The weekends were magic. Once he’d waded through the mind-numbing tedium of domestic chores; grocery shopping, mowing the lawn, cleaning the gutters, and anything else Susan thought up for him to do while she sat at home all day long; after all that, there was Daddy and Jack time. Father and son time. Quality time.
Jack’s first word had been ‘Da-da’.
Gary had loved his son. Loved him so much that it hurt, sometimes. Despite how cliched it may have sounded to some people, the pain was real. And good. When Jack was little, Gary used to stand over his crib and watch him sleeping. In those moments, Gary’s breath hitched up in his chest—a powerful, overwhelming emotional wave. He’d loved Susan like that too, once upon a time, when they’d first been married. Before job-related stress and mortgage payments and their mutual weight gain—and before Susan’s little personality quirks, things he’d thought were cute and endearing when he’d first met her, the very things he’d fallen in love with after the initial physical attraction, became annoying rather than charming. They knew everything there was to know about each other, and thus, they knew too much. Boredom set in, and worse, a simmering complacency that hollowed him out inside and left him empty. When Jack came along in their fifth year of marriage, Gary fell in love all over again, and his son had filled that hole.
At least temporarily…
Parental love was one thing. That completed a part of him. But Gary still had unfulfilled needs. Needs that Susan didn’t seem inclined to acknowledge, and in truth, needs he wasn’t sure she could have satisfied any longer even if she’d shown interest. Not with the distance between them, a gulf that had grown wider after Jack’s birth. There were too many sleepless nights and grumpy mornings, too many laconic, grunted conversations in front of the television and not enough talking.
So Gary had gone elsewhere.
To Leila.
A crow called out above him, perched on a tree limb. The sound startled him, bringing Gary back to the present. The bird spread its wings and the branch bent under its wings. The leaves rustled as it took flight. Gary watched it go. His spirits plummeted even farther as the bird soared higher.
He stepped out from underneath the water tower’s shadow, back into the sunlight, and shivered.
“Oh Jack,” he whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
Gary felt eyes upon him, a tickling sensation between his shoulder blades. He glanced around. Through his tears, he noticed a rabbit at the edge of the field, watching him intently.
He sniffed, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
The rabbit twitched its whiskers and kept staring. Gary felt its black eyes bore into him. He wondered if animals blinked.
The rabbit didn’t.
“Scat.” Gary stamped his foot. “Go on! Get out of here.”
The rabbit scurried into the corn, vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. Gary studied the patch of grass where it had been sitting. The spot was empty, except for a large rock. Was it his imagination, or was the stone’s surface red?
Maybe the animal was injured. Or dying.
His mind threatened to dredge up more of the past, and he bit his lip, drawing blood.
Gary checked the time on his cell phone. He’d been gone a long while. Susan would be worried. He shouldn’t have left her alone, especially on today, of all days. But she’d insisted that at least one of them should visit Jack’s grave. That was what had brought him here in the first place. He’d been drawn to the water tower without even thinking about it. Susan hadn’t come with him to the cemetery. Said she couldn’t bear it. She’d visited the grave many times over the past year, but not today. It had been left for Gary to do, and so he had.
He pressed a button, unlocking the keypad, and the phone’s display lit up. It was just after twelve noon, on August fifteenth. But he’d already known the date.
How could he forget?
He trudged back the way he’d come, wading through the sweltering afternoon haze. Heat waves shimmered in the corners of his vision.
He shouldn’t have come here. Not today, on the one year anniversary of his son’s death. This was a bad idea. It was bad enough that he could see this stupid water tower everywhere he went. Why come this close to it? What was he hoping to find? To prove?
The wind whispered,
Gary turned around, and gasped.
Jack stood beneath the water tower, watching him go. The boy was dressed in the same clothes the police had found him in.
His son reached out. Jack was transparent. Gary could see corn stalks on the other side of him.
“No. Not real. You’re not real.”
Gary shivered. Jack’s favorite song from
“You’re not there,” he told his son.
***
Gary stuck his pinky fingers in his ears and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Jack was gone. He’d never been there. It was just the heat, playing tricks on him. He lowered his hands.
Something rustled between the rows of swaying corn.
Gary didn’t believe in ghosts. He didn’t need to. Memories could haunt a man much more than spirits ever could.
He walked home, passing through the cemetery on the way, and his son’s grave.
He stopped at Jack’s headstone, knelt in the grass, and wept. He did not see Jack again. He did spot several more rabbits, darting between tombstones, running through the grass. Playing amongst the dead.
He tried to ignore the fact that they all stopped to watch him pass.
***
By the time he got home, Gary’s melancholy mood had turned into full-fledged depression. He’d been off the medication for months now, ever since he’d stopped seeing the counselor. If he went inside the house, he’d feel even worse. Susan had been crying all morning, looking at pictures of Jack. He couldn’t deal with that right now. Couldn’t handle her pain. He was supposed to fix things for them, and this couldn’t be fixed. Gary couldn’t stand to see her hurting. Had never been able to.
He decided to mow the lawn instead. Even though he dreaded mowing, sometimes it made him feel better— the aroma of fresh cut grass and the neat, symmetrical rows. He went into the garage; made sure the lawnmower had enough oil and gas, and then rolled it out into the yard. It started on the third tug.
Gary pushed the lawnmower up and down the yard and tried not to think. Grasshoppers and crickets jumped out of his way, and yellow dandelions disappeared beneath the blades. He’d completed five rows and was beginning his sixth when he noticed the baby bunny.
Or what was left of it.
The rabbit’s upper half crawled through the yard, trailing viscera and blood, grass clippings sticking to its guts. Its lower body was missing, presumably pulped by the lawnmower. Gary’s hands slipped off the safety bar, and the lawnmower dutifully turned itself off.
Silence descended, for a brief moment, and then he heard something else.
The baby rabbit made a noise, almost like a scream.
He glanced around, frantic. A few feet away, the grass moved. Something was underneath it, hiding beneath the surface. Gary walked over and bent down, parting the grass. His fingers came away sticky and red. Secreted inside the remains of their warren were four more baby bunnies. The lawnmower had mangled them, and they were dying as he watched. Their black eyes stared at him incriminatingly. The burrow was slick with gore and fur.
Gary turned away. His breakfast sprayed across the lawn.
Despite their injuries, despite missing limbs and dangling intestines, the bunnies continued to thrash, their
