Rabbit Moon

by Jennifer Haigh

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of Mercy Street, a tense, propulsive family drama set in Shanghai, where a fractured American family faces its complicated past.
 
Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for:  their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. 
 
The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family:  the shocking event that ended the Litvaks’ marriage and turned Lindsey against them. Estranged from her parents, she has confided only in her younger sister, Grace, adopted as an infant from China. As Claire and Aaron struggle to get their bearings in bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the newly prosperous “miracle city,” they face troubling questions about Lindsey’s life there, in which nothing is quite as it seems.
 
With her trademark psychological acuity, Jennifer Haigh delivers a taut, suspenseful story about family, secret lives, and the unbreakable bond between two sisters, the fabled red thread that ties them together across time and space.

“Ms. Haigh is an expertly nuanced storyteller long overdue for major attention. Her work is gripping, real, and totally immersive, akin to that of writers as different as Richard Price, Richard Ford, and Richard Russo.” ― The New York Times
 

Release date: April 8, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 272

Sample

It could happen anywhere.

A red-haired girl stands on a street corner staring at a cell phone, music streaming through her earbuds. Stands, crucially, with her back to the street.

It could happen anywhere, but it happens in Shanghai, miracle city of modern China, on a Sunday morning just before dawn. Lujiazui, the financial district, is quiet as a graveyard—a ghostly proscenium studded with skyscrapers, a gleaming diorama of poured concrete. The buildings are sleek and fantastically shaped—a perfume bottle, a hypodermic needle, strategically lit like sculptures in a gallery. The streetlamps wear Mickey Mouse ears. The lampposts are decorated with colorful flags, printed in both Chinese and English: THE MAGIC BEGINS.

The street is silent. Except for the girl, there is no sign of life here. Traffic signals change ironically: green, yellow, red. For a brief, surreal moment, she feels that she is watching a light show, timed to the music feeding into her head—a pop song she remembers from childhood, sung by a girl with a scratch in her voice.

I’m like a bird, I’ll only fly away

She nods to the music, a rhythmic self-soothing, and taps out a text message to a friend. Waiting 4 dd

And then, because she needs to tell someone: Disaster night! Kill me now

Six blocks to the south and one block west, a driver steers one-handed. The other hand covers his left eye, to stabilize his vision. He is nineteen and full of rice wine. His girlfriend screams at him through a Bluetooth earpiece.

I’m like a bird, I’ll only fly away

The red-haired girl taps out another message, this one to her little sister. It’s late afternoon in New Hampshire, where Grace has been sent, unhappily, to summer camp.

Good luck in the talent show! Send pix!

On the long empty blocks the driver guns the engine, racing through green lights, testing himself. He feels that he is inside a video game: Lujiazui emptied out for his own amusement, the white Mercedes—his father’s—his on-screen avatar. Green light, green light, green light. His luck is supernatural, his skill epic. He cannot be stopped.

Finally he encounters a yellow light, a sign his luck is turning. He makes a sharp left and hears a dull thud. With the firm conviction of the very intoxicated, he believes that he has struck a lamppost. With a puff of exhaust, the car squeals off, generating a sulfurous breeze.

The red-haired girl—her name is Lindsey—is thrown two and a half meters. Her purse and shoes go flying, her mobile phone skates along the pavement. She lands neatly, flat on her back, as though stretched out for a nap on the sidewalk. Her breathing is shallow. Beneath her head is a spreading pool of blood.

Above her the sky lightens. At dawn a street sweeper finds her. He calls the police on his old Nokia, then slips her iPhone into his pocket.

Johnny Du waits for the ferry, dressed in his Sunday clothes. His parents live on an island east of the city. One Sunday each month he joins them for lunch, lavishly prepared by his mother: pork bone soup, seaweed salad, tripe dumplings, an entire steamed fish. Johnny takes the smallest servings possible, knowing his parents will stretch the leftovers to last the week.

On Sunday evening the ferry terminal is crowded—young couples mostly, dutiful adult children returning to their real lives in Shanghai. Johnny, the only single, studies his reflection in a smudged plate-glass window. In his good-son costume, wool trousers and a cardigan sweater, he’s still himself, only less niang—no earrings or eyeliner, his hair combed flat. To a careful observer he’s still plenty niang, but his parents aren’t careful observers. Like most people, they see what they wish to see.

The boat boards slowly. As he climbs the stairs to the upper deck, he feels a man watching him, an employee of the ferry company. Such men are everywhere, in cafés and bars and, on summer afternoons, a secluded rock garden in People’s Park. Usually the attention excites him. Today he feels slightly offended. He wants to ask: Why me, Uncle? In his good-son costume he feels above such notice.

