Velveteen Read online

  Maybe Mama also knew something was wrong with Remy. Maybe she could feel that God was coming to take him back, because after they got him all cleaned up and his skin wasn’t quite so blue anymore (he still hadn’t made a sound), I started seeing this new look on Mama’s face, which I’d never seen before, something besides exhaustion and relief. This new look was like she’d just woken up from a nightmare, except she wasn’t sure if she really was awake yet and the nightmare was still there, hiding just underneath her pillow.

  He died the second night, after we had already started to fall in love with him. Even me, who knew that he was sick and was maybe a little jealous of him. I knew, although that time it wasn’t because I could smell it. This was all before I could smell the sickness on people. I don’t know how I knew about Remy, but I did.

  Mama didn’t cry until after she came home a few days later, and then she cried a whole bunch for a couple of weeks, especially when we went to go visit Remy in the cemetery down the street. But finally she stopped crying, and when she did, Daddy brought her Shinji from the rescue because I already had Ben Nicholas, and he told her that he was already named — Shinji was — which made me feel bad for Mama because she wouldn’t get to pick a name like I had already secretly chosen for Ben Nicholas from the vampire bunny book, ‘a rabbit-tale of mystery,’ which was my favorite story for Daddy to read.

  It turned out that she didn’t care about any of that. In fact, she barely cared anything at all about Shinji, just like she barely cared about Ben Nicholas. She was too busy being angry with Daddy all the time, like she blamed him for trying to fill in the hole Remy left in her heart when he died, and she wasn’t ready for it to be filled yet. I know Daddy didn’t want to go live in an apartment, but I also knew he couldn’t take the sadness in the house, neither. He told me it was smothering him, which means he couldn’t breathe.

  Anyway, that’s how Shinji became mine, too, which was fine because he was a good dog anyway, even if he did poop sometimes on the rug. And once on the couch, which was my bed at Daddy’s, when on accident I didn’t let him out in time. You can still see the stain on the cushion if you lift it up to look underneath, even though Daddy tried to wash it a million times in the shower.

  But Ben Nicholas was my first pet, and it was him I always truly loved more.

  He was such a tiny little thing, a dirty little snowball, but each day he grew a little bit until he was real big, almost too big for me to carry around, all floppy feet and legs and arms, his ears hanging down like socks. He stopped growing when he was almost too big to sleep with me in my bed at night. Luckily, Shinji didn’t mind sharing. Like I said, he was a good puppy. Just like Ben Nicholas was a good bunny.

  Despite what Mama believed, it never once crossed my mind that a rabbit like him could ever suck the blood from a person — or the juice from a tomato, for that matter. There are no such things as vampire rabbits. Or even vampire people. Daddy said so, and I was never ever confused about that.

  But after Ben Nicholas died, I did secretly wish it could just be a little bit true. Because then he wouldn’t have stayed dead. He would’ve just come back on his own.

  How many thunderstorms have I listened to, loud and angry outside these empty walls, pounding like the loud hungry noise that once filled the inside of me till it felt like I would explode from it beating, beating on the inside of my head?

  hundreds

  I can only feel the thunder through my feet now, through my skin. I think I’m deaf now, but not unhearing. I feel everything deep inside the middle of my head.

  a thousand storms?

  How many times have I tried counting as high as that? I think I might have reached a thousand once, long ago. But now I always lose track and have to start all over again from the beginning. The numbers get smaller and smaller before I lose track. I’m beginning to forget how to count.

  It once frightened me, the thunder, but now it doesn’t. Maybe because I can’t hear it and it’s good that I can’t see the lightning. Lightning always used to really scare me, when I was sick with the disease. But now the storms come and go and I can’t remember what it feels like to be afraid of them anymore, though sometimes I wish I could be afraid, because that would be proof that I am

  alive

  still a part of the world.

  How many storms?

  millions, maybe

  I can’t even imagine a number that large.

