rabbit bone pink

“You sure you don’t want to keep this place, for your family?” The real estate agent’s gaze wafts up to the off-white popcorn ceiling in the living room. She measures the length of the living room, then retracts the tape into its holder with a snap. 

Sathya stands at the window overlooking the driveway and watches the quiet road in front of the house, watching for the painter’s white van to appear at the bend. She has already removed the curtains and the rods from each window in the house. On one side of this window are faded black lines like wrinkles, small letters next to each - Sathya, age 6; Sathya, 7 – the lines growing closer together until they stop at age 14. The wall behind her is marked with divots and peeling blisters of paint, irritated by the rubbing of the hospital bed that her mother had slept on for the last six months of her life. On the staircase walls are holes where photos had once hung, the outlines of the frames irradiated into the sand-coloured paint by the daily appearance of the sun. All of these blemishes need to be filled in, cured, sanded and painted over before the house can be placed on the market in two days time. 

 “I’m sure.” says Sathya. Her eyes don’t move from the street outside the window. 

* * *

Sathya’s childhood home is deep in Scarborough, only an hour-long bus, rapid transit and subway ride away from Toronto proper. 42 Rainbow Centre Drive, or, as Sathya called it, 42 RC. She has only to think these syllables and her mind reproduces what she saw each time she entered the doorway into the house as a child, teen, and adult: an expanse of square tiles in the main foyer, demarked by grid lines of greying grout; on the left, a trio of doors, leading to the basement, the powder room, and the laundry room; on the right, the formal living room with creamy beige carpeting.

Once Sathya had moved out for good, her parents replaced the carpet of the entire house with honey-coloured hardwood floor. They kept the pink tile where it was, pointing to the cloud of steam perpetually surrounding the floor around their new dishwasher, the washing machine with the penchant for dancing across the laundry room during the spin cycle, and uneven powder room subfloor which never allowed a tight seal to be installed on the toilet. 

When Sathya visits 42 RC in her dreams, it is always the beige carpet on the floors instead of the wood, vacuum cleaner tracks unmarred by footprints, and the old chesterfield sofas encased in custom-made plastic covers. 

Sathya remembers the day the covers were made. She is eight years old, and a pair of long-haired Italian men arrive with sheets of plastic around gigantic rolls, that they then cut and fold and fix around the wood contours of the couches, securing them with straight pins. 

“Where did they go? Why did they take everything with them?” Sathya asks her mother after the men remove all the plastic and leave. 

“They’ll be back,” her mother says, but Sathya does not believe her, until a week later when the Italians return and outfit both the couch and the loveseat in fitted plastic covers sewn like a sari blouse. There are even separate sleeves for the cushions, with see-through zippers and a lip-like flap covering their interlocking teeth. 

“Get off there!” her mother barks at her when she tries to sit on them. “This isn’t a playground.” 

When Sathya is 11, she gets her period. Confused at first and believing that she is going to bleed every day for the rest of her life, Sathya is comforted after she confides in friends and learns that they too have periods. At school, she giggles with her friends as they learn about their bodies, the right names for everything, what to expect and why. At home, her mother asks her increasingly frantic questions each month: Why are you getting your period again? Why are you bleeding so much and using up so many pads when you’re still so young? Are you still bleeding today? Sathya knows she is being accused of something. She gets told off for writing “period started” on her wall calendar, where anyone can see it. Unable to anticipate the start of her next cycle, Sathya soils pair after pair of underwear, the dark red tear drop shaped stains not washing out even after soaking them in bleach. 

One day, Sathya leaves her panties soaking overnight in the laundry tub, forgetting to wash them in the morning before she leaves for school for the day. Her mother tells her she is a troublemaker. From then on, Sathya, twelve years old, steals quarters and loonies from her father’s coat pockets, and runs to the mall at lunch every few weeks to buy panty liners that she affixes into her underwear each morning. She takes the plastic sticky backing with her to school to discard in the bathroom there, where her mother will not find it. She hides the package of liners in the bottom of her school knapsack where they are crushed under her textbooks. Her mother finds them one day, having gone through Sathya’s bag while she was in the shower. “So you’re carrying pads around with you now,” she hisses.