When the uncle turns away, Johnny snaps his photo and sends it to Lindsey: Dashu cruzin me on the boat

They text the way they speak, in both languages, toggling back and forth. His English is exactly as good as her Chinese. The symmetry makes for harmonious conversation. He’s neither ashamed of his errors nor impatient with hers.

She doesn’t respond to his message, a fact he’ll remember later. They text at all hours, twenty or thirty times a day. Her last text was sent early that morning. Disaster night! Kill me now

Johnny wonders briefly about the nature of the disaster—a word she uses often, a word she taught him. A disaster, for Lindsey, might be anything or nothing: run in the stockings, lost wallet. Missed train, broken heel.

He finds a seat on the upper deck and settles in. The uncle is not unhandsome. He wears a nylon windbreaker like one Johnny’s father owns. Johnny has nothing against older lovers—he prefers them—but Chinese men don’t tempt him. Friends tease him about this. Potato eater, they call him. Only to Lindsey has he explained it: Chinese men are too beautiful. He needs to be the pretty one.

At his parents’ house, the Sunday meal begins at noon. Today, because it was his mother’s birthday, the entire family gathered: Johnny, his parents, both sets of grandparents. His father’s parents are quiet and slender, his mother’s talkative and round. Johnny is, officially, an only grandchild, the only child of only children. Seven people sat around the table, six lives that have culminated in his.

The visits unfold according to a template. Because the family expects it, he talks about his job at China Mobile. The job is imaginary, a fabrication of long standing. For three years he has worked as a hairstylist in Shanghai. At the Young Phoenix Salon he’s known for spiky cuts and fanciful color, style with a streetwise edge. His imaginary self is an office flunky, known for nothing—an underpaid diaosi who sells mobile phone contracts, a job of such low status that no one would lie about doing it. His story thus has the ring of truth.

At each visit, Johnny’s mother asks the same question. “Jun, is there any news from Lin?”

A year ago he gave his imaginary self an imaginary girlfriend. Like that of his job at China Mobile, the story of Lin has grown increasingly elaborate, an intricate tapestry embroidered over time. The story begins with a chance meeting, Lin coming into the store to buy a SIM card. Johnny gave her a widowed mother in a faraway province and, when his parents hinted that they’d like to meet his friend, a two-year scholarship at Wesleyan University in America. He wishes, now, that he’d made the scholarship longer. The first year passed too quickly. Soon he’ll have to invent another story.

His given name, Jun, means “to be truthful.” Each time it passes his mother’s lips, Johnny hears it as a reproach.

She is a lonely woman. Johnny feels responsible for her unhappiness. His parents’ marriage was inauspicious. His mother is sensitive and hungers for conversation. His father is an anchovy fisherman with a grade-school education. What is there to talk about?

Lin is a gift to his parents, a generous fiction, something to tell the neighbors. Lin brings peace and comfort to all concerned, even if they know she’s a fantasy. Certainly his mother knows. What his father knows or doesn’t, Johnny is less sure.

In this family, truth is selective. Many stories go untold. His slender, quiet father drinks and gambles. His round, talkative mother takes painkillers her body doesn’t need. To Johnny she surrenders her secrets. She never wanted a son, not truly. She wanted, still wants, the daughter she gave up, her firstborn. The child she sent away.

Johnny isn’t supposed to know he has a sister. At the table this fact isn’t mentioned. His mother speaks of it only later, when she and Johnny are alone in the kitchen, after she’s taken her pills.

“I had no choice,” she often tells him. Her husband’s parents wouldn’t have forgiven her, their one chance for a grandchild wasted on a girl.

The story changes slightly with each telling. Johnny’s sister is now twenty-five years old, adopted by rich Westerners and taken sometimes to England, sometimes to America. (To his mother they are interchangeable, different names for the same distant place.) Hearing the story for the first time, he understood that a mistake had been made. He saw himself with new eyes, the victim of a cosmic mix-up. He should have been the girl sent to England or America, not the dutiful Chinese son.

He’s seen photos of Lindsey’s little sister, the beloved round-faced child adopted from China. Her name, Grace, is tattooed on Lindsey’s shoulder. Grace is fourteen years younger than his own lost sister, yet in his mind they’ve become the same girl. It’s why he’s fallen a little in love with Lindsey, a pure love that has nothing to do with the hungry uncles in People’s Park. He loves her because they share a sister, the Chinese girl in America who is also, in some way he can’t explain, his own true self.

Monday morning in the city. The subway trains are so crowded that Johnny commutes on foot. The stagnant air is moist and heavy, thick with industrial exhaust, the hot breath of coal-fired plants to the north, south and west. He wears a surgical mask of black silk, embroidered with tiny red flowers. A lover told him, once, that it made him look mysterious, like a harem girl’s veil.

