Rabbit Remembered

"And the animals in cages," Billy goes on. "I have a nightmare about being in a cage that gets smaller and smaller, like an egg slicer."

"You poor dear worried thing," Annabelle says silkily.

Pru says to Annabelle, as Nelson angrily whips the car up and around the exit ramp, "I think that was unrealistic, too. Most men would have just screwed her anyway. I mean, he'd been dreaming about almost nothing else."

But it is hard for her to break into the cocoon of mutual narcissistic regard being woven in the back seat. From the little overpass road, dark farmland seems to stretch in every direction, broken only by a Gulf station, its towering oval sign aglow, level with the profile of the hills. Nelson asks the back seat, "What do you think, Annabelle? How far would the older man have gone? The father figure?"

Her gentle voice arrives: "Nelson, what are you asking?"

"How far did Mr. Byer go with you? My gut tells me," he says, recklessly wheeling through the entrance ramp and heading down the highway toward where Brewer's dome of light stains the sky, "he went pretty far. That's why you're always saying what a great guy he was. He wasn't. He was into touchy-feely. A good thing he died when you were sixteen, it might have got a lot worse."

"Baby," Pru says to her husband, but there is no stopping him, now that he and the Corolla are headed in the right direction. He needs to undress his sister, in front of Billy.

"And your mother was no help, was she? She was a savvy old tramp, she must have guessed. She'd been through the mill, why not you, huh?"

"That's not true!" Annabelle cries. "She never knew anything! And he never-what's the word?-"

"Penetrated," Nelson offers.

"Exactly!" she says. "He just groped, all in the name of parental affection, of course." This bit of sarcasm pries her open; she makes a strange shuddering prolonged sound of upheaved regret, then pours out, sobs making her gasp, "I didn't dare ask him to stop, he'd handled me since I was a baby, it didn't seem right, yet how could it be very wrong? It was as if he couldn't help it, he was, like, sleepwalking. He'd tuck me in afterwards."

"He knew what you didn't know," Nelson points out. "That he wasn't your real father. And your mother knew it loo."

"She had no idea what he was doing, I'm positive. But it was so much a relief when he died that I blamed myself. It had got to be a secret between us, as if I wanted it too, when I hated it!" Her tears are coming freely now, pent-up, accusing. Nelson squints into the high headlights, trucks and those fucking SUVs, that afflict his eyes from behind and ahead. The traffic is hurrying in both directions toward some disaster, the end of time as they've known it. Annabelle goes the next step, crying, "I felt I'd killed him! Good for me!" Her round face flashes in his rearview mirror, one teary eye meeting his.

"Right," Nelson says calmly. "It really screwed you up with men since, didn't it? How come, do you think, you've never married?"

"Oh stop it!" she protests. "Why do you want me married, why do you care?" She sinks back, sobbing now with a muffled, burbling quality that suggests Billy is comforting her. Nelson can't risk turning his head to look into the back seat; his sensation of a fifth person in the car is so strong he needs to strengthen his grip on the steering wheel.

Billy says, "Great going, Nelson. So that's psychotherapy."

"It helps to get things in the open," he sulkily says. "Then you go from there." He stares ahead. He has always disliked this flat side of Brewer, as opposed to the tilting Mt. Judge side. Serve-yourself gas stations with ranks of pumps, fast-food franchises with plastic mini-playgrounds for obese toddlers, dismal six-store strip malls, carpet and linoleum outlets, vegetable stands boarded up for the winter, cutesy Amish cut-outs beckoning ignorant tourists from the inner cities to Real Pa. Dutch Cuisine. He knows where he is now. If he stays on this new improved 222 a bypass will hurl him right around Brewer southwest toward Lancaster and the Turnpike; instead he turns off, by the mattress warehouse with the Aurora Massage Parlor tucked in behind, on old Route 111, which runs parallel to the river, the silhouette of Mt. Judge far to their right, crowned by the distant lights of the Pinnacle Hotel, where they had been, the four of them, sitting and eating and making polite conversation, a few hours ago. Time does wonders.