Lily whispered it back to herself, testing the shape of it in her mouth.
“Josie.”
Hearing it in her small voice nearly undid me.
Part Fourteen: Home
I took Mr. Bunny down from the table and set him in both our laps.
I told Lily how Josie carried him everywhere, even into the bathtub, even though I told her a hundred times that rabbits don’t like baths. How she loved him so hard, squeezed him so tight every night, that his fur wore right off his belly. How I sewed his ear back on one night after she tore it on a fence, and how she inspected my work the next morning and declared it “a little crooked but okay.”
Lily laughed at that. A real laugh, wet and surprised.
Then she went quiet, leaning her head against my shoulder, and I could feel her thinking.
When she finally spoke, it wasn’t the question I expected. It was the question she actually needed answered.
“So… you’re still my mommy?”
“Yes.”
I said it before she had even finished the sentence. I didn’t need to think about it. I would never need to think about it.
She melted against me like all her bones had turned to relief.
A moment later, she looked down at the rabbit again, and her voice went very soft.
“Will you tell me about Josie? Like, all about her?”
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.
[This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events.]
