Expecting, hoping, to find her parents’ house as still and dark as the rest of the street, she stared at the boy on the top step of the porch with terror, awe, and a childish attachment to her own pain. He was real. He was real. But why was he here? Why was he doing this to her?
From the distant corner where she sat, she couldn’t make out the face that mirrored her own. She saw only a boy in an oversized black hoodie, head bent, worrying scabs of paint from her parents’ porch stairs. In this casual, slightly monastic pose of self-absorption, he was identical to countless boys she saw camped on the college greens. A standard-issue teenager.
No, she couldn’t do it.
When she took her foot off the brake, she had no solidly formed idea of where she was going. She simply wanted to get away. Bypassing the house, she continued along the sleeping, leaf-strewn curve of School Street until she came to the Anselmans’, a once picture-perfect but now woefully shabby Queen Anne that had belonged to the ancient organist at the Presbyterian church and his spinster sister. Claudia stopped. The cracked paint job and crooked basketball hoop that hung over the garage door made clear that the new owners were younger and less fastidious than their predecessors, but as a child, this had been Claudia’s favorite house in all of Alluvia. Its fairy tale tower, pastel fancy butt shingles, and gingerbread detailing had fed a little girl’s fantasy of trapped princesses and the deceptively pretty homes of the witches who preyed upon them.
She remembered sitting on the verdant strip of the Anselmans’ lawn, sixteen years old, sunning herself like Sue Lyon with her skimpy bikini top and cat eye sunglasses, as Nick painted the flourishing scrollwork of the gables. His father had left him to finish the job with a winking admonishment that Nick didn’t appreciate.
“I wasn’t making moon eyes at you,” Nick called sullenly from his ladder perch. “Does anyone under fifty even know what that means?”
“Come on, Moonbeam,” Claudia called back. “The faster you finish, the faster we can leave.”
Nick unhooked his bucket and began climbing down. “Screw it,” he said once his feet hit the ground. “I’m finished.” His rebelliousness was both more decisive and more vulgar now that his father wasn’t there to witness it, but Claudia didn’t mind. She liked the rare occasion when the scorpion that slept inside this mild-mannered boy scuttled out into the open with its tail raised. She egged him on, lifting her glasses to stare up at his handiwork, and said, “You missed a spot.”
He laughed a temperate laugh as he set the paint bucket at his feet, then, taking the brush in hand, leapt at her like a madman with a knife.
“Truce!” Claudia screamed, jumping to her feet.
“Oh. Now she wants a truce.” He grinned, forcing her retreat with every jab.
“Look what you’re doing to the grass,” she said with real alarm in her voice. She pointed to the Pollocky dribs of pink paint, running thick to thin, that threaded the green. “Nice job.”
Chastened, Nick held his palm under the dripping bristles and returned the brush to the bucket. He wiped his hand on his already motley jeans and dragged his foot across the vandalized lawn. Frowning at his sneaker, the lousy eraser, he said, “You think he’s a pill about his lawn. You should see his house.”
“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.