Orwell's Luck (9 page)

Where else had I seen this color, tousled and shining in the sun?

Winter and the woodpile both were nearly gone. The snow that fell on Saturday melted into raindrops before it could reach the ground. I brought in the last of the hickory logs and laid them in the fireplace, where they complained hissing and sizzling to the kindling, but eventually took full responsibility for the flame.

My father had rented a video for the evening. My mother baked oatmeal-raisin cookies. My sister insisted on turning out all the lights, the better to imagine being at the movies. I flopped down on the floor on a pile of pillows I'd pilfered from the couch.

The movie was the story of a family that sets out on a journey to make a new life. Some of it was funny. Some of it was sad. Some of it I didn't understand. It made me think of Orwell and how he'd wandered far to make his home with me.

I must have been pretty tired, because when it was over, instead of jumping up like I always do and heading off to do something else, I stayed on the floor as the credits rolled.

I never usually look at movie credits because I never know who those people are. They might as well be lottery winners, as far as I'm concerned. But as the tiny white letters went whizzing by, one name among them caught my eye. "Orwell Lapin," it read. "Second unit assistant to the associate director."

Interestingly,
lapin
is French for rabbit. Even so, I would have dismissed this sighting as a coincidence, had it not been for the message that followed Mr. Lapin's name. Before disappearing into the top of my television screen, it said,

FEELING BETTER THANK YOU
THANK GRANNY TOO.

"What?" I said. "Did you see that?"

The sputter of the fireplace was the sole reply. The others had already left the room. I stopped the tape, rewound the credits, and played them back again. There was no Orwell Lapin to be found.

Had I imagined it?

Or had Orwell begun leaving me messages the way my mother used to do, back during all those years when I was little, at my old school, hiding notes in my books and my lunch box and pinned inside my coat?

Had there been other vanishing messages that I had missed? Messages like my mother's "You're a great kid—I love you" and "Here's a bunny hug—be good today" scrawled into the fog of a frosted windowpane early on a winter day or drawn in the dust beneath my feet?

I advised my brain to pay closer attention.

The weekend passed with little else to remember it by. The church was dressed in purple to mark the countdown to Easter. My father and my mother worked on the house. In a brief, closely supervised experiment, my sister and I let her cat climb inside Orwell's cage.

Orwell didn't seem to mind.

On Monday, the people who lived across the street became the people who never were. A moving van, painted with the outline of an ancient sailing ship, backed into their lucky driveway with great lurching trucklike squeals, explosive hisses, and loud self-important clatters as I was heading off for school. It was gone with their stuff before I got back home.

The people across the street had high-tailed it out of there like people in a hurry. They left a birdbath, garden tools, and a perfectly good trampoline standing in their backyard. They left hoses attached to their faucets. They left trash cans on the curb.

The rusted tricycle that had lain undisturbed in their front bushes for the better part of a year continued its nesting for a few days more, until a real estate man in a dark blue suit wrestled it out one somber and drizzly morning and jammed it into the trunk of his car.

For several days I watched as newspapers piled up on the lawn. I don't take things that aren't mine. I never have and I never would. But even though I had n't paid for these particular papers, I figured they almost belonged to me, and anyway, nobody else seemed to want them.

Crows rose with the sun the day I made a lightning dash across the street to my absent neighbors' house. The breaking dawn behind me reflected from the windows like nearly identical watercolors neatly arranged for sale, each made by painting magenta pink right on top of azure blue while the blue was very wet. Bathed in this heavenly light, I nervously knelt to scoop the papers into my arms.

They say someday you have to pay for all your sins. I say you start paying right away.

Two of the stolen newspapers were wet. I hoped it was from rain, but it could have been from passing dogs. In any case, the soggy pages shredded when I tried to turn them. Another paper, barely two days in the yard, had already become a habitat for spiders. I dropped it in a trash can the moment I got the news.

