When God Was a Rabbit (23 page)

I lay on the bench, shivering, until night lay with me and the moon struggled to penetrate the canopy above. The leaves were unyielding, hanging on firm in the sudden chill that succeeded sunset; they would not fall yet – not tonight, at least.

The sounds of unseen creatures and movements – once the sound of creeping dread – were now familiar to me, and kind, and I breathed in the dank mustiness, the earth-laden chill, and filled my nostrils and put out those fires that raged still within. Sleep was mine. Unencumbered by dreams, I slept long, long into the early hours when I awoke to rain. It was almost morning as the sun haloed the outer reaches of the forest. I sat up on the bench; my underside dry. I felt in my pocket and pulled out a half-eaten bar of chocolate. It was dark chocolate, bitter, Arthur’s favourite. I always took it with me when we went out for a walk. I broke off a square and let it melt in my mouth. A little too bitter for breakfast, but I was grateful.

I heard the sound of rustling first and knew what it was before I saw it. I hadn’t seen it in months, almost a year maybe. The dark intense eyes came out of a pile of leaves, followed by the chestnut fur, the pointed nose twitching in recognition. It stopped in front of me, as if wanting something. I tried to shoo it away with my foot but it didn’t flinch this time; stayed staring at me. It didn’t even startle at the sound of my phone, the loud ringing harsh in the feeble dawn. Its eyes never left mine as I picked up and nervously said, ‘Hello?’ And it stayed staring at me as I listened to her voice – now so much older – as she whispered the words, ‘Elly, I can’t talk for long,’ just like she said twenty-one years ago. ‘Listen to me, don’t give up. He’s alive, I know he’s alive. Trust me, Elly. You must trust me.’

Its eyes never left mine.

I didn’t shower, just changed into an old fishing sweater bought almost fifteen years before. The elasticity had gone, and it hung straight across my hips, hung from the neckline too. Joe used to say it was my comfort. Maybe he was right. It felt coarse and rustic after the cottons of summer; it felt defiant; as if winter was within reach.

Arthur was at the breakfast table when I came down and he was listening to his pocket radio, a single wire dangling from his left ear. The other two had left a note: ‘Gone to Trago Mills to buy paint.’ Buy paint? I didn’t know whether to be glad or not. It was a start, was all I kept thinking. Something they were doing together.

‘Coffee, Arthur?’ I said, as I pulled apart a croissant.

‘No, I’m fine, dear. Had three already and I’ve got palpitations.’

‘Better not then.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

I bent down and Nelson came towards me. I nuzzled him, rubbed behind his ears and gave him a piece of the pastry, which he tried to refuse but couldn’t. He tried so hard to be conscientious, but we as a family had ruined him. From the day he arrived, earnest and full of intention, all we ever saw was the prettiest of souls and treated him as such, until his single-mindedness turned into flighty, everyday distraction. And as I rubbed his belly, the sleekness was now replaced by rotundity, for he had become the receptacle of my parents’ grief and ate whatever was offered; preventing them from feeding their own gnawing heartache.

I brought my coffee to the table and sat down.

‘It’s so quiet here without you all,’ he said, turning off the radio. ‘Your absence has made me old.’

I reached over and held his hand.

‘I can’t believe all this. I thought I’d left such violence behind,’ and he took out his neatly pressed handkerchief and quietly blew his nose. ‘I’m ready now, Elly. Ready to depart. The fear has gone, together with my desire for life. I’m so tired now. Tired of saying goodbye to those I love. I’m so sorry, my darling.’

I kissed his hand. ‘There’s a new family of herons on the river, I believe. Dad heard them the other day. The young should be ready to leave soon. How about we go and find them?’

He squeezed my hand. ‘I’d like that,’ he said, and I finished the last of my coffee and dropped the remainder of my croissant into Nelson’s grateful mouth.

A brisk wind blew up the valley, carrying occasional rain and the smell of salt, and the water chopped and slapped at the sides of the boat as Arthur yelled in delight. Nelson stood at the bow like a figurehead until a flock of Canada geese startled him as they unexpectedly took flight, and he jumped down and hid behind Arthur’s warm spindly legs. I turned off the engine and paddled along the riverbank in search of the large nests the herons always built at water level along this stretch. We hid under overhanging branches, paused to listen to distinct river sounds, and as we beached momentarily on a shingled shelf, the leathery greens and the grey-greens and the black-greens of watergrowth surrounded us, and merged with the dark front that suddenly rolled up the river like thick dark smoke. I barely managed to pull the heavy tarpaulin over us before the first of the lightning flashed and the sleeting rain fell.

