Bunny Call Read online

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but which way to sign up for activities?”

  Ridiculously, she blew the whistle again, but this time it was at least a short burst, and she pointed to a shallow flight of stairs on one end of the lodge. “Go up those stairs, and follow the walkway to the front porch. Get in the line, and it will lead you to the sign-up tables inside.” She blew the whistle again.

  Bob’s fingers itched to pull the whistle off her neck, but he contained himself.

  “Thanks,” he said through a murderous smile.

  Bob went up the stairs and found the line on the lodge’s front porch. From here, he could see that his family was already settling in. Cindy was holding hands with another girl, this one with black braids, and spinning around on a big dock that stretched over the lake. What was it with little kids and spinning? Near Cindy, Wanda was talking to a woman while Bob’s boys and another boy took turns trying to skip rocks across the surface of the lake.

  And here he was, standing in a line so he could take care of paperwork. Story of his life.

  Bob lost track of how long he waited. Flies droned around his head, and he felt his nose starting to burn. That would teach him to ignore Wanda’s advice to put on sunscreen.

  “It’s going to rain,” he’d told her confidently.

  “You never know,” she’d said. It was amazing how often she did know what he didn’t know.

  Someplace nearby, someone played a guitar. Someplace even nearer, someone ate beef jerky. Bob wrinkled his nose. The smell made his stomach roil.

  Other parents were chatting in line, but Bob kept his head down. For the first time since he’d pulled the minivan out of his driveway, he was able to think about the proposal he wished he was home working on. He didn’t have time to take a week’s vacation, and if he did, he sure didn’t want to take it running himself ragged doing activities with a bunch of strangers. Honestly? He needed to be alone.

  Bob turned to watch his family again. Cindy and her new friend were now playing a makeshift game of hopscotch between the lawn and the lake, while the boys were trying to balance on the pilings along the edge of the dock. He was sure he was going to hear a splash pretty soon.

  Bob finally reached the doorway of the lodge. Hard to believe, but it would eventually be his turn. Curious in spite of himself, he looked around the lodge’s interior. It was just as the brochure depicted: exposed log walls, lots of big heavy wood furniture padded with cushions covered in vaguely Native American patterns. A massive buck’s head presided over the fireplace, and the chandeliers hanging from the log roof were made of antlers. This was not the best place to be a deer.

  Bob took one last peek at his family before he stepped completely into the building. As expected, the boys fell into the lake. Cindy continued to play hopscotch. Wanda laughed at her sons … only because they were laughing, too.

  If anyone had asked Bob if he loved his family, he would have answered a vehement “Yes!”—because he did. But that didn’t mean he liked them all the time, and lately, he’d been liking them less and less. They always wanted something.

  Daddy, look at the picher I drew, Cindy would say.

  Dad, can you throw the ball to me? Aaron would ask.

  Dad, please help me with my school project, Tyler would beg.

  Honey, the garage door is rattling; please fix that, Wanda would order. Yeah, order. She always said “please” but it felt no less like an order than it did when his boss said, “Get that done today, please.”

  Bob was tired of all the requests, all the obligations. He needed to breathe.

  “It’s your turn, dude.” Someone tapped Bob on the shoulder.

  He looked around.

  A young dad who obviously still loved fatherhood stood behind Bob. The dad grinned and pointed over Bob’s shoulder. “You’re up.”

  At the table in front of Bob, a hefty, tanned woman with super-short dirty blonde hair and smile lines around her eyes looked up at him. “Hi. I’m Marjorie.” She gave him a big smile, and he admired her very white, even teeth while she pointed to the white plastic name tag pinned to her green Camp Etenia shirt. “Welcome to Camp Etenia.”

  “Oh, is that where I am?” He was aiming for dry humor, but apparently he missed the mark.

  Marjorie’s smile faltered. She frowned for a second and then said, “Name?”

  “Mackenzie.”

  The woman tapped the keys on a wireless laptop. “Bob, Wanda, Cindy, Aaron, and Tyler.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, let’s get you signed up. Have you prepared your list of activities?”