  The silence fills the in-between spaces of my thoughts, when I can’t get the memories to come. Sometimes they slip too deep into the cracks of my mind and it’s too dark there for me to find and pull them out. How many hours of the endless quiet, nothing but the whisper of the breeze around the house telling lonely secrets through the lonely trees, knocking the walls, rattling the chains on my swings in the back yard. I can hear them, whispering to my skin with their clinking little voices. Calling me to come out and play.

  Another step forward, another bump into the stupid wall.

  bad word, cassie

  I keep forgetting.

  patience

  first things first, cassie

  shhh . . . .

  These whispers, memories of whispers, and my own thoughts are my only company. In this tiny, dark, locked room.

  Oh, and this toy. I keep it because it reminds me to remember Ben Nicholas. “It looks just like your bunny,” Daddy had told me. But it doesn’t look anything like him at all. Its eyes and nose are black instead of pink, and there’s no hot chocolate stain.

  I don’t play with it. I have no need for playing no more.

  The darkness in this room isn’t always the same. There are differences in it, swirling about my head, dark gray and black. Or maybe it’s just my mind tricking me. I stare hard at it and wonder if maybe I’ve become blind, too. Maybe my eyes have grown large from being in this darkness for so long, like the movie we watched about those funny-looking monkeys on TV. Or maybe my eyes have sealed over, turned useless like the blind creatures that live in caves. Blind, and yet seeing.

  Deaf, yet hearing.

  Not smelling, not tasting.

  what would it feel like to be hungry again?

  say grace, honey?

  Thank you, Lord, for this meal we are about to partake.

  Do I sit down and rest while I wait?

  Do I lay me down to sleep and pray the Lord my soul to keep?

  Not yet. Not yet.

  It hasn’t been long enough yet.

  patience

  I stand and wait and watch the spinning darkness with my blind eyes. I listen to the itching sounds with my deaf ears, willing them to feel the beating of my own heart. They can’t. Because it doesn’t. Beat. No more.

  Now that I have been cured. Now the sickness is gone from me.

  just silence

  All around. Forever. Until—

  Until forever suddenly shatters with the hard sound of breaking of glass, a noise so bright that it cuts the skin of my mind and makes me nearly fall over backward.

  mama? Is that you? is it time?

  But the silence returns, a dark blanket which grows over me.

  smothering me

  Hello?

  mama? daddy?

  No sound but the whisper of emptiness, and so I know it’s nothing but the wind yet. Again.

  The first time it happened, the first time I heard a window break, it made me hope it was them coming back. It seemed like such a long time after Daddy

  promised to return when they found the cure

  locked me in here so I could make Ben Nicholas Real. A long time ago. But it isn’t them, and so I knew I hadn’t waited

  forever

  long enough.

  I don’t let the sounds tease me anymore. I’ve learned patience. I don’t mind waiting. I don’t get hungry. Or tired. I don’t need to hurry. Mama and Daddy know I’m in here. They’ll know when to come and open the door. They

  promised

  finally understood why I did what I did. />
  Nothing but the hard wind on the delicate glass. Until—

  Until I

  feel

  hear the front door open for the first time in a

  million years

  long time, and suddenly this thing stirs deep inside of me. I can’t stop it. I don’t want to stop it. A moan slips through my lips, sounding more of hunger than of loneliness, and for the first time in forever the first pangs of it wake deep inside my throat and start to claw their way out.

  not yet!

  I try to push the feeling down and away. My thoughts are only for Ben Nicholas.

  “First things first,” as Daddy always said.

  The sound of a footstep presses against the skin of my face. There! In the kitchen! Just one step, silence, waiting. Then another.

  More waiting.

  I’m in here! I want to cry out, but my lips are too dry, too stiff. My tongue is a stone in my mouth, and the wind that passes through my throat stirs only a memory of what my own voice once sounded like.

  More footsteps follow in a rush, hurrying through the kitchen, entering the living room, getting closer. Closer! Stopping. A door in the hallway opens — not mine — closes. More steps.

