The weekend passed with little else to remember it by. The church was dressed in purple to mark the countdown to Easter. My father and my mother worked on the house. In a brief, closely supervised experiment, my sister and I let her cat climb inside Orwell's cage.
Orwell didn't seem to mind.
On Monday, the people who lived across the street became the people who never were. A moving van, painted with the outline of an ancient sailing ship, backed into their lucky driveway with great lurching trucklike squeals, explosive hisses, and loud self-important clatters as I was heading off for school. It was gone with their stuff before I got back home.
The people across the street had high-tailed it out of there like people in a hurry. They left a birdbath, garden tools, and a perfectly good trampoline standing in their backyard. They left hoses attached to their faucets. They left trash cans on the curb.
The rusted tricycle that had lain undisturbed in their front bushes for the better part of a year continued its nesting for a few days more, until a real estate man in a dark blue suit wrestled it out one somber and drizzly morning and jammed it into the trunk of his car.
For several days I watched as newspapers piled up on the lawn. I don't take things that aren't mine. I never have and I never would. But even though I had n't paid for these particular papers, I figured they almost belonged to me, and anyway, nobody else seemed to want them.
Crows rose with the sun the day I made a lightning dash across the street to my absent neighbors' house. The breaking dawn behind me reflected from the windows like nearly identical watercolors neatly arranged for sale, each made by painting magenta pink right on top of azure blue while the blue was very wet. Bathed in this heavenly light, I nervously knelt to scoop the papers into my arms.
They say someday you have to pay for all your sins. I say you start paying right away.
Two of the stolen newspapers were wet. I hoped it was from rain, but it could have been from passing dogs. In any case, the soggy pages shredded when I tried to turn them. Another paper, barely two days in the yard, had already become a habitat for spiders. I dropped it in a trash can the moment I got the news.
One paper remained. I flipped back to the comics page, spied the smile face on Scorpio's numbers and set to work deciphering. It soon declared
A FRIEND PAYS YOU AN IMPORTANT COMPLIMENT.
What friend? What sort of compliment? This didn't sound like Orwell. This was just an ordinary, luck-of-the-draw horoscope, and despite its goofy smile face, I had drawn a dud.
Oh, well. C'est la vie! I thought. That's life in the funny papers. I tossed the paper on the counter and prepared to feed my rabbit.
Whether Orwell's legs were improving, I couldn't tell, but his appetite certainly was. His demand for lettuce, celery, spinach, carrots, and radishes was beginning to be noticed.
"Shouldn't your rabbit be eating alfalfa pellets?" my mother asked, leading the family into the kitchen to forage for breakfast, just as I was attempting to leave.
"He doesn't like that stuff," I replied. "He likes fresh food."
"Fresh food is expensive," my mother pointed out.
"Many people consider rabbits to be fresh food," my father chimed in, picking up the newspaper I had provided.
"Ugh!" my sister said as she flopped into a chair. "Who would eat a rabbit?"
I withdrew from the discussion in order to deliver the goods.
I knew it was true that rabbits aren't well positioned in the food chain. Many creatures find them easy pickings. Clearly, when the world began, the luck of the draw hadn't gone their way. But surely there's a reason rabbits are the way they are. I mean, you have to believe in something, don't you? Even if it doesn't have a name.
A rabbit is an extraordinarily beautiful creature. Unlike a turtle or a spider or a moose, a rabbit is a delight to observe. A rabbit's fur, its ears, its nose, its tail—all are uniquely constructed and arranged. A rabbit's face is very pleasant. It makes you happy just to see it. A rabbit is soft and gentle and begs to be hugged. Just to touch one feels like love.
Maybe this is the reason a rabbit isn't very rugged, why it's "not put together especially well," as the new veterinarian had said. Maybe, to make a rabbit, God was willing to sacrifice durability for beauty.
In this respect, a rabbit has more in common with a painting or a poem or a symphony than with a rhinoceros or a horseshoe crab. To be sure, God made them all, but with the rabbit, he took his time.
It had to be: God sent Orwell to me.
In the sunlight streaming through the window by his cage, Orwell lifted his face from the vegetarian feast I'd prepared him, wiggled his nose appreciatively, and opened his mouth to release a tiny, rabbit sized burp.
"You're welcome," I said.