The note was penned in purple ink on a sheet ripped from a spiral notebook, and by the moment I arrived at Dakota’s front steps I had crumpled it into a ball in my fist. I could hear Tony behind me in the street. “Jennifer! Jen, wait. Please.” I didn’t wait. I didn’t look back. I climbed her three concrete steps, past the pot of yellow mums she’d placed out the week she moved in, and I paused in front of her red door with my heart hammering so violently I could feel it in my ears. I was fifty-one years old. I had never in my life knocked on a stranger’s door to pick a fight. I raised my hand. It was trembling. I knocked anyway.
To understand why I was standing there, you need to know about the coffee. And to understand why that note hit me the way it did, you need to know about the twenty-five years before the coffee. I’ll tell you both. But I’ll begin with the easy part, because for a time, that’s all it was. Easy. Almost funny. Dakota moved into the house across the street at the close of August. It was the little gray rambler that had belonged to old Mr. Petrakis for forty years, until his kids moved him to assisted living in the spring and put the property on the market. Tony and I watched the moving truck pull up from our front porch, sipping iced tea, the way people in our neighborhood watched everything. Maple Court is a small street. Eleven houses in a horseshoe. Everybody knows everybody’s business, and what they don’t know, they invent. The movers carried in a sofa, a drafting table, a few boxes, a bed. That was about it. Then a young woman stepped out of a compact blue Honda with Arizona plates. Late twenties, maybe. Thin. Dark hair pulled back under a knit beanie, even though it was eighty-five degrees. She stood on the sidewalk for a long time, gazing at the house. Then she turned around and gazed at ours.
Right at us. Right at Tony. I remember that because it struck me as strange. Most people look at their new home when they move in. She looked at us for maybe five full seconds before she turned and went inside. “Friendly,” Tony remarked. “Maybe she’s just tired,” I said. Two days later, she knocked on our door with a plate of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in plastic. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Dakota. I just moved in across the street. I wanted to introduce myself.” Up close, she was pretty in a worn-out way. Big dark eyes. Pale skin. She was still wearing the beanie. A different one, gray this time. “I’m Jennifer,” I said. “Jennifer Moretti. Come in, come in.” She hesitated on the doorstep. Then she entered. Tony was in the kitchen fixing the garbage disposal, which he’d been fixing every other month for about fifteen years. He came out wiping his hands on a dish towel. “This is my husband, Tony,” I said. Dakota looked at him. And I want to tell you precisely what I saw, because I’ve pondered it so many times since. She didn’t look at him the way a young woman looks at a man she finds attractive. I know that look. I’ve seen waitresses give it to Tony. He’s fifty-four, but he’s still got all his hair, and his arms are still strong from thirty years as an electrician, and he has a good easy smile. Women notice. This was different. She looked at him like she was trying to memorize him. Like she was looking at a photograph she’d only ever seen in black and white, and suddenly it appeared in color. “Hi,” she said. Her voice came out a bit strange. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” Tony said, and shook her hand. “Where are you coming from?” “Phoenix.” “Long way. What brings you to Ohio?” She paused. “Work. I’m a graphic designer. I can work from anywhere. I just. I needed a change.” “Well, you picked a good street,” Tony said. “Mostly. Watch out for Marlene at number seven. She’ll know your blood type by Friday.” Dakota laughed. It was a nice laugh. A bit rusty, like she didn’t use it often. She stayed for twenty minutes. She asked a lot of questions. How long we’d lived there. Twenty-three years. What Tony did. Electrician, his own company, Moretti Electric, six guys. What I did. Office manager at a pediatric dental practice. Whether we had kids. “No,” I said. “No kids.” She looked down at her hands when I said that. “Oh,” she murmured. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.” “It’s alright,” I said. It was a question I’d been answering for twenty years. I’d grown good at saying it lightly. After she departed, I placed the cookies on a plate. They were good. Homemade. “Nice girl,” Tony noted, eating his third one. “She seemed sad,” I observed. “Everybody’s sad when they move,” Tony replied. “It’s the boxes. Boxes make everybody sad.”
At first, she genuinely seemed nice enough. She waved when she retrieved her mail. She stopped to chat when she spotted us in the yard. She asked me where the good grocery store was and whether the farmers market was worth it. She brought Marlene at number seven a loaf of zucchini bread, which was a smart move, because Marlene told everyone on the street that the new girl was “a sweetheart, but too skinny, and why does she always wear that hat?” Then she began paying closer attention to Tony. It was little things initially. If Tony was out mowing the lawn, Dakota would step out to water her mums. If Tony was washing his truck in the driveway, Dakota would wander over to inquire about her circuit breaker. If we were sitting on the porch in the evening, she’d walk her recycling bin to the curb very slowly and wave. I noticed. I’m not blind. But I didn’t think much of it. Tony is the sort of man people approach with questions about circuit breakers. Then came the coffee. Tony leaves for work at the exact same time every morning. Six fifty. He’s done it for thirty years. He kisses me in the kitchen, takes his thermos, and walks out to his truck, while I watch him from the kitchen window as I finish my own coffee. It’s one of those small habits a marriage builds up, like coral. You don’t notice it until something shifts. One Monday in late September, something shifted. Tony stepped outside at six fifty. And at that precise moment, Dakota’s red front door opened, and she hurried down her steps and across the street carrying two paper cups from the Daily Grind on Main Street. I stood at the window with my mug halfway to my mouth. “Morning!” I heard her call. “I bought an extra by mistake. Do you want it? It’ll just go to waste.” Tony looked surprised. Then he smiled and accepted it. “Well, thank you. That’s real nice.” “Have a good day,” she said, and retreated inside. The next morning, she repeated it. Same time. Same two cups. Same “I bought an extra.” This time Tony laughed. “Twice in a row? You need to talk to those people about their ordering system.” “I’m terrible at mornings,” she said. “Apparently.” By Wednesday, I’d stopped finishing my own coffee at the window. I was simply standing there, watching. By Friday, she somehow knew precisely how he liked it. I heard her through the screen. “Two sugars, no cream, right?” Tony halted halfway to his truck. “How’d you know that?” Dakota smiled. “Lucky guess.” That evening at dinner, I laughed about it. “I think our new neighbor has a crush