Sathya visits the kitchen of 42 RC in her dreams for years, starting around the age of 12. The dream begins with her taking milk out of the fridge to add to a boiling pot of chai, or sliding a damp cloth over the countertop, collecting crumbs and debris and tipping them over the edge into her hand. At a point in each of these dreams, Sathya remembers that she needs to be at school. Waves of distress crash through her subconscious and jostle her awake, and her teeth grind together, radiating pain to points in front of her ears and on the top of her head; this ache stays with her all day. 

* * *

In high school, Sathya works at a local bookshop after school three days a week. On her working days she comes home at 8 PM, eats dinner with her family, washes and dries all of the dinner dishes, puts them away in the cupboards, and sweeps and mops each square of the pink-tiled floor. It stretches through the kitchen in one-foot squares, continuing through the breakfast area to a sliding door at the back that opens to the backyard. The backyard fence backs onto a few feet of wild grasses, then gives way to a sharp cliff. At the bottom of the cliff snakes a ravine that is tributary to the Rouge River. The house has a security system, and each time Sathya opens or closes that back sliding door, or the front door, or the side door, she hears a quiet but clear beep-beep-beep. 

Throughout her high school years, Sathya dreams she is in this kitchen and suddenly remembers that she is late to go write an exam. Just as she is about to open her mouth and state that she must leave her chores and go to school, her mouth freezes. She is unable to emit a sound. She wakes like that, with all the muscles around her mouth clenched, sweat behind her knees. It takes her several terrified seconds, eyes wide open and mouth sealed shut, before she comes into her body enough to open her lips and intake a gulp of air. 

A dining room is plopped into the floor plan of 42 RC immediately adjacent to the kitchen breakfast area, so that there are two dining tables within feet of each other, separated only by a wall and a small doorway. The kitchen side is where Sathya and her parents eat their meals every day, while the dining room, next to the living room, is for guests. On the kitchen side of the wall is a particleboard TV unit that Sathya’s dad made by hand; on the other side, in the dining room, hangs a stuffed pheasant mounted onto a wooden plate. Whenever guests are over, the pheasant glares down at them from its perch, claws curled around a walnut-coloured branch, tail resplendent, stiff and colourful, oblivious to the din of conversation and the clink of cutlery. 

The kitchen and dining room of 42 RC look out onto the backyard, an almost perfect square of grub-eaten grass with failed flower beds clinging to the edges like mould on cheese left too long in the fridge. One corner of the yard near a wild berry bush is sunken by half a foot; beneath the surface are the bones of Sathya’s pet rabbit Ricky. She got him when she was ten years old, when he was still Ethel. He became Ricky after Ethel got Lucy, the family’s other rabbit, pregnant in the middle of their first winter with them. The entire litter froze. 

“She didn’t even make them a nest,” Sathya’s mother says from behind her. She joins Sathya at the sliding door and together they watch her father’s pained grimace as he cleans the rabbit hutch out with a shovel. “She probably just pushed them out and left them on the mesh and then went back into the corner,” her mother continues. 

Even with the sliding door shut and the snow insulating sound, Sathya can hear the scraping sound of metal on metal as her dad drags a shovel along the mesh bottom of the rabbit hutch, tipping the hay, rabbit droppings, and Lucy’s litter into a garbage bag.

“Why would she do that?”

“Mothers know sometimes.” Sathya’s mother says without hesitation. Sathya doesn’t know what she means. She reads books on rabbits from the library, and comes to the conclusion that they were either born dead or Lucy had known they wouldn’t have survived the cold and did what made sense. 