‘Oh, I see it all!’ shouted Arthur, as he staggered out into the rain and lifted his face to the onslaught, squealing as the mad urgency of nature whipped his eager senses. The air rumbled with the cannon sound of thunder, and the lightning bounced from field to tree to field.

‘Arthur! Get back!’ I shouted, as he fell close to the side.

Again thunder and lightning triumphed, the splintering sound of fractured wood tore through the valley; the loud thump of rain as it hit the river surface before being enveloped by the rising mass. Nelson shook behind Arthur’s legs, and again Arthur shouted out into the storm and railed at the loss of his boy, his hallowed gentle boy he’d feel and know no more.

I didn’t hear my phone ring, not the first time – the thunderous noise maybe, or the inconsistent signal that faltered during storms. But as the storm moved over and left us with the feeble spray of sunlit rain, that’s when I heard it, the ring suddenly echoing amidst the quiet exhaustion of the scarred river valley.

‘Elly,’ the voice said.

‘Charlie?’

‘Elly, they’ve found him.’

The moment I’d waited for. I held my stomach. My legs suddenly shaking. I reached for Arthur’s hand. What had they found? What thing had they found that had declared him, him? And as if he could read my silence he quickly said, ‘No, Elly. They’ve
found
him. He’s alive.’

. . .
to a passer-by he might have looked like a man sitting on a bench overlooking Lower Manhattan, enjoying a quiet moment of aloneness away from the wife, from the kids maybe, from the pressures of work. He might have looked like an insomniac, just like the joggers who ran the promenade in those early hours. He might have looked like either of those things, because he was shaded by the trees and nobody would have been close enough to see that his eyes were shut; not close enough to see the trickle of blood from his ear or the dark wet patch that matted his curls on his swollen head; because they weren’t close enough to see, he could have been a drunk, sitting on a bench in the early hours of the morning. And nobody was interested in a drunk.

He was found unconscious at three o’clock in the morning on 11 September 2001, on a stretch of the promenade at Brooklyn Heights, a place he always went to, to think about life.

It was quite a walk from his house, Jenny, but he did it at night, often instead of a run. He loved the bridge, loved to walk the bridge and never felt afraid of the city’s vacant aggression that hugged darkness, because it thrilled him and emboldened him. Could quite simply arouse him. And he was found by a young man who approached him for a light, a man who saw up close the bruising around his mouth, the swollen features of a bursting head. This young man phoned the police and saved his life.

They found nothing on him. No wallet, no phone, no keys, no money, no watch. Nothing to say who he was or where he was from. He wore only a faded red T-shirt and old chinos and brown Havaianas on his feet. He never felt the cold. Not like me. Remember how I’d shiver.

They rushed him to the ER, where they drained the fluid and worked on his head until the swelling retreated. They took him up to the ICU where they put him with four other patients and there he stayed, waiting for his mind to return to gently inform the rest of his body to awaken and live. And there he stayed, quite peaceful, apparently, and immune, until the morning he awoke and tried to pull the tube from his mouth. He didn’t know his name or where he lived or what had happened. Or what would happen next. He still doesn’t.

All this is fact. What we’ve just learnt. Will let you know more, Jenny, as it comes.

Ell xx

Her name was Grace. Grace Mary Goodfield, to be exact, and she was a registered nurse, and had been for twentysix years with no thoughts yet of retiring. Her folks were from Louisiana and she still holidayed there.

‘Have you ever been?’

‘No, not yet,’ said Charlie, the first day they met.

She lived alone in Williamsburg, had the ground floor apartment in an old brownstone, a happy place, good tenants above and below. ‘Space enough for me,’ she’d said. ‘Kids long since flown; man long since gone.’

Like so many others she wasn’t supposed to be at work on 11 September. She was doing mainly night shifts that week, and her morning was to be spent changing over the curtains to heavier ones in preparation for the coming fall. But even before the Towers fell she rushed to the hospital to take up her position like all those others, waiting for the mêlée of survivors and their tales of luck from those upper floors. But, as we know, that didn’t happen.

