Chapter Two

Chapter Two


Soft warm light greeted Patricia as she opened the door to her apartment. She and Alfred had moved to this cozy little nook when they had decided to get rid of most of their clutter and move closer to the heart of the city (and Granville Island, Alfred's favourite locale) nearly a decade ago, and by this point she had it exactly as she wanted. That meant she had a light switch hooked to the power for a lamp with a timer: she didn't have to listen to the timer humming unless she turned the light switch on, and the newfangled digital one Patricia's daughter Laura had given her meant she didn't have to adjust it with each use - just each season, to adjust for the shift in sunset - yet she always came home to a space that was invitingly well lit.


It wasn't nearly the same as coming home to a hug from Alfred, of course, or even a pounce from May, when she visited. But at least it wasn't dark and gloomy. After a day spent outside her comfort zone, Patricia appreciated all the warmth and familiarity that her light and its timer were able to embrace her with.


Patricia smiled to herself and moved into her space, past the computer desk on the one side and the couch on the other, and plugged her kettle in the outlet in the kitchen. She thanked her lucky stars once again that she and Alfred had pared down their things when they'd moved here - she liked her place sparse, these days, so that she had fewer things to bump into and just as few to dust. They'd also given quite a lot of their dishes to Laura, so now she had a whole cupboard just for her teas. A nice autumn tea would do nicely, she thought, and reached for the harvest spice roobois mix. Just as friendly as the pumpkin spice latte she had been enjoying that whole long day ago, but without the caffeine. She reached for her tea spoon and carefully measured the leaves into her tea basket, and hung it from the lip of her Prince Albert-painted teapot, ready for the boiling water.


Nearly 6o'clock, Patricia noted, with a glance at her clock. May had painted it for her: green leaves and a big purple flower with nearly circular leaves, shining on the back of a ceramic plate her artistic mother had turned and fired herself. It centered a mass of family photos on the wall over the couch, and Patricia smiled at her favourite of these - a portrait with Alfred at their wedding - before turning back to the burbling kettle. A sharp click, suddenly - but she'd been expecting it; Patricia had had this kettle since before they had moved to this apartment. She poured the steaming liquid over the fragrant spices and red tea leaves, popped a bright green knitted tea cozy over the pot, and carried it to the coaster waiting with her telephone on the table by her rocking chair. She pulled a fresh porcelain teacup, from the same lush flower-painted set as the teapot, from the shelf near her chair and set it on the dragon-embroidered coaster she pulled out from its resting place beneath the phone. It was Sunday evening, which meant May would call any minute now, as soon as she finished with her job at her mother's art store in Victoria. May had a cell phone and liked to chat with her grandmother while she walked the half hour home from the shop.


Taking the multi-toned green quilt from its back to wrap around herself, Patricia settled into the rocking chair. She smoothed the familiar wool over her lap, letting the familiar pang of memory slide past her as she remembered Alfred knitting the squares, then teasing her for pricking her finger as she sewed the squares together. Perhaps after this novel business finished she would pull her sewing out from under the bed. She had been coasting for too long, she thought. Just one afternoon of meeting new people had enabled her to recognise that she had stopped being productive, stopped doing anything but walk in place - she, Patricia, who had always scoffed at treadmills for not getting you anywhere.


Well, it was time for a change. She was young yet, and she could get things done. Patricia nodded decisively to herself. She would talk with May, and tell her all about this novel thing - she knew May would be giddy for her, would bring out more enthusiasm in Patricia than she thought she had left. She smiled just thinking about it, reminded a bit of Zale from the afternoon, with her evident eagerness to be as encouraging to a new NaNoWriMo author as her brother had been with her. May would like Zale, she knew, and she was looking forward to telling her all about the out-of-the-blue afternoon. Usually she let May tell her all about her life, about school and her friends and the quirky oddballs she had seen in the store that day, and then had little to say when May asked about her own activities. She couldn't quite believe she had slowed down, these past few years, to the point where her prized activity of the week was a new flavour of tea in her cupboard.


But today she had a whole adventure to relate, and she couldn't wait.


