Page 165 of Hell Bent

Alex bumped her hip through the door and entered the apartment, the smell of pot heavy, the air hazy with smoke. The noise from the TV was overwhelming, the ceaseless pound of Halo, Len and Betcha and Cam shouting at each other on the couch, Betcha’s pit bull, Loki, asleep at his feet. A bag of Cheetos was open on the table beside a blue glass bong, an empty baggie, Len’s vape pen. Hellie was curled in the big papasan chair with the taped-together cushion, wearing a long T-shirt and underwear, as if she hadn’t bothered to get dressed, just rolled right out of bed. She was staring at the TV listlessly and didn’t even glance at Alex when she started unloading groceries in their tiny kitchen.

Alex was unpacking a jar of Ragú when she saw the bloody mass of fur near the sliding glass doors that led to the balcony. The jar slid from her hand and shattered on the linoleum.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” Len said over the noise from the game.

This couldn’t be right. She was seeing things. She was misunderstanding.

Alex knew she should get down the hall and check the cage, but she couldn’t quite make her legs work. There was a piece of glass lodged in the side of her foot, tomato sauce on her flip-flops. She slipped them off, brushed the glass away, made herself take one step, then another, felt the wiry spring of the carpet beneath her feet. No one’s head turned as she passed, and she had the eerie sense that she hadn’t walked into the apartment at all.

The hallway was quiet. They’d never hung art or photos on the walls, except for a Green Day poster they’d taped up after someone put a fist through the drywall during a party.

Their bedroom looked the way it always did. The battered old TV stand she’d stuffed with paperbacks, mostly sci-fi and fantasy. Anne McCaffrey, Heinlein, Asimov. The futon mattress on the floor, the old blue-and-red bedspread crumpled up. Sometimes it was her and Len in the bed, sometimes all three of them, sometimes just her and Hellie. Those were the best times. And by the windowsill, Babbit’s cage. It was empty. The door was open.

Alex stood with her back pressed against the wall. It felt like she had cracked down the middle. She and Hellie had gotten the little flop-eared bunny at a pet adoption outside of Ralphs. They’d lied on the application, about where they lived, how much money they made, everything. Because once Alex held that soft white body in her hands, she’d wanted it more than anything. When they’d brought him home, Len had just rolled his eyes and said, “I don’t want to smell that thing. I don’t like living in shit.”

Alex had been tempted to say she had bad news for him, but she was so grateful he hadn’t gone into some kind of tantrum, she and Hellie just scurried down the hall and shut the door. They’d spent the whole day playing with the rabbit. It didn’t do much, but there was something about being near it, about feeling its heart rate slow in her hands, knowing that this living thing trusted her, that made Alex feel better about everything.

They’d started calling him Babbit Rabbit because they didn’t have a name for him, and then it just stuck.

“That thing looks like bait,” Betcha had laughed once.

“Cheapest way to keep a bitch happy,” Len had replied. He got annoyed when they talked about Babbit Rabbit or crooned at him. “Better than getting one of them knocked up.”

Bait.

Alex walked back down the hall. Nothing had changed. No one had moved. She had become a phantom. The heap of fur and blood lay unmoving on the carpet. It was unmistakable now that she made herself look, really look. A little dead body. There was blood on Loki’s muzzle.

“What happened?” she asked.

No one seemed to hear her.

“Hellie?”

Hellie turned her head slowly, as if the effort cost her something. She lifted her golden shoulders. Always she looked like a sun-burnished bit of treasure, something precious. Even now, slack and dead-eyed, her voice flat when she said, “We wanted to see if he and Loki would play.”

Alex knelt by the little body. He had been torn open, and there was almost nothing left inside him. His fur was still soft in the places it wasn’t sticky with blood. Alex had loved to stroke his ears with her thumb. They were mangled now, the cartilage exposed in stringy lines. His one remaining pink eye stared at nothing.

“Don’t be shitty about it,” Len said. “It was an accident.”

Betcha looked guilty and said, “We didn’t think Loki would get so excited.”

“He’s a dog,” Alex said. “What the fuck did you think he was going to do?”

“He couldn’t help it.”

“I know,” said Alex. “I know he couldn’t.”

She didn’t blame Loki.

Alex scooped up Babbit Rabbit’s remains and went to the kitchen. She cleaned off her flip-flops and shoveled the sauce and glass into a corner.

“Oh, come on,” said Len. “Rabbits are basically vermin. You’re crying over a rat.”

But Alex wasn’t crying. Not yet. She didn’t want to cry here. She took Len’s keys off the counter without asking. She could pay that tab later.

She tucked what was left of the rabbit’s body into a Ziploc bag and went out to the Civic. She hoped Hellie would follow. All the way down the steps, across the patch of dry lawn, the sidewalk, the street, she hoped. She sat in the driver’s seat a long time, still hoping.

Then, at last, she turned the key and drove. She took the 405 through the valley, past the Galleria and Castle Park with its batting cages, climbing the hill. That was what they’d always called it, “the hill.” Alex didn’t even know the name of the mountain range she was crossing, only that it was the great divider between the San Fernando Valley and the west side. You could stand on Mulholland and look west to the dream of the ocean, museums, mansions. Or east to the valley and the consolation prize of smoggy days and cheap condos. The California dream for people who couldn’t afford Beverly Hills or Bel Air or Malibu.