Chapter 15: Day Zero

I read the paragraph twice.

The mother had been drinking at a party in Duluth.

The mother had insisted on driving.

The mother had fled the hospital to avoid a blood test.

There was a signature at the bottom.

Dag Haugland, grandfather of the minor child.

The lawyer was watching my face.

He had the look of a man who'd done this a hundred times and liked it a little more each time.

"Mr. Haugland is prepared to testify," he said. "As are others."

"Others."

"Witnesses from that night."

I folded the petition in half and put it in my back pocket.

"They took my blood in the ER," I said. "At midnight. Before your client got there. It's in a chart at the hospital in Duluth."

The lawyer's mouth stayed polite.

His eyes went still.

"I'll be asking for it," I said. "So will the judge. Tell Dag."

I walked past him to the coffee machine.

My hands were shaking so badly I spilled half the first cup.

I made a second one.

Then I went to watch my daughter get her father's blood.

Day zero didn't look like much.

I'd pictured surgery.

Bright lights, masks, a countdown.

Instead it was one nurse in a gown and a bag about the size of a juice box hanging on Ingrid's pole.

The bag was a deep, dark red.

Ingrid looked at it from her pillow.

She was so weak she couldn't lift her head, but she could still have an opinion.

"That's from Daddy?"

"That's from me," Erik said.

He was sitting on the bed in a yellow gown and a mask, his shaved head shining under the lights.

"It looks like juice."

"It's not juice."

"It's Daddy Juice," Ingrid decided.

The nurse laughed so hard she had to turn around.

She wrote DADDY JUICE on a strip of tape and stuck it on the bag.

Then she opened the line.

We watched it go in.

Drip by drip.

Down the tube, into the port in Ingrid's chest, into her.

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