  Bob handed the woman Wanda’s neat lists. The camp offered 112 activities and asked that campers come prepared with lists of at least twenty, ordered by preference. Wanda’s lists held seventy-two activities altogether. Bob wondered what Marjorie would do with that.

  But she didn’t seem surprised at all. “Perfect,” Marjorie said as she began typing.

  Bob watched her, his jaw clenched. One of the objections he had to Camp Etenia—in fact, to any summer camp—was the rigidity of the whole thing. He had no issues with being outdoors or doing fun things, but doing things on a schedule, following a list—that drove him nuts. Ha! Maybe he did belong in Cabin Nuttah.

  Seriously, though, didn’t he get enough schedules and lists to follow at work? At least at work he was getting paid. Why did he have to be subjected to this crap at home, too?

  Marjorie stopped typing. “I wasn’t able to get you into every activity listed, but I managed the top twenty for each of your children and for your family as a whole.”

  “Awesome juice.” Bob enjoyed using one of Tyler’s favorite sayings. Tyler actually meant it when he said it, but for Bob “awesome juice” meant either “That sucks” or “I couldn’t care less.”

  Marjorie handed Bob’s lists back to him, then looked both ways and behind her before leaning forward. When she spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper. Bob heard “Do you want,” but the rest was incomprehensible.

  He leaned forward. “I’m sorry?”

  Marjorie leaned forward, too. Her breath smelled like chocolate. “Do you want to sign up for a Bunny Call?” she asked.

  He must have misheard her. Bob asked, “What’s that?”

  Marjorie turned and pointed toward a tall rabbit standing in the far corner of the massive room, under an antique canoe hanging from the vaulted ceiling. The rabbit, which had bright orange fur, wore a white-and-black checked vest, a yellow-and-white polka-dot bow tie, and a black top hat, through which its floppy ears stuck straight up. The rabbit held cymbals, like old-fashioned windup monkeys used to have. Bob blinked. How had he missed the rabbit when he first looked around? It was like missing an anaconda in a pen full of puppies. The rabbit did not belong. It really did not belong.

  Bob was mesmerized by the rabbit for several seconds. He couldn’t tell if the rabbit was a person wearing a costume or one of those creepy animatronic things he’d seen in a couple of restaurants his family had visited when he was young. In any case, it wasn’t the kind of rabbit that made you want to cuddle up to it. Its eyes were a little too big to be friendly; they bordered on crazed.

  “Mr. Mackenzie? Bob?”

  Bob blinked. “Huh?”

  Marjorie grinned at him and winked. “When you sign up for a Bunny Call, the rabbit over there—his name is Ralpho—will visit your cabin.”

  Bob looked back at the rabbit, Ralpho.

  “He’ll come into your cabin screaming, clashing cymbals, and spinning his head.” Marjorie chuckled. “It’s really something terrifying to behold!”

  Bob could just imagine it.

  “It’s quite the wake-up call,” Marjorie added.

  Bob didn’t get it. “Wake-up call?”

  “Oh, right, I didn’t say. Ralpho makes his rounds between five a.m. and six a.m. During that hour, he’ll visit every cabin that signs up for a Bunny Call. It’s a bit of a naughty prank we play on the children on their first d
ay here. Most of them love to have that rush of terror when they’re scared silly first thing in the morning.” Marjorie chuckled again. In her low voice, the sound was reminiscent of a villain’s devilish laugh. “Are you interested?”

  Bob looked from Marjorie to Ralpho and back again. He thought about his annoyingly happy family and their insistence that he spend his only week off this summer in this poorly disguised detention center for overworked dads. He thought about how long he’d stood in this stupid line signing up for all the asinine activities. He thought about all the luggage he still had to schlep to Cabin Nuttah.

  Then he thought about how his family reacted to loud noises in the morning. That thought began teasing some of his good humor to the surface.

  “Sure!” He grinned. This was going to be a riot!

  “Wonderful,” Marjorie said. She tapped her keyboard again. “There. All signed up.” She smiled up at him, and he smiled back.

  It was Bob’s first genuine smile of the day. It was the first moment since this trip had been scheduled that he felt something other than resentment and annoyance. He even felt a little delighted.

