The Third Bear

  Aunt Etta cackled, jumped up and down, which looked less dramatic than it sounds because of the length of her dress. Every utterance from Sensio's mouth must have sounded like a celestial chorus of dollar bills to her.

  Sensio first spoke one night in my room, about a week after he came into my life. I had the windows pulled open because of the heat, hoping for a cross-breeze or anything to stop the sweat. I was on top of the sheets, naked except for my underwear. I was in a typical wretched, self-pitying mood. I had no friends. I was bored. I would never have a life in this place. The moon through the window was like a huge round cross-section of bone. The strange cries of nighthawks seemed to come from that whiteness, not the darkness into which their silhouettes disappeared.

  Sensio was in the cage in the corner near the closet, next to my old dolls and other toys. I'd told Aunt Etta I'd found him cowering under an orange tree, even attached a crude splint to his paw to support my lie that he'd been injured, needed my help. "He must have been someone's pet," I said.

  I don't know if she believed me, but she'd let me keep him, making it clear that if he became a nuisance, "into the pot he'll go." Although she'd never killed an animal in her life except mice, Aunt Etta loved rabbit stew. She said it reminded her of "her youth" growing up in Minnesota. I thought there must be better memories than that, even if my own childhood hadn't yet amounted to much. Still, four or five times a year, she paid the Mexicans to get her rabbits. They tended to be stringy things, marsh rabbits taken from the shores of nearby lakes.

  That night, as I lay there, so uncomfortable, staring out the window, listening to the sound of mosquitoes kissing the window screen, I heard a voice.

  "Let me out of my cage," it said, gruffly. "Let me out."

  I sat bolt upright in my bed, grabbed a plastic doll for protection. I listened carefully but heard nothing except my own breathing.

  After a minute, I lay back down, chest tight and heart devouring my blood.

  But a little later, the voice spoke again: "Please let me out of this cage, Rachel."

  This time when I sat up brandishing my doll, I dared look over at the cage. Sensio was staring at me, his white fur darkly glowing against the cross-cut shadows.

  "Was that you?" I whispered, almost hoping it had been, and not someone who had broken into our home. An absurd little part of me was almost more afraid of waking up Aunt Etta than of a talking rabbit.

  "Yes, it's me. Sensio."

  I couldn't see Sensio's mouth, but the sound definitely came from his cage.

  That's when I thought I must be asleep, and that the heat was giving me strange dreams. I would wake soon.

  In the meantime, it was the most natural thing in the world to climb down off my bed made for an adult and kneel down in front of the cage and say to Sensio, "If I let you out, will you go back in when I tell you?"

  Those eyes, so full and dark against the ghost-white of his face, saw me.

  "Yes, Rachel," Sensio said.

  Had I, in my loneliness, created a voice for Sensio? Something like this thought passed through me.

  Watching myself do it, I opened the cage, and even then it was as if I had opened more than just a cage. I flinched from the slight electrical discharge as the latch shocked me.

  But nothing odd happened afterwards, not really.

  Sensio hopped forward, snuffled against my knee, asked in a low, deep voice, "Do you have any lettuce? Any carrots?"

  Just like any rabbit.

  The photographer laughed weakly when he'd recovered his composure. He turned to me and pointed and said, standing straight again, a new cigarette held in one shaking hand, unlit: "Nice trick, kid. You should take that act out on the road." While Sensio stared up at him from his position as prisoner at the post.

  Aunt Etta became livid, all the cheer dropping from her face and a pink blush steadily moving up her face from her neck.

  "It was the rabbit, you idiot!" she shouted at him, her lipstick a ragged blood-snarl in the heat. "You heard it! You heard it speak! You heard it and you think she could do that? That stupid little kid?"

  The photographer stared at Aunt Etta much as he'd stared at Sensio. I was staring, too, but Aunt Etta hadn't really said anything I hadn't heard before.

  He worked much faster after that, and Sensio said nothing. Nothing at all. But from the look he gave me, I thought there was must be much more he wanted to say.

  At first, we talked mostly at night, when I thought Aunt Etta couldn't hear us. I'd forgotten the strange ways in which that old bungalow could carry sound, or I'd just decided to risk it. I can't remember.