She wasn’t needed in ER, and so she went to her office on the ICU floor, and went around the rooms to boost morale, to hand out cookies, and always with a smile, because she was the best shift leader and she knew her staff and she knew her patients. Just not the new one, though, not the unconscious one. No one knew him.

She called him ‘Bill’, after an old boyfriend who liked to sleep. She would sit with him when the others had visitors, and she would hold his hand and tell him about her life or tell him about what she’d cooked the previous night. She’d tried to look for him on the Missing Persons websites, but it was useless because thousands were missing. The police wanted to help but there was nothing they could do whilst he was under, their minds and resources directed elsewhere; directed to the horror unfolding beyond those safe walls.

She looked at his clothes, those meagre belongings bagged in his locker, and she could piece nothing together of his life. This useless anonymity scared her. She worried he might die lost, with no one knowing; parents and friends not knowing. I’ll be there for you, she said one night, as she left after a particularly hard shift.

She brought in different smells and oils and placed them under his nose, anything to flick the switch of memory. She introduced lavender and rose and frankincense to his mind, coffee too, and her latest perfume – Chanel No 5 – which Lisa from emergency had brought back from Paris. She encouraged the other four patients to talk to him if they felt well enough, and soon stories of wars and sex and baseball rebounded across the floor, and only quietened if a nurse was present, something more reminiscent of an old bar than the care unit it was. Sometimes she would bring in music and hold a headphone gently to his ear. She thought he was in his thirties and calculated what songs may have travelled with him throughout his life. She played Bowie and Blondie and Stevie Wonder – all borrowed from her neighbour’s collection, the neighbour who lived upstairs.

Almost three weeks later she got the call. Janice ran in and said Bill had woken up. Grace called for a doctor. When she entered he was grabbing for his breathing tube, panicking, his left arm sluggish. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s OK,’ and she stroked his head. He tried to sit up on his own and he asked for water. They told him to sip it slowly, they told him not to speak. His eyes darted around the room. Gerry in the bed by the door said, ‘Welcome back, son.’

When he was strong enough, the police returned.

‘What’s your name?’ they asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is there someone we can contact?’

He rolled over.

‘Don’t know.’

He did well over the next few days. Ate well, slowly started to walk, but still remembered nothing. He recognised the Twin Towers as structures of architecture, not as places he’d visited for meetings, places that housed people he’d lost. They moved him out of ICU to a single room. They heard nothing from the police. Grace kept an eye on him, tried to see him most days, took him flowers and kept calling him Bill; he didn’t mind. And they would talk about magazine articles and watch films. He watched a film with the actress Nancy Portman and he decided he liked her and thought she was funny, and he would have been thrilled at that moment, had he known she was his aunt, but he didn’t, of course. He remained locked into a world solely of the present.

When he improved, Grace knew he’d eventually be transferred to a public psych hospital, and that would conceal him deeper, mire him further in a system from which, without memory, he could never return.

He was standing at the window, a forlorn sight, singing a tune he’d picked up from TV. He turned to her and smiled.

‘Know how you lost that tooth?’ she said, pointing to his mouth.

He shook his head. ‘A fight probably.’

‘You don’t seem like a fighter,’ she said. ‘Too gentle.’

Then one night, as he lay sleeping, Grace went to his locker and took out his clothes for the last time. They were the only clue she had. She picked up the faded red T-shirt and saw again the faint drawing of a woman – a starlet maybe? – with the words
Six
and
Judy’s
above it, barely visible. She turned it over. Could hardly read it:
Sing with all your Hear
across the back.

It was all she had.

She typed in
Six Judy’s
and pressed SEARCH. Waited. Nothing on the first page. She reached for her coffee. It tasted stale. She stood up and stretched.

Clicked on the second page.

The word was
Heart
. It was the nineteenth entry:

Choir Sings for Sweet Charity

The Six Judy’s are an all-male choir specialising in show tunes and the era of Old Hollywood. We are a non-pro fitmaking group and have supported various charities, including Unicef, HelpAge USA, Coalition for the Homeless, Cancer Research Institute, as well as more personal projects like fundraising for kidney transplants and heart by-passes. If you’re interested in us, please contact Bobby on the number below.

It was late, too late to call, but she called anyway. A man answered. He wasn’t angry, just tired. She asked him if any of his singers were missing. One, he said. I think I’ve found him, she said.

‘He has a gap in the front of his teeth.’