Authors: Richard W. Jennings
EXPLANATIONS FOR ORWELL'S ABSENCE
These were the most likely explanations that came to mind. Others, like "abducted by space aliens" or "kidnapped, held for ransom" I dismissed as being too far-fetched.
The problem with my list was that, because I had no clues, I couldn't with certainty eliminate any of it. The case of the disappearing rabbit was, as the French say,
impossible.
No real detective would take it.
I wondered, What if this had happened in a movie on TV? What would the movie detective do if he had no clues?
He'd question people, that's what he would do!
And the first person he would question would be me.
I sat at my desk in the middle of the night, an angry thunderstorm carrying on outside to beat the band, trombones and all, and began to question myself. "Try to think," I asked. "Did you notice anything unusual about the victim that day?"
"Everything about the victim was unusual," I replied. "From the moment he arrived in my yard."
"Very well, then. Let's try it a different way. Did anything happen that day that seemed strange?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"Everything."
"Try to be specific."
"All right. My father was painting upside down."
"Very good. Anything else?"
"My mother went to work and none of us knows what she does."
"Good. Good. Please continue."
"My sister and I have been turned into maids, school has been temporarily canceled because spring is just around the corner, and my rabbit walked out the back door, standing upright, with white paint on his feet. Is that strange enough, or shall I go on?"
Lightning flashed through the corner windows, illuminating Orwell's empty cage.
"Thank you very much," I told myself. "I will get back to you."
"But wait," I pleaded. "What about my rabbit? Can you find him for me?"
"I will do my best," I replied. "First, I must examine the clues."
"What clues?" I asked. "There aren't any clues."
"There are always clues," I insisted. "Everything that happens leaves clues. I just haven't found them yet." But I would, I vowed silently. I had to! I had come too far with Orwell to let him simply vanish from my life.
Perhaps if I gave my brain time to rest, I'd figure this one out. I switched off the light and climbed back into bed, remembering that somewhere I had heard it said, "Sufficient to the day is the worry thereof."
Mourning doves scattered when I stepped into the front yard to inspect the starting of the day. Two fat squirrels clambered up to the roof. Robins, too busy to be disturbed, merely hopped aside as I walked by. In a raggedy circle surrounding the big tree, the first green evidence of daffodils peeked up from the earth like groundhogs checking out the sky. And coming down the street, big as a house and heading right where I was standing, was a moving truck.
I was getting new neighbors.
"A moving van just pulled up across the street," I told my family at the breakfast table. "I think I may know one of the kids."
"I should bake them something," my mother said.
"Good idea," my father agreed.
By the time I got back outside, the minivan had arrived and was parked at the curb. The moving truck was jackknifed across the driveway and out into the street, where it would have blocked a lane of traffic, had there been any. Double doors as big as the entrance to a garage were open in the back and on the sides. Two men were walking up and down ramps with big cardboard boxes that they stacked three high on the lawn. Even though the day had not yet warmed up and the men's work had just begun, they were sweating from the effort.
The front door to the house was open. From inside I heard a radio playing much too loudly and people laughing. I knocked politely on the door frame.
Tap-tap -tap-ta-tap!
No reply.
With one foot, I stepped inside and leaned forward into the house, keeping the other foot outside on the porch, in order to make it clear to any observer that I wasn't barging in uninvited.
"HELLO?" I called. "Is anyone home?"
The only answer was the sound of the radio. The laughter had stopped. I took a few steps into the house, stopping at the edge of the entry where the polished wood floor met the light green carpet of the living room.
"HELLO?" I called again, peering around the corner.
The radio continued its unwelcome noise. I took two more cautious steps in its direction.
"What are you, a burglar or something?" a voice behind me asked, startling me.
Embarrassed, I turned around to face the tousle-haired boy. He had his arms folded across his chest. He looked angry.
"Oh, hi!" I said. "I tried knocking."
"I could have you arrested, you know," he said.
"I'm sorry," I replied sheepishly. "I just wanted to welcomeâ"
"And you'd probably have to go to jail, maybe even do hard time. You know what hard time is?"
"No."
"It's where they put you to work until your sentence is up."
"Oh, look, I'm really sorry. I just came over toâ"
"But I'm going to give you a break," he continued. "Instead of calling the cops and going through a trial and everything, I'm going to let you start serving your hard time right now. Do you know how to operate a vacuum cleaner?" His stern face broke into a big smile.
"Actually," I said, returning the smile with relief, "I've recently become something of an expert."
When the people across the street won the lottery that was meant for me, I thought,
What rotten luck.
But now that they were gone and the tousle-haired boy had taken their place, and he'd begun shooting baskets with me in the driveway, I thought,
What great luck!
The thing about luck is you have to stay tuned to see how it all works out.
I had even started to think that possibly there's no such thing as luck at all. If everything happens because of something else, if everything is connected end to end, then what looks like chance is really the result of countless individual decisions all taking place in a universe subject to the same natural laws.
The tousle-haired boy called it "destiny." He said things are meant to be. And the more we talked, the more I liked to hear what he had to say and the way his voice sounded when he said it.
I was in the driveway discussing Orwell's disappearance with my new neighbor, hopeful that two brains would have better luck at finding a rabbit than one.
"He's probably around here somewhere," he said, bouncing the basketball off the backboard into the net in a quick, clean one-two from the edge of the sidewalk. "Probably just doing what he has to do."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, look, it's nearly spring, and, according to what you've told me, he just suddenly got up and walked out the door. Except for him walking like he was wearing snowshoes, that sounds perfectly normal to me. For a rabbit, anyway."
