struggled with kicking surges to escape, but Joe held it close to his chest.

      “Happy Birthday, Fi,” he said.

      My heart surged with excitement as Joe brought the rabbit to me. Gently he placed it into my arms. I stroked its soft fur, its beating heart a rapid tapping against my palm. The fur was black and gray, except for white around the rabbit’s eyes and on its stomach. The rabbit looked very scared, but Joe talked in a slow voice and I used my softest hands, my gentlest touch.

      “Where did she come from?” I asked.

      Joe whispered, “A secret.”

      Outside in the backyard, Joe helped me set up an enclosure of sorts with some broken-down boxes for a fence, a wooden crate propped on its side for shelter, and one cereal bowl for water, another for food. I named the rabbit Celeste after the elephant queen in the Babar books.

      Every morning I fed my rabbit carrots and wilted lettuce and the small green apples that fell from the trees in the park. Celeste was not a delicate eater. Her nose moved together with her mouth in a grasping motion, and the food vanished quickly. I loved the quick motion of her eyes. I loved her long legs with their loping, circular movement like she was riding a bicycle. I loved her smell of musk and clean, fresh grass and even the dry, perfectly shaped pellets of dung that sat in tidy piles around her pen.

      Joe loved Celeste, too. For weeks we studied her. We determined what she liked best to eat, where she most enjoyed a scratch, when she was most amenable to a cuddle, and when she preferred to play. Joe liked to feed her long blades of grass, the ends disappearing smoothly into her mouth as though she slurped spaghetti.

      We doted on Celeste for one month, maybe two, and then she vanished. When I arrived one morning to feed her as I always did, her pen was empty. It was August, the days slow to start, humidity thick as fudge. Joe helped me search the bushes in the yard and took me down the street, calling “Celeste! Celeste!” until the dew burned off and we were both sweaty, pink-faced, still wearing our pajamas.

      I wept as Joe carried me home.

      “Fiona, listen,” Joe said. “Celeste had to go back to live with her rabbit brothers and sisters.” He set me down in the front yard. My tears had wet his pajama top. Stripes of snot glistened on his shoulder.

      “Really?” I said. I hadn’t considered this possibility.

      “Have you ever heard the term ‘reproduce like rabbits’?” said Joe. “All rabbits have so many brothers and sisters! The most of any species.” Joe was eight and wise in every single way.

      I stopped crying. I believed my brother. All at once I felt ashamed for keeping Celeste imprisoned for so many weeks. I was glad that now she had returned home. It would be a terrible thing, I thought, to be separated from your siblings.

      * * *

      MY GRIEF FOR Celeste lasted exactly five days. Then Joe brought me to the pond.

      It was another hot, sticky morning, and I lay on the couch reading War of the Worlds and imagining where I would hide from an alien invasion. I was a precocious and prolific reader, often stealing Renee’s books or ones from the cardboard boxes we had yet to unpack, generally preferring to exist within my own made-up world rather than the real one that surrounded me.

      “Come here,” Joe said, standing in the doorway. “I want to show you something.”

      I narrowed my eyes, examining his face, and then put the book down.

      He led me along the sidewalk, through a neighbor’s backyard, over a low fence, and down a steep, wooded hill. The going was rough—no real path, heavy vegetation, and fallen tree trunks. Shifting spots of sun played with my eyes, and I tripped and fell. Joe helped me up, then swung me onto his shoulders, and I rode like this down the hill, ducking sharp branches, holding tight with my legs around his shoulders, my arms around his neck.

      Finally the woods thinned, and Joe lifted me down. Before us was a shallow, sun-speckled brook that twisted through the trees.

      “Ta-da!” Joe said, as though he were a magician and this his finest trick. It was cool here, calm, the water talking quietly to itself, the fizz of dragonflies and the airy whine of mosquitoes.

      “Let’s stay,” I said.

      For the next few hours, we played on the rocks beside the brook. We did not speak. We threw stones. We crouched and watched the spindly-legged water bugs skitter across the surface. We fashioned fishing poles from sticks and bits of long grass tied to the ends, but we had no bait and the quick, darting minnows ignored our efforts, instead flashing silver as they poked and picked algae from the rocks like housewives choosing melons. We walked downstream, the brook widening as it went. The sound of rushing water grew louder, and then the woods cleared and before us shimmered a small green pond set like a jewel amid the trees and the long cattails. On the far side was a dam with water rushing beyond it in turbulent free fall.

      Duck grass and bunches of loosestrife grew along the perimeter, lily pads, too, with their hand-size leaves and stiff flowers like divination rods. There was a low grassy bank, perfect for sitting, and a small beach area of gray sand and pebbles. No one else was here, but I saw evidence of activity: a battered little rowboat overturned СКАЧАТЬ