At night, the watchman walked the hallways, bouncing his flashlight off the walls. The kids heard it:clunk, clunk, clunk. Some closed their eyes and pretended it was a better sound. It could be a father, coming home from work, dropping his keys on the table, and saying,I’m home, dear. Or it might be that mother they all so sorely missed, even if they’d never known her. After so many years, she had come back. She was walking up the steps now.
But those were foolish ideas, in Dennis’s view. He had regained hisimagination—maybe it had been there all along—and he used it for good imagining.
In his mind, it was Ralph coming up those stairs. It was Ralph dragging something over the walls. He was carrying a suitcase. He was setting it down at the foot of Dennis’s bed. He was saying,Do you want to leave now, son?andWill you come with me?
And for him, Dennis always said yes.
Early one morning, Dennis snuck out the front door. The idea had come to him all of a sudden. Maybe it was the sound of the back door opening that sent the creature into hiding. If Dennis went out the front door, maybe the creature wouldn’t be alerted.
He made his way through the woods until he was a good distance from the bush but still within sight of the center. He could feel the waves of sadness emanating from it.
Suddenly, he longed for the comfort of one of the isolation rooms.
He stayed in the trees. He could see the bush, and the wind-flattened grass of the backyard. The cook moved about the kitchen, making breakfast. The previous night’s rain dripped from the trees. He captured a drop on his hand, and licked it. It tasted like winter and ice.
He crouched, waiting.
The bush was dome shaped, and had stayed much the same. He hadn’t noticed before that the leaves were a different color than those of the surrounding shrubs. They were reddish and drooping. It looked like the bush had been planted there, and had not grown as part of the natural habitat.
He stayed very still. The birds began calling, the way they do as the sun rises. He smelled the salt wind. Inside the center, he knew, the boys would be waking up. The staff would walk the halls, ordering them to get dressed. Some of the kids would have snot lathered on their faces andothers would be crying, but all would be ignored. Their doors would be shut, as crisply as the lids of coffins.
The rain dripped, and the wind moved gently through the trees, and the bush stayed very still.
It was then that Dennis saw it: the tiniest of movements, from inside the bush. A single shake, like a tiny hand or paw was moving a leaf.
He froze, watching. He could feel everything all at once, all over him. The feeling shook him like a gust of wind. He wanted to yell and run and call for Ralph, who had not yet arrived for the day, or for the others.Come look! Come see!he would yell, and he would be a proper boy, a real boy, in that moment.
The bush parted, and it happened. It did so in the way of all true miracles, with a touch of the ordinary, even disappointment. There was not a bell from the heavens or a clap of thunder or a bolt of lightning. There was just a little boy, Dennis, age six, survivor of a lifetime of pain, crouched in the trees, watching a single bush as the reddish leaves gently parted and a wise face looked out, brown with a pink, twitching nose and fair, round eyes. Below the face was a velvety soft chest, crowned in white.
A rabbit.
“A rabbit!” Ralph said.
The custodian had hidden in the woods with Dennis and seen, only briefly, the silver-brown tufted back of the bunny, before the bunny had sensed him and hopped quickly back down its hole.
“You found it.” Ralph turned to his young friend with amazement. “I am so proud of you.”
Dennis, for one of the few times ever, basked in the praise.
“A rabbit,” Ralph said. “I never would have guessed.” From his voice, it sounded like he was telling the truth. “I didn’t even know they lived out here. Never seen one at the beach. Just deer and elk. Wow.”
Dennis smiled, his heart full.
“So it was a rabbit all along.” Ralph laughed, standing up. The sun flashed off his belt buckle. “You solved the mystery.” He looked a little worried, like now Dennis had no reason to be friends with him.
“It’s our rabbit,” Dennis said.
“Naw, it’s the world’s rabbit. Are you going to name it?”
This thought had never occurred to Dennis.
“I don’t know,” he said. He thought of all the names the foster parents wanted to call him, before they gave him back.
“Sorry to bring that up, son.”
Dennis smiled at the word.
“I’ll think about it,” Dennis said, but in his mind there already was a name.
