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by a stiletto, and bleeding. “I couldn’t
stand it
,” she said.
    “What should I do?” I asked her.
    “Bury it.” She might have been reading from the book. Her profile, I noticed, was becoming a cameo, with a lovely gentle bulge to the forehead, high like Margaret’s. I hoped being intelligent wouldn’t cramp her life.
    “Deirdre will want to see it,” I argued. “It’s her baby.”
    “It will only make her
sad
,” Linda said. “And dis
gust
me. Already it must be
full
of
ver
min.”
    Nothing goads me to courage like some woman’s taking a high tone. Afraid to touch the rabbit’s body while life was haunting it, I touched it now, and found it tepid, and lifted it from the box. The body, far from stiff, felt unhinged; its back or neck must have been broken since the moment the cat pounced. Blood had dried in the ear—an intricate tunnel leading brainwards, velvety at the tip, oddly muscular at the root. The eye not of isinglass was an opaque black bead. Linda was right: there was no need for Deirdre to see. I took the rabbit out beyond the prickly yard, into the field, and laid it under the least stunted swamp oak, where any child who wanted to be sure that I hadn’t buried it alive could come and find it. I put a marsh marigold by its nose, in case it was resurrected and needed to eat, and paused above the composition—fur, flower, the arty shape of fallen oak leaves—with a self-congratulatory sensation that must have carried on my face back to the shack, for Margaret, in the kitchen loading the refrigerator, looked up at me and said, “Say. I don’t mind your being partners with Jenny, but you don’t have to toss the balls to her in that cute, confiding way.”
    “The poor bitch can’t catch them otherwise. You saw that.”
    “I saw more than I wanted to. I nearly threw up.”
    “That second set,” I said, “your backhand was terrific. The Maggie-O of old.”
    Deirdre came down the hall from the bedrooms. Her eyes seemed enormous; I went to her and knelt to hold her around the waist, and began, “Sweetie, I have some sad news.”
    “Linda told me,” she said, and walked by me into the kitchen. “Mommy, can I make the cocoa?”
    “You did everything you could,” I called after her. “Youwere a wonderful nurse and made the bunny’s last day very happy.”
    “I know,” she called in answer. “Mommy, I
promise
I won’t let the milk boil over this time.”
    Of the children, only Henrietta and Godfrey let me lead them to where the rabbit rested. Henrietta skittishly hung back, and never came closer than ten yards. God marched close, gazed down sternly, and said, “Get up.” Nothing happened, except the ordinary motions of the day: the gulls and stately geese beating home above the pond, the traffic roaring invisible along the highway. He squatted down, and I prevented him from picking up the rabbit, before I saw it was the flower he was after.
    Jimmy, then, was the only one who cried. He came home a half-hour after we had meant to set out rowing across the pond to the beach picnic, and rushed into the field toward the tree with the tallest silhouette and came back carrying on his cheeks stains he tried to hide by thumping God. “If
you
hadn’t dropped him,” he said. “You
ba
by.”
    “It was nobody’s fault,” Margaret told him, impatiently cradling her basket of hot dogs and raw hamburger.
    “I’m going to kill that cat,” Jimmy said. He added, cleverly, an old grievance: “Other kids my age have BB guns.”
    “Oh, our big man,” Cora said. He flew at her in a flurry of fists and sobs, and ran away and hid. At the dock I let Linda and Cora take the kayak, and the rest of us waited a good ten minutes with the rowboat before Jimmy ran down the path in the dusk, himself a silhouette, like the stunted trees and the dark bar of dunes between the sunset and its reflection in the pond. Ever notice how sunsets upside down look like stairs?
    “Somehow,” Margaret said to me,