The bunny hops over from the patch of grass by the memorial garden.

“He’s moved in with his father,” I tell her.

“What’s that about?” she asks, and leaps up, long legs stretching, onto the hood of my minivan.

Her nose scrunches in outrage. Her back leg thumps: DANGER.

She hops toward the windshield, leans forward to sniff, and I lean forward too, drawn by her eyes, both soft and angry. She knows me, this bunny, and she’s pissed. How dare these fuckers, this bunny’s eyes say, and I lean even closer, as if the glass might melt away and we’ll end up nose-to-nose.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“I am not,” I say. “I am almost definitely not okay.”

“How dare these fuckers,” she says, nodding.

An ambulance pulls in slowly, lights flashing.

“What’s the plan, doll?” the DJ on the radio asks, distracting me. The song has ended. What was it? Now it’s just he and I, talking this out. The rabbit shakes her head. She’s not on board with this.

“I don’t know,” I say.

My phone vibrates. Probably your dad, but maybe you? Never, no, but maybe?

“Don’t read it,” the rabbit says, and I stop, wonder how I can hear her through the windshield. Then reach for my phone.

“Don’t check,” she says.

“It’s time,” the DJ says. “I’ll put on a song just for you. This is your moment, Leah. It’s epic. It’s perfect. Let’s do this, girl.”

“That’s some excellent bullshit,” I say and the rabbit snorts.

“Rabbits don’t snort,” I say.

The DJ puts on “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails.

“See?” he says. “Epic.”

“This is a little on-the-nose,” says the rabbit. She wiggles hers.

Two medics get out of the ambulance and open the back doors. There’s a woman on the stretcher.

I open the car door.

“Wait a minute,” says the rabbit. She hops down, then lightly pads over to me and pulls up to a sitting position.

“Think about this. Remember what it was like for James all those times. It’s worse for adults. It’s bad.”

This is a serious bunny. I reach out to rub the top of her head, right between the ears. When we were little, Meg and I’d had a gray, flop-eared rabbit named Frank, who was also a girl, but we thought it was so funny to name her that. She was much bigger than this little bun-bun.

Bun-Bun. Meg called Frank that.

 Frank had the same white fur and black spot over her left eye. Frank died unexpectedly from a bladder stone. Remembering this is a shock to my system, fills me with an entirely new—or maybe old?—sadness. Oh Frank.

“Are you listening to me?” Frank asks, ducking. “Stop petting me!”

“We’re not here to talk about your son,” the doctor says. “We’re here to talk about you.” She sits across from my gurney, on a metal folding chair she scooted up close so we could chat, woman to woman. I try to sit naturally, like her, try to cross my legs and look relaxed. Only I’m in a hospital gown with just one tie, at the top, at the back of the neck. The other one was torn off and the nurse never brought a new one like she promised.

I haven’t shaved my legs in weeks. This woman’s young enough to be my daughter. Beautiful, a fledgling, with perfect skin, translucent and glowy. I bet she shaved this morning.

“Are you for real?” I ask, pretending I mean it the way it sounds.

“I’m for real,” she assures me as her skin briefly turns clear, then disappears, her veins pulsing, wrapped in and around wet, red muscles. Her eyeballs roll back in their sockets. Her skin reappears and she smiles. “Is it that hard to talk about yourself? Easier to talk about—”

She checks her notes.

“James?”

“Well, James is relevant,” I say, avoiding her eyes, looking at the floor and my hands and the thick, grippy hospital socks on my feet. Gray, too long at the toe, because they were out of the orange ones in my size. I slipped on the way to the bathroom earlier and the guy in the room next to me yelled OH SHIT SHE’S GOING DOWN and then laughed and then started to cry and I felt guilty about making him cry, so I started to cry, too, and then I went and peed a neon purple stream that sizzled when it hit the water in the toilet. That made me think about the time James peed blue as a toddler and I rushed him to the ER, and it turned out it was from the two popsicles he’d eaten at Mama’s house and the nurse told me to be more careful about his sugar consumption. He was only two, she reminded me.

Only two. I need to get home to my kid.

“Are you uncomfortable looking at me?” the doctor asks, and she is every doctor, every teacher, every adult saying Look at me to my son. Eye contact, they’d insist.

Just do what they say, I told him.

“I can talk about myself without looking at you,” I tell this woman, just like he always did when I’d say, Just cooperate, Jesus, okay?

“Okay,” she relents. “Tell me about yourself.”

Every morning in the hospital is the same. The knock on the door, permission to get out of bed, a hand reaching in and flipping the switch on. The lights a shock to the system, even when I’ve been awake for hours. Breakfast isn’t until eight, meds not ‘til nine. Before that, the slow molasses of thick-brained, medicated patients who can’t wake up fully. Some for an hour or so, some all day. But mornings are the only time I’m not sick-slow, the only time my eyelids don’t feel weighted.

