Bunny, a romance
“Oh, Bill. Oh, Billy Bill. Please don’t be dead. Oh, please.”
"This is a wondrous, luminous, dark, haunting, utterly original novel. So many brilliant lines and lyrical, compelling sequences throughout. I know there are many readers who will love to enter this world and get caught up in its spell. A true enchantment of a reading experience."
—Marly Swick, author of Paper Wings.
Eighteen years ago a college love affair ended disastrously: a moonlit walk, a fairy tale evening, and then a terrifying confrontation and farewell. Bunny Bingham fled to the safety of a more ordinary life. But now, with that life in tatters, she returns to the scene of her greatest happiness, trying to make sense of all that she has lost and all that might still be waiting. Bunny finds herself on a journey made of equal parts memory and dream. And as the inevitability of loss gives way to a new sense of possibility, the ordinary boundaries of life and longing may yet open up to include that most unlikely of things: a happy ending.
Chapter 1
She is sitting on a large pink suitcase in the middle of Willow Rock Park dressed in pearls and a pale grey suit. The shining silver hair is not her own, though the color is true. She'd gone pewter grey by senior year in college--that was the joke between them: a life of privilege had aged her prematurely--and the next eighteen years have brightened it to a fine, metallic sheen. Though the chemo has doubtless dulled it again. She's been traveling all night, Chicago to Connecticut, home to here. A bus and then a cab and then walking for what seemed like forever. She has barely slept. Now, peering around, she wishes it all looked more familiar--the shape of the trees, the slope of the grass. This scene has stood out for so long in her memory it is a shock to realize how wide the gap has grown between what she remembers and what is true.
Partly it's fatigue; she knows that. But mostly it's the medications playing with her mind. Poisons fighting poisons fighting poisons: how can that end well?
Cautiously she rises, trying for another perspective, and in turning notices the pink suitcase. It isn't that she's forgotten. She looks down and, of course, there it is. But lately she has room in each moment's thought for only a single thing, as if her mind is constantly remaking itself.
Now she tugs the suitcase on its little wheels over the grass, and as she does she feels the quick, sharp pain of the skin graft drawing tight, a new seam threatening to open between her shoulder blade and the base of her neck. It's been two months, but still she thinks of it as an intruder who has hitched a ride and now can't be shaken off.
Dappled light, the feel of grass, the scent of the breeze. She tries to concentrate on each. It is only gradually that she notices the man. He is sitting on a bench beneath a tree: a slender figure in dark hat, suit, and sunglasses with a book open just beneath his eyes as if not wanting to miss a word.
Two months ago she would not have spoken: strange man sitting in a park. But there is something about bad luck that makes you think. If enough of it accrues you begin to wonder if maybe it doesn't mean something, so that every event becomes weighted with doubt.
Besides. There's something about a reader...