CW: animal harm.
Inspiration: A relationship—everything but the drill.
When I was forty and working construction in the new developments on the hill, I watched a lot of TV (you know the kind of programming) with my twenty-five-year-old girlfriend. She was young, sure, her life ahead of her, a perfume model at the local department store (“just for the time being”), and I thought I loved her. At first, she claimed she loved me, too. I was two years out of a fifteen-year marriage and I wanted something bright and shiny, and she was that. She could sing like an angel, dance in stilettos, and do cartwheels like a happy kid. She was very pretty, and I wanted her to save me from something. What, I wasn’t sure.
This happened in the little yellow fixer I was renting and hoped to buy. A real embarrassment. Stucco coming off the walls outside and mold in the bathroom and kitchen. We’d sit side by side on the sofa, not touching, just watching, and never fooling around afterwards like we used to. I knew why she didn’t want to, but I was waiting.
She finally broke up with me—saying “I can’t do this anymore”—when the rabbit she bought and brought to the house one day and let run around for weeks died. She’d always wanted a rabbit, she’d said, and it needed to run free. I liked rabbits. Sometimes I thought I knew what they were feeling—happy or nervous or hungry or hurting—and sometimes I even thought I could hear them talking to me. I’d had one as a kid in the Valley, and, when that one died, another one when we moved, before my parents broke up and that rabbit disappeared and I kept dreaming about it and hearing it.
I wasn’t looking forward to cleaning up the rabbit pellets from the floor, which I knew Mary wouldn’t want to do. She was a princess, though the bright and shiny made up for it. I cleaned them up, no complaints.
But the rabbit died. It died in my arms on the sofa, making a sound like a baby, and I knew what it was feeling. I kept holding it because I was remembering something, and because it was the right thing to do. I don’t want to be alone when I die, it was telling me.
It had, the vet told us later, chewed on the baseboards, right? Yes, we said. The old baseboards of the TV room and the hallway, we said. A rabbit can’t help itself, he explained. “It’s got to chew. It’s got to use those teeth or they’ll get too long, and what happens, when it chews on old baseboards, is that it swallows old oil-based flakes of paint, and the flakes don’t get digested. They slice, like little knives, the poor thing’s stomach lining and intestines. And, yeah, it makes a sound like a baby, which rabbits do when they’re in pain.”
Mary was crying in front of the vet, and I didn’t know how to help. I took her by the elbow and led her to my car, which wasn’t enough. She cried all the way home. I didn’t have the words. I didn’t even try.
She stopped crying at my place, and, when she did, she turned to me in the TV room and said, “You held it like that, Keith, like a baby, so I’d hear it dying, so I’d hear its pain and feel bad about it. That was a mean thing to do if you really love me.”
She wasn’t finished.
“You also seem upset all the time, but you won’t talk about it. You’ll never talk about it.”
That was why she couldn’t do it anymore, she told me. That and the meanness, like holding the rabbit that way as it died.
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to tell her about a baby, but couldn’t. She didn’t know it—how could she?—I hadn’t told her and I should have—but the only child my ex and I ever had during our marriage, I’d held in my arms, yellow and wrinkled from the IV sepsis as it died. It was a little girl. Eyes closed, tiny, squirming for something it would never have. She lived an hour. My ex wanted me to hold her—So you’ll remember your daughter, she said when she stopped crying.
Before the baby died, it made a sound I didn’t know babies could make. A terrible sound, a grunting.
But that’s not really what I was upset about, I told myself, and when I found Mary that night at her friend’s in the apartment complex where we’d first met, I said, right there in front of her friend, how I’d known about the younger guy at the gym for a long time now, and how I’d kill them both—yes, kill them—maybe with one of her favorite kitchen knives, maybe with a drill from the truck—if she didn’t stop seeing him, and that I didn’t care what sounds they made when I did.
I started planning—really planning. Would they tell the police? I didn’t think so. “He’s just angry,” they’d tell each other. It would be the drill, I decided, because that’s how it felt thinking of them together. I could hear the rabbit talking—the way the rabbits I’d had as a kid talked to me—saying Do it, Keith. She was thinking only of herself when she let me run free. I could hear my daughter saying something, too—something about dying—though she was so young, I couldn’t be sure.