After she talked with May, she would drink her pot of tea, and then she would pull out some hats. She was sure to find just the ticket she needed to get her through this extraordinary idea - a novel, her novel - to become more than a vague idea and more like a solid story. Patricia didn't have much time to plan anything, but Alfred had always been the planner. She was too impulsive to think things through in advance, and she wasn't about to change now. She would write it by the seat of her pants and hope it turned out. It was long since time she did something without -


Brrrrrt, brrrrrrrt, buzzed the phone. Right on time.


"Hello, May!" Patricia said as she held the phone to her ear.


"Hallo, mom," the voice that wasn't May's responded.


"Laura?"


"Yes, mom. I know, I never call. But there's nothing wrong, so don't panic." Patricia could hear that her daughter was smiling on the other end of the line. Though they didn't talk much, now that Laura lived too far to drop in for a cup of tea on Patricia's balcony, she knew her daughter well. And also that Laura disliked phones immensely.


"In that case, it's nice to hear from you, love," she responded. "How are you? How's the shop?"


"Oh, fine, fine. I didn't call to talk about that. May asked me to ring you to say she can't tonight - she had the day off to spend with her friends for Hallowe'en. They were going to dress up and do Trick-or-Eat, collecting cans for the local food shelter, and then watch a couple horror movies before heading home."


"Thank you for calling to let me know - I know how you dislike phones," Patricia smiled.


"I know, I know. I keep meaning to call and say hello. But before I get too freaked out by this bizarre communications device, how are you, mom? Any new tea I should mention to May?"


"Actually, I had a really exciting day today," Patricia said, but, reminded of her pot of tea, reached out to pull off the cozy and move the basket to the little plastic drip tray she kept beside the phone. She breathed in the warm and spicy steam that wafted up from the uncovered pot. "I was hoping to tell May all about it, but the short of it is..." she paused for effect. She'd always had a sense of drama. "I'm going to write a novel!"


Her daughter's warm chuckle rang over the line. "A novel? That's great! I didn't know you wanted to write!"


"I didn't, really," Patricia acknowledged, smiling, and tucking the phone into her chin so she could reach with both hands to pour a cup of tea. Not that she'd likely get to drink even the first cup before Laura decided she had to get off the phone. "But there's a crazy event called National Novel Writing Month where people write a novel in a month and somehow I ended  up at their opening party today. Everyone starts writing tomorrow."


"In a month? Mom, I haven't heard you have an idea this crazy in years." Patricia grinned, thinking of her instinctive defensiveness when Jamie had implied that everyone who did NaNoWriMo was crazy. It felt good to be called crazy by her daughter again. There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Mom, I'm so proud of you."


"Thank you, Laura. Now tell me what you've been up to so I can feel all warm and fuzzy about what you're doing too!"


Another chuckle. "Oh, mom. Just more pots. And I've started teaching a few of the kids from May's school." Laura's voice took on a slightly cynical tone. "Apparently it's fashionable to be artsy again."


"May must like that! Is she helping?"


A brief pause. Long enough to mean something, but not long enough for Patricia to ask what it meant. Laura had a good sense of theatrical timing too, Patricia thought.


"No," said Laura, "she would have told you all about it if she were. Listen, mom, I'll tell her to give you a call after she finishes her homework tomorrow, alright? By that time you should have a fair bit written and you can tell her all about it."


"Alright, love," Patricia smiled fondly. "Thank you again for calling. It really is nice to hear from you."


"Have a good night, mom. I love you."


"I love you too, Laura."


Patricia settled the phone onto its rest and picked up her tea cup thoughtfully. She leaned forward, her nose nearly in her cup, near enough to feel the warm aura of the tea, all the better to capture the spicy sweet steam's scent before it dissipated. It certainly hadn't been a half hour chat with May, but she felt just as invigorated and determined to write this book as if she had talked to May. She may not talk to her daughter often, but when she did she was always impressed with the warmth and openness of her character. Just like the perfect cup of tea, Patricia thought, and took a sip of warm delicious autumn flavours.


She sipped slowly through the first cup, staring at nothing and not thinking about much, then put the cup on its saucer and slipped the cozy over the pot. If she wasn't going to be on the phone for another twenty minutes, she could pull out those hats, and consider them while she finished her tea.


