I let myself in. Bunny’s collection of antique glass fishing floats still hung in the entryway window, casting splashes of blue and green light against the walls. I expected to hear her voice. I wanted her to rush in from the kitchen and hug me.
“Hey, Bits!” I shouted when I couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “It’s me!”
“Hey, kiddo!” Bitsie yelled back. “I’m in here.” I headed toward her voice and found her in the den, under the oak desk in the corner, mumbling to herself.
“So if this goes there, then that goes . . . Where the fuck does that go?” She backed out, holding a power cable. “Where does this belong?” she asked.
“The printer?”
“I think so. It came loose when I was dusting, but now I can’t find the right whatsit for the doohickey.”
“Here,” I said, scooting under the desk, “I’ll take a look for the whatsit.”
Bitsie laughed and handed me the cord. “Thank you! I spent all morning writing a letter that won’t print.”
“Who are you writing to?” I asked, pressing my cheek to the wall so I could thread the cable up behind the desk.
“About what?”
“My opinion. I write to him every week,” Bitsie said, like it was the most normal thing in the world. I knew Bitsie had marched for women’s liberation, gay liberation, marriage equality, and health care reform. On the wall in her reading room were framed pages of her FBI file, from back when the government couldn’t figure out if women’s rights activists were a threat to society. But for some reason, I hadn’t understood the texture of her conviction. The continuity of it.
“Every week?” I pushed the cable through the gap.
“How’s he supposed to know how to represent me if he doesn’t know what I think?” Bitsie said, grabbing my elbow to help me up. “You don’t write your representatives?”
“I haven’t,” I said, and felt suddenly ashamed. I was an eager voter, I signed petitions for causes I cared about, but I’d never gone beyond that.
“Democracy works best when we speak up,” Bitsie said.
I pulled the printer away from the wall and got the wire plugged into the correct whatsit. “There you go,” I said.
“Will it print?”
“Where’s your letter? Let’s see.”
Bitsie leaned over the desk and pushed the mouse around slowly, until she found the window with the letter. She hit print, and we could hear the paper queuing up.
“Thank you, sweetie!” She raised her hand for a high five. I slapped it. “Here to sew?”
“Yeah,” I said, hoping my jitters weren’t apparent.
“It’s just some curtains. You can figure it out, right?” Bitsie walked me to Bunny’s sewing room, but she stopped at the door. “I’ll let you go in on your own,” she said, eyes damp, and I realized she probably hadn’t been in the room since it happened. I wasn’t sure if I could handle going in either, but I felt like Bitsie needed me to, like she knew the room needed company.
“I’ll come see you before I go,” I said, giving her shoulder a squeeze.
“You better, kiddo,” she said.
I opened the door. It still creaked. Once, I told Bunny I’d bring over some WD-40 to fix it. “I don’t know why we’re all so concerned with dulling the music of life,” she said, waving my offer away.
Nan told me that Bitsie came home from Publix and found Bunny, fallen from her chair, draped in the pale blue chambray she’d been sewing into curtains. The fabric lay across her worktable. I picked it up, and it smelled like the rosewater she dabbed on her wrists every morning.
I found a sketch on the back of an envelope with measurements written out. Bunny’s careful pencil strokes made a rectangle with a Greek key pattern at the border and an X in the middle. A few yards of natural colored linen were folded neatly next to the machine. When I unfolded the fabric, a plastic template shaped like an anchor fell out, and I understood what she’d wanted the curtains to be.
At Bunny’s wake, all I could think about was the moment right before they closed the casket on my dad. I couldn’t bear the idea of not kissing him goodbye one last time, so I ran over to hug his body. Too solid, like he’d been filled with cement. I kissed his forehead, and the cold shocked me. No blood running under his skin. I knew he was dead. I understood what dead meant. But it was only a concept until that moment. He was a skeleton. He wasn’t anything more than bones hiding in flesh. The thick makeup they’d painted on his face lingered on my lips no matter how hard I tried to wipe it off.
Nothing about that memory faded with time. It hovered at the edges, ready to hijack my mind. So I couldn’t say goodbye to Bunny. I couldn’t bear to see her body, still and cold. When I went back to Rochester, I tried to erase the fact that her funeral even happened. To keep Bunny alive. In my mind, this whole time, she’d been in her sewing room, making things.
Her unfinished curtains were the worst kind of proof. I swished the chambray between my fingers and fought to keep the feeling of ChapStick on my lips from turning into something it wasn’t.
I rolled up my sleeves and flipped on the record player. Patsy Cline was halfway through “She’s Got You.” I smiled. We both loved that song. But when Patsy sang the refrain about the memory of her love not letting her go, I realized this was probably the album Bunny listened to last. Who turned the record player off? Bitsie? Nan? One of the paramedics? I could see everything that must have happened in my head, like I was sitting in the corner, powerless to help. Patsy wailing, Bunny falling to the floor. Bitsie’s screams; sobbing while she called Nan. Stiffness setting into Bunny’s graceful fingers. The wait for the coroner when the paramedics couldn’t revive her.
They said she didn’t have pain. Aneurysm. Instant, Nan told me. The fallen fabric, pins in her sleeve for ready access, it was obvious she was in the middle of her project. She hadn’t stopped to nurse a headache.
I heard Bitsie slide the door to the patio. Could she hear the music? Was it making her remember? I switched the record for Ella Fitzgerald, and the images in my mind switched over too.
