Amy's Old Rabbit

Amy's Old Rabbit is a damaged stuffed animal preserved among Amy's belongings from the convent. When Lacey returns it to her years later, the rabbit does more than identify a lost childhood possession: it helps open a conversation about Amy's sisters, her memories of Wolgast, and the human life she had before the world that followed. Its worn material form makes memory tangible, while its return leaves open how much of Amy's earlier self she can still remember.

The object and its return

Lacey has imagined the moment of returning Amy's possessions for years. She brings out two army lockers that once held guns and asks Peter and Amy to help carry them into the kitchen. The first locker is the one she kept for Amy; inside is the knapsack Amy wore to the convent, with the Powerpuff Girls associated with it. Lacey sets the bag on the table and tells Amy that it is hers.

Amy studies the bag before unzipping it carefully. The objects inside include a toothbrush, a tiny shirt marked with the word SASSY in glitter, and threadbare jeans. At the bottom lies the rabbit: tan velveteen, dressed in a pale blue jacket, its fabric crumbling and one ear missing so that a curl of wire shows. This is not an intact keepsake presented as a piece of childhood preserved unchanged. It has visibly deteriorated, and its condition makes the time between the convent and its return part of what the object communicates.

Memory, care, and the convent

As Amy examines the contents, Lacey supplies a small piece of the bag's history: Sister Claire bought the shirt, though Sister Arnette apparently did not approve of it. The exchange places the rabbit among the ordinary belongings of Amy's early life and among the people who cared for her at the convent. Amy identifies the women as sisters, but distinguishes that bond from biological sisterhood. Lacey affirms that they are sisters in the eyes of God, returning the conversation to the religious kinship that shaped Amy's childhood there.

Amy sets the other objects aside and holds the rabbit, peering into its face. She strokes its fabric with her thumb as she begins to recall the sick room. She remembers someone bringing the rabbit to her and a voice telling her to wake up, although she could not answer. The keepsake does not merely accompany the memory: holding it gives Amy a concrete object around which an otherwise distant recollection can take shape.

Wolgast and the remembered self

When Lacey asks who spoke to her, Amy names Wolgast. She recalls that he told her about Eva, his daughter who had died, and says he would have given Eva his heart. Amy then recognizes that Lacey was there too. The rabbit's return thus reconnects Amy not only with the convent but with the people and losses bound up in her recovery. Lacey has preserved a possession from Amy's first life; Amy's account turns it into a route toward a memory of Wolgast and the care he gave her.

Later, Peter picks up the rabbit while considering whether Amy remembers what was done to her. He asks instead whether she remembers being a girl—being human. The shift from what happened to Amy toward who she was makes the rabbit's significance more than sentimental. It is a surviving object from the period when she was a child, and its presence gives Peter a way to ask about a self that may persist beneath the changes her life has brought.

Significance and uncertainty

The rabbit carries two kinds of evidence at once. Its fraying fabric and missing ear show that a material remnant has survived years of separation, while Amy's recollection associates it with the sick room, Wolgast's voice, and her inability to respond. It cannot establish the full shape or reliability of her memories, and Peter's question receives no definitive answer. Instead, the scene holds remembrance and uncertainty together: Amy can recognize the rabbit and recover particular people and moments, but the extent to which she remembers her earlier human life remains unresolved. Its importance lies in this modest, intimate function—as an object preserved by Lacey and returned to Amy, it makes the past present without claiming to restore it whole.