“Just three?” I asked.
Leo folded his arms. “Erik always expected more. I expected less.”
Now a rustling came from the woods behind the hutches.
“I indulged him. I always thought that this was some sort of joke.” Leo looked at the three lost bunnies. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”
I was about to share Toby’s theory on coincidence, when the rustling grew louder. Then came a rolling wave of white, not from the sky but from deep in the pines. It poured through the trees and slipped over the carpet of needles.
“Rabbits,” Leo said, dropping his arms to his sides.
Hundreds of rabbits were gliding over the ground like mercury. They came in waves. They slipped around tree stumps and hopped over roots.
“The rabbits,” Leo said again.
Soon the hutches were teeming with the ghost rabbits.
“They’re real,” one of the Christophs said, pulling a woolen hat over his ears.
“Where do they come from? Where were they?”
Leo looked at me.
“I wonder if Toby found the rabbits,” I said.
“Toby?” Olivia asked. “What does he have to do with the rabbits?”
In the low light, the rabbits’ fur was ghostly white. Their outlines melted into one another.
“I think Toby’s magic is confusing the past with present.”
The forest was silent once more. The rabbits were snug in the hutches.
“How did they know where to come?” Olivia wondered, picking up a rabbit.
“They’re lucky,” I said. “Someone was waiting for them.”
“Leo,” she called, “come. They’re soft, like pom-poms.”
Leo wasn’t listening. He was staring past the hutches and into the woods. “He knew. Erik knew they would come back. I wonder.” I looked into the pen. The rabbits’ pink eyes had taken on a piercing glow. Their shifting forms made me uneasy. Leo was still staring into the woods. “The rabbits came.” He took a deep breath. “They came like a blizzard. But he’s not. He shouldn’t.” Leo wound his fingers through the fence. “He left by choice, wandered off in the middle of a hiking trip. We are from a flat land. Erik should have known better to fool with mountains. The leader of the expedition simply said that when he turned around, Erik was gone. I’m not sure whether he wanted to leave for good or he simply got lost. All I know is that he’s not coming back. But the rabbits, they never had any choice. They were sent away. Whatever magic claimed them doesn’t last forever. There’s some comfort in that.” Leo watched three rabbits squeezing into the same hutch. “Somehow Erik knew.”
I nodded. “Maybe there are no perfect tricks,” I said, thinking how the cocoon of magic that trapped Eva on her mesa slowly began to dissolve.
“I wonder where they’ve been?” Leo said.
“I have an idea,” I replied, wondering what words to use to describe the intermediate world of Toby and Theo’s magic. “It’s not a happy place. But one that can be escaped. Had Toby found the rabbits as a way of atoning for his mistakes, or was their return just a by-product of his explorations of the Dissolving World?
Leo put an arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go back to the villa. You will have a bed to sleep in instead of the studio floor.”
A fire was blazing in the main hall of the villa.
“Something happened to my quilt,” I said to Olivia when we were alone. “Some of the images of my brother are fading. They’re taking my recollection of Max with them.” I bit my lip. “My memory is all I have left of my brother.”
“Why is it happening?” Olivia sat forward in her chair.
“Toby’s playing with the past. He doesn’t think it will affect the present. But it does.”
“He’s making your brother vanish?”
I told her about the Dissolving World.
Olivia had only one question. “Where was the last place you saw your brother.”
“In the ocean.”
“So, tomorrow, that’s the first place we’ll look.”
Sixteen
Olivia and I set off early the next morning into an escalating storm. We took the train through a countryside that was stretched as flat as a fitted sheet. It had been placed on the ground with impeccable care in a palette of greens, browns, and grays. Rows of perforated depressions that marked the path of the harvest ran perpendicular to the canal and bike path—a drab Mondrian print bordered by slate-color roads. Two-story farmhouses with red-brown roofs sprang from the dull land as if from the pages of a pop-up book. Each disruption of the flat landscape surprised me. But soon the appearance of the houses established a rhythm that fell into sync with the clatter of the train wheels—simple chords that marked time over its persistent drum roll.
Olivia and I rode in silence, letting the train cut through the advancing storm. Finally we arrived at the beach town and found a tram that would bring us to the sea. The tram rattled through half-deserted streets. The swelling storm gave the city a hollow sound. As we approached the beach, the air grew damper. Sand, borne by the wind, dirtied the tram windows and crusted our lips. The beach seemed to be coming to us—the sticky mix of salt and sand that I hadn’t tasted in years.
The tram deposited us in front of a grand hotel, asleep in the off season. The pennants flying from its towers danced madly in the rough wind. The sea was hidden behind a wall of shuttered surf shops where towels, visors, Frisbees, and sunscreen hibernated until late spring. A promenade of more empty stores inside a dirty glass atrium led back to the beach. Iron grates were pulled across the arcades. The video games sat blindly in their cages. Seaside souvenirs smiled sourly inside the darkened stores. As we walked, our footsteps echoed like the march of giants.
“I’m not really comfortable around the ocean,” I said, catching sight of the gray sea for the first time. “I haven’t been near it since Max left.”
Olivia