The opening chords of “Blue Skies.” Bunny helping me sew my prom dress. Teal organza. Sequins everywhere. We tried to scat like Ella. With most people I was too embarrassed to be goofy, but in Bunny’s sewing room, I felt like the person I was supposed to be.
I sewed the rod pockets to the tops of Bunny’s curtains, and pressed them carefully on the ironing board, using the spray can of Niagara Sizing to make them stiff and smooth. I sewed tubes of bias-cut linen for the appliqué border, but I could only find a few pins in Bunny’s stuffed strawberry cushion.
She had Royal Dansk butter cookie tins stacked on the shelves on the wall. No labels to mark them, so I opened each one. They still smelled sweet. Buttons, ribbons, scrap squares, zippers—each organized in their own tin. Bunny used to save the pretzel-shaped cookies for me. The kind with sugar that looked like salt. I swore they tasted better than all the other shapes.
No pins. The stack of tins on the next shelf housed her sewing machine feet, upholstery piping, and a vast collection of silk thread for embroidery.
There were three tins on top of the oak bookcase. I opened the first one. It was full of pretzel-shaped cookies in their white pleated paper cups. The other two tins were the same. She kept saving them. For me.
I sat on the floor and hugged the stack of tins to my chest. When I left, I assumed I stopped mattering, but there were so many cookies’ worth of thinking about me. I ate one, crunching sugar crystals between my teeth while I listened to Ella sing about poor Miss Otis. Three whole tins was too long for me to have stayed away. I wished I’d had the chance to tell Bunny how much she meant to me.
I slid down to lie next to the spot where she left us. I knew it was terrible, but it felt good to lie there, eating Bunny’s pretzel-shaped cookies, pretending her spirit was still in the room.
The same way my brain could imagine the most horrible scenarios in vivid Technicolor—Nan getting attacked by an intruder, Bark drowning in the pool, Eric twisted and tortured in a car accident when he was late coming home—I could imagine good scenes too, even impossible ones.
“Do you still enjoy sewing?” Imaginary Bunny asked sweetly. Without pressure. Without poking at the fact that I’d thrown my dreams away on a bad marriage.
“I think I do,” I said.
“Would you mind helping me?” she asked. “With the curtains?”
“Of course.” I said. “Happy to.”
Bunny was the one who taught me how to sew. The sewing machine I left in Rochester was my twelfth-birthday gift from Bunny and Bitsie. She’d encouraged me to dream about big things. I was going to move to Manhattan to be a costume designer at the Metropolitan Opera. My father took me to New York City to see Carmen the year before he died, and all I could think about for weeks after was that beautiful red dress. When Carmen was on stage in that dress, it was impossible to look anywhere else. I wanted to be the person who designed that kind of spectacle, who imagined it and made it so. Bunny made me feel like it wasn’t past my reach.
“What are the curtains for?” I asked. I never even applied for an internship at the Met. I was too scared to fail, and Eric was a great excuse for not even trying.
“They’re for Bitsie’s reading room,” Imaginary Bunny said. “To match those throw pillows she likes.”
“You be the art director, I’ll be the hands,” I told her. It’s what she said to me when she helped sew costumes for three seasons of plays by the St. Lucie Senior Citizen Thespian Brigade so I’d have a portfolio of work for college.
“Come back again tomorrow?” she asked.
I nodded.
“You can bring your dog.” She smiled, the beautiful creases around her eyes amplifying her warmth. If anyone else offered the same, I’d make excuses about how Bark wasn’t that kind of a dog. But Bark would have loved Bunny. She would have quieted the unrest in him the same way she had for me.
There was a knock at the door. I opened my eyes, and Bunny was gone. Bitsie came in, stunned when she saw me lying on the floor.
“I am so sorry,” I shrieked, jumping to my feet. My heart pounded too hard. The room went black until my balance steadied.
Bitsie’s eyes welled up.
I hugged her. “I am so sorry.”
“Oh, honey,” she said, hugging me hard. “I should have known this wasn’t good for you.”
“No,” I said. “It was. It is.”
“We can move her sewing machine to the living room. Or Nan’s house. Or you don’t have to finish the curtains.”
“I do have to,” I said, tears dripping from my chin. “I need this.” I wanted to make those curtains for Bunny. Like penance for being gone. Like a tribute. “I never got to say goodbye.”
“Okay.” Bitsie nodded. “Okay. But if it stops being alright, you let me know.”
I could see the tremble in her cheek. The fear in her eyes. She was working hard to pretend she wasn’t unnerved.
“Coffee?” she asked. “I need coffee.”
I worried she’d have a difficult time looking at me, that maybe I’d traumatized her, but Bitsie set up the coffee maker and chatted away about mermaid class, like nothing had happened.
“It’s basically water aerobics,” she said, pouring soy milk in the little cow pitcher. “We don’t have breathing tubes. Or tails. But it’s nice to dance in the water again.”
“I could make you a tail,” I said, the words coming before they had time to bounce around my brain. “Even if Nan insists on a bake sale. I could just make you a tail.” I expected her to say no. That she wouldn’t want to trouble me. That they were only in it for the exercise, and don’t be silly.
“Could you?” she said, her face so suddenly bright.
“I can try.” I’d made her sad, but maybe I could make her happy too.
We sat at the kitchen table, drank our coffee, sketched mermaid tails on napkins, and I started to feel like making a mermaid calendar might be something I could handle.