There was another litter after that first one, even after Ricky moved into his own hutch. No one was completely sure how it even happened, though the rabbits had been let out to play together every now and again. It was spring and the snow was almost completely gone, the daylight lingering longer than the day before it. Sathya’s father kept finding tufts of fur in Lucy’s hutch for a few days before he made the discovery: seven plump baby bunnies. Sathya stared at the litter with awe. Their eyes were sealed shut and they nestled together inside an empty clementine crate, limbs moving in irregular spasm, encircled by hay, and the tufts of fur that Lucy had pulled from her own belly. Sathya recalled the books she had read from the last time, and left piles of shredded newspaper in a corner, cheering quietly when Lucy added it to the nest. She brought out bowls of warm milk and corn cereal, watching from a distance as Lucy licked the bowl clean and then returned to the clementine crate to nestle in with her babies. Carrot skins and celery stems and the blossom and stem ends of tomatoes all made their way into the hutch for Lucy, along with her usual kibble and lettuce. 

Sathya thought Lucy had been eating one of the stem-end or blossom-end tomatoes the day that her parents said Lucy had to go. She was watching the hutch from the kitchen sliding door, as she did every day after school since the litter had been born, and saw pink on Lucy’s mandibles as she delicately moved around the hutch. Lucy stopped and Sathya could see her chewing, pink dribbling down her chin. Lucy moved her head into the clementine crate, clasped something in her mouth, and pulled her head out, chewing again, more pink, trailing down her neck and onto the white fur on her chest. 

Sathya screamed for her father. 

“Don’t look,” her father said after he returned from the yard to get a garbage bag, but Sathya ran out, slippers squelching in the lawn. 

To Sathya, it looked like tomatoes. The pulp and skin of tomatoes, not baby bunnies that had been growing and thriving, that were almost ready to jump over the sides of the clementine crate and start padding around the hutch in exploration. The seeds of tomatoes tinged pink from the flesh and juice of the fruit, not the bones of seven baby rabbits stained with watery blood.  

Her mother said Lucy must have gone crazy. “Gaandi thay,” she said over dinner that evening. 

“Mom,” said Sathya, a quake in her voice, “I read in a book that you’re not supposed to touch the baby bunnies when they are small. The mommy bunny doesn’t like it.”

Her mother shrugged. Sathya imagined her, in a fit of tenderness, stroking the downy fur of one of the babies and igniting Lucy’s ire.  

They gave Lucy to one of Sathya’s school friends that summer. Her parents said it would have been paap, a sin, to have this keep happening. Lucy was dead by the fall. Over the phone, through tears, the friend said over and over that she was sorry, while Sathya stayed silent. 

Ricky lived to be seven years old, passing away the summer that Sathya was seventeen. Sathya’s father took the hutch apart and stacked the rotting plywood on the curb. The grass where the hutch had stood was lush for years afterwards, the accumulation of seven years of rabbit poop that slipped through the metal grating enriching the soil, making the grass a deeper green than the rest of the yard.

* * *

After high school, Sathya moves out of town for University through a combination of truth (“I need to be in a good co-op program), embellishment (“Toronto’s programs are of declining quality”), and outright lies (“I intend to go to law school”). She moves into a tiny apartment on the top floor of an old home in Kitchener, near the University of Waterloo campus, with a roommate from North Bay. They share a kitchen and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub, and write out shower schedules on a dry erase board in the kitchen in elaborate script. Sathya’s skin tingles the first time she goes to the movies with friends on a whim, aware of not having to find a pay phone to ask anyone if she can go, or to report on when she will be on her way home. In the grocery store around the corner from her apartment, the colours of the produce are brilliant. Once a week, Sathya lugs a garbage bag full of clothes to the laundromat, and her coins clinking into the machine sing in glorious melody.  

Sathya’s dreams do not abate. They invade her subconscious, slithering from a point deep inside her stomach as she sleeps, and follow her into her school day like an odour. In the dreams, Sathya is in the kitchen of 42 RC, wiping the counter; she remembers she has to leave to write an important exam back at Waterloo. She is able to speak now, and proclaims she must leave. Her father and mother ignore her, laugh, or sneer. Sathya states she is going to leave on her own, and will drive herself. She sees the car keys hanging from the wooden “Letters, Bills, Misc” mail sorter with the key loops at the bottom, and starts towards them. She freezes on the spot; she can see the car keys, they are so close, but she is immobilized. 

