Rabbits(12)

Ruby had been there for me when I came home from the press conference where they’d announced that the rescue operation—which had eventually turned into a recovery operation—was now strictly a salvage operation.

When my parents were finally pronounced dead, having Ruby there needing to be fed and walked helped me make it through the seemingly endless days.

When she died, I was well and truly alone.



* * *



—

One night, shortly after Ruby died, I was playing a brand-new massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) called Underlight, when another game popped into my mind. It was something my parents had played with me when I was a kid, something called Connections.

Connections was all about trying to find patterns and relationships between a number of seemingly disparate and unrelated images.

My parents had introduced me to Connections on a weekend evening, sometime in the late summer. We were getting ready to go to the drive-in, and it had started raining really hard. I was angry, because for the first time I’d managed to persuade my parents to let me pick an R-rated movie. I’d chosen Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners, and they’d reluctantly agreed.

I called the drive-in theater, but they told me all of the movies had been canceled because of the weather. My mother decided this wasn’t an unfortunate event but rather an opportunity for a family game night.

She made popcorn and the three of us played Monopoly. It was a far cry from The Frighteners, but I enjoyed playing games with my parents, and I loved the way my mother made popcorn. She called it a delivery system for butter.

Later, after we’d all made banana splits (a delivery system for hot fudge), my father brought out a worn rectangular black box with the word “Connections” written in burnt orange across the front in a modern font. I’d been through the closet where our family kept our games a million times. I’d never seen that box before.

I remember my mother wasn’t impressed when she saw it. I heard her whisper to my father that he was forcing things, that I wasn’t ready, that this game might exacerbate something she referred to as my “condition.” He told her that was exactly why it was important.

Inside the box were a variety of photographic images in a series of color-coded envelopes. The pictures had been printed on some kind of thick card stock. Each card had some words or numbers printed on the back of it.

I wasn’t allowed to see the backs of the image cards, only the pictures themselves.

After a minute or two spent arranging the images and envelopes, my father lifted up one of the cards and asked me to look at the image carefully.

It was a picture of a tiger in a lush green jungle setting.

After a moment, he put that card away and held up another one. This one was a photograph of a woman sitting at a Formica table in a 1950s-style kitchen. She was doing some kind of accounting work.

My mother asked me if I could see anything in the second picture that was similar to something in the first. I told her that the patterns of the tiger’s markings matched some of the patterns on the wallpaper.

Then my father brought out a third photograph.

Taken in what appeared to be some kind of honky-tonk bar, the photograph featured a bottle of beer sitting on top of an old Wurlitzer jukebox.

My father asked me if there was anything in the third photograph that matched the second. I told him that the time on the clock in the second picture matched the numbers of the song on the jukebox in the other.

This continued a few more times, until I could no longer come up with anything to connect the images.

That’s when the game ended.

We played Connections a few more times over the next couple of months. It was fun spending time with my parents, but staring at cards and trying to find some kind of link between them really wasn’t much of a game. After a while, I found myself getting bored. I’d started dreading the sight of the black box with the orange letters.

But the last time we played Connections was different.

My parents had taken me out for pancakes. This time there were no cards.

This time we were looking for connections in real life.

My father asked me to look for things that could be related somehow, for any kind of link between two or more things in the restaurant.

I hadn’t noticed anything that stood out until after we’d eaten and were just about to leave. I pointed out a girl wearing a T-shirt with a horse on the front. It was very similar to a painting of a horse hanging above the door to the kitchen.

We followed the girl and her family as they went outside and got into their car.

As we were standing outside the restaurant, a bus pulled up and stopped. There was an ad on the side of the bus for a group of artists at the Frye Art Museum. The ad featured a horse. And just like the girl’s T-shirt and the painting above the kitchen door, the horse was rearing up on its back legs. My mother grabbed my hand and we ran for the bus.

We didn’t make it. My parents had a brief conversation, then we got into the car and drove to the Frye Art Museum.

We entered the museum and my parents took me straight to the painting of the rearing horse that had been featured on the side of the bus. There was something in the title and catalog number of the painting that led my parents to drive us to a park. I can’t remember exactly which park, but I remember seeing a bust of a man’s head attached to a small fountain, and some kind of outdoor performance stage.