A soft scratching, patient, like knuckles that didn’t want to startle anyone. I walked slowly to the back gate and pulled it open.
He was there.
The same scruffy golden mix, sitting square on his haunches, tail moving in these tiny, careful sweeps.
Something soft hung from his mouth, matted with dirt and time.
“Oh,” I breathed. “Oh, sweetheart.”
He didn’t flinch.
He waited until I crouched down, then he lowered his head and set the thing gently at my feet, like a waiter placing a plate.
It was a stuffed rabbit. Small. Grey, once.
The ear had been chewed years ago by tiny teeth I had known better than my own hands. Anatomy
“That can’t be,” I whispered. “That is not possible.”
The dog watched me.
I reached for the toy, and my fingers went cold.
I knew this rabbit.
Ethan had slept with this rabbit almost every night of his little life.
It had vanished sometime after he turned six, during the long stretch when Marlene was watching him three or four days a week, and I had torn apart every box in the garage looking for it.
I had cried out there over a stuffed animal because I could not cry over anything else that day.
“Where did you get this?” I asked him.
The dog only blinked.
I turned the rabbit in my palms, and that was when I felt it.
Something hard shifted inside the toy’s belly.
Something small and rigid that did not belong under soft cotton stuffing.
“What is inside you?” I murmured.
I stood up too fast. My knees clicked.
The dog rose with me, calm as a churchgoer.
“Stay,” I said. “Please. Just stay.”
I hurried into the kitchen, the rabbit clutched against my chest, and I yanked open the drawer where I kept the shears.
My phone rang on the counter, and I almost knocked it to the floor.
Marlene’s name lit up the screen.
I stared at it.
Two rings. Three.
I picked up because I did not trust myself to explain later why I hadn’t.
“Diane, honey,” she said, her voice smooth as always. “I just wanted to check on you. How are you doing this week?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You sound out of breath.”
“I was hanging laundry.”
“Well.” A small pause. “I’ve been thinking. You know how much I worry about you. Those Sunday visits, the cemetery, all of it. It has been two years, sweetheart. I really think you need to stop going so often. It isn’t healthy.” Funeral& Bereavement
I looked down at the rabbit on my counter.
“Marlene, I can’t talk right now.”
“Diane, please. I only say this because I love you. Ethan wouldn’t want you living inside that grief.”
The words used to soften me.
Today they sounded like something else. Like a hand steering a wheel I hadn’t realized wasn’t mine.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Diane, wait, are you sure you’re—”
I ended the call.
My hand shook when I picked up the shears.
I laid the rabbit on the cutting board, and gently slit the old seam along its back, the way you would open a wound you cared about.
Cotton stuffing spilled out in yellowed clumps.
And then, wrapped inside a folded scrap of lined paper, something metallic tumbled onto the wood.
A key. Tarnished. Small, the kind for a padlock, not a door. Attached to nothing.
I picked it up. It was cold in my palm.
Then I unfolded the paper.
The handwriting was blocky and careful, the kind a child does when they are trying very hard.
It was Ethan’s.
Not the writing from his final year, when the sickness had thinned him out. This was earlier—probably from when he was six, more than a year before he died.
I read the words twice before I understood I had read them.
“For Mama. Aunt M said don’t tell.”
My legs went out from under me, and I sat down hard on the kitchen stool. Kitchen& Dining
“Aunt M,” I whispered. “Aunt M said don’t tell what?”
Through the screen door, I could see the dog still sitting in the yard, exactly where I had left him.
