Chapter 7 - The Room on the Third Floor
Friday morning arrived at St. Jude’s Memorial with the clean, pale light of late autumn.
The rain had cleared before dawn, leaving the sky above the industrial canal a high, cold blue that looked like polished steel. The wind through the birch trees outside the pediatric pavilion was stripping the last gold leaves from the branches, sending them spinning across the asphalt of the doctors' parking lot.
Room 312 smelled of toast, warm apple juice, and the mild medicinal scent of the hydrocortisone ointment they had applied to Lily’s back.
I sat in the vinyl armchair beside the bed.
I was wearing a clean grey sweatshirt I had bought from the hospital gift shop at six in the morning and a pair of dark jeans. My hands were scrubbed clean. My phone—which had been vibrating continuously with calls from Emily’s sister, her lawyers, and three partners from my construction firm—sat face-down on the rolling meal table, switched to silent.
Lily was awake.
She was propped up on three pillows, her legs tucked beneath a yellow hospital blanket printed with small smiling suns. On the tray in front of her sat a plastic bowl of oatmeal with three brown sugar packets, mostly untouched, and a small sketchpad with twenty-four new colored pencils laid out in a neat, perfect gradient from silver to violet.
She was drawing a house.
Not our colonial on Elmwood Terrace.
It was a small, square cabin with a stone chimney, two windows with blue curtains, and an enormous, wildly disproportionate oak tree that took up half the page, its branches covered in hundreds of tiny, individual red dots that represented apples.
"Dad?" she asked, without lifting her pencil from the paper.
"Yeah, baby?"
"Where is Mom?"
The pencil stopped moving. The lead rested on the bark of the apple tree.
I reached out and laid my palm flat on the mattress beside her knee. "Mom is with some people who are going to help her, Lily."
"The police people?"
"Yes."
She looked at the pencils. Her small thumb ran along the hexagonal edge of the emerald green one. "Is she going to jail?"
I took a slow breath. In eight years of parenting, I had learned that children know when you are editing the world for them; they can hear the missing syllables in an adult’s voice like a musician hearing a flat note.
"I think she is, Lily," I said.
She didn't cry.
She didn't drop the pencil.
She simply lowered her shoulders two inches, letting out a long, shuddering sigh that seemed to come from the very bottom of her lungs—a breath she had been holding since Tuesday afternoon, perhaps since she was three years old and learned that crying over a broken elbow made the room go cold.
"Do I have to go back to the house?" she asked.
"No," I said. "We’re never going back to that house."
She looked up at me then. Her hazel eyes were clear, the chemical glaze from the morphine completely gone, leaving them bright, deep, and remarkably old.
"Where are we going to live?"
"Remember that place we looked at last summer?" I asked, smiling slightly. "The one near the reservoir with the red barn that had the old tractor inside?"
Her eyes widened slightly. "The one with the porch that went all the way around?"
"That’s the one," I said. "I called Mr. Henderson this morning. The lease is ready. We can move our clothes and your drawing table in on Monday."
She looked back at the drawing on her tray.
With slow, careful movements, she picked up the brown pencil and drew a small figure standing under the apple tree.
Then she drew a taller figure beside it.
The taller figure had an enormous, wildly inaccurate tool belt around its waist and a ridiculously oversized pair of work boots.
"That's you," she said, pointing with the lead.
"I have better boots than that," I said, leaning over the bed to kiss the top of her head.
May you like
She giggled.
It was a tiny sound—rusty, fragile, like a gate hinge that hadn't moved in ten years—but it was real. It bounced off the pastel yellow walls of Room 312 and hung in the clean morning air like a silver bell.