  These weren't conversations like the ones between two people. For one thing, I sometimes still believed I'd made it all up and was talking to myself. For another, Sensio sometimes made sense and other times talked in riddles, or with some kind of veil between what I wanted him to mean and what he actually meant. I mimicked Aunt Etta's mutterings for a while around the cottage, but my favorite phrase was "Just the tip of the iceberg," to remind me of larger mysteries. My forehead became taut with the strain of thinking all the time, trying to interpret Sensio.

  "How come you can talk?" I asked him this question the second night; I hadn't had the nerve to interrogate what seemed like a miracle the night before, had been afraid it might turn out to be a dream, or a nightmare.

  "I have always been able to talk," Sensio said, with the stiffness of a Russian count from a fairy tale. "It is just that no one could understand me."

  "What do you mean?" That was a favorite question of mine at the time, along with "Why?"

  "I do not mean anything," Sensio said, and nibbled on a carrot.

  "How old are you?"

  "I do not know. Very old."

  For a rabbit? For a person? Sensio did not know.

  Then I asked a question that I kept coming back to in my feverishly alert child's mind - about the man who'd brought Sensio to me.

  "That man. The one who gave you to me. Who was he?"

  "A friend from another country."

  "What's the country?"

  "A place far from here."

  I paused, frowning. I tried a different approach.

  "Where did you come from?"

  "Somewhere else."

  "Where?"

  "A place far from here."

  "Have you ever been to school?"

  "What is school?"

  "A place where you learn things."

  Sensio had nothing to say to that, but he seemed to give me a disapproving look. I tried again.

  "How long have you been able to talk?"

  "As long as I have been able to talk."

  I really didn't like that answer. Impatient, almost imperious, I asked, "Are you the only rabbit that can talk?"

  "I am not a rabbit."

  And there it was: I am not a rabbit. Even now, so long after, it makes me shiver. But at the time, it made me giggle. It seemed like a funny answer. Of course Sensio was a rabbit. He looked like a rabbit, ate like a rabbit, and definitely crapped like a rabbit.

  "So what are you then?" I asked. "A ham sandwich? A can of beans? A witch?" I was delighted with myself for these guesses.

  "I am not a rabbit," he said again.

  This time I didn't giggle. It was said with such a sense of aloneness, that it's impossible to convey. It made me stop asking questions, because I felt I understood him. He was just like me.

  That was the day before Aunt Etta found out.

  After the photographer had taken his pictures and left along with all of his strange equipment, giving us a brusque promise of samples in a week, we stood there for a little while. It was dusty. It was uncomfortably hot. My throat felt parched and the green of the orange groves quivered in an air thick and humid.

  Aunt Etta licked her lips, asked Sensio, "Don't you have anything to say?"

  Sensio said nothing.

  "Not one damn thing?" Aunt Etta asked again.

  Sensio still said nothing. I felt the moment turn,
like we were all balanced on the same thin plank high in the air, and at least one of us was going to fall off.

  "Not one damn thing," Aunt Etta muttered. "You've got nothing to say to me after all of that. I feed you, I give you shelter, and you won't give me one word when I need it."

  "There is nothing to be said," Sensio growled after a moment.

  Turning his head to the side in a very unrabbit-like way, Sensio stared up at Aunt Etta. Aunt Etta stared back, just as implacable.

  Right then, the rope in Aunt Etta's hand looked less like a leash and more like a fuse.

  "Remember, it's just an animal," Aunt Etta said to me, during that first meal after she discovered me talking to Sensio. This was back when she thought she might flatter Sensio into cooperating with her plans. I know she was wearing something else, but in memory she is wearing the same outfit as she did to the photo shoot.

  We sat, the three of us, at the dining room table in A. C. Pittman's house, which almost qualified as a mansion. Eating there was something Aunt Etta did rarely, and only when she wanted to impress. Sometimes the foreman - a tall, rangy Mexican originally from Tijuana - would visit, and the two of them would walk up to Pittman's house laughing, with some bottles of beer, and be gone for hours. That was the happiest I ever saw her, and the house had something to do with it.