Early mornings are when I sneak out of bed and look out the window, tracing the white ovals. They’re etched into the glass, one tech told me, to prevent birds from flying into the building and dropping, shocked, to the ground twelve floors below. I can see just the edge of the Domino Sugars sign from my window, the first part of the D, but I know the rest so well, know it from so many angles. This angle just happens to be mine

“Please stay in bed until seven, hon,” a woman’s voice says over the intercom.

Meg never had a view, she said. The hospital Mama took her to was on the ground floor, overlooking a courtyard used by kids on the oncology unit. So they covered the windows with brown butcher paper, on the outside so nobody could rip it off in a desperate bid for sunshine and sky.

It’s still dark this morning. And cloudy. No sun today, I bet.

Meg always had a roommate in that hospital. One thought she was a witch and even showed my sister how to cast spells. The nurse prayed the rosary over her bed every night when she thought they were both asleep, and Meg told the girl she should pretend to be possessed, but she said no way, they’d probably throw her in the ‘cool down’ room.

“I think she really was a witch,” Meg said. “Not crazy. Maybe none of us are.”

When I visited Meg when she was older, it was a blur of shock that felt new every time. She’ll get better now, I thought over and over. This will be the last visit. But there was always another visit.

“Honey, it’s five-fifteen. Try to get some sleep,” the voice on the intercom says.

They tell me I experienced an acute psychotic episode. But now that I am supposedly recovering, I’m having a hard time remembering. Before and now. Last night I kept thinking Meg might visit. I remember that. This morning I keep thinking, How will Seth take care of James with me away so long? And then I remember. And then I try to remember other things and can’t. What floor was the room I used to bring James to? When he was a baby? With those other moms? Maybe right below me, just a few floors down. My little boy, he’s so smart.

Out the window, the clouds sink lower, fog settling halfway down the buildings, hiding the streets below. I intentionally don’t focus. Thoughts hang and then slip away. After my morning dose at nine, I’ll sleep all day. For now, I remember. My sister and I on a sand dune, at the beach, at the pool, whispering in bed. For now, the old ache of Meg is more real than my son, and I wrap my arms around myself, offer myself a little kindness. I’m not so bad, right? I loved her.

The nurse comes in, sees me crying, and walks back out. No, I want to tell her, I’m grateful. I was a pretty fucked up kid and maybe it wasn’t all my fault?

She comes back in with a small white cup of water and a small foil pack. She rips it open, holds out a tiny orange pill for me to take. I can recognize Haldol from a mile away.

“I’m okay,” I say.

“You need rest, honey.”

She leaves once I take it, and I stand at the window, wishing for a chair, wishing I could talk to Meg, just for a moment.

This place is like a drug den, I’d tell her. But the drugs suck.

I know, she’d say. I always told you.

I can’t tell if I’m in a different building than James, I’d tell her. When they brought me up in the elevator, they tucked me in, a little gurney burrito, just like my son, and I thought This is okay, this is alright, but then he pushed the third-floor button.

“Where are we going?” I asked, which surprised him. I hadn’t spoken the whole time and maybe he thought I couldn’t speak, I don’t know. Or maybe that was all in my head, but he told me we were taking the third-floor bridge over to Tower 2, to the adult unit on the twelfth floor. Twin psych units, the top floors of two buildings mirroring each other. I’d never noticed.

Oh right. The room with the mothers was in the other building, not this one. And the room with James is across from here, above that.

I wish I could look out and see where James’ room was, I’d tell her. But this side faces the water.

You always were a masochist, she’d say.

Pot, meet kettle, I’d say back, and for a second yes, I’m a big sister again and oh my God, I’ve missed that feeling.

Kettle, meet pot, she’d laugh.

Oh little sister. What I would give to touch your soft cheek, to tuck your dyed-black hair behind your ear. The grief leaks in, the memories clearer now, sharp even, but it’s too soon. The Haldol hasn’t kicked in yet and there isn’t even a chair in this room. If I sit on my bed, I’ll sink. The grief pours in. Am I a human in this place? The grief floods in. That was my sister. My sister. My baby sister who once came home dirty, her shirt torn from two girls in her second-grade class, so I found them the next day on the monkey bars at recess. I grabbed each of them by the ends of their stupid matching braids and I jerked them, hard, to the ground. I wrapped a braid around each hand and held their faces tightly to the dirt, put my lips close to their wide, terrified eyes.

“Don’t ever touch my sister again. Do you bitches understand me? Don’t even look at her.”

One nodded, then the other. Their friends behind us yelled, but nobody stepped forward to stop me.

“You’re crazy,” the blonde girl said, once I let her up. But she never told. And she never touched Meg again.

The med finally starts to kick in. I’m face down on the floor now, the front of my shirt soaked, covered in snot. Am I howling? I’m so loud with this pain, a wild animal dying, but the intercom is silent. Go back to bed, they’d said. But it turns out, they just want you down.

---

Hannah Grieco is a writer in Washington, DC. Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on Bsky/IG @writesloud.

---