Back by the front door, Patricia pulled open the double folding doors of her closet. This, unfortunately, was the one part of her apartment with poor light. It had a wall between it and the living room, meaning only the light from the bathroom, next to the closet, could reach into the closet, and the angle was all wrong to provide any sort of clarity on the closet's contents. That had turned this closet into the long-term storage space, and the box she thought the hats were in was near the bottom of the centre stack.


Oh well. No help for it. Patricia started moving the column of boxes, stacking them in reverse vertical order to the side of the closet until she could pull out the one she wanted.


Patricia had just opened up the box, still in the closet's dusk, and seen a hat's silhouetted shadow, just as she'd hoped, when a knock echoed softly through the hallway. A knock? On her door? Patricia paused, hands still holding the cardboard flaps she'd pulled to open the top of the box. Another echo - it must be her apartment, but it didn't sound like someone knocking on the door. Curiouser and curiouser, she thought, and rose to her feet.


She peered through the door's peephole, but saw no one. Patricia shook her head. It was Hallowe'en. Perhaps someone in the building was trick-or-treating and had given up on her. She didn't have any candy anyway, so she turned to go back to the closet.


Another knock, but this time she was on her feet in the open and could tell why the muffled noise hadn't sounded like a knock on the door from her position in the closet: it had come from her balcony, the other side of where she'd moved her rocking chair after the cold weather kicked in enough to keep her from spending time out on her small wooden "yard". She hadn't opened the blinds when she'd come home, since it was already dark, so she couldn't see what was out there. She walked towards the balcony, slowly. How could someone be knocking on her balcony door? She lived on the second floor and there was no easily climbable route, or May would have found it the last time she'd visited. Besides, below her balcony was another tenant's yard. It didn't make sense for someone to come up here to knock.


But another knock echoed on the glass.


Patricia shrugged internally, and opened the blinds by the balcony door. No one. Just the glow of windows in the facing apartment building, and headlights passing in the lane to the right of both her own and the facing buildings.


Her internal shrug turned into an internal head shake, and she reached for the pull to tug the blinds closed again. Her mind flickered to the rabbit ears she had thought she had seen at the party that afternoon, and she wondered what tricks it was playing on her now. Hopefully it would let her long enough to pull out those hats and drink her tea.


Her hand paused of its own accord before the blinds were completely closed. What, her mind thought to itself, was that?


And she found herself opening the door to the chilly night breeze and pulling in the cloth-covered cube that had somehow appeared outside her balcony door. Patricia closed the door against the cold, pulled the blinds all the way closed this time, and looked at the foreign object in her space.


Now that she looked at it properly, it looked like it might be a cage, a grid of bars and evenly spaced shallow dips showing beneath that threadbare blanket which might once have been colourful squares. Its sight made her think unexpectedly of her sewing again. Hadn't she been making a quilt like that not that long ago? She wondered who had sewn this one, whether its author had pricked her finger threading the needle of her sewing machine, as she herself had though Alfred had laughed and said she was doing the impossible.


But whomever had made the blanket, the fact that the box was here was more important right now, that and that someone had evidently brought it to the outdoor previously inaccessible door, rather than the inner door that seemed more accessible (but only through the locked front door of the building, she realised suddenly).


Patricia reached down to take the blanket off the box - please let there not be something inside that would infest her apartment, she prayed, but it was inside already. She wasn't about to take it outside into the cold to open it - although she supposed that was probably safer.


Oh well.


Her left hand, reaching down to grab the blanket on the left, touched what she expected: soft fabric, chilled from the October night air. Her right touched something smoother, and the harsh coldness of metal - a pin? Patricia leaned to the right and found a piece of note paper pinned to the side of the blanket. Perhaps a note about why this whatever it was had been left on her doorstep, she thought, as she deftly unpinned the paper.


"I hopɚ you enjoy what I left fur you", scrawled a shaky, thick stroke in slightly smeared blue ink. Alfred would have liked this, Patricia thought first, with his love for puns. Her second thought was more practical: "left fur you"? If it was a cage, perhaps the fur and - was that e in hope obscured to make hop a possible interpretation? - perhaps those rabbit ears she had been seeing earlier were a premonition of this.


Her fingers flipped the paper over.


