The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

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AND IN THIS MANNER, EDWARD’S days passed, one into the other. Nothing remarkable happened. Oh, there was the occasional small, domestic drama. Once, while Abilene was at school, the neighbor’s dog, a male brindled boxer inexplicably named Rosie, came into the house uninvited and unannounced and lifted his leg on the dining-room table, spraying the white tablecloth with urine. He then trotted over and sniffed Edward, and before Edward even had time to consider the implications of being sniffed by a dog, he was in Rosie’s mouth and Rosie was shaking him back and forth vigorously, growling and drooling.

Fortunately, Abilene’s mother walked past the dining room and witnessed Edward’s suffering.

“Drop it!” she shouted to Rosie.

And Rosie, surprised into obedience, did as he was told.

Edward’s silk suit was stained with drool and his head ached for several days afterward, but it was his ego that had suffered the most damage. Abilene’s mother had referred to him as “it,” and she was more outraged at the dog urine on her tablecloth than she was about the indignities that Edward had suffered at the jaws of Rosie.

And then there was the time that a maid, new to the Tulane household and eager to impress her employers with her diligence, came upon Edward sitting on his chair in the dining room.

“What’s this bunny doing here?” she said out loud.

Edward did not care at all for the word bunny. He found it derogatory in the extreme.

The maid bent over him and looked into his eyes.

“Hmph,” she said. She stood back up. She put her hands on her hips. “I reckon you’re just like every other thing in this house, something needing to be cleaned and dusted.”

And so the maid vacuumed Edward Tulane. She sucked each of his long ears up the vacuum-cleaner hose. She pawed at his clothes and beat his tail. She dusted his face with brutality and efficiency. And in her zeal to clean him, she vacuumed Edward’s gold pocket watch right off his lap. The watch went into the maw of the vacuum cleaner with a distressing clank that the maid did not even seem to hear.

When she was done, she put the dining-room chair back at the table, and uncertain about exactly where Edward belonged, she finally decided to shove him in among the dolls on a shelf in Abilene’s bedroom.

“That’s right,” said the maid. “There you go.”

She left Edward on the shelf at a most awkward and inhuman angle — his nose was actually touching his knees; and he waited there, with the dolls twittering and giggling at him like a flock of demented and unfriendly birds, until Abilene came home from school and found him missing and ran from room to room calling his name.

“Edward!” she shouted. “Edward!”

There was no way, of course, for him to let her know where he was, no way for him to answer her. He could only sit and wait.

When Abilene found him, she held him close, so close that Edward could feel her heart beating, leaping almost out of her chest in its agitation.

“Edward,” she said, “oh, Edward. I love you. I never want you to be away from me.”

The rabbit, too, was experiencing a great emotion. But it was not love. It was annoyance that he had been so mightily inconvenienced, that he had been handled by the maid as cavalierly as an inanimate object — a serving bowl, say, or a teapot. The only satisfaction to be had from the whole affair was that the new maid was dismissed immediately.

Edward’s pocket watch was located later, deep within the bowels of the vacuum cleaner, dented, but still in working condition; it was returned to him by Abilene’s father, who presented it with a mocking bow.

“Sir Edward,” he said. “Your timepiece, I believe?”

The Rosie Affair and the Vacuum-Cleaner Incident — those were the great dramas of Edward’s life until the night of Abilene’s eleventh birthday when, at the dinner table, as the cake was being served, the ship was mentioned.