The thing inside the rabbit’s ear was a tracking tag. I know that now because Denise Harlan cut the seam open with the tiny folding scissors she kept on her keychain, tipped the stuffing into her palm, and said, very calmly, that we needed to move right now.
Three minutes earlier I had been frozen on a bench in Deeds Point MetroPark watching a red pickup truck roll through the parking lot like my worst thought had taken shape in steel and chrome and was moving toward us at an idle. Three minutes later my daughters and I were following a woman I had never met through a side door of the park’s small nature center while she spoke into her phone with the even, practiced voice of someone who has learned to make fear obey instructions.
“Female adult, two children,” she said. “Confirmed tracker. Likely active pursuit. Need an emergency transport pickup at the south service entrance.”
That was the first moment in nine days that I felt something stronger than terror. I felt handled, in the best possible sense of that word, in the sense of being in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing and was doing it on my behalf without asking me to justify the need.
Denise was fifty-eight, silver-haired, with the kind of posture that certain women develop over decades of being the person a room depends on, upright and alert and impossible to rush. I found out later she had spent twelve years as a school counselor and eight before that as an emergency room nurse, and that the posture was occupational, that you develop it when you spend your working life in the presence of people in crisis and you understand that your own steadiness is part of what you are offering. By the time she saw me in the park she was volunteering twice a week with a domestic violence outreach program that partnered with county shelters and public libraries, driving her own car, spending her own time, showing up at parks and waiting rooms and bus stops to be the person who notices.
At the time, sitting on that bench in the November cold with my daughters pressed against my sides and nine days of sleeping in the car wearing on all three of us, all I knew was that she had sat down at the far end of the bench ten minutes before the truck appeared, seemingly rummaging in a canvas tote bag while she watched us with the trained peripheral attention of someone who has learned to observe without appearing to. She had taken in the too-thin jackets on my girls, the split at the corner of my lip that was five days old and had gone through all the colors and arrived at yellow, and the way I tracked every engine sound in the parking lot the way you track weather when you live somewhere that gets bad storms.
“Your daughter’s shoe is untied,” she had said.
It wasn’t. Hadley’s shoes were both tied, double-knotted the way I had started doing them because Ruthie thought it was funny to pull the laces loose and Hadley took this personally.
I understand now that she was testing me. Seeing whether I would snap or flinch or go blank, whether the pressure was so close to the surface that a small wrong thing would break through. When I didn’t answer, she gave it a moment and tried again. “There’s a warm restroom in the center building if you need one. And a water fountain that actually works.” She said it without looking directly at me, without any quality of prying in her voice, simply as information that was available to me if I wanted it, an exit offered without embarrassing the person being offered it.
I almost took it. I was so tired and so cold and the appeal of being able to say we needed to use the bathroom, which was true, and moving from our visible bench to somewhere enclosed and warm was almost more than I could resist. Then Ruthie said, “Mommy, Bunny has a light.”
She held up the stuffed rabbit she had carried everywhere since she was eighteen months old, a worn cotton thing with one ear slightly longer than the other from years of being held by that ear during sleep, and there was a small rhythmic pulse of red light coming from somewhere inside the longer ear. The kind of light that, in other contexts, you don’t think about. In that context, on that bench, with the red pickup now visible at the entrance to the lot, it meant something I couldn’t put into words because my mind went white and blank the way it does when the thing you feared most stops being theoretical.
Denise was on her feet before I processed what I was seeing. She didn’t ask me if I was sure. She didn’t suggest there might be an innocent explanation. She looked at the truck and she looked at my face reading the truck, and she made a decision in the space of one breath.