Neatly typed on the other side she read:


"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." -- John Steinbeck


Oh no. No way was someone going to saddle her with a pair of rabbits. Patricia had heard about Australia. She flipped the blanket off the cage - phew, she sighed with relief. Just one.


Just one was a relief all of a sudden? she wondered. She had decided a long time ago not to have pets, even though hers was one of the few apartment buildings that allowed them at all. She just didn't want to deal with taking care of them.


Well, she had been thinking that she was up to more, in her day's realisation that she needed to stop moping. Apparently she was going to deal with a rabbit as well.


What did you do with a rabbit?


And how on earth had a rabbit ended up in a cage on her balcony, knocking on her balcony door?


A little unnerved and in need of thinking about something besides the rabbit, Patricia decided to get back to work. She still had to get the hats out, and she still had to drink her tea. Both of those things would calm her down, she thought, and forced a bit of happy bustle into her stride on her way back to the closet. It would just take a moment to pull the box out, but she'd have to put the stack back in.


Patricia pulled the big cardboard box out, confirming in the slightly better light that the contents were what she was looking for. Hats were heavier than she expected, she thought as she dragged it to the living room to leave beside the couch. She didn't look at the newcomer to her space. She wasn't ready to think about it yet.


Instead, she went back to the closet and methodically replaced the boxes she'd moved, again reversing the order of the stack so that they ended up in the same order they had been before she had started, save for the removal of the hat box. It wasn't exactly the towers of Hanoi, but she smiled at a job well done as she closed the closet's folding doors and turned off the light in the bathroom. It had been quite a while since she had had any need for any of the things in her closet, and it felt good to do something with something - anything - from the closet again. She wasn't ready for the dust heap, and neither were the things she had saved. Patricia laughed softly aloud, wondering at how she had gone from feeling defensive and low on energy that morning to coming home and pulling boxes out of her closet, reminding herself of her continued self-worth. Obviously it was time and past time that she get her act together. Even if the novel was terrible, even if she didn't make it to 50,000 words, Patricia was suddenly and effusively grateful to Mary and Molly, the two bubbly bunnies who had walked past her earlier that day at the coffeeshop.


Bunnies. Patricia's smile faded.


There was something going on. First at the kick-off party, and now this. And somehow it all came down to rabbits, as bizarre as that seemed.


Patricia sighed. She was not about to start getting paranoid, and she simply didn't have enough information to make it all make sense. She went back to the living room and stood in front of the cage. There was a bag of food inside. She opened the top, watching the small brown rabbit to see if it reacted at all - it didn't - and lifted the bag out. It had been sitting on top of a small dish with a picture of a bunny emblazoned on the bottom. Patricia ripped the top of the bag open, finding a bunny-shaped scoop resting inside on top of the small brown pellets of rabbit food. She put one scoop of food in the dish, and detached the water bottle from its perch on the side of the cage. She filled it at her kitchen sink, then pressed its hook-clasps back into position on the bars so that its silver tube - like a ballpoint pen for water, she thought - hung down to bunny height.


She looked at the rabbit, still in its far corner of the cage, unmoving but for its quivering pink nose. Perhaps it would do better with some cover from the light, she thought, vaguely remembering something about one of Laura's friends keeping her hedgehog's cage covered most of the day. Patricia picked up the threadbare blanket from where she had dropped it on the floor, and hung it so that the side of the cage nearest the light was covered, then shook her head in wonder at the rabbit.


Really. How on earth had a rabbit ended up in a cage on her balcony, knocking on her balcony door?


And how, whispered a tendril of inspiration at the back of her mind, could she fit this into a detective novel?


Thinking of which, she had a hat to choose. And tea to drink.


Patricia pulled the tea cozy off the pot and poured herself a cup. She felt the cup's sides and smiled, relieved. Still warm, although she definitely wouldn't need to let it cool before she drank. She swallowed that cup-ful in one go, and poured another before replacing the tea cozy and moving to the box by the couch.


She began pulling the hats out one by one, laying them out on the couch. There weren't all that many, but she had so many memories associated with each one...


First, the hard curve she had seen on the top: a bright yellowy-orange stackhat, from the time she and Alfred had spent in Australia in the 1980s. On the one hand, it was just a bike helmet - one she knew from May's comments was completely out of data and bizarre to the eyes of North America - but which she had brought back as a keepsake since neither she nor Alfred could afford to bring a bike back from overseas.


