Postcards

I ran into Philip Gould in front of his old house later that week. I was taking an evening walk, working on my redeemable element game, when I saw him standing in the road with a shovel. I thought he might be missing the sugar maple, but when I got closer I realized he was scraping at a dead rabbit in the road. When he saw me he stopped working and said, in lieu of a greeting, that he’d seen the rabbit hit by a car earlier in the day and had to do something about it.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

“We had a rabbit in the yard for years. We put food out sometimes. I think this might be the one.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Beth is in the hospital.”

“Oh, no.”

“She had a stroke. A minor one. They think she’s going to be all right.” He shook his head. “There’s no way of knowing for sure,” he said. “About the rabbit, I mean.”

I almost said that I’d seen lots of rabbits around Duck Woods, but it wouldn’t have been true. The rabbit in the road was so smushed I had to look away. I told him I would be thinking about him and Beth. Philip nodded and went back to his work, lifting as much of the rabbit as he could into a shoebox.

I walked the entire perimeter of Duck Woods—the length of Founders Avenue, left on Huron, which follows the river, left again on Jefferson, which skirts the railroad tracks back up to Todd Lane—but when I got home I could still see that bloody rabbit in my mind.

There were two postcards in the mail. The first one was from my brother. On the back of a photograph of the Pioneer Cabin Tree in Calaveras Big Trees State Park, he’d written, “I loved your postcard.” The photo was an old one, black and white, from the time when cars were allowed to drive through the tunnel carved into the tree. The postcard showed a Ford Model T in the tunnel, which was clever. My brother had always been jealous that our mother taught me to drive. “You got her best years,” he used to say. And it was true.

I was suddenly so tired I closed the door and sat down right there in the front hall. That part of the house always makes me feel detached, unmoored. Someone else might have tried to meditate, but I can’t. Hester came over and sniffed my knee, then circled behind me, bumping the side of her body against my back. She circled and purred until I stood up. Hester wasn’t alive when my mother died, but I swear she doesn’t like the front hall either. I got her as a kitten a few years afterward and named her for Hestia, goddess of family and home. Hestia was the daughter of Rhea, who, it’s interesting to note, had no particular activity under her control.

The front hall isn’t large, it’s more of a vestibule. If you stand at the front door and look into the house, there is a table and mirror to the right, a center hallway in front of you leading to the living room and kitchen at the back of the house, and to the left is the dining room. The staircase begins in the hall and rises to the left to a landing edged with a balustrade, then turns right up to the second-floor hallway. Off that hallway are three bedrooms and a bathroom. The bedroom I’ve used since my mother died overlooks the front yard. It was my brother’s, and other than taking down his posters so that the walls are bare, I’ve never decorated it. When Balzac was a poor writer in Paris he lived in a garret and inscribed on his bare walls notes on the things he wanted to own one day. “Rosewood paneling.” “Picture by Raphael.” I haven’t even done that.

I wondered if my brother knew the Pioneer Cabin Tree had fallen a few years ago, felled by a storm. It shattered on impact, but scientists estimated it was more than a thousand years old. I put the postcard on top of my father’s tree sheets and decided to see the whole episode as progress.

The second postcard was from Leo.