Rabbit Heart

Rabbit Heart: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Story by Kristine S. Ervin
Published by Counterpoint Press
Publication date: March 26, 2024
Genres: Book Clubs, Debut, Non-fiction, Crime, Memoir

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But doubting our terror is what we’ve been trained to do.

Imagine being eight years old and awakened on what should be a normal school morning by your father and older brother sitting on the side of your bed. They tell you that your mother has been kidnapped and your father cries. This is where the memoir Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story begins and the journey doesn’t end with any sense of closure for the next 25 years.

It’s 1986 when Kristine Ervin’s mother, Kathy, is kidnapped by two men outside a local mall in Oklahoma City. A week later her car is recovered in New Mexico and a month later her body is found in an oil field. Without DNA testing, despite two suspects, there is no other movement in the case for next 10 years. Years in which Kristine goes from being a little girl who adored her mother to a young woman without any female presence in her life at all.

At the most basic level, this decade without a mother to guide her means things as commonplace as getting your period or needing a bra are mysteries to Kristine. At a deeper level, her father’s patriarchal attitudes and benign neglect mean that while the surface of her life is secure and middle-class, the reality is anything but. There is nothing sensationalistic, just the painful micro-traumas that most women will find heartbreakingly familiar. As she puts it:

I didn’t tell my father this. I didn’t know how to explain the fear I was feeling, not when no one had taught me that when I said uncomfortable, I really meant unsafe.

 

By the time Kristine is 18 she’s dating a 30-year-old neighbor. She’s a confused young woman running down dangerous paths because she believes being desired is all that matters. She has very little understanding of boundaries with men and so is taken advantage of.

As the years progress Kristine continues trying to process what happened to Kathy. There are very few answers, but she becomes obsessed with her final hours, reading everything she can find online. When DNA testing provides some updates, but everything is fragmented and incomplete. It isn’t until 25 years later that there are answers, but even then, Kristine is left trying to reconcile the woman who was abducted and murdered with the woman who was her mother.

As she got older her focus shifted from her mother as victim to her mother as woman, pushing Rabbit Heart into tender territory. She goes through Kathy’s possessions and recreates her, using memory and Kathy’s own words in a poignant attempt to bring her mother back in full, not just as a statistic or cautionary tale. It’s a bittersweet transformation bringing Kathy to life as the kind of woman any of us would want to know.

Articulating the emotions evoked when reading Rabbit Heart is not easy. There are moments when Kristine’s choices are the wrong ones, made worse by grown men willing to take advantage of her vulnerability. But feelings of judgment give way to pathos in the passages where she has conversations with herself, often blaming herself or trying to excuse the actions of the men involved. These are heartbreakingly familiar, as most of us have had the same conversations with ourselves at some point in our lives. Any number of scenes in the memoir made me weep or feel discomfort, but while this is a raw story of a wounded young woman Rabbit Heart’s overall themes are universal. A memoir that should be shared among women of all ages and the men around them.

 

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