Alvin and the Girl in the Window

Every morning, right when the sun poured gold over the fence posts, a small cottontail rabbit hopped out from under the porch and into the tall butterfly grass beneath Ann Marie's window. Being ever observant of his surroundings, he would often gaze up upon the shiny reflection of the glass window just above his favorite resting place, in the butterfly grass he loved so much.

He knew that the window had yellow curtains, and that sometimes, if he sat very still, they would flutter open and a girl with two crooked braids would press her nose to the glass and watch him eat clover.

Ann Marie was ten years old, and she had decided, the way ten-year-olds decide things, all at once and completely, that the rabbit outside her window was the most interesting creature in the whole world.

"Good morning, Alvin," she whispered one day, even though she didn't know his name was Alvin. She just thought he “looked” like an Alvin, round-cheeked and a little bit nosy, the kind of name that fit a rabbit who twitched his whiskers at everything.

Alvin froze mid-chew, one ear swiveling toward the sound. Rabbits are careful like that. The world is big and full of things that would like to eat a rabbit, so Alvin had learned to listen first and trust later.

But Ann Marie didn't move. She just knelt on her windowsill, chin on her folded arms, and waited.

So the next morning, Alvin came a little closer.

And the morning after that, a little closer still, close enough that Ann Marie could see the pink of his nose twitching three times every second, and the white flash of his tail when he hopped, like a puff of cotton someone had sewn on backward.

She started leaving things for him. Not food; her mother had explained that wild rabbits needed wild food, not crackers or carrot sticks from the kitchen, but other “things”. A smooth stone. A dandelion gone to seed, so he could watch it scatter. Once, a Blue Jay feather, which Alvin sniffed at for a long time before deciding it was not, in fact, food, and hopping away unimpressed.

"You're supposed to like my presents," Ann Marie told him through the screen, propping her elbows on the sill.

Alvin flicked an ear, which Ann Marie decided meant “I like you fine, I just don't like feathers.”

Weeks went by like that, Ann Marie at her window, Alvin in the butterfly grass, the two of them keeping their careful distance the way you do with someone you're only just beginning to trust. She learned his habits: how he froze completely still when a noise crossed the yard, how he thumped one back foot twice before diving under the porch, how he liked the grass best in the long light of early morning, before the world got loud.

And Alvin, in his own quiet rabbit way, learned hers too. He learned the creak of her window opening. He learned that her voice, soft and low, never meant danger. He learned that when she sat very still with her chin on her arms, it meant she wasn't going anywhere, and neither did he have to.

One morning in early autumn, when the grass had gone gold and stiff with the first cold snap, Alvin did something he had never done before.

He hopped all the way to the base of the window. Right up to the brick ledge below it, close enough that if Ann Marie had reached down, which she didn't, because she somehow understood, without being told, that this moment belonged to Alvin and not to her, she could have touched the soft grey fur between his ears.

He sat there a long moment, nose working, one paw lifted mid-step. Then he looked up. Right at her.

Ann Marie held her breath.

"Hi, Alvin," she said, so quietly it was almost not a sound at all.

Alvin's ears turned toward her voice, and stayed there.

It wasn't a big moment, not to anyone watching from the street, or to the birds in the maple tree, or to the wide indifferent sky. Just a girl in a window and a rabbit in the grass, looking at each other in the gold morning light.

But Ann Marie would remember it for the rest of her life; the first morning Alvin decided, all at once and completely, the way rabbits do, that she was safe.

And from then on, he came every single day.