  Then, suddenly:

  too bright!

  The door closes before I can react. My body is too slow. It’s forgotten how to move. The footsteps fade away before I can call out their names:

  mama

  daddy

  come back

  But all too quickly, the front door closes again and I am alone once more. The swirling silence returns and smothers me.

  I want so badly to feel sadness, but I can’t even do that.

  But I do feel something, something I haven’t felt in a long time: wanting.

  My chest tightens and a moan of longing rises from my throat.

  first things first, baby

  Okay. It wasn’t them anyway, Mama and Daddy. It was

  food

  someone else, someone sick with the disease.

  How long has it been since I’ve heard the sound of breathing and the beat of a living heart?

  forever

  How long since I’ve smelled their terrible disease?

  But first things first. I’ll wait as long as it takes.

  Until.

  The bat was the first one, not Ben Nicholas.

  I don’t really know how long Ben Nicholas had been sick, when I first started smelling it on him. A few days maybe. I didn’t notice until after I started smelling it growing inside of me. But even before that, I think I must’ve known something was wrong with him, just like I knew about Remy before he died. Ben Nicholas wasn’t acting right. He wasn’t as playful. He wasn’t

  hungry

  eating right.

  It was Miss Ronica who found the dead bat outside on the back lawn. She was just going to throw it into the trash and not tell anyone.

  “But what if it’s not dead?”

  “It is, Cassie. Just keep away from it.”

  “But what if it can be fixed? Maybe Mama or Daddy can fix it?”

  “They’re not that kind of animal doctors, Cass. Besides, bringing dead bats back to life isn’t their specialty. And it’s definitely dead. Not only that,” she added in a stern voice, “but they already have a lot on their minds and don’t have time for this. Now, I’m going to the shed to find a shovel, so don’t you touch it. It could still have germs. You hear me?”

  I nodded that I did.

  “Good. And keep Shinji away from it, too.”

  She looked down at it one last time and shivered, like seeing it made her cold. But it didn’t frighten me. Seeing the poor thing only made me sad. I wanted to save it. I didn’t want it to be dead.

  I held out as long as I could. But she was taking too long getting the shovel and all I wanted to do was touch its fur for just a second to see how soft it was. To see if it was as soft as Ben Nicholas’s. But it wasn’t

  dead

  very soft at all.

  Miss Ronica came running back when she heard me scream, trailing cobwebs in her hair, her cheek smudged with dirt. The shovel was bouncing on the grass behind her.

  I’d already managed to shake the clinging thing off my hand, but as soon as it hit the ground, it leapt back at me, latched onto my ankle with its scraggly wings, and tried to scramble up my leg.

  “Stop moving!” Miss Ronica screamed at me.

  “Get it off! Get it off me!”

  “I told you!” she said, dropping the shovel and grabbing a stick. “I told you not to touch it! Damn it, Cassie!”

  “You said it was dead!”

  She swiped at the thing, scraping it off the back of my leg. It thudded to the ground and, before it could jump back up on me, Miss Ronica had already stomped on it. I heard its bones crunching beneath her sandal, felt them breaking inside my own head as if she was crushing me. I was horrified by the sight, but, in all honesty, I was also happy. I hated that it had attacked me. I hated that I wanted it dead — really truly dead this time — and I felt terrible at the way it had happened, but it didn’t stop me from also being glad.

  “Damn it all to hell, Cass!” Miss Ronica cursed. She was crying, partly from anger, partly from fright. She grabbed my hand to check it and, seeing no marks there, spun me around to look at my leg.

  “Did it bite you?”

  “You said a bad word—”

  “Fuck yeah I said a bad word, girl! I told you not to touch it. Did it bite you? Shit, is that blood? Damn if it is. Cassie, it probably was sick. I bet you it was. Haven’t you ever heard of rabies? Well, have you?”

