Leo lifts his hand from his leg and pulls it through his hair.
“Obviously I have other memories, too. Maybe it would have been better if I’d picked a different one, something more cheerful.”
Then he starts telling me about a cabin where his family spent whole summers when he was little, a log cabin by a lake surrounded by woods. They swam and played there. His father took him hiking in the woods and taught him how to fish.
As he speaks, the discomfort gradually abates. What he says sets other thoughts in motion, elicits memories from my own childhood. Several summers in a row, my parents rented a cabin by a sandy beach on the other side of the sound. We drove there and Papa sang along to the music on the radio even though he didn’t know any of the lyrics. My sister and I laughed at him from the backseat. Mama smiled, and her hair fluttered in the wind as air rushed in through her rolled-down window. The cabin wasn’t that big, and my sister and I had to share a room, which neither of us minded. In the evenings, we barbecued and played games, and during the day, we hung out on the beach.
I remember that while my sister was swimming and Mama was lying on a blanket reading, my dad and I built a sandcastle. He was astoundingly good at it, showing me how you did everything from towers and domes to ring walls. When we came back out the next morning, our creations had been destroyed, wiped out by the high tide. We stood there staring, my dad and I, and I remember that I was afraid he would be sad, so I snuck my hand into his and wanted to say something nice. “It doesn’t matter, Elena,” he’d said. “That’s how the world is. Everything goes.” It was both beautiful and frightening at the same time, and I squeezed his hand harder. Little did I suspect then that there could be something prescient in his words, an omen that pertained to him, and to our whole family.
“Do you think I should have written about something else instead? Some cheerful memory from the cabin?”
I shake slightly, and the images of my own childhood fade away. I’m back in the kitchen with Leo.
“I don’t know,” I say, clasping my hands on my lap. “No one else can make that decision—only you. If we even have a choice, those of us who write. Some authors believe the story chooses them and not the other way around.”
Leo turns toward the window. His bangs hang down over the side of his face that’s turned toward me, and I can’t see his eyes.
“But it’s not like that for you, is it? You choose what you’re going to write, don’t you?”
He refers to some article he found online, an interview where I described my writing process: why I write, how I come up with my ideas, and that I usually take inspiration from the things going on around me.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “How did you find this article?”
“OK, maybe I googled you a little.”
“Googled me?”
“I’ve never lived next door to a real author before,” he says, blushing.
I don’t know how to react, neither to the words nor to the hint of admiration in his voice. I feel self-conscious, proud, and embarrassed, so I laugh. It’s as if something relaxes inside Leo, because he starts laughing, too.
When he stands up a little while later, I accompany him to the front hall and look on once again while he pushes his feet into his shoes by wiggling his heels back and forth. He pulls his hood up again, and I hand him the folder containing his essay. The laughter we just shared suddenly feels distant.
“Do you have a key today? Or do you think… Is your mom home from work?”
He pushes the hair off his forehead.
“My mom didn’t go to work today.”
“She didn’t?”
Leo shakes his head.
“Dad said she wasn’t feeling well and called in sick. He didn’t want to say any more than that, but I could tell something was up and… well, that she doesn’t exactly have the flu. It’s back.”
It? I furrow my brow.
“What? What’s back?”
He straightens up and clutches the folder with both hands.
“Right before that incident I wrote about. I mean, right before the part about the rabbits…”
As if he needed to remind me, as if the content of his essay weren’t already indelibly engraved. I nod.
“The period before that. My mom had been confined to bed for several weeks, kind of barely able to talk to anyone. It was just like that this morning. The bedroom door was ajar, and I saw her through the crack, lying in there with her back to the door. And before I came over here this afternoon, I stopped in at home, just to peek in on her. Either she was asleep and didn’t notice that I’d come in or she wasn’t up to rolling over. She was still lying in exactly the same position. As if she hadn’t moved at all the whole day.”
We look at each other. I don’t know what to say. There’s nothing I can say.
Leo shakes his bangs over his face and turns away.
“It’s so obvious,” he says. “She’s on her way into the darkness again.”
20
My sister texts me right after Leo has gone home. She texts, and then texts again. I see her name on the display but don’t answer, don’t even read what she wrote. So she calls instead.
“Are you OK, Elena? Are we OK, you and me, I mean…”
She keeps talking, but I only hear isolated words. Her voice sounds like it’s coming from far away. Everything about her seems as distant as she did in the dream last night. It’s only been a few days since we saw each other, and yet so much has happened. I should tell her about Peter’s text. Or that I’ve started a tentative new writing project. But for some reason, that feels insurmountable.
“Uh, hello?” she says after a while. “You don’t even seem like you’re listening to what I’m saying. How are you actually doing?”
Leo’s parting words a while ago did something to me, caused my thoughts about his essay to start spinning again.
“They bought him rabbits,” I mutter. “But then she just—”
“Rabbits? Bought rabbits for whom?”
“For Leo.”
I walk closer to the window and stand beside the table.
“What are you talking about? Who’s Leo?”
I tell her about the family in the house across from me. Explain that things don’t seem right between Philip and Veronica. And that Leo is a good guy, but he’s having a hard time. My sister’s confused silence switches into a cautiously positive tone.
“So you’ve met some new people? That’s a step in the right direction. And other than that… how are you doing otherwise?”
But I can’t answer, can only think about the rabbits, about Leo’s raw, uncompromising way of describing what happened the summer the Storm family rented an apartment somewhere by the Mediterranean.
On this one occasion, they visited a market, where, to their horror, they saw rabbits crammed into crowded cages. The animals were out in the broiling sun with no access to water. And no one seemed to care about their suffering since they were intended for slaughter. Leo started crying and wasn’t able to stop when he saw how they were desperately crawling all over each other inside the cages. He refused to leave, so his parents bought him two of the rabbits, let him bring them back to the apartment and keep them as pets. He loved those rabbits, loved holding their soft little bodies on his lap, and every day he was grateful that his parents had helped him save them from the harsh fate that would have awaited otherwise.
Then their vacation was coming to an end, and it soon would be time to travel back home to Sweden. The rabbits couldn’t come. His father was clear about that. Maybe they could give them away to someone else? Or simply set them free? Leo cried and protested, but deep down inside, he started preparing himself to separate from his furry friends. The days passed, and their return home grew closer, but still no concrete decision had been made about the rabbits. And then, on the last morning, it happened.