  Marjorie leaned over to grab a stack of papers she’d just printed. She thrust them in front of Bob. “If you could read these over to be sure you approve, and then initial each page.” She handed him a pen. He sighed and read the excruciating lists one more time. He didn’t approve at all, but he initialed the pages anyway.

  Marjorie beamed. “Excellent!” She shuffled the papers, and stapled some of them together. “Here are your schedules,” she said. “Ralpho will visit in the morning, and the rest of your activities are blocked out on the calendar.” She handed Bob a key and a little booklet. “Key to Cabin Nuttah and a book of camp rules,” she explained.

  Oh lovely. A book of rules. Bob needed more rules … like he needed a few more jobs or a few more kids.

  He didn’t say that out loud. He just took the rulebook and the key.

  “Have fun, and don’t hesitate to ask if you need anything,” Marjorie said.

  Bob nodded at her, gave Ralpho one last look, and then headed outside. He noticed his step felt lighter. He was tempted to do a little spin as he headed out the door. Instead, he turned to Ralpho one last time and tipped an imaginary hat to his new “friend.”

  “Thanks, buddy,” Bob said quietly. Ralpho had given Bob the most profound sense of gratification he’d had in weeks.

  Bob hauled the last load of luggage into Cabin Nuttah and stepped back outside to catch his breath. Basically an A-frame with a shallow porch, Cabin Nuttah was a simple log structure with two small side windows, one picture window in the front, and a small window on the loft level. Bob shook his head at the cabin. It wasn’t the five-star hotel he had envisioned spending his vacation in.

  “Bob?” Wanda called.

  He went inside the cabin, and Wanda gave him what he’d come to think of as “the look.” The look was a lips-quirked-to-the-side-with-an-eyebrow-raised expression that meant “You’re not doing what I want you to do.”

  “What?” Bob asked.

  “You need to get a move on. It’s time for the Opening Day Picnic,” Wanda complained, bustling over to Bob and waving the schedule under his nose. “See? Four p.m. We’re going to be late.”

  “No one is on time for picnics,” Bob said.

  Wanda threw a pair of khaki shorts and a navy-blue polo shirt in his direction. “Here. Change into these. You smell like sweat.”

  “You think?”

  Wanda’s words had sounded accusatory, and he wanted to ask her how he was supposed to have gotten all their stuff to the cabin without working up a little sweat. Instead, he watched Wanda set up Cindy’s “sleeping kit,” a small vinyl pouch tucked into a white wicker basket. The pouch held a sleep mask and earplugs, and the basket included a cup of water with a lid.

  From early in their relationship, Bob had known that Wanda was a loud snorer—she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder at an outdoor concert once, and her snores were somehow audible over the loud music. When they had kids, he found out that the snoring thing was genetic, and unfortunately it came with a propensity toward light sleep and an overreaction to being awakened by loud noises or bright light. These days, Wanda and the kids all wore earplugs and blackout sleep masks to bed. Bob never bothered with a mask, but Wanda’s snores forced him to wear earplugs, and even those weren’t enough to keep him from feeling like he spent every night in a working sawmill. That was another thing about this trip that displeased him: All four of his snoring family members in one small area? Bob didn’t see a lot of sleep coming his way over the next seven days. One of the reasons he got such a kick out of the Bunny Call was he thought it would mete out a bit of justice. If he had to be tortured all night, at least they’d get a little shock in the morning.

  Cabin Nuttah was as basic on the inside as it was on the outside. On the first floor, the cabin held a double daybed with a pull-out trundle bed beneath, a table with five chairs, a chest of drawers, and a small refrigerator. A door led to a tiny bathroom. Up in the loft, two twin beds with matching nightstands were tucked under the roof’s steep pitch. The cabin had no shelves or closets. Instead, coat hooks lined several of the walls, and low benches were set under the hooks, presumably to hold luggage. Wanda had already stashed all of their suitcases neatly in rows. She’d also piled snacks, paper plates and cups, and a roll of paper towels on top of the refrigerator.

  “I thought there would be bunk beds,” Aaron had said when Bob reached the cabin. “Bunk beds would have been fun.”

  “When I was your age, your uncle and I were complaining that we had to have bunk beds,” Bob told his son. “We thought twin beds would have been fun.”

