Winter and the woodpile both were nearly gone. The snow that fell on Saturday melted into raindrops before it could reach the ground. I brought in the last of the hickory logs and laid them in the fireplace, where they complained hissing and sizzling to the kindling, but eventually took full responsibility for the flame.
My father had rented a video for the evening. My mother baked oatmeal-raisin cookies. My sister insisted on turning out all the lights, the better to imagine being at the movies. I flopped down on the floor on a pile of pillows I'd pilfered from the couch.
The movie was the story of a family that sets out on a journey to make a new life. Some of it was funny. Some of it was sad. Some of it I didn't understand. It made me think of Orwell and how he'd wandered far to make his home with me.
I must have been pretty tired, because when it was over, instead of jumping up like I always do and heading off to do something else, I stayed on the floor as the credits rolled.
I never usually look at movie credits because I never know who those people are. They might as well be lottery winners, as far as I'm concerned. But as the tiny white letters went whizzing by, one name among them caught my eye. "Orwell Lapin," it read. "Second unit assistant to the associate director."
Interestingly, lapin is French for rabbit. Even so, I would have dismissed this sighting as a coincidence, had it not been for the message that followed Mr. Lapin's name. Before disappearing into the top of my television screen, it said,
FEELING BETTER THANK YOU
THANK GRANNY TOO.
"What?" I said. "Did you see that?"
The sputter of the fireplace was the sole reply. The others had already left the room. I stopped the tape, rewound the credits, and played them back again. There was no Orwell Lapin to be found.
Had I imagined it?
Or had Orwell begun leaving me messages the way my mother used to do, back during all those years when I was little, at my old school, hiding notes in my books and my lunch box and pinned inside my coat?
Had there been other vanishing messages that I had missed? Messages like my mother's "You're a great kid—I love you" and "Here's a bunny hug—be good today" scrawled into the fog of a frosted windowpane early on a winter day or drawn in the dust beneath my feet?
I advised my brain to pay closer attention.