Rabbit At Rest

The redness pulses with a pain spaced like ribs, stripes of pain with intervals of merciful nothingness between them. Very high up, slowly, an airplane goes over, dragging its noise behind it. "Judy got under the sail," he hears his own voice say. "Scared me." He lies there like a jellyfish washed up, bulging, tremblingly full of a desire for its lost element. Another complicated warmish thing, with fingers, is touching his wrist, feeling his pulse. First-aid training must be part of Gregg's job. To assist him in his diagnosis Harry volunteers, "Sorry to be such a crump. Out there I had this terrific desire to lie down."

"You keep lying there, Mr. Angstrom," Gregg says, sounding suddenly loud and crisp and a touch too authoritative, like his father adding up the golf scores. "We're going to get you to the hospital."

In his red blind world this news is such a relief he opens his eyes. He sees Judy standing huge and sun-haloed above him, fragments of rainbows confused with her tangled drying hair. Rabbit tries to smile comfortingly and tells her, "It must have been that birdfood I ate."

Nelson was still sleeping at eleven, but Janice was in no hurry for the confrontation. She sat out on the balcony for a while after Harry and Pru and the children went, coming back twice for things they forgot and forgetting two flippers and a bottle of sun lotion anyway, and she discovered there is a place, one step to the left of where the Norfolk pine gets in the way, from which you can see a patch, a little squarish sparkling patch between an ornamental condo turret and a Spanish-tile roof, of blue-green water, of Gulf. But of course there was no hope of seeing their sail; from this distance it would take a yacht like the one they raced off San Diego this September, the Americans outwitting with a catamaran the New Zealanders in their giant beautiful hopeless boat. Looking from their balcony always a little saddens her, reviving something buried within her, the view they had from their windows in the apartment on Wilbur Street, of all the town, Mt. Judge's slanting streets busy and i

When Nelson finally comes out in his expensive smoky-blue pajamas he is surprised and a

"No," she tells her son, "I get enough sun and wanted to spend a little time with you before you rush back."

"That's nice," he says, and goes back into his room, and comes out a minute later wearing his bathrobe, for modesty she supposes, with his own mother. You think of all the times you changed their diapers and gave them a bath and then one day you're shut out. It's a summer-weight robe, a mauve paisley, that reminds her of what rich people used to wear in movies when she was a girl. Robes, smoking jackets, top hats and white ties, flowing white gowns if you were Ginger Rogers, up to your chin in ostrich feathers or was it white fox? Young people now don't have that to live up to, to strive toward, the rock stars just wear dirty blue jeans and even the baseball players, she has noticed looking over Harry's shoulder at the television, don't bother to shave, like the Arab terrorists. When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.

She offers to make Nelson what was once his favorite breakfast, French toast. Those years on Vista Crescent before they all got into such trouble she would make a thing of its being Sunday morning with the French toast, before Nelson went off to Sunday school. He had really been such a trusting child, so easy to please, with his little cowlick in his eyebrow and his brown eyes shuttling so anxiously between her and Harry.

He says, "No thanks, Mom. Just let me get some coffee and don't hassle me with food. The thought of fried bread full of syrup makes me want to barf."

"Your appetite does seem poor lately."

"Whaddeyou want, me to get hog fat like Dad? He should lose fifty pounds, it's going to kill him."

"He's too fond of snacky things, that's where he gets the weight. The salt attracts water."

There are tarry dregs left in the Aromaster, enough to fill half a cup. Janice remembers buying that percolator at the K Mart on Route 41 when she and Harry were new down here; she had been drawn to the Krups ten-cup Brewmaster but Harry was still sold on Consumer Reports and said they said the Braun twelve-cup Aromaster was better. Nelson makes that face he used to make as a child with cod-liver oil and pours the eleventh-and-a-half cup down the sink. He sniffs prolongedly and picks up the News-Press from the counter under the see-through window. He reads aloud, "City reduces charge against football star. Lake Okeechobee's cure may be hard to swallow," but it is clear to both of them that they must talk really.

Janice says, "You sit in the living room and read the paper a minute while I make a fresh pot of coffee. Would you like the last of those Danish we bought? If you don't your father will eat it."

"No, Mom, like I said. I don't want to eat any junk."

As the water in the percolator comes to a boil, he laughs to himself in the living room. "Get this," he calls, and reads aloud, " `The highly commended head of Cape Coral's police narcotics team will be fired because of an investigation that showed he mishandled nearly one thousand dollars' worth of cocaine he borrowed from the Sanibel Police Department. The borrowed cocaine is missing, police say, and has been replaced with a handful of baking soda in a department storage box.' " Nelson adds, as if she is too dumb to get the point, "Everybody's snorting and stealing down here, even the head of the narc squad."

"How about you?" Janice asks.

He thinks she means coffee and says "Sure" and holds out his cup without taking his eyes from the newspaper. "Says here southwestern Florida was the hottest place in the country yesterday."

Janice brings the percolator and sets it on the glass table, on a section of the newspaper she folds over to make an insulating pad. She has a superstitious fear of cracking the glass with heat, though Harry laughs at her and says you couldn't crack it with a blowtorch. Men laugh about things like this and electricity but don't always know. Bad things do happen, and then men try to pretend they didn't, or it was some other man's fault. She settles firmly on the fold-out sofa next to the wicker armchair Nelson is in, and spreads her thighs to broaden her lap the way she often saw her mother do when she was determined to be firm, and tells him, "No, I meant about you and cocaine. What is the story, baby?"

When he looks over at her she is reminded of that frightened sly way he looked that whole summer when he was twelve. Among the things she can never forgive herself for was the way he would come over on his bicycle to Eisenhower Avenue and stand outside Charlie's place hoping to get a glimpse of her, his mother run off with another man. He asks, "Who says there's a story?"

"Your wife says, Nelson. She says you're hooked and you're blowing a lot of money you don't have."

"That crazy lying bitch. You know how she'll say anything to make a dramatic effect. When did she fill you full of this crap?"

"Don't be so rude in your language. A body can see at a glance things aren't right. Teresa let a little out the night before last when you didn't come home till after midnight, and then yesterday we had more chances to talk, while your father was walking ahead with the children."

"Yeah, what's he trying to do, anyway, this great-big-lovable-grandpa routine he's pulling on my kids? He was never that way with me."

"Don't keep changing the subject. Maybe he's trying to make up with them for some of his mistakes with you. Anyway your father's not who concerns me these days. He had a hard time when we were younger giving up his freedom but he seems to be at peace now. Which is what I can't say about you. You're jumpy and rude and your mind isn't on anything that's in this room or has to do with your family. You're thinking of something else every minute and I can only think from what I read and see on television that it's drugs. Pru says it's cocaine, and probably crack now, she believes you've stayed clear of heroin, though evidently the two go together in something called speedballing."