  “Yeah,” Aaron said, “but you’re old.”

  Bob wondered what that had to do with it. He didn’t think of himself as old, although with each passing day the label got closer to sticking. But even if he was old, did old automatically mean wrong? He was beginning to think it did.

  Bob surveyed the cabin’s beds, indulging in a moment’s anticipation for the Bunny Call. Every bed in the cabin was covered in a red blanket, and the sheets were dark green. This gave the place a decidedly Christmassy feel that was heightened by the green-and-red striped curtains on the windows. Bob thought it was a little weird and had said so when they first entered the cabin, but Wanda had insisted, “It’s festive.”

  “Exactly my point,” Bob had said.

  Although the boys didn’t like the lack of bunk beds, they did like one of the cabin’s features: it had a trapdoor in the floor.

  “What’s that for?” Aaron asked when he found it.

  Bob made Aaron wait while he dropped through the trapdoor and checked out what was below. Turned out it was just the cabin’s crawl space. Bob figured they’d decided to put the crawl-space door inside to prevent critters from getting under the cabins. Or maybe it was an insulation thing. Whatever it was, it delighted the boys, who went in and out of the crawl space several times, jabbering about hidden treasure.

  Wanda snapped her fingers in front of Bob’s face. “Why are you just standing there?” She gave him a push. “Change!”

  Obediently, Bob began peeling off his sweaty clothes, replacing them with fresh ones. When he was done changing, he stood at mock attention in front of his wife, who had already changed into a simple emerald-green sundress. “Do I pass muster?”

  Wanda smiled, gave him a hug, and kissed him on the cheek. She recoiled. “Oh. Rough. You need to shave.”

  “I’m on vacation,” Bob reminded her.

  “That’s an excuse to give your wife whisker burn?”

  Bob sighed. Would he ever get a break from anything? He picked up his shaving kit.

  “Not now!” Wanda said. “We’re late.”

  Bob dropped the kit in frustration. “Well then, you just tell me exactly when and where and how, and I’ll do exactly what you want,” he said.

  Wanda didn’t seem to hear the acrimony in his
words. She probably thought he was serious, because she smiled at him, and linked her arm through his. “Let’s go to a picnic.”

  Spread out over a vast expanse of lawn sloping down to a sandy beach, the picnic was a chaotic mass of food, games, and socializing. Bob wanted to run and hide in the forest the second he and his family reached the edges of the tumult.

  CAMP ETENIA WELCOMES YOU! a bright-green banner shouted from its place stretched between two massive fir trees. Bob doubted that Camp Etenia welcomed any of them. It was more probable that the camp wanted them all to go away. In fact, Bob was pretty sure Lake Amadahy wished the camp had never been built.

  Bob had entered the architecture firm as an apprentice right out of school, and in the twelve years he worked there, he’d learned a lot about form and function and energy and landscape. Walking sites to prepare plans, he often had a sense of when a place welcomed a structure and when it didn’t. Not that he ever shared that tidbit with anyone. He kept his intuitive sense of a place in mind when he designed structures, but he never told his clients he was repositioning a building on a site because the earth wanted it that way. He had some sort of weird sense about land and nature, but he wasn’t stupid.

  “Come on, Bob.” Wanda tugged on his arm. “Stop loitering. You look like a deer in headlights.”

  “I feel like a deer in headlights. I’ll probably be mounted on one of the lodge walls by the end of the week.”

  “Very funny.” Wanda towed Bob to the end of a row of picnic tables. They were lined up, covered with dark-green vinyl cloths, and valiantly trying to hold several tons of food. Wanda handed him a heavy-duty paper plate. “We might as well eat while the kids play. Then I’ll corral them and help them get their own meals.”

  Bob looked around for the kids. The boys appeared to have become ninja warriors. They wore green headbands now, and they were having sword fights with long sticks.

  He glanced toward a cluster of toddlers clambering around a clown, who was smearing paint on a redheaded girl’s face. Cindy was hopping up and down next to the girl. “Me too. Me too,” she squealed loud enough that Bob could hear her clearly from a great distance. “Make me buzzy honeybee,” Cindy commanded.