One paper remained. I flipped back to the comics page, spied the smile face on Scorpio's numbers and set to work deciphering. It soon declared

A FRIEND PAYS YOU AN IMPORTANT COMPLIMENT.

What friend? What sort of compliment? This didn't sound like Orwell. This was just an ordinary, luck-of-the-draw horoscope, and despite its goofy smile face, I had drawn a dud.

Oh, well.
C'est la vie!
I thought. That's life in the funny papers. I tossed the paper on the counter and prepared to feed my rabbit.

Whether Orwell's legs were improving, I couldn't tell, but his appetite certainly was. His demand for lettuce, celery, spinach, carrots, and radishes was beginning to be noticed.

"Shouldn't your rabbit be eating alfalfa pellets?" my mother asked, leading the family into the kitchen to forage for breakfast, just as I was attempting to leave.

"He doesn't like that stuff," I replied. "He likes fresh food."

"Fresh food is expensive," my mother pointed out.

"Many people consider rabbits to be fresh food," my father chimed in, picking up the newspaper I had provided.

"Ugh!" my sister said as she flopped into a chair. "Who would eat a rabbit?"

I withdrew from the discussion in order to deliver the goods.

I knew it was true that rabbits aren't well positioned in the food chain. Many creatures find them easy pickings. Clearly, when the world began, the luck of the draw hadn't gone their way. But surely there's a reason rabbits are the way they are. I mean, you have to believe in something, don't you? Even if it doesn't have a name.

A rabbit is an extraordinarily beautiful creature. Unlike a turtle or a spider or a moose, a rabbit is a delight to observe. A rabbit's fur, its ears, its nose, its tail—all are uniquely constructed and arranged. A rabbit's face is very pleasant. It makes you happy just to see it. A rabbit is soft and gentle and begs to be hugged. Just to touch one feels like love.

Maybe this is the reason a rabbit isn't very rugged, why it's "not put together especially well," as the new veterinarian had said. Maybe, to make a rabbit, God was willing to sacrifice durability for beauty.

In this respect, a rabbit has more in common with a painting or a poem or a symphony than with a rhinoceros or a horseshoe crab. To be sure, God made them all, but with the rabbit, he took his time.

It had to be: God sent Orwell to me.

In the sunlight streaming through the window by his cage, Orwell lifted his face from the vegetarian feast I'd prepared him, wiggled his nose appreciatively, and opened his mouth to release a tiny, rabbit sized burp.

"You're welcome," I said.

Back in the kitchen, the rest of my family was eating less nutritiously. Cereal. Juice. Lightly buttered toast. And for the grownups, coffee weakened with skim milk.

I sat across from my father, whose face was hidden by the paper I'd procured. He must have been reading the sports section, because the back of the sports section is where they put the weather, and it was the weather page that faced me as I poured Frosted Mini-Wheats into a bowl.

There is so much information on the weather page. There is a map with color-coded temperatures. A detailed forecast for the city, the area, the state, and the country for the day that lies ahead, plus a long-term guess for five. There are highs and lows for more than a hundred cities. Pictures, sort of like on a horoscope, showing the phases of the moon. Charts having to do with air quality, humidity, precipitation, river stages, lake levels, and what was going on outdoors a year ago today. There are even phone numbers to call to get more information!

Finally, there's a friendly little paragraph written by a weather forecaster about making the weather a part of your life—as if anyone could escape it! This time the paragraph was about lightning and how many times it kills people.

A university reported that three hundred unlucky people die every year from lightning strikes. The weather service said it's a hundred and six. The safety council said it's exactly one hundred. The national climate data center said it's only forty-one.

The weather forecaster said he didn't know which experts to believe, but even if the highest number were the one that's true, the odds of being killed by lightning were three million to one, better odds, he said, than your chance of winning the state lottery, where the odds on any given day are five million to one. Since I'd seen the lottery strike right across the street, is it any wonder that I'm a little jumpy during thunderstorms?

