Rabbit Redux

Then his eyelids flutter as if at her touch. His eyeballs in the faint cold light seem unseeing, without pupils. Moonlight glints in a dab ofwater at the far corner of the far eye. He groans, and Janice realizes this is what has waked her. A noise not freely given but torn from some heavy mechanism of restraint deep in his chest. Seeing that she is up on an elbow watching, he says, "Hi, tiger. Jesus it hurts."

"What hurts, love? Where?" Her breath rushes from her throat so fast it burns. All the space in the room, from the comers in, seems a crystal a wrong move from her will shatter.

"Here." He seems to mean to show her but ca

"Charlie. Is there any pill?"

He makes words through his teeth. "Little white. Top shelf. Bathroom cabinet."

The crowded room pitches and surges with her panic. The floor tilts beneath her bare feet; the nightie she put on after her disgraceful scene taps her burning skin scoldingly. The bathroom door sticks. One side of the frame strikes her shoulder, hard. She ca

Charlie's body changes tone. He is dead. No, at his mouth she eavesdrops on the whistle of his breathing. Sudden sweat soaks his brow, his shoulders, his chest, her breasts, her cheek where it was pressed against his cheek. His legs relax. He grunts, "O.K." She dares slide from him, tucking the covers, which she had torn down to bare his chest, back up to his chin.

"Shall I get the real pills now?"

"In a minute. Yes. Nitroglycerin. What you brought me was Coricidin. Cold pills."

She sees that his grimace had meant to be laughter, for he does smile now. Harry is right. She is stupid.

To ease the hurt look from her face Stavros tells her, "Rotten feeling. Pressure worse than a fist. You can't breathe, move anything makes it worse, you feel your own heart. Like some animal skipping inside you. Crazy."

"I was scared to leave you."

"You did great. You brought me back."

She knows this is true. The mark upon her as a giver of death has been erased. As in fucking, she has been rendered transparent, then filled solid with peace. As if after fucking, she takes playful inventory of his body, feels the live sweat on his broad skin, traces a finger down the line of his nose.

He repeats, "Crazy," and sits up in bed, cooling himself, gasping safe on the shore. She snuggles at his side and lets her tears out like a child. Absently, still moving his arms gingerly, he fumbles with the ends of her hair as it twitches on his shoulder.

She asks, "Was it me? My throwing that awful fit about Harry's sister? I could have killed you."

"Never." Then he admits, "I need to keep things orderly or they get to me."

"My being here is disorderly," she says.

"Never mind, tiger," he says, not quite denying, and tugs her 'hair so her head jerks.

Janice gets up and fetches the right pills. They had been there all along, on the top shelf, she had looked on the middle shelf. He takes one and shows her how he puts it under his tongue to dissolve. As it dissolves he makes that mouth she loves, lips pushed forward as if concealing a lozenge. When she turns off the light and gets into bed beside him, he rolls on his side to give her a kiss. She does not respond, she is too full of peace. Soon the soft rhythm of his unconscious breathing rises from his side of the bed. On her side, she ca