Rabbit Remembered

So, despite her respectable clothes, this is a beggar. "I'm sorry," Janice says again, in a harder tone, "but I don't believe I can help." Her hand moves to swing the heavy door shut. Nelson is off at the treatment center and Ronnie playing golf at the club with some other retirees so she is alone in the house. Not that the girl looks violent. But she is bigger than Janice, bigger-boned, with a dangerous fullness to her being there, as if defiantly arrived at the end of a long wavering, like a client taking the plunge of offering thirty thousand more than she can afford. Her eyes are set in squarish sockets showing the puffy look of sleeplessness and her hair, cut raggedly short the way they do it now, is mixed of light-brown and darker-brown and gray strands.

"I don't think you can either," she agrees. "But my mother thought you might."

"Did I ever know your mother?"

"No, you never met. You knew each other existed, though."

Janice does wish Nelson were here. He could tell at a glance if this person were over the edge, and give it one of those names he had- bipolar, schizophrenic, paranoid, psychotic. Psychotic, you see and hear things, and can murder without meaning it, and then in court seem so innocent. The varnished grain of the door under her hand calls out as a potential shield and a slammed end to this encounter, but the something pleasant and kind and calm about the girl, who is these as well as troubled and trembling, holds the door open. The dry warm air of this early-fall day in southeastern Pennsylvania-children tucked back into school, the mid-morning streets quiet, the vegetables in the backyard gardens harvested or gone to seed-lies on Janice's face as a breath from the past, her visitor having come from this same terrain.

"I nursed her at the end, she didn't like hospitals, they made her feel penned up," the light, considerate, shaky voice goes on.

"This is your mother," Janice says, in spite of herself entering in.

"Yes, and of course being a nurse I could do that, administer the meds and see that she was kept turned in the bed and all that. Only it was strange, doing it for your mother. Her body had all these meanings for me. She didn't like being touched, as long as she had strength. Though she could come on free and easy with some people, she was really a freak about her privacy, even with me. She didn't like telling me anything, except then when she knew she was dying."

The girl as her nervousness eased has skipped a stage of her story without being aware of it. "What did you say this had to do with me?" Janice asks.

"Oh. I guess-I guess you were married to my father."

A mail truck coasts by, one of those noseless vans they have now, white with a red and blue stripe. They used to be solid green, like military vehicles. Mailmen used to be men; now theirs is a mail-lady, a young woman with long sun-bleached hair and stocky tan legs in shorts who pushes her pouch on a three-wheeled cart ahead of her along the sidewalk. It is not time for her to go by yet, but across Joseph Street, another young woman comes out on the righthand porch of the semi-detached house opposite. For years and years that address was occupied by a couple that had seemed old and changeless to her. Then they went off to assisted living, and a young couple has moved in, with hanging plants on the porch they fuss at, and music that booms out over the neighborhood through the window screens, and two small children who go to pre-school.

"Maybe you should come inside," Janice says, stepping back invitingly, though admitting to her home this piece of a shameful dead past disgusts as well as frightens her.

Inside, the girl, her face and arms as white as if summer had never been, hangs in the dim-lit living-room clutter like one more piece of furniture that time's slow earthquake has jostled out of place. She seems, as Harry used to, a bit out of scale. Janice is used to her house with average-sized people in it, herself and Nelson and Ronnie, though Ronnie's Alex is big, when he visits from Virginia, and Judy and Roy when they lived here took up plenty of space with their music and games and sibling competition. Though with one a girl and the other a boy and over four years between them it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

"Would you like any coffee?" Janice asks. "Or tea-that's what my husband drinks now, for his blood pressure, and now I've got the habit."

"No, honestly-I couldn't take anything on my stomach right now. I've been thinking of what I'd say for so long, and then it came out all backward. My name is Annabelle Byer."

Janice is used to hearing the word as "buyer." For every seller there is a buyer.

"Like I said, I'm single. I'm going to be forty next year. I'm a practical nurse, at St. Joe's for thirteen years, and these last five I've been in home care, those that need an L.P.N., though the number that can afford it is going down, with the tightening up of what Medicare will pay for."