PART 2: The Rabbit Goes Missing
Daniel hired me before the clock in the hall struck four. He did it standing in the foyer with his mother’s hand on his sleeve and her voice pitched low and furious, saying that he was making a decision in grief, that it was reckless to hand a child to a stranger over three gestures. He listened to all of it. Then he took his arm gently away and said that for a year his daughter had not shown him a single thing, and today she had shown me three.
Mrs. Dobbs, the housekeeper, led me upstairs. She was a short woman with round wire glasses and a gray bun, and she moved along the corridors with a careful, soft tread, as though the walls had ears. My room was small and warm, with a narrow bed, an oak dresser, and a connecting door to Wren’s nursery.
At the threshold she stopped and glanced back down the hall.
“Keep your door shut when you sleep,” she murmured.
“Is the neighborhood unsafe?”
“The neighborhood is perfectly quiet,” she said. “It is the family that carries the noise.” She looked at me for a moment longer, then hurried away before I could ask what she meant.
That first afternoon I did not try to teach Wren anything. I sat on the nursery floor several feet from her and watched the rain run down the balcony doors. The room was filled with beautiful toys that no one seemed to have touched: a dollhouse with every tiny chair in place, boxes of paints with the seals unbroken, a row of china dolls lined up on a shelf like a jury. Wren sat on a woolen rug with the rabbit in her lap, smoothing its ears one at a time.
After a long while, she glanced at me. I shaped a slow letter B with my hand and then the sign for rabbit, and asked, with my fingers, what his name was.
“Biscuit,” she signed. Then she touched her chin with her thumb, the sign for mother. “Mama made him talk. With hands.”
“Your mama signed with you?” I asked.
She nodded. Her gaze went to the doorway, to the hall, and back again. Then, very quickly, she signed, “Grandmother says no hands. Grandmother says only whispers are safe.”
I kept my face gentle, though my heart was beating hard. “I am not afraid of hands,” I signed. “I am never going to tell you to stop.”
Her shoulders dropped by a fraction, and she let me sit nearer. We spent the rest of the afternoon building a crooked tower with wooden blocks, saying nothing aloud at all.
That evening, Daniel found me in the library after dinner. A single lamp lit the room, and the desk in front of him was covered with papers he did not seem to be reading. He looked as though he had not slept in a year.
“Claire used to sign with Wren when she was small,” he said. “I remember a few words. More, milk, bunny. I thought she had forgotten all of it. I thought that part of her had died with Claire.”
“It did not,” I said. “She only learned to hide it.”
“From whom?”
I hesitated. I had been in his house for half a day and I was already about to accuse his mother of something I could not name. “From anyone who told her to stop.”
He looked down at the desk, and neither of us said anything else. When I climbed the stairs, I heard his footsteps pacing below for a long time.
The rabbit was gone in the morning.
I discovered it when I went in to wake Wren. She was sitting up in bed with her knees pulled to her chest and both arms wrapped around nothing, and her face was so white that for a second I thought she was ill. When she saw me, her hands began to fly, sloppy and frantic, so fast I had to catch her wrists gently and ask her to slow down.
“Biscuit is gone,” she signed. “Grandmother came in the night. I heard her shoes.”
“Are you sure?”
Her chin trembled. She pointed at the empty pillow, then at the door, and I understood that she had been awake for hours, afraid to leave the room.
I found Cordelia at the breakfast table in a fresh ivory suit, pouring tea with perfect composure. Daniel was across from her, his coffee untouched.
“Where is Wren’s rabbit?” I asked.
She did not look up. “That filthy thing? I had it taken away. It was falling apart and full of germs, and a child her age should have something clean. I will buy her a new one this afternoon.”
“She did not agree to that,” I said.
“She does not agree to anything,” Cordelia replied. “She does not speak.”
Daniel set his cup down so hard the saucer rang. “Mother, you took it from her room at night?”
“I did what any sensible grandmother would do.” Her smile was smooth and thin. “Daniel, do not let this woman turn you against your own family in a single day.”
I did not wait for the rest. I asked Mrs. Dobbs where the household’s trash was collected, and she gave me a long look over her glasses and said that Mr. Peters, the groundskeeper, burned the garden waste in the old barrel behind the greenhouse on Thursdays. It was Thursday.
I ran. The wind pulled at my cardigan, and the wet grass soaked through my shoes, and I could smell smoke before I saw it. Mr. Peters was standing beside a rusted barrel with a long metal rake, and a thin gray column was rising from the top.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Please, wait!”
He looked up in surprise and drew the rake back. I pushed past him and plunged my hand into the heap of burned branches and wet leaves, ignoring the heat, and my fingers closed around something soft near the bottom.
It was Biscuit. One ear was scorched and the stitching along his back was blackened, but he had not burned through. I pulled him out and turned him over in the gray light, and my breath caught.
The seam along his back had been cut open and crudely stitched shut again. It was not Wren’s mother who had done it, and not recently, because the thread was clean and new.
Someone had already opened this rabbit, and someone had already taken out whatever he held.
