I wondered how much he’d heard of our conversation. Bastien was a lot like his mother in that he let you know only what he wanted you to know. Everything else stayed locked up tight.
Milo stashed the last two beers in the mildewed cupboard where our mother liked to stock preserves—they stood upright behind Ball jars of orange marmalade and strawberry jam turned the color of beef gravy. Then we went inside. It still smelled like home, though a faded-out version. There was less of my father’s aftershave. Less of the tanners and formaldehyde, a scent he’d always carried on his body.
Smell, I’d learned, was something that would always be able to sucker-punch me.
LEPORIDAE OF THE ORDER LAGOMORPHA—RABBIT KITS
Movement under my hand broke the spell.
Don’t stop. Why’d you stop?
Fingers splayed wide on her bare skin, I prayed the fluttering away. Let myself think it was an anomaly. Maybe her stomach was upset, something that could be quickly cured by antacids.
Here, like this. Brynn moved my palm from where I’d cupped her belly button and dragged it down, lower, until it edged the thin lace of her underwear. Shadows licked her skin, dotting her breasts and hips in dripping gray. Rain drummed against the driveway and the wide oaks in a thick, continual beat that slurred into white noise. We were cocooned in a nest of blankets that smelled like my father’s aftershave and my mother’s lemon talcum powder.
A single tap against my temple. Where’d you go? Her nose dug into my neck. She snuffled, rooting around, and I curled my head to the side, trying to trap her there. My arm slid around her stomach and then I felt it again: a kind of squirming, a wriggling set low in her belly. New life burbled and popped. I’d felt it there before. We both knew what it meant. She rolled away and propped her head on her folded arm, staring out the window.
Yeah, she sighed. I know.
That morning I’d said bunny, bunny to my four-year-old nephew as I walked into my parents’ kitchen. He was standing at the counter with my mother as she pressed orange halves on a citrus squeezer. I smiled at him and he smiled back, his mouth a solid block of orange from where he’d bitten down into a stray segment.
Whath nummy nummy, Bastien mumbled, tongue working around the peel. He choked and it was a wet, sticky sound. Poor Florida baby couldn’t handle the constant pollen, drifting onto all our cars and staining the roads yellow. It made him hack and wheeze, a forty-year-old smoker’s cough, pale eyes forever bottomed out with purple smudges.
Keeps us safe from monsters.
I dug the peel from between his lips, tossing it into the overflowing garbage. Milo never took out the trash, said he was too tired when he got home from work. Brynn said he never had time for her, that they never had sex anymore, and I was fine with that.
It means good luck. If you say it on the first of the month, everything will turn out perfect, just how you want it.
Bastien closed his eyes. Bunny, bunny. He held up one finger and blew on it, like you would a birthday candle.
It rained every day that May, sky drowning the world at four o’clock before the sun came out again to boil the leftover water off the pavement. The world cracked open and smelled fresh cut, seeping green over everything. I drove with the windows down and inhaled the world: the dank scent of wet dirt at a construction site, orange clay smoothed into wet puddles at the high school baseball field, the fruity shampoo as my hair whipped around my face. Even the festering Dumpster beside a traffic light held appeal; it all teemed with life. There were birds nesting in the eaves of the taxidermy shop. When one of the babies fell out and cracked its neck, I spent a whole afternoon carefully preserving it for Bastien.
Every day my mother made scrambled eggs with sharp cheddar cheese, Milo’s favorite. The three of them had moved back into my parents’ house on the premise of saving money to buy one of their own. Milo’s old room had been converted to a sewing studio, so the three of them shored up in my childhood bedroom. They slept every night beneath the tattered posters that still clung to the dark wood paneling: bands Brynn and I used to like and movies we’d watched in high school. My brother, whom I loved, curled up with the woman I loved beneath my red-and-white quilt. Milo said he was glad Brynn spent all her time with me since he was always gone. Said he knew I’d take care of her and make sure she was happy. He smiled as he said it, never a moment’s pause that I’d be touching his wife as soon as he walked out the door.
How could he not know? I wondered. How could he think anything less was happening, when he knew I’d had her first?
Milo’s job at the Lexus dealership was forty-five minutes away. He got up early and came home late, taking overtime and working holidays. It was a low-paying gig that didn’t require any previous experience, which was good because his resume took up less than half a sheet of paper. He’d gotten the job through one of his high school buddies. It was the first time he’d ever really tried, and it didn’t agree with him.
If I make it through the ninety-day trial period, I’ll be set for a promotion, he said. Just gotta make it through these first ninety and then it won’t be like this anymore. Get our own place. Have another kid.
On his days off, he stayed in bed until midafternoon and then ventured out to the kitchen for a sandwich before passing out on the couch again. He looked tired all the time, skin grayed out and hair lank with grease. His polos were never clean. Brynn sometimes did laundry, but we both acted like kids on summer vacation. She let my mother do the chores as we hung out and watched television. When Milo came home he’d kiss Brynn first thing. She leaned into it so hard I could hear their teeth click together.
You take such good care of us, she’d say, drawing a line down his cheek with a fingernail I’d painted for her. Who else would love me so much? No one’s sweeter than you, baby.
He’d look better then, and I knew it was all worth it to him—the long hours, the driving, just to come home to her and Bastien. Listening in on these whispered conversations, I tried to imagine myself in my brother’s position and couldn’t make the image stick. I knew what she wanted from each of us; the things we provided. I watched my brother work himself to death, saw how he was still able to be emotionally there for her, and wished I could be the kind of person who could do both.
I came over every day on my lunch break from the shop, eating leftover crusts from Bastien’s peanut butter and honey sandwiches.
I like our little family. Brynn snuck her hand into the crease of my elbow. I’d let it sit there, collecting sweat, mine and hers. Something I could take home and keep at the end of the day when I drank rum and Cokes next to the busted AC unit in my apartment. Drunk, thinking about what kind of person I was: taking from the people I cared about, taking because if I didn’t take what I needed, I might die.
We sat at the dining room table and ate ham sandwiches for lunch. Bastien slurped speckled cereal milk from a yellowing Tupperware. Between bites of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, he touched the little bunnies in their basket with a gentle hand—the kits my father and I had lovingly worked on for several weeks, attempting to perfect the downy sweetness found in mammal babies. My father had found them in a cardboard box inside our garage, cuddled in a nest of shredded newspapers and telephone book pages.
Asphyxiated. Carbon monoxide from the car engine. He cupped one in his palm, body the size of a fat dinner roll. When I took it from him, its neck flopped back until the head was lying over my fingers, limp and dangling.