"You think he had no choice?" I asked, puzzled.
"Try to think about it like a scientist instead of a pet owner and you'll understand. Rabbits can't help being rabbits, you know."
"I don't get it," I said.
"Where'd you say you kept his cage?" he inquired.
"In my room by the windows," I answered.
"So he was able to see outside, right?"
"That's why I put it there," I said. "I can see the whole backyard from my windows."
"And anything that might have hopped into it," he added, sinking another one with a near-silent swishing sound, signifying a perfect nothing-but-net shot.
"Oh," I said. "I think I'm beginning to understand."
"I'll bet there are lots of rabbits around here. It's a rabbity-looking kind of neighborhood, don't you think?" He smiled at me, then, with an effortless leap, arced the ball high into the air, where it looked like it was going to overshoot, but at the last moment it stopped, fell, spun around the rim and wobbled through the net.
"Well, I have seen other rabbits," I admitted.
"Didn't you tell me that cottontail rabbits only like to be with other rabbits when they're feeding or whenâ"
"Or when it's time to start a family!" I interrupted. "Of course!"
"Bingo!" he exclaimed, surprising me by missing his next shot by more than a foot. He nervously combed his hair with his fingers and grimaced. "Ooops!" he said. "Your turn."
Everything not only changes, I realized, everything
must
change. It's the Law of Commonplace Events. My plans for my personal career now included becoming a philosopher.
I chose this new path for several reasons. First, being a detective was getting me nowhere. Not only had I not figured out why Orwell came into my life, I had managed to lose the mysterious little rabbit in the process.
Second, I realized that I enjoyed thinking about things more than I enjoyed actually doing things. Some people might call this being lazy, but only because they can't tell how hard my brain is churning while the rest of me is sitting there looking comfortable.
Finally, recent developments in my life had put pressure on my philosophy to undergo some changes, too. This required additional thinking time, time that could most easily be freed up by abandoning my mediocre career in private investigations.
Non regret rien. I have no regrets,
I told myself, demonstrating my revised way of looking at things. Such changes are not only
inevitable,
they are improvements. If we just paid closer attention to the details of our daily lives, nothing that happens to us would surprise us.
Take my father's accident, for example. In hindsight, it had to happen. How long did he think that he could stand on top of a ladder, ignoring the warnings clearly spelled out in orange and black letters on the top step just beneath his foot, and ignoring, too, the natural force of gravity?
"I find it interesting," I told him, practicing my philosophy as I sat beside him in the ambulance en route to the emergency room, "that only one letter separates 'paint' from 'pain.'"
"Please be quiet," my father said.
While my father's foot was being bolted back together, I checked out the hospital cafeteria. Surprisingly, I found it to be a cheerful place, brightly lit, not too crowded, with clean, plastic-topped tables and lots of good food. But, since I hadn't taken much money with me, I had to settle for a little box of Lucky Charms and a half-pint of milk.
I knew when I turned the box around to read the back, as I always do when eating cereal, that I had made the choice destiny had earmarked for me. Under the heading "Lucky You" was a drawing of a big-eyed comic leprechaun wearing a green top hat, shiny green jacket, green buckle shoes, and a huge, almost frightening smile. He was dancing and holding a pot of gold on which were written seven rabbitlike words:
HAVING A WONDERFUL TIME. BE BACK TOMORROW.
Unlike the silence surrounding his sudden departure, this time Orwell had thoughtfully sent me advance notice of his migrations.
My rabbit was coming home!
In books, stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In real life, they go on forever, because one thing always leads to another.
After proving that he could hobble around on crutches, my father was released from the hospital with a cast on his foot and a job offer in hand, having shared a room with a newspaper executive who was sympathetic to his injury and impressed with his credentials. My father had accepted his roommate's offer with the explanation that he couldn't start until he could walk, an outcome that could be some weeks away. The newspaper executive, whose nose was packed with cotton and covered with white tape, replied in a muffled voice that he understood completely and would be pleased to wait.
I am convinced that such a lucky turn of events is not a coincidence, if by coincidence you mean something that is unusual. Everything about our lives is based on such a coincidence. If what was going to happen were limited to what is probable, then not a single one of us ever would have been born. The odds are always against it. Evidently, unseen forces rule our lives.
One of those unseen forces tried to sneak back into the house.
As my father swung his damaged foot awkwardly beneath his crutches, struggling up the steps to our front door, a small, brown, upright rabbit-shaped creature wearily emerged from beneath the bushes beside the porch.
"Orwell!" I shouted. "Where have you been?"
Slowly and side by side, the two disabled mammals stepped into the house to join a family grateful to receive them both.
My father collapsed on the sofa and went to sleep, while Orwell, obviously worn out from his nights on the town, climbed slowly up the stairs and into his cage where he, too, curled up and summoned the train to slumber-land.
"Mister," I whispered softly, lest I disturb the rabbit's rest, "you've got some explaining to do."
To assist him in preparing for his new career, and to give him something to do while lying on his back on the couch with his foot propped up on pillows, my father instructed my mother to reinstate our newspaper subscription.
I resumed my ritual dash across the front yard each day to retrieve the paper, lingering in the increasingly bright mornings to read amid daffodils who waved their happy yellow heads at every passerby. But although I examined it closely every day, I found nothing in the paper that I could attribute to Orwell.
School also started up again and, with it, my interest in the science class I attended with the tousle-haired boy from across the street. It was strange how easily things worked out when it came time to choose partners for the science fair. I chose him and he chose me. Nobody laughed. Nobody teased. Nobody complained.