Amberville

Chapter 15

The bedroom was bathed in the gentle daylight coming in through the drawn, white curtains. On a massive double bed, thick down comforters and a dozen shapeless pillows created a white lunar landscape with high mountains and deep ravines. Resting in this realm of softness was the delicate, unclothed body that was Emma Rabbit. She was lying on her stomach, with her legs scissored around a thick bedspread and her face turned to the right, toward the windows.

The walls of the bedroom were white, the oiled oak boards of the parquet floor had become darker since they moved in, and the bed was the only piece of furniture in the room, besides the round, white rug and the overstuffed armchair where Eric Bear was sitting, observing his sleeping wife. In the bedroom on Uxbridge Street there was an aroma of sleep and well-being, but it had been several years since Eric had noticed that. Today, after having been squeezed in with the males at Yiala’s Arch for two weeks, the aroma was more than tangible; it broke over him, filling him with melancholy.
He couldn’t see his wife’s face from the armchair where he was sitting, but he saw her thin body, and that caused tenderness to bubble up from his heart.
Was Eric Bear sitting there, secretly looking at his sleeping wife?
It couldn’t be denied.
Thoughts were moving through his head, slowly but evasively. Memories and associations, scenes and words, all in a single incomprehensible jumble. He let it happen. His yoga teacher had taught him to let thoughts come and go like clouds passing over an early Forenoon Sky. He had never understood what she meant, but finally he did just what she’d said. And slowly but surely he fell through the years down toward his childhood, which is often the case if you simply let your thoughts be in peace. Morning and the bedroom faded away and disappeared, until the scent of a familiar breathing was all that remained.
A sweet-smelling breath, closed-in the way a stuffed animal’s breath always is. The warm exhalations that come from the belly, that gather fragments from cotton that has never seen the light of day. From Teddy’s mouth came a breath that, to be sure, was lukewarm and stale, with a touch of honey and grass, but which made Eric secure. After the nightmares, he might take the few steps across the room and jump down into Teddy’s bed where his breath was waiting on the pillow, and the ghosts and demons that were haunting him disappeared. Or in the classroom, when Teddy turned around and whispered something in his ear, and Eric felt his breath sweeping past a few millimeters away; then it was those two against the world.
Alone was strong.
But two was one stronger.
During Eric Bear’s entire upbringing he’d wanted to get closer to his twin brother. It was being close to Teddy that meant something, that gave him power to free himself from Mother and dare to revolt against Father. And with every year that passed, Teddy became more and more distant.
Perhaps that was why the moments of physical proximity with his twin had survived through all these years. His breath of course, but also how in the evenings they’d used each other’s bellies as pillows, and how the feeling of being a part of someone else had been a shield against the reality lying in wait outside the house on Hillville Road. They used to massage each other before they fell asleep in the evening, hard with a solid grip, or loosely with the fingertips. Even the wrestling matches, which Teddy always won as he was the stronger of the two, left behind a feeling of healing nearness despite the bruises and worn fur.
Eric had loved his twin brother. He had needed him. More than he’d loved and needed anyone else in the whole world. It was in the light of Teddy’s betrayal that Eric’s complicated teenage years should be seen; this betrayal which neither of them could truly say when it occurred. It was not a matter of open conflict. Teddy disappeared by degrees into his own world of peculiar ideas that he refused to account for. It hurt to be shut out. And in his attempts to compensate for the loneliness to which he was inescapably consigned—and which he feared more than anything else—he sought community in circles where community was offered only in exchange for something else.
Eric loved Teddy. Eric did everything Teddy asked for. The only problem was that Teddy asked too seldom. But when it happened…when it happened…it was such a joy. However peculiar Teddy’s requests were, Eric went along. It was as though he stood, freezing, outside a shuttered-up house week after week, and then suddenly someone opened the door and asked him to come up and sit down in front of the warm fire. Coming home. Feeling secure. Not having to wonder and worry.




