Sandy sits in the doctor’s office, gazing at her baby through round purple-tinted glasses. She cradles her first daughter close to her chest. The doctor enters the room and gives the diagnosis. Her baby has cancer. Heart cancer.

I wouldn’t know if this is how the events played out – Sandy watching the room go sterile as she realizes her 18-month-old’s grim future. I wouldn’t know because I am the baby and Sandy is my mother. Maybe my mom found out via phone call, or email. Maybe she cried, maybe she didn’t. Maybe my dad was there – he probably wasn’t. I don’t know.

I only know that, when an infant is diagnosed with heart cancer, the outcome is usually fatal.

I believe in the saying, “God never gives us more than we can handle” even more than I believe in God. I don’t think my mother could have handled her baby dying from cancer. But she would have had to – if the doctor hadn’t given a misdiagnosis.

I don’t remember the sequence of events that led me to uncover a cottontail rabbit’s nest in the large flowerbed in the front yard. Maybe it was while my mother played roulette with the plants she was moving around. Maybe I stumbled across the nest as I was playing outside with Kristin.

I spent a Friday afternoon pulling the babies, one-by-one, from the nest. Constantly pushing disheveled sweaty auburn hair out of my face, I produced six wildly kicking rabbits with woody fur and twitching pink noses. After digging around more, I rose from the nest. Cupped in my hand was the emaciated seventh rabbit. The lucky one. His skin was pulled taught over his bones. His wide, bulging eyes – innocent yet aggrieved.

I believe in the saying, “God never gives us more than we can handle,” and I also believe that, when I first found him, I was somehow not rattled by his state. I think I pitied him. The runt of a bunny.

By the end of the day, two bunnies had run off. Kristin and I picked out names for the remaining five: Zelda, Angemon, Angewomon, Pikachu, and Axew, the runt. We named them in the backyard sitting in the grass. I observed Kristin playing with the bunnies. I heard her giggle as she turned her baby-face to grin at me.

We declared that Axew’s name was significant, more than the others. How exactly we decided upon this, I don’t know. Axew’s namesake was from Pokémon Black and White – the dragon-type Pokémon, Axew. The late-blooming dragon who couldn’t breathe fire just yet. The weakling of the litter.

I believe in the saying, “God never gives us more than we can handle,” as I mess about in my mother’s studio, watching her attach pieces of polycarbonate – ones that have been inked with X-rays of my heart – to a painting of me sleeping.

Maybe, as she worked, she was reliving the moment she’d thought her baby was going to die. Maybe, she was thinking back to when she learned my ailment was benign.

I believe in the saying, “God never gives us more than we can handle” because the moment when I saw myself in Axew was the moment I felt my heart careen and jolt and somersault. I fed him kitten formula out of a tiny bottle. His body was wrapped in a rag. He turned his head toward me, trembling, when I moved the bottle away from him. He wanted me, needed me. I think the leaping of my heart was something maternal. A desire to protect him.

As I read the section of Crispin: The Cross of Lead that had been assigned for homework, Axew bobbed and hobbled around on my chest before falling asleep. I think that, in the moments when the silence had become too much, I read aloud to him. I vaguely remember him waking up and turning his head toward the sound of my voice. 

I believe in the saying as I come home from school, kicking off my brown clogs and rounding into the kitchen.

“I’m sorry! I forgot to put Axew’s box out of the dogs’ reach! I forgot to close the door to my–“

Donna is there – my mother’s friend from college – an old woman who lives in California. She comes into the house wearing a sun hat.

“Oh, Ms. Donna! Did you see Axew? Did you see my pride and joy?”

Donna’s lip curled upward. Her wrinkles held disgust. I think I felt something between panic and bewilderment. Confusion. I don’t know what I felt.

Mom came up behind Donna. I think I stood on my tiptoes to get a better look at her face.

“Mom! Mom? Where’s Axew? Is something wrong?”

“I’m sorry, honey,” my mother says as she presents me with a yellow checkered cloth napkin. “The dogs got to him. There was nothing we could do.”

Laid out upon the napkin was Axew, still and wounded – a hole in the junction between eyeball and eye socket.

It was in the moment after I cradled the feather-light weight of the napkin in my hands, that I realized. I think I screamed. I held him gingerly, but daringly close to my chest as I cried. I think I ran out into the backyard. Maybe I thought that Axew would move if I did. I think I choked on my own tears.

Maybe I’m exaggerating when I say that I felt something akin to what my mother did as she sat in that doctor’s office. Maybe the saying was wrong. Maybe God did give me, in that moment, more than I could handle.