And Sathya wakes, body stiff, arms pinned to sides, jaw clenched, a scream trapped in her throat.

* * *

The main floor powder room of 42 RC has the same pink tile as the kitchen and the hallway. One day in the summer after she has graduated from University and moved back home, Sathya retreats into it, pushing the lock just before her mother gets to the door. She plunks herself down on the floor in front of the vanity cabinet and opens the doors, looking for something to read, as her mother bangs on the door. Behind the extra rolls of toilet paper and old No Frills Grocery flyers, she finds a jar of green hair gel, a flytail comb, and the Mach III disposable razor that her dad keeps here to trim under his nose, where he says the light is better. 

Sathya picks up the razor and feels its weight in her hand as she examines the grips in its handle. It has been six weeks since Sathya received her degree, moved back home, started a full-time job in Toronto, and told her parents she will not be going through with the arranged marriage they have planned for her. She has, in fact, been living with her boyfriend, for the past year in Waterloo, and she intends to move in with him in Toronto the following month. 

“Do you know what izzat means?” Sathya’s mother’s voice is barely muffled by the door. “Do you know what it means? There’s no word like it in English. It’s more than shame, its worse. It’s like you took all of your father’s clothes off of him, and pushed him into a crowd of people! And everyone looks at him, without his clothes!” 

The pink tile is cool under Sathya’s legs. She cracks the sides of the razor and removes three miniscule blades. The pounding behind the door stops. 

“I’m getting a bobby pin,” her mother warns from behind the door. 

Sathya looks at the razor blades, only slightly larger than a pin, and realizes that the triple blade action touted in the Mach III commercials, while working together would give a smooth close shave, individually would not do more than scratch the skin on her wrists. She pricks the tip of her left index finger with the short end one of the blades and watches a tiny, iridescent dome of maroon, black and red emerge. The door to the powder room clicks softly, and her mother enters. Sathya’s mother spots the blood. Her eyes narrow. “What do you think you are doing?” she asks.

The next day, Sathya’s mother swallows half a bottle of Paxil.

“I’m calling 911. She’s not getting up.” Sathya’s father says, as he picks up the phone and starts dialing. 

“I just want to sleep. The rest of the bottle is there.” Sathya’s mother slurs, nodding her head in the direction of her nightstand before her eyes close again. 

Sathya’s dad glares at her as the sound of sirens approach. The paramedics come upstairs and shimmy her mother onto a blanket, cradle her in the blanket into a wheelchair, push the wheelchair from her room to the top of the stairs and then inch the chair down the stairs, one lifting the bottom, the other holding the top, as Sathya and her father follow. The paramedics take several moments to affix an IV to her mother’s limp arm as a fire truck wails up the street and then leaves, and then push her out of the house and load her into the back of the ambulance. 

A pair of policemen come inside to where Sathya and her dad are. “Does anyone need to speak to us?” they ask. Sathya looks at the cop who asked the question. Her dad looks at her. Sathya looks down at the pink tile. The cops leave. 

Sathya’s mother stays at the hospital for two nights on an IV, where she is admitted to the psychiatric unit. Her father is allowed to see her the day after she is admitted, and picks up burgers on the way back for dinner for the two of them. “She doesn’t belong there,” he says, burger wrapper crinkling in his hand. 

“Yes, she does.”

“The others there, they are crazy! Some of them are screaming, and this one lady across from your mum, she just sits there and stares and drools. Your mother doesn’t belong there.” He throws down his half-eaten burger and stands up. “She’s coming home tomorrow afternoon. She’s fine. I told them this is just a family matter, and it’s done now.”

When Sathya returns from work the next day, her mother is home, sleeping upstairs, and her father watches television. He had told extended family that her mother had been hospitalized due to a reaction to medication, so an aunt had dropped off dinner for all of them: eggplant curry, fresh roti, fragrant rice and a thin daal meant to help her mother regain her strength. The next day, Sathya calls the psychiatrist, Dr. Marisol Riaz, from work after Googling her name from the new bottle of antidepressants her mother is now on. Sathya cups her hand around her mouth and the mouthpiece and leaves a message on Dr. Riaz’s voicemail, pleading to be called back, saying it is urgent. It works.