  Panic flared inside of me. I’d heard of it, of course. My parents worked with animal diseases, how could I not know about it? Rabies was what made dogs go crazy and want to bite you.

  She shook me something fierce, rattling my head on my neck. My teeth clinked and I bit my tongue. “Ow!”

  “Why don’t you listen, Cassie? Damn it!”

  “Daddy s–said there’s no such thing as vampires,” I stammered.

  She stopped and stared at me, confusion in her eyes. I didn’t know why I’d said it — it had nothing to do with what was happening except that maybe I’d made some sort of connection between the bat and vampires — but I took advantage of the break to plead with her. “Please, don’t tell Mama.”

  “Cassandra Lynn—”

  “No, please!”

  “I have to, you know that.”

  She dragged me into the house, leaving Ben Nicholas to nibble grass on the lawn. By the time she had my heel cleaned up and coated with ointment and a bandage, she’d calmed back down again. At least she wasn’t screaming anymore and looking like she might suddenly explode. Though I could tell by the way she held her jaw that she was still very angry with me.

  Through my tears, I continued to beg her not to tell on me.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, Cassie, I really don’t. And please stop crying. It’s not going to work on me, young lady.”

  “Wh–what are you g–g–going to do with the bat?”

  She told me to stay inside the house, but of course I watched from between the railing posts on the porch as she used the shovel to pick its mangled body up and drop it into a little plastic bag which used to hold Ben Nicholas’s treats, which she’d dumped out on the lawn. Blood was leaking from its crushed head, from its ears and its tiny nostrils. One of its gray eyes was swollen open and its tiny wing had been broken.

  After she washed her hands, Miss Ronica packed us all up — Ben Nicholas and Shinji included — and drove us in her tiny, noisy, smelly gas car to the nearest animal hospital.

  “They’ll test it for diseases,” she told me on the way there. “I’ll bet you anything it was sick. Why else would it just be lying there on the ground in the middle of the day?”

  She made me stay in the car in the hot sun with the windows down so I wouldn’t fry my brains. I didn’t argue, just held Ben Nicholas on my lap and petted him w
hile he panted and Shinji stood on the seat and looked out the window and sniffed the air every time someone passed by us with some kind of animal, like a cat or dog or turtle. He didn’t bark even once, not even when the parrot went by and made me jump when it squawked, “Hello!”

  When Miss Ronica got back into the car, she whispered, “I hope and pray to God it wasn’t sick.” Then she started it up and backed it out of the parking spot.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Home.”

  “When will we know?”

  She was quiet for a moment, her eyes glancing up at me in the mirror, then back down to the road. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking just by looking at her eyes. Finally, she said, “They told me a day or two for the results. Your parents could probably run the test in their own lab and know within an hour.”

  “No! Please!”

  “I won’t tell them, Cassie. Not yet.” Her face softened. “Look, I know things have been really rough on you these past few weeks with, you know, stuff. And your folks splitting up like that is just messed up. Anyway, I can’t even begin to imagine how hard it is for all of you. Especially you. But having said that, you have to try harder, Cassie. The last thing they need right now is something else to stress them out — especially your mom.”

  She exhaled noisily. “But if that bat was sick, then you know I have no choice but to tell them. God, I should anyway. I could lose my job for keeping it a secret.”

  “You won’t,” I said confidently.

  She slapped the steering wheel, making me jump. “Why I let you talk me into keeping it a secret—”

  “You promised!”

  “First of all, I didn’t promise. Second of all, you should be worrying more about the shots than what your parents might do to you.”

  My heart fluttered in alarm. “What shots?”

  “In your stomach.”

  I could sense her anger returning, and I couldn’t understand why she’d be mad about that. She wasn’t the one who’d been bitten; she wasn’t the one who’d have to get any shots.

  “Big ones with big needles,” she continued. “And they hurt like hell, too, Cass. But you’d have to get them soon, before you start getting sick. Once you start getting sick—”