"How do you mean, honey?"
"With Mommy and Daddy."
"Sure. They love you and Roy, and they love each other."
"They say they don't. They fight."
"A lot of married people fight."
"My friends' parents don't."
"I bet they do, but you don't see it. They're being good because you're in the house."
"When people fight a lot, they get divorced."
"Yes, that happens. But only after a lot of fighting. Has your daddy ever hit your mommy before, like tonight?"
"Sometimes she hits him. She says he's wasting all our money."
Harry has no ready answer to that. "It'll work out," he says, just as Nelson has. "Things work out, usually. It doesn't always seem that way, but they usually do."
"Like you that time you fell on the sand and couldn't get up."
"Wasn't that a funny way to act? Yes, and see, here I am, as good as new. It worked out."
Her face broadens in the dark; she is smiling. Her hair is spread in dark rays across the glowing pillow. "You were so funny in the water. I teased you."
"You teased me how?"
"By hiding under the sail."
He casts his weary mind back and tells her, "You weren't teasing, honey. You were all blue and gaspy when I got you out. I saved your life. Then you saved mine."
She says nothing. The dark pits of her eyes absorb his version, his adult memory. He leans down and kisses her warm dry forehead. "Don't you worry about anything, Judy. Grandma and I will take good care of your daddy and all of you."
"I know," she says after a pause, letting go. We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
Emerging opposite to the closed door of the old sewing room, where Melame used to sleep, Rabbit sneaks down the hall past the half-closed door to the master bedroom – he can hear Janice and Nelson talking, their voices braided into one – and to the room beyond, a back room with a view of the back yard and the little fenced garden he used to tend. This was Nelson's room in the distant days when he went to high school and wore long hair and a headband like an Indian and tried to learn the guitar that had been Jill's and spent a small fortune on his collection of rock LPs, records all obsolete now, everything is tapes, and tapes are becoming obsolete, everything will be CDs. This room is now little Roy's. Its door is ajar; with three fingertips on its cool white wood Harry pushes it open. Light enters it not as sharp slices from the proximate streetlights above Joseph Street but more mistily, from the lights of the town diffused and scattered, a yellow star-swallowing glow arising foglike from the silhouettes of maples and gables and telephone poles. By this dim light he sees Pru's long body pathetically asleep across Roy's little bed. One foot has kicked off its fake-furry slipper and sticks out bare from its nightie, so filmy it clings to the shape of her bent full-thighed leg, her short quilted robe ruched up to her waist, rumpled in folds whose valleys seem bottomless in the faint light. One long white hand of hers rests extended on the rumpled covers, the other is curled in a loose fist and fitted into the hollow between her lips and chin; the bruise on her cheekbone shows like a leech attached there and her hair, its carrot-color black in the dark, is disarrayed. Her breath moves in and out with a shallow exhausted rasp. He inhales through his nose, to smell her. Perfumy traces float in her injured aura.
As he bends over for this inspection, Rabbit is startled by the twin hard gleam of open eyes: Roy is awake. Cuddled on his bed by his mother, sung a song that has put the singer to sleep, the strange staring child reaches up through the darkness to seize the loose skin of his grandfather's looming face and to twist it, his small sharp fingernails digging in so that Harry has to fight crying out. He pulls this fierce little crab of a hand away from his cheek, disembeds it finger by finger, and with a vengeful pinch settles it back onto Roy's chest. In his animal hurt Harry has hissed aloud; seeing Pru stir as if to awake, her hand making an agitated motion toward her tangled hair, he backs rapidly from the room.
Janice and Nelson are in the bright hall looking for him. With their thinning hair and muddled scowling expressions they seem siblings. He tells them in a whisper, "Pru fell asleep on Roy's bed."
Nelson says, "That poor bitch. She'd be O.K. if she'd just get off my case."
Janice tells Harry, "Nelson says he feels much more like himself now and we should go home to bed."
Their voices seem loud, after the foglit silence of Roy's room, and he pointedly keeps his own low. "What have you two settled? I don't want this to happen again."
In Nelson's old room, Roy has begun to cry. He should cry; it's Harry's cheek that hurts.
"It won't, Harry," Janice says. "Nelson has promised to see a counsellor."
He looks at his son to see what this means. The boy visibly suppresses a smile of collusion, over the necessity ofplacating women. Harry tells Janice, "I said, Don't let him con ya."
Her forehead, which her bangs do not cover, creases in impatience. "Harry, it's time to go." She is, as Lyle informed him, the boss.
On the drive back, he vents his indignation. "What did he say? What about the money?" Route 422 shudders with tall trucks, transcontinental eighteen-wheelers. They make better time in the dead of the night.
Janice says, "He's running the lot and it would be too unmanning to take it from him. I can't run it and you're going into the hospital for that angio-thing. Plasty."
"Not till the week after next," he says. "We could always put it off."
"I know that's what you'd like but we just can't go on pretending you're fine. It's been nearly four months since New Year's and in Florida they said you should recover enough in three. Dr. Breit told me you're not losing weight and avoiding sodium the way you were told and you could have a recurrence of what happened on the Sunfish any time."
Dr. Breit is his cardiologist at the St. Joseph's Hospital in Brewer – a fresh-faced freckled kid with big glasses in fleshcolored plastic rims. Janice's telling him all this in her mother's matter-of-fact, determined voice carves a dreadful hollowness within him. The sloping park as they cruise through on Cityview Drive seems fragile and papery, the illuminated trees unreal. There is nothing beneath these rocks, these steep lawns and proud row houses, but atoms and nothingness, waiting for him to take his tight-fitting place among them. Dear God, reach down. Pull my bad heart out of me. Thelma said it helped. Janice's mind, far from prayer, is moving on, her voice decided and a bit defiant. "As for the money, Nelson did allow as there has to be some financial restructuring."
"Restructuring! That's what everybody up the creek talks about. South American countries, those Texas S and Ls. Did he really say `restructuring'?"
"Well, it's not a word I would have thought to use. Though I expect when I start with my courses it'll be one of the things they teach."
"Your courses, Jesus," he says. That tank, painted the wrong green, how much longer before nobody remembered why it was there – the ration stamps, the air-raid drills, the screaming eightcolumn headlines every morning, God versus Satan a simple matter of the miles gained each day on the road to Aachen? "What did he say about himself and Pru?"
"He doesn't think she's found another man yet," Janice says. "So we don't think she'll really leave."
"Well, that's nice and hard-boiled ofyou both. But what about her, her own welfare? You saw her battered face tonight. How much more should she take? Face it, the kid is utterly gonzo. Do you see the way he was twitching all the time? And throwing up then? Did you hear him offer me a beer? A beer, for Chrissake, when we should have been the cops really. He's damn lucky the neighbors didn't call 'em."
"He was just trying to be hospitable. It's a great trial to him, Harry, that you're so unsympathetic."
"Unsympathetic! What's to be sympathetic with? He cheats, he snivels, he snorts or whatever, he's a lush besides, over at the lot he hires these gangsters and guys with AIDS -"