He crosses the street to avoid a building under construction. Long ago, it was the Gate of a Hundred Pleasures—at the time, the largest dance hall in Shanghai. Now the place is getting yet another facelift. A foreman in a lawn chair sits on the sidewalk in front of it, smoking. His head and shoulders are covered with white dust, as though he’s been dipped in flour. Behind him the building’s front doors are propped open. There is a terrific racket, the sounds of a demolition in progress: jackhammer, sledgehammer, shattering concrete.

The man in the lawn chair is brave but foolish. Sitting with his back to the work site is asking for trouble. It’s common knowledge that an unquiet spirit inhabits the building. Workers have been killed here—two known electrocutions, a fall from a fourth-floor window. Last month a crossbeam collapsed on a carpenter, crushing his skull like a melon.

Johnny breezes past the cell phone store where his imaginary self—the dutiful diaosi—has already reported to work, neatly dressed in his blue China Mobile polo shirt. All day long, while Johnny shampoos and blow-dries, his imaginary self will sell phone contracts. Pinned to his imaginary polo shirt is an imaginary name tag, printed with the real name his parents gave him: DU JUN.

Two blocks east of China Mobile, he crosses the street to the Wang Building, a nondescript tower nineteen stories tall. The doorman, a sullen thug with a shaved head, pointedly averts his gaze. This is their daily routine, a kind of silent conversation. In the three years Johnny has worked in the Wang Building, they’ve never exchanged a word.

In the elevator, a half-dozen strangers wait in silence, each staring at a cell phone. The elevator doors close and open. A well-dressed woman gets off at the second floor, which houses a karate school and the So Elegant Nail Salon. A pregnant woman gets off at the third floor, occupied by a travel agency and the Abundant Health Foot Massage Club.

There is no fourth floor.

No one gets off at the fifth floor, where ballroom dancing lessons are given, or the sixth, whose function is unknown. The elevator empties out on floors seven through twelve, which are occupied by the World Peace Guest House. The topmost floors, thirteen through nineteen, are home to the Modern Universe Service Apartments and a few small offices: a driving school, the New Me Acupuncture clinic, and Johnny’s workplace, the Young Phoenix Style Salon.

The salon’s door is propped open for ventilation. One of the stylists has an early appointment. Johnny recognizes the distinctive burnt-sulfur odor of a permanent wave.

The morning is busy. Young Phoenix is shorthanded, his colleague Anqi at home with a fever. Johnny works on her customers in addition to his own. Anqi is his mother’s age; her clients, grandmothers with thinning hair and no imagination, don’t interest him. Their tastes are conservative, their wishes predictable. They wish for the hair they had forty years ago, a miracle not even Johnny can perform. At ten o’clock, he goes down the hall to Lindsey’s apartment. As he does each morning, he knocks softly at the door.

“Girlfriend,” he calls. “Are you sleeping?”

He remembers the last text message she sent him. Disaster night! Kill me now

He has a bad feeling.

Johnny waits and waits, but no one comes to the door.

He can recall clearly the first time he saw her—last summer, in this very hallway. He was taking a cigarette break, reading a danmei on his phone—erotic fan fiction about Sherlock Holmes, a character played by Curly Fu. The nickname was invented by the celebrity magazines. The actor’s real name, Cumberbatch, is packed with consonants, nearly impossible to pronounce.

He was smoking and reading when Sun, the property manager, stepped off the elevator with a very tall Western girl. At the Wang Building, the presence of a foreigner was unremarkable. The World Peace Guest House attracted travelers from all over the world: European hippies loaded down with rucksacks; spry gray-haired tourists in matching tracksuits; Turkish women with more children than seemed physically possible, their tiny daughters already swathed in veils. The Modern Universe Service Apartments were occupied by long-term tenants—businessmen mostly, from Japan and Korea. They worked long hours and returned after dark, carrying takeaway bags—fried chicken to eat in front of the television, packs of cigarettes and liters of beer.

Johnny smoked and studied the girl. His interest was professional. Her hair hung in loose waves halfway down her back. The color was extraordinary, brighter than auburn—the flaming red hair of a cartoon heroine, a shade he’d never seen on an actual person. Her hair reminded him of Princess Ariel in The Little Mermaid, a film he’d seen literally hundreds of times. Throughout his childhood, the DVD had played on a continuous loop.

Sun led her down the hallway to the corner apartment, delivering a speech Johnny had heard before. Rent was to be paid each Saturday. Electricity, water and internet were included in the weekly rate. They were halfway down the corridor before Johnny registered a surprising fact: Sun had spoken, and the Western girl had responded, in ordinary, correct Mandarin.

For weeks he saw her everywhere: buying dried jujubes at the corner market, hunched over a bowl of noodles in the shop across the street. Her red hair was impossible to miss.