“I can’t discuss patient files,” the psychiatrist begins, her Pilipino accent rich in Sathya’s ears, “but I can refer you to get help.”

“Is this my fault?” Sathya blurts. 

“Your mother sees you as one of her fingers,” Dr. Riaz sighs, “so it is as distressing to her when you don’t do as she says, as it is if her own finger does not move when her brain commands it to.”

Sathya and her mother do not speak, even while living in the same house. Extended family members learn about Sathya’s partner. They help plan the wedding that will take place the following year. In each of the wedding photos, the corners of Sathya’s mother’s mouth turn down.

After the wedding, Sathya moves out of 42 RC and into an apartment with her new husband in the west end of Toronto. They take classes and try new restaurants and go for hikes wearing matching boots caked with mud, burrs stuck between the treads. 

The dreams continue. Sathya is in the kitchen of 42 RC but does not wipe any counters, and makes no chai. In these dreams, Sathya strikes her mother, digging her nails into her eyes. She grabs her mother by her hair and slams her head into the pink tile repeatedly, then pulls her head up slowly to assess the damage, with a worry that she’s gone too far. In the dream, Sathya’s mother’s smiles back at her, skin unbroken, hair in perfect place. 

Sathya goes to therapy. Weeks turn to months. She breaks up a thing she thought was whole and disassembles it into smaller and smaller pieces, sorting the pieces into things to keep, things to discard, and things to look at more closely. 

Months churn to years.

Sathya asks her mother for recipes for meals her grandmother had made. She writes down each step in the recipes, and calls her mother to troubleshoot the results. Her mother mispronounces her husband’s surname many times and jokes about shortening it. Sathya explains to her mother the significance of each syllable in the name and assures her that she is able to say it right, and she does. Sathya’s mother gets cancer. It goes into remission. Sathya has a child, then two more. Her mother’s cancer returns.

Sathya’s mother palliates for five months and three days. On the fourth day, Sathya sits at the end of her mother’s bed in 42 RC, the time growing longer between each of her mother’s sleeping breaths. Then, her mother’s head slumps to the side and she breathes no more.

* * *

“You sure you don’t want to keep this place, for your family?” The real estate agent’s gaze wafts up to the off-white popcorn ceiling in the living room. She measures the length of the living room, then retracts the tape into its holder with a snap. 

“I’m sure.” says Sathya. 

“This is a great location. If you didn’t stay here, I could get a renter for you easy. The house is good, the bones are good, you’d have a lot of space if you decided to stay here yourself. Room for the family. Maybe do some updating.” The agent points her chin at the foyer, at the pink tile. 

Sathya steps out of the living room to the front door of 42 RC. She looks at the walls, picturing them torn down to make an open concept floor. The tile could be replaced with the same wood from the living room. She thinks of her father, settling into his bungalow in the retirement village, the payments for it pending. She looks at the pink tile stretching from the door to the backyard, big enough for an addition, or a pool. The grid of the grout lines blur in and out of focus and all she sees is pink, dusty pink, peachy pink, watery pink. 

Sathya shakes her head. “Too much work.”

“You wouldn’t be doing it yourself. I know some great guys.”

Sathya steps back into the living room. The sun shines onto the honey coloured floors, warming them under her feet. 

Sathya remembers the final dream she’s had of this house. It was after she was married, but years before her children were born. It starts the same way as the others: she is wiping the countertop, her parents are there, the chai and the exam are all the same. In this dream, Sathya turns away from her parents and strides out of the kitchen to the front door, the pink tile cool beneath her feet. She puts on her shoes and feels the dented brass doorknob in her hand. She twists it and swings open the door. beep-beep-beep. 

“If you held onto it, I could look into some financing, and it wouldn’t take long to get people in to start working.” The real estate agent is looking at her. 

Sathya shakes her head. 

“Why not?”

“This isn’t my house.” Sathya looks at the walls and the floors and out the window and says, “This is my mother’s house.”