The March Hare

Miller wakes up with Janelle's arms wrapped around him. Even though the ancient window unit air conditioner is on high, he can feel the sweat start to come out on his skin. She looks so sweet there, holding on to him, that he decides not to move her yet, not for a while.

The whole house is still; it must be very early if his mother is not yet awake, moving around the kitchen and listening to the morning news on the radio. Miller decides to enjoy this time, alone with his sleeping wife in the sleeping house.

He hears footsteps from upstairs, the creak of bedsprings; Anna's room, the one that used to be his own. He watches the ceiling and traces the sound of her feet across it as they make a circle around her room, no pauses, he thinks, what is she doing up there? A soft humming drifts down to him, and the circle moves faster and faster. Like dancing, he thinks, is she dancing up there? It ends with a sound like a sack of flour hitting the floor, and he hears that laughter again, deeper and throatier than his daughter's laugh only a few months ago, drifting down through the floorboards. It raises gooseflesh on his skin. Janelle stirs beside him, rubs her light brown head against his chest, and he puts his own arms around her, holds her tight.



Miller and his mother both decline to go into town with Janelle and Anna to see a movie. HIs mother pleads both exhaustion and having a million things to do around the house, and he says he would like to just talk with her and help her out with some of the chores, if she'll let him. "I'd hat to leave her alone when we're here to see her, but you and Anna should definitely get out. She won't want to stay cooped up here all week." Janelle nods and follows Anna out to the car. MIller and his mother stand on the porch to see them off, and he watches his daughter's face, pale and expressionless, slightly blurred behind the windshield. Once they are gone, his mother turns and walks quickly back into the house.

"For a long time," he says, having followed her into the kitchen where she begins to wash the dishes with as much noise as they can produce, "I thought you couldn't hear it."

"I didn't want to make it worse. I thought, if you could just think it was something in your mind, it would go away, you wouldn't be so scared." His mother turns from the sink to face him. "I'm sorry, baby, if I made it harder for you. But can you honestly tell me that you wouldn't do the same thing? That you aren't doing it now?"

He sits at the table and puts his hands, palms down, on top. "I don't blame you, Mom. I was just relieved when I found out that you heard it, too."

"You should never have gone there in the first place, Miller. I should have kept a better eye on things, not let you wander out there by yourself all the time. I should have known that you would find it sooner or later." HIs mother rinses a plate under the faucet and puts it in the drying rack. "Tell me," she says. "Was the road there still fresh, no leaves or dirt covering it?"

"Yes," he says, "it was like it had been made the day before."

His mother finishes the dishes in silence, then sits at the table across from Miller, pats his hand.

"You know she looks just like her. Anna, I mean. I never showed you pictures of my mother, but she looks just the same. Right down to the haircut." His mother goes to the living room, comes back with an old shoebox. She rifles through the photos inside until she comes up with the right one.

"Here, this is her when she was about twenty. Older than Anna, but then Anna is starting to look older now, too, isn't she?" Miller nods and takes the picture in his hand. There are the waves of dark hair that fall just under the chin, the smooth pale oval face and dark eyes. He holds the picture closer to his face and looks at the skirt and blouse his grandmother is wearing in it. He can see how similar they are to the new things Anna just bought, just picked out for her birthday.

"I used to wake up in the morning and here her dancing around in the attic, dancing in a circle and humming to herself. When I was a little girl, I wanted to go up there so badly, I wanted to know what she was doing. But I knew better than to disturb her when she wanted to be alone." HIs mother pulls out another picture, this one of his grandmother and grandfather together.

"My father's parents said that he never should have married her, that she was a foundling, that she was cursed. Well, his parents were a little odd themselves, you know how country people can be, so separated from the world, so tied to the land. But my daddy, he loved her so much, he wouldn't listen to any of it." She fingers another photograph, this one of her mother standing in front of what looks like a stone wall.

"And she was the prettiest girl around, that's for sure. And Daddy had been to school, he was a businessman, he didn't have all the superstitions that the country people did."

"Mom, Janelle and I haven't told you about something that happened a couple of months ago."

His mother is still fingering the photos in the box, carefully touching their cracks and yellowed edges. He looks down at the pictures she has pulled out for him, his daughter's face superimposed on a woman's body, his daughter's face pulled out of time and taken back forty, fifty years.

"It was at Anna's school. There was this boy, a terrible accident. He and Anna were alone in the music building, we're not sure why. We think he may have followed her there, some of the other kids said that he had a crush on her. He died in there, Mom, with Anna watching. An exposed pipe that ran along the cieling, it fell, it cracked his skull." He looks at the picture of his grandmother, standing in front of the stone wall. It's too close up to tell if it's the side of a house, or of a tiny playhouse in the woods.

"Anna was so calm. We sent her to a counselor the school recommended, and she told us that she was having a delayed reaction to the emotional stress of witnessing something so awful. But it's been months now, and she hasn't cried. She didn't even want to miss a day of school."

"I watched my mother," Miller's mother says, "every night, when she would go off into the woods alone. My father, he always slept through it, he never knew. Or if he did, he had sense enough not to say anything about it. We all knew there were some things about my mother that you just didn't talk about, you didn't ask. You wouldn't like the answer."

"It was even before the accident that she started changing," Miller says. "We just hadn't noticed it as much. And then I heard her laughing one day, up in her room, and it was the same. It was the same laugh I heard then, in the woods, and then in my room every night. Every night for how long, Mom?"

"Years, baby. I haven't heard her since you left home. Until Anna."

Across the table, Miller and his mother grip hands, hold on to one another. They stay like that until they hear the crunch of gravel under car tires, and then all the pictures of Miller's grandmother are swept away, the shoebox replaced in the living room cabinet where it hides. Just before Anna and Janelle come in, his mother says, "The day she disappeared, it was like a weight was pulled of Daddy and I. We just looked at each other while the sherriff asked us questions, while they combed the woods with dogs, and we knew that she had gone off to wherever she came from, that she was gone. And it was a relief."




That night, Miller gets out of bed for a glass of water and stands drinking it at the bathroom sink. From the small window above the toilet he sees someone, a girl with dark hair wearing a full skirt and frilly blouse, pass over the lawn, headed toward the line of trees. Before, he would have gone after his daughter, caught her and taken her back inside the house, told her not to wander off on her own. Instead, he finishes his water and goes back to bed, thinking, she knows where she's going, and I don't have the heart to follow her there.