One morning she came into the salon to ask about a haircut. A brief but heated competition ensued. Anqi held the girl’s hair up to the light, like a length of fabric she might purchase. Incredibly, the color was natural. Even a master colorist couldn’t achieve that red.

“She’s mine,” Johnny said, waving Lindsey into his chair. “I saw her first.”

On the third floor of Xiehe Hospital, the girl lies motionless. A port in her left hand receives a dose of sedatives; the right hand, anticonvulsants. Another tube fills her lungs with air. Her shoes and clothing have been bagged as evidence. The satin pumps, with heels thin as chopsticks, were found two meters from her body. Her lace dress is deep red, the color called oxblood, a shade darker than her hair.

Who is she, and where did she come from? The patient isn’t talking. Her body speaks for her. Her height is measured at 183 centimeters; her weight, 62 kilograms. A female police officer photographs the Chinese character tattooed on her shoulder.

At the local precinct, she writes a report destined for obscurity. It’s the sort of crime that is quickly forgotten—a hit-and-run without witnesses, a foreign victim with no name and no family, no keening relatives camped out at the police station, demanding justice.

Some days later, a detective studies the officer’s report. The girl’s handbag contained keys and lipstick, but no identification. She wore a dress and shoes, but no undergarments. A paramedic found, near her body, a pair of earbud headphones, but whatever they’d been plugged into could not be located. A phone, probably. No young person went anywhere without a phone.

On a hunch he calls DiDi, the car hailing company. Thirty-nine people requested predawn pickups in Lujiazui that Sunday morning, but only one had a foreign name. He writes it carefully on a notepad, unsure of the spelling: Lindsey Litvak. The syllables mean nothing to him. For instance: Is Litvak a man’s name or a woman’s? With foreign names he is never sure.

He studies the photograph taken at the hospital. The girl’s eyes are closed, as though she is dead or sleeping. She looks young to him. Young enough to be a student? With Westerners it’s impossible to tell.

The city has dozens of universities, students from every country on Earth. Like all foreigners living in China, they are required to register with the local police. The files are maintained by a centralized Records department, where the detective knows a guy.

Some days later, his friend in Records faxes over Lindsey Litvak’s file. Attached is a copy of a US passport. The grainy photo shows a younger version of the girl lying in Xiehe Hospital, now twenty-two years old and breathing through a tube.

In a city of thirty million people, he has found her.

The rest of the file yields little information. On the Attestation of Temporary Residency, most sections had been left blank. Lindsey Litvak had supplied only her birthdate, passport number and a local address, the Modern Universe Service Apartments. The detective locates it on a map. The building is in the Jing’an section, west of the river. In his mind this raises a question: What brought an American girl to the financial district before dawn on a Sunday morning, dressed for a party but far from any nightclub?

The detective picks up the phone.

The comatose girl breathes deeply. A student nurse washes her arms and legs. The long limbs are slender and heavy. Her pale skin smells of milk. The student nurse studies the character inked on her shoulder. Except for a scraped elbow, her body shows no sign of trauma. All the damage happened above the neck.

The comatose girl dreams of rabbits. They are her little sister’s favorite animal. Grace is eleven and enchanted by them. For months, now, she has lobbied their mother for a pet rabbit, so far without success.

Lindsey met her at the same instant their mother did. Grace was then seven months old, living in a state-run orphanage in Chongqing. There exists, in some family album, a photo taken that morning: Lindsey with a ponytail and a mouthful of braces, holding her new sister; Grace with pink eye and a persistent rash on her cheek. Invisible in the photo is Grace’s scar, a white circle at the base of her neck, the size of a pencil eraser, where she’d been burned with a cigarette. She was not an abused child, they were told through an interpreter. Her birth mother had marked her so that she could be identified later, in this life or the next.

“Who was she?” Lindsey asked.

The interpreter relayed the question to an attendant, who responded at length. That she couldn’t understand the answer is the great regret of Lindsey’s life.

The interpreter’s translation was four words long: “She was very poor.”

Later, when Grace was older, their mother taught her the Chinese legend of the red thread, an invisible cord that connects each person to her future, to all those destined to love her in the course of her life. From the day Grace was born, the red thread connected her to the Litvaks. She was meant to be Claire and Aaron’s daughter, and Lindsey’s sister.

Of course, no one mentioned Grace’s birth mother, the “very poor” woman so desperate to keep her that she’d burned her baby with a cigarette. This detail would have ruined the story. Would have proven, definitively, that the red thread could be cut.

New Hampshire is having a heat wave. For three days in a row, the temperature has reached ninety degrees. At Camp Friendship, the counselors pretend not to notice. Campers are sent on hikes with an extra bottle of water. No further concessions to the weather are mad. . .