  Chandeliers from Paris, Waterford crystal, decanters of brandy, rosewood chairs and tables, carpet from the Orient, and even an awful lion's pelt rug in the study. Pittman made money from more than just orange groves, and he spent it on only the most obvious things.

  The dining room table could seat twenty along its length, and its surface was a rich, shining mirror from which none of us could hide. Aunt Etta sat at the head of the table, me to the left, sullen and on edge. Sensio sat on the other side - balanced atop five cushions to begin with, Aunt Etta having, absurdly I realize now, pulled up Pittman's ornate French chair from the study to impress the rabbit.

  After a time, Sensio hopped onto the table, onto his plate.

  "Rachel, move that for him," Aunt Etta snapped at me. Since she'd found out Sensio could talk, her whole world had been Sensio, except when she needed something done.

  "Isn't this nice?" she said to Sensio.

  That afternoon, when she'd burst into my room in the bungalow and admitted she'd been listening at the door on and off for a while - when she saw I had neither imaginary friend nor actual friend - she'd at first let out a kind of horrible shriek, followed by the hiss of an intake of breath. Her face had seemed for a moment to crumple. Ever since there had been in her eyes a light that was too bright. Her actions, her movements, were also too "bright," as if under such tight control that she might at any moment explode.

  Isn't it nice?

  Perhaps, in that moment, I did find it nice, almost as if I were younger and having a teddy bears' tea party in the orchard by myself. Those bears had talked to me, too, but I'd always known what they were going to say.

  But Sensio said nothing in reply. The tock-tock of the inlaid mother-ofpearl grandfather clock in the hall became oppressive. Even the savory but thick smell of dinner cooking in the kitchen added weight to the air.

  "Your friend is a little shy," Aunt Etta said to me.

  I shrugged, not sure what to make of the situation. Aunt Etta's discovery that Sensio could talk had been a different kind of shock for me. It meant that Sensio's ability was definitely real. There was relief in knowing I wasn't imagining things, and another kind of relief in hoping that the rabbit might create a kind of truce between Aunt Etta and me.

  "What's for dinner?" I asked, but she had already turned her back on me.

  "Why are you here?" she asked Sensio.

  I sat up straight in my chair. It was a question that would have seemed like nonsense if I'd asked it. Coming from Aunt Etta, it seemed like the only question.

  Slowly, Sensio stirred and turned toward Aunt Etta.

  "Does it matter?" he replied. "It only matters what you think I'm here for."

  Suddenly, a coldness crept into me. Suddenly, I was not Sensio's friend. Instead, it felt as if he were an adult just like Aunt Etta.

  Aunt Etta leaned forward, said, almost primly, "I think you are here to make all of us very rich," as if she'd invited an oil derrick or a shipment of gold bullion to dinner. Then she went to get our meal.

  That was just the first of three fancy dinners, each more tense than the last. In memory, they are all mixed together, but they each had their own characteristics: in the first, vegetarian lasagna, as Aunt Etta tries to flatter what cannot be flattered; in the second, steamed vegetables, rice, and (for us) chicken, as Aunt Etta tries to plead with that which cannot negotiate; in the third, Aunt Etta outdoes herself in more than one sense.

  Later, I would think about what she did and wonder if she just had limited ways of coping with the impossible without going insane. Yet, her solution - that Sensio would make us rich - made her even crazier.

  The day after Aunt Etta discovered Sensio could talk, she shoved a cot into her room for me to sleep on and also brought Sensio's cage in there. She made sure he only got the best carrots, lettuce, and other produce.

  I was mad about this, and not just because my feet dangled off the end of the cot and my back became stiff from the mattress, or that she didn't care. I was mad because now there was almost no time for me to talk to Sensio without Aunt Etta around. Sensio didn't talk as much during the day.

  Then Aunt Etta started to call newspapers. First, national newspapers, from telephone numbers she found rummaging through Pittman's business office, and then the Florida papers, because the national papers thought she was a kook.

  "I'll show them kook," she'd say, dialing yet another number.

