It was almost a year after the trial. We were celebrating the anniversary of Emily coming home—“Gotcha Day,” we called it, though we were thinking of changing the name to “Family Day” to make it feel less abrupt.
Emily was playing in the yard when she came running in, tears streaming down her face, holding Mr. Rab out like a wounded soldier.
“He’s hurt!” she wailed, her small face crumbled in despair. “Mommy, fix him! His tummy is broken!”
The main seam along the rabbit’s stomach, worn thin by years of clutching and squeezing, had finally given way. White stuffing was spilling out like entrails.
“It’s okay, baby,” I soothed her, taking the toy. “I can fix him. I’m a good doctor for bunnies. Why don’t you go have a juice box with Daddy on the porch? I’ll operate right here.”
I set her up with Tom and took the rabbit to my sewing chair by the window. The afternoon sun was streaming in, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. I threaded a needle with grey thread, intending to do a quick stitch-up job.
I pushed the loose stuffing back inside the cavity. My fingers brushed against something hard.
I frowned. I knew this rabbit. I had hugged him and moved him off the couch a thousand times. I assumed it was a voice box or a squeaker that had stopped working long ago.
But it felt… sharp. Angular. And when I pressed it, it crinkled.
Curiosity is a dangerous thing. Instead of sewing the hole shut, I pulled the fabric wider. I reached two fingers deep into the cotton filling, past the soft, familiar fluff.
My fingertips grazed cold plastic. I pulled.
It wasn’t a voice box. It was a heavy, sandwich-sized Ziploc bag, wrapped tightly in electrical tape.
I stared at it, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I looked out the window; Emily was chasing a butterfly, her laughter muffled by the glass. I looked back at the bag in my lap.
I was a pharmacist. I dealt with controlled substances every day. I knew the weight of things. I knew the look of things.
I peeled back the corner of the tape. Inside were smaller bags. One contained dozens of small, blue pills stamped with “M30.” Oxycodone. Counterfeit, likely laced with fentanyl given the street trends.
I reached back into the rabbit. My hand shook uncontrollably.
I pulled out a second bag. Fine white powder. Cocaine.
And a third. Methamphetamine.
I sat there in my sun-drenched living room, surrounded by the smell of potpourri and the sounds of suburbia, holding enough felonies to put a man away for three lifetimes. I looked at the one-eyed rabbit, its face frozen in a perpetual, lopsided grin.
This wasn’t a toy. It was a mule.
I didn’t call the police immediately. I sat there, frozen, the drugs heavy in my lap. My first instinct wasn’t justice; it was protection.
I thought of Emily. I thought of the system that had chewed her up and spit her out. If I called the police, would they take her? Would they say our home was unsafe because there were Class A narcotics in her bedroom? Would they blame us?
I waited for Tom to come inside. When he walked into the living room and saw me—pale, shaking, surrounded by bags of white powder—he dropped the empty juice box he was holding.
“Susan?” he whispered. “What… what is that?”
“It was in the rabbit,” I said, my voice sounding foreign to my own ears. “It was inside Mr. Rab. All this time, Tom. All this time she’s been sleeping with it.”
Tom walked over and touched the bags, his face hardening. He realized the danger instantly. Fentanyl. One tear in that bag, one night where Emily chewed on the rabbit or hugged it too hard, and she would have been dead.
“We have to call,” Tom said, though I could see the fear in his eyes. “We can’t keep this here. But we have to make sure they know… we have to make sure they know we just found it.”
I called Officer Alvarez. I didn’t call 911. I called the woman who had saved Emily, hoping she would save her again.
