I watched Jane drink. She held the glass with both hands, like a child. I waited until she was done and then repeated that I really had to leave.

Jane walked me to the car. We stood in front of the old Buick for a moment, letting the sun beat onto our scalps. Jane turned to me. “I threw my purse into the water on purpose.”

“I know,” I admitted.

Before I got into the car I asked if I could kiss her goodbye. When she acquiesced I took her face in my hands, the first time I ever touched her. Her skin sprang back at my touch, slightly greasy with suntan oil. Jane closed her eyes and tilted her head back, waiting. She smelled of cocoa butter and honest perspiration. There was nothing I wanted more than to kiss her, but I kept hearing the voice of her father. I smiled at my good fortune; and, thinking I had all the time in the world, I pressed my lips against Jane’s forehead.

Dear Joley-

If Daddy could see me now. I spent the morning with Rebecca at the Indianapolis Speedway, at an auto museum filled with Nascars and racing paraphernalia. Do you remember when we used to watch all five hundred laps with him, every year? I never understood what it was that made auto racing such a biggie for him-it’s not like he ever tried the sport himself. He told me once when I was older that it was the absolute speed of it all. I liked to watch for crashes, like you. I liked the way there’d be a huge explosion on the track and billows of ebony smoke, and the other cars would just keep a straight course and head right for the spin, into this sort of black box, and they’d come out okay.

I practically had to drag Rebecca onto a bus that drove right along the speedway. I closed my eyes, and I tried to imagine that speed that enchanted Daddy. It wasn’t easy, lumbering along at 45 mph, on a track that’s meant for 220 mph. When we got off the bus, we were each handed a card signed by the track president: “I hereby certify that the bearer of this ticket has completed one lap around the Indianapolis ‘500’ Mile Speedway.” I laughed. It isn’t much, you know? But Daddy would have hung it over his desk, on the SAE fraternity bulletin board Mama was always trying to take down.

This is the best part, though: after we got that card, I thought about all the things I could do with it. I certainly wouldn’t hang it up on the refrigerator, or on any bulletin board, and I didn’t care enough to keep it in my wallet. I considered taking it to Daddy’s grave when I got to Massachusetts. And no sooner had I thought that very thought, than my fingers just released the card-just let go, like they belonged to someone else’s body-and the wind carried the card up to the clouds. It was a beautiful day, today, too-those big puffy clouds with ironed-flat bottoms, like you were looking at them from underneath a glass table where they had been arranged. The card crept higher and higher towards the sun, and when I realized I wasn’t going to see it again, I started to smile.

I don’t know why I felt it was important to tell you this; I suppose this letter is part-this and part-apology for the way I sounded when I called you the other day. Sometimes I act like it’s your fault Daddy never went after you, and I’m the martyr. Maybe it’s the way I try to make sense of it.

There are things that happened that I’ve never told you about, at least not in so many words, that I’m sure you’ve figured out by now. And there was a reason I never did tell you. When he started to come into my room at night, even though it was only once a month or so, I thought I was going crazy. Daddy was so incredibly nice to me when it was all happening. He told me over and over what a good girl I was, and I believed him. Still, when he turned the doorknob my fingers would curl around the edges of my mattress and my blood would run thick. It got to a point where the only way I could let him do the things he did was by pretending this wasn’t me at all. I would pretend to be in some other part of the room, like a corner or a closet. I’d watch. I could see everything that happened, which wasn’t nearly as bad.

One morning I faked being sick so that I wouldn’t have to go to school. While Mama was making me lunch I told her that Daddy had been coming into my bedroom at night, and she dropped the can of tuna all over the floor.

“You must have had a bad dream, Jane,” she said. We were both crouched over the linoleum, wiping up the runny oil and the flakes of fish.

I told her it had happened over and over, and I didn’t like it. I started to cry, and she held me, getting fingerprints of grease on my nightgown. She promised me it would never happen again.

That night Daddy did not come into my room. He went into his own, and had a tremendous fight with Mama. We heard crashes and loud shrieks; in the middle of it all you came into my room and crawled under the covers. The next morning Mama had her arm bandaged, and the frame of their pine bed had been split.

The next time that Daddy came to my bedroom, he told me we had something very serious to discuss. “Here I am, spending all this special time with you,” he said, “and what thanks do I get? You run and tell your mother you don’t like to spend time with me.” He told me I’d have to be punished for what I’d done. He wanted to spank me, but he made me pull down my underpants before he started. As he struck me, he told me not to tell anyone again. He said he wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt. Not Mama, not Joley, not anyone.

In retrospect I believe I was very lucky. I have heard stories from the social workers at the San Diego schools about children younger than I who have sustained much more violent sexual abuse. It never got beyond the point of touching, and it only lasted for two years. When I was eleven, just as strangely as it all had started, it stopped.

So I wanted you to know why I never told you what I am sure you already have deduced. Perhaps now Daddy won’t be able to hurt you.

Please do not be angry with me. Please do not-

I stop writing here, and I reread the letter. Rebecca turns on the water in the shower and starts to sing at the top of her lungs. On second thought, I rip the paper into shreds. I rip it so many times there is no more than one word on each piece. I toss them into a garbage pail. And then, taking the matches the housekeeping staff has placed beside the bed, I set the shreds on fire. It is a plastic trash can and the flame scorches the sides. It will never be seashell pink again, I think. It is probably ruined forever.

Dear Jane,

When you were twelve you had a rabbit named Fitzgerald, you’d seen the name on the shelf at the library at school and liked the word. The rabbit wasn’t as interesting as the circumstances that surrounded it-Daddy had actually broken two of Mama’s ribs and she’d been hospitalized and you got so distracted by it that you refused to eat, sleep, whatever. In the long run Daddy broke the spell by bringing home this rabbit, striped like an Oreo, whose ears couldn’t quite stand up.

Unfortunately this was February and rather than building the rabbit a hutch you insisted we keep it safe and warm indoors. We took a thirty-gallon aquarium tank from the attic and put it on the floor of the living room. We filled it with wood chips that smelled of forests and then we dropped Fitzgerald in. He ran in confined circles and pressed his nose up to the glass. He pawed at the clear corners. All in all, he was a rotten rabbit. He chewed through telephone cords and socks and the edge of the rocking chair. He bit me.

You loved that demonic rabbit. You dressed it in applespotted baby clothes; hid it in your shiny, stooped church purse; you sang it ballads by the Beatles. One morning the rabbit was stretched out on its side-a revelation-we discovered the rabbit was male-but you felt this change of position was a bad omen. You made me stick my hand in Fitzgerald’s cage and when he didn’t nip me you knew he was sick. Mama refused to take him to the vet; she wouldn’t get close enough to the rabbit to drive it anywhere. She told you to be sensible and get ready for school.