  I admit I became caught up in the idea of Sensio becoming famous, and the thought of it almost made up for Aunt Etta making us sleep in the same room with her. I don't know what Aunt Etta envisioned, but in my daydreams Sensio did make us rich, and we went on the road with him as part of a traveling carnival a little like the one painted in a picture in Pittman's house: all garish reds and greens, and smiling carnies standing to one side of cages with dancing bears in them and jugglers practicing their trade on the other. All sorts of exotic ideas came out of my head. As Sensio's trainer I would be much interviewed and admired. I'd have someone to help me with my makeup and buy me clothes. The other kids in the carnival would seek me out. When we weren't working, we'd take holidays, going to fancy restaurants and staying in swank hotels. I had a fixation with chocolate ice cream back then, so I dreamed of eating mountains of it.

  But more important, it began to dawn on me that if Aunt Etta was successful, her attention wouldn't always be on me and all the things I was doing wrong. That I would have some relief, and maybe even some control, even though I knew that, thankfully, she didn't yet realize this fact. I could also, during those handful of days, pretend that, for once, Aunt Etta and I wanted the same things - for Sensio and for ourselves.

  A couple of reporters finally came down, one from the Orlando Sentinel and one from the St. Petersburg Times, but Sensio wouldn't talk to them. Aunt Etta had made him clothes by then, so he'd look more human, but I thought he looked more foolish that way, like he was playing dress up, and it didn't help with the reporters, who only cared if he talked or not. The second reporter left angrier at the waste of time than the first, maybe because he'd had to drive a longer distance or maybe because he'd already been having a bad day.

  When no one else would come out Aunt Etta made a fool of herself trying to get Sensio to talk to people over the phone, which he wouldn't do. The sight of Aunt Etta, on her hands and knees, holding the phone down to Sensio's mouth and pleading with him to talk should have made me feel bad for her.

  When I hesitantly tried to tell Aunt Etta that no one thought of a rabbit talking over the phone as proof of anything, she snapped, "He still sounds like a rabbit."

  Except, I realized he didn't sound like a rabbit. He didn't make
a chutter- ing purr or the kind of warbling squeak I'd heard from other rabbits. All he did was talk in a voice like a man, and he snored sometimes at night, a sound that made me smile because sometimes he formed a chorus with Aunt Etta. Once, waking up suddenly, he made a sound like a high-pitched sonic boom.

  "Maybe he's more comfortable staying in my room," I said, but Aunt Etta wasn't having any of that, either.

  After the photo session, the moments extended out into a kind of standoff while I watched, Sensio staring at Aunt Etta and Aunt Etta staring at Sensio. They were like battle-scarred emissaries from two different countries that would never speak the same language and never admit to the need for an interpreter.

  Almost as if to make him stop, she yanked on the rope and Sensio fell over like a child's toy. Silent. Still looking up at her. I was so surprised I just stood there.

  Aunt Etta nudged Sensio with her foot as he tried to right himself. Then she kicked him in the side.

  I beat on her then, my fists on that impenetrable, ridiculous skirt that seemed made of something more like aluminum siding than fabric.

  I imagine I was screaming at her, although I can't remember making a sound.

  A week or two before Aunt Etta contacted the photographer, she called the Ringling Brothers Circus, which kept a permanent headquarters in Tampa. The woman who came out surprised us both. I'd expected a bearded lady and Aunt Etta had expected a trapeze artist. What we got was a slim, grayhaired woman dressed smartly in slacks and a blouse. Her shoes were flat and black and simple. She had hazel eyes tinged with green. She could have been from Sears, except for her mysterious smile that made everything ordinary and normal about her seem just a disguise. I liked her. She seemed the opposite of Aunt Etta in almost every detail.

  We went to the screened-in Florida Room of Pittman's house, a ceiling fan lazily revolving above our heads. The circus woman, whose name I can't remember, sat on the couch and looked out at the orange orchards in the distance while I brought Sensio in and put him on the wicker chair to her left. Aunt Etta had gotten a fancy tea service with a hummingbird pattern out of the basement, and handed the circus woman a cup of orange blossom tea.