When did Eric discover for the first time that everything wasn’t as it should be with Teddy?
This question might be answered in two ways.
The first answer is: never.
The second answer is: at the same moment that they started school and Eric had the chance to compare his twin brother with others who were the same age. But by avoiding judging his brother’s singular manner in terms of right or wrong, life went on.
Sometimes it was absurd. In his teenage years it was not uncommon for Teddy to do and say things that appeared patently peculiar. Eric defended his brother by refusing to react to these peculiarities, and together the brothers seemed like certifiable lunatics. Even if Eric didn’t know what would happen if it was openly acknowledged that something was wrong, the thought frightened him.
Boxer Bloom was a fundamentalist, a conservative on the border of being a reactionary animal in all questions except political ones, where he gladly appeared to be liberal. Teddy Bear’s eccentricities became more extensive the older Teddy got. The boxer became more and more irritated. Rhinoceros Edda’s understanding for Teddy was exceeded only by her desire to smooth things over.
“I can’t eat this,” said Teddy suddenly one evening when all four of them were sitting in the kitchen on Hillville Road, having dinner.
The twins had recently turned fourteen and they were in the eighth grade. Teddy and Eric had spent the last weeks of summer vacation at Hillevie’s sailing camp. Since they’d come home from camp and the family had moved into Amberville again, Boxer Bloom had done his best to pretend as though everything were fine. He imagined to himself that Teddy had undergone a magic metamorphosis over the summer, and that everything would finally be…normal. Now he was getting desperate. It had nothing to do with food. The reminder that they would be forced to live with Teddy’s lack of accountability and compulsive thoughts for yet another year was more than Boxer could bear. When Teddy pushed aside his plate and awkwardly looked down at the table, something burst inside Boxer Bloom. With suppressed rage he muttered, “You can’t eat?”
“Papa,” said Teddy, who, like Eric, heard how angry his father was, “that’s not the idea. I…I just can’t.”
“It’s a tomato salsa, potato casserole, and veal cutlet,” Boxer informed, “that your mother has devoted hours to preparing. And which you have eaten a hundred times before.”
“Well,” objected Mother, “perhaps not that many times…”
“Why doesn’t it suit you just now?”
Boxer stared fiercely at the cub.
“If he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t have to, does he?” said Eric. “He’s eaten the salsa and the casserole. Maybe he’s full?”
“It’s got nothing to do with that,” said Teddy.
“Well, now,” thundered Bloom. “So what does it have to do with?”
“It can’t be right to kill a calf,” Teddy almost whispered.
And Boxer struck his paw on the table and got up. He appeared massive where he stood looking down at them. He held one paw pointed right at the cub.
“And what in the hell do you mean?!” shouted Bloom.
But in the moment following, before Teddy had time to reply, despite the fact that the tears were already rolling down his cheeks, Eric unexpectedly flew at his father.
Mother screamed, Father cried out and staggered backwards out toward the living room. Eric was hanging around his belly in something that resembled a convulsive hug.
“No more!” shouted Eric. “No more now.”
Eric didn’t care about the veal cutlet and his crazy brother. Feelings of impotence had built up for several weeks, just as long as Bloom had tried to imagine that everything would be fine, and finally here was the violent, physical release.
It should be said in Boxer Bloom’s defense that he did not forcibly attempt to free himself from his cub. When he regained his balance he simply stood completely still until Eric released his hold. And they remained standing like that, staring at each other, the cub openly aggressive, the father more surprised. Before they recovered enough to say anything to each other, Teddy got up from the table out in the kitchen. The sound caused Eric to turn around, and he saw his twin brother running up the stairs.
“There are limits,” said Bloom flatly. “A limit for when it’s gone too far and we can’t take care of it ourselves any longer.”
Eric turned around again and stared into the dog’s eyes.
“Your love ought to be boundless,” Eric whispered scarcely audibly, “but it never has been.”
Whereupon he turned and ran up the stairs after Teddy.


Emma Rabbit turned around in the bed.
Eric Bear gave a start, restored in an instant to the present. He looked at her and how in her sleep she was searching for the blanket because she was cold lying there on her back. She pulled one of the large, white comforters over her, again disappearing out of his field of vision. The tears were running from Eric’s eyes without his realizing it. Soundlessly he got up. It was a little more than two weeks since he’d seen her last. But tonight, after he’d put the Death List back in its crumpled envelope, he was compelled to come here instead of to Yiala’s Arch. Compelled to see her, to carefully stroke her forehead in her sleep.
He had intended to sneak out of the bedroom and let it be fine like that, but he wasn’t able to. Not just now. He stood up, taking a few steps over toward the bed. She turned her head, and her whiskers twitched from the dream she was having. It was strange, he thought, that he dared to love someone like this. Again. To make yourself so defenseless, to risk being wounded so terribly. Again. After everything that had happened with Teddy.
Eric looked at his sleeping wife and smiled. But she wouldn’t hurt him. And it was this certainty, this self-assured thought that meant that he’d dared. He loved her because she was worthy of being loved, and he, more clearly than anyone else, could see that.
Carefully he sneaked out of the bedroom, avoiding the plank in the floor right next to the threshold, the one that always creaked. He walked quickly through the living room and out into the hall, succeeded in opening and closing the door without the least sound, and only a few moments later he was en route in his gray Volga Combi.
A Death List existed.
It was not drawn up by the Chauffeurs.
And Nicholas Dove was there on the list.
The list consisted of names and dates, that was all. On certain days no one would be picked up, other days there was more than one. Such was the case the twenty-first of May.
That was the day the Chauffeurs would pick Nicholas Dove up.
That was in four days.
But on the twenty-first of May there had been one more name. Yet another stuffed animal would be taken away from this life in four days.
Teddy Bear.