Then, as sudden as a bolt ka-blamming from the blue, brain lightning struck the breakfast table. I spied some words on the weather page that I'd failed to see before. Without warning or apology, I jerked the paper from my father's hand.

"Hey!" he said, spitting Grape Nuts on the table. "I was reading that!"

"Hold on a minute," I responded impatiently. "I'll give it back."

There it was, a single, tiny line of type, just above the giant ad for trucks and minivans, and just beneath the heading "Special Bulletin." Seven nearly microscopic words, like seven dwarfs, standing in a single line, saying

THE WAIT IS PART OF THE CURE.

There on the weather page I'd found a phrase in a familiar tone having nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with recuperating rabbits.

The paralyzed Orwell was on the move, jumping from the comics page and its superstitious horoscopes to the sports section's popular weather page.

On the move and moving up, on the rise in his personal career, Orwell was no longer to be found among fortunetellers. He had joined the ranks of the weather forecasters!

Time leapt. February, the shortest month, like the shortest kid in class, was pushed aside by bully March.

Both Orwell and my days at school improved. In the mornings, I'd awake to find my rabbit occupying a different corner of the cage. He seemed proud of his achievement. At school, my teachers usually remembered me from the day before. I started sitting with the same two girls at lunch. They were kind of quiet, but because they were nice to me, I liked them.

Band, P.E., math, and English were a breeze. History had begun to interest me. Science class was cool. Soon we were to submit ideas for projects for the science fair. As for French, well,
mon chéri,
let me put it this way: Whatever grade I got wouldn't even count. The course for which I'd volunteered was just an entertainment.

The tousle-haired boy smiled when I passed him in the hall, but I couldn't tell if he was smiling like you would smile at a friend, or if he was smiling the way some people smile at people they feel sorry for.

But just as the fog was lifting on my junior high career, and barely two months after an extended Christmas holiday, they closed the whole school down for what they called Spring Break, even though winter was still hanging around.

Sometimes the world makes no sense. If you don't like something, it seems like you have to do it all the time. But when you start to like it, then you have to stop. Riding the bus home in the middle of the week, knowing that I wasn't going back to school for a while, I felt like I'd been fired.

Everything keeps changing all the time.

To help make ends meet, my mother took a job at the nearby junior college. To help pass the time while he waited for his luck to change, my father continued working on our house.

As Orwell's condition improved, his messages, published in the paper tossed across the street, became as prevalent as the weather. His pattern now included light observations:

WHAT YOU DO MATTERS LESS THAN WHY

mixed with warm requests:

ASK THE CAT TO COME BACK THURSDAY.

I was, of course, happy to accommodate him.

My sister and I were given household duties. Hers was laundry. Mine was cleaning up the rooms. I was issued an upright vacuum cleaner with a picture of a tornado stamped on its green plastic case.

In no time at all, I was cleaning up a storm. I've found that vacuuming goes much faster if you don't stop to move things out of the way. The only problem is the cord. Either it isn't long enough to reach where you want to go or it's too long and keeps getting wrapped around chairs and wastebaskets and lamps. But no job is hassle-free, so, like Lewis and Clark pushing relentlessly upstream on the great Missouri River, I persevered.

Not surprisingly, my room, which I'd saved for last, was the biggest mess of all. Books and papers and dirty clothes covered my unmade bed. Pieces of projects littered my desk and shelves. Pine shavings from Orwell's cage were scattered on the floor.

I plugged in, turned on, and went to work intent on suctioning anything smaller than a dime. The carpet color began to return foot by hard-fought foot.

As I turned the L-shaped corner, the cord, stuck into the wall at the other end of the room, wrapped around the LEGO table that supported Orwell's cage. Not knowing this, and with the mission's end in sight, I gave it a firm tug to set it free, which is exactly what it did, taking the table, Orwell's cage, and the startled Orwell with it.

One thing always leads to another. Events always happen end to end. The cage landed on the floor, the door popped open and a rabbit-shaped bundle tumbled out onto the floor.