Then Alfred's fedora, brown with a band of darker fabric, lightly imprinted with paisleys. She had chosen that fabric, had added it to his hat as one of the first gifts she had given him. She had said his plain band had been too classic, hadn't she? Patricia smiled in memory as she laid the hat down fondly.


Her own trilby was next, black with white pinstripes. Alfred had chosen it for her from the hat store nearby, and brought home half a dozen strips of felt to tuck under its brim in case it was too big. She held it by the slightly pinched front, noticed, perhaps for the first time, that the crown was teardrop-shaped, not oval, and set it beside the others on the couch. She remembered wearing that hat to a dance, once, and getting envious looks from the girls wearing their boyfriends' fedoras.


Then - a gas mask? All black harshness and rubber, with huge empty alien eyes. Strange. Patricia couldn't remember where it had come from or why it would be in this box. She also couldn't see herself basing a story around it - although - she heard a slight scrabbling from the rabbit cage as a sudden image presented itself in her mind: a war novel, set in time of war, with gas attacks common - no. She had no experience of war, no desire to know the fears and tensions of war. She set the gas mask aside and continued with the others.


A baseball cap with the big SF letters of the San Francisco Giants, from when they had gone down the coast one fall. She remembered, suddenly, singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" with Alfred in the car as they crossed the border into California from Oregon. And then he had actually taken her, and they had cheered for the home team and eaten cracker jacks, and bought this hat. Patricia smiled and pulled the hat over her head - just the right fit, without even needing to adjust the little nobs.


Only two left. Where on earth had this come from? Perhaps Laura had brought it back from that trip when she had taken May down to Disney Land. It was like a cowboy hat, but instead of the usual pinched brim, it had what looked like a sand castle, with turrets and flying buttresses and towers and perhaps a princess waving out one of its windows. It was exactly the sort of thing Laura would have bought May, but how it had ended up here, Patricia had no idea. One thing was sure: this was not going to show up anywhere in her novel.


And last but not least, a small, delicate pillbox hat, with an equally delicate mesh veil hanging down its front. It was the oldest of the hats in the box, for Patricia had inherited this one from her own mother. She could remember her mother wearing it when she dressed up in her beautiful black velvet dress and bright red lipstick on the few occasions that her father took his wife to the theatre. She could also remember her mother wearing it with the same black dress, but without the red lipstick, for her father's funeral, and then never wishing to wear either again. Patricia had no idea what had happened to the dress (or the lipstick), but her mother had given her the hat when she and Alfred bought their first house. Somehow her mother had seemed it an appropriate housewarming gift. It was the sort of thing she did.


This one would work for her novel. This was the one she had, at the back of her mind, been hoping to find. She would have been willing to use the trilby hat, but this one offered so much more of a narrative. She could have a lady in mourning, and perhaps her husband had been murdered. She could base the lady's character on her own mother: theatrical, given to wistful meandering thoughts, and married to an older man whom she loved but who had never been able to give her the attention she wanted or thought she deserved. Or perhaps she could go a completely different direction, and make the lady the detective, or at least the one determined to get to the bottom of her husband's demise, and have a police detective playing opposite her, perhaps helpful but likely not. Corruption could play a role.


Behind her, scrabbling noises came from the rabbit cage. Patricia didn't even notice, but she paused to finish her cup of tea, and to pour another – the last of the pot. She breathed in the spicy aroma, and looked at the hat in her hands. Yes. This month's novel was shaping up nicely in her head. She would start with the woman – now, what would she name her? Oh dear – perhaps trying to get the police detective to help her. Explaining what had happened. And being turned away? Then she would have to take the situation into her own hands.


Patricia finished her cup of tea, full of thoughts and characters. She set the hat down next to her computer, put the rest back into the box and placed on top of the stack in the closet, and cleaned up her tea things. If she was to start work on a novel the next day, she had better get some sleep. She supposed that she would also need to do figure out what to do with the rabbit the next day, but for now it could wait. She pulled the blanket fully over the rabbit's cage so that it too could get some rest, and she went to get ready for bed.