So I did.
I started with the way Josie sang off-key in the car, loudly and proudly and completely wrong. How she wouldn’t eat anything green unless Mr. Bunny took the first pretend bite. How she was afraid of thunder but not of spiders. How she wanted to be an astronaut, then a veterinarian, then “a lady who sells ice cream from a truck and also fights crime.”
Lily listened to every word. The whole time, she stroked Mr. Bunny gently along his bald belly, slow and careful, the way you’d comfort something that had been very frightened for a very long time.
That night, when I tucked her into bed, she asked if Mr. Bunny could sleep with her.
I hesitated for only a second.
“Just for tonight,” she promised. “I’ll take good care of him. I’ll tell him about you, so he knows he’s in the right house.”
I tucked the rabbit under her arm and pulled the blanket up over both of them.
Then I stood in the doorway for a long time, watching my daughter sleep with my daughter’s rabbit, and I thought about a little girl on the side of a road, pushing her best friend into a stranger’s hands and asking him to take it home to her mommy.
It had taken years. It had taken a stranger, a secret, a hospital room, a wedding, a funeral, and a brave six-year-old keeping a promise that wasn’t even hers.
He had come a very long way to get here.But finally, Mr. Bunny had come home. To me. Just like Josie wanted.
