Free Slices by Michael Montoure Page B

stole the sun from the sky.
    “What
is it?” Nathan asked her. “What’s wrong?”
    She
hesitated a moment, and then she said: “When is she going to
tell you about the rabbits?”
    And
then Nathan jerked awake.
    He
was wide-eyed and startled in the cool gloom, tangled in the sheet.
Sammy’s arm was sprawled across him in her sleep, but she was
moving it away —
    No.
Something inside the arm was moving away.
    Nathan
never got back to sleep that night, after seeing it, after watching
the shadow he was sure was his daughter slide away unseen. He wanted
to call out her name, but remembered, now that he was awake, that
she’d never had one.

    He
didn’t understand what she’d said to him. Didn’t
understand why it had startled him badly enough to wake him up. But
the words kept echoing to him the whole next day:
    When
is she going to tell you about the rabbits?
    It
sounded at first like nonsense, like a phrase his mind had just
pulled randomly into his dream. Like something from an old book he’d
read in college — “Tell me again about the rabbits,
George” — but he didn’t think that was it. That
wasn’t it at all.
    The
next day was Saturday, and after spending the morning trying to come
up with some excuse to slip away from Sammy, he realized in the end
he didn’t need one. He just left while she was singing in the
bath, and spent all afternoon and all evening at the library, reading
everything he could find about rabbits; using their computers,
setting search engines into motion.
    By
the time he got home that night, he felt like his mind was boiling.
If Sammy noticed he’d been gone, she didn’t say anything.
He didn’t know what to say to her. He watched her silently,
watched the way she moved and held herself, and all his suspicion
boiled down to certainty, all his unnoticed resentment cooling into
anger. It would keep cooling, he knew, to hatred, if he let it.
    The
next week, he realized, nearly forgotten by both of them, was their
anniversary. He surprised her by announcing a spontaneous trip, the
two of them, alone, out to a cabin in the woods. Far away from
everything.

    Their
evening was nearly perfect, up in the rented cabin. Nathan had to
admit that. They shared a simple cold meal, meats and bread and
cheeses and wine, like when they’d been dating, perfect little
slices with the knife set and bread board she’d bought him
their first Christmas, and it all brought back memories, sweet ones.
They talked, more in a night than they had in months. She laughed
that night, and for a change, she was laughing for him; her eyes were
huge and dark and deep and his candle-lit image danced inside them as
she laughed. All of it nearly perfect. This was what he’d
hoped, wanting to draw her out, to get her to talk to him.
    He
hated to ruin it.
    He
nearly asked a dozen times, but the moment never seemed right. Then,
as she was laughing at something he’d just told her about
something that had happened at work the week before, it just slipped
unbidden from his lips, exactly the wrong moment:
    “When
were you going to tell me about the rabbits?”
    In
that second, even up to the last, some remaining part of his rational
mind expected — something else, expected her to look at him
blankly, or quizzically, to ask him what he was talking about.
    Instead,
her eyes widened, startled and trapped, and her arms curled
reflexively, protectively, around her waist. No pretending and no
going back.
    She
sat down on the cabin’s small bed, arms still around her waist,
looking little and lost. The look on her face was sad and anxious,
and he’d seen that expression just the other night, in his
dream — he’d never noticed, before, how much his dream
daughter looked like his wife, how similar was the set of the mouth
and the eyes.
    For
a moment, neither one of them said a word. Silence waited in the room
like a witness. Then she said:
    “When
I was five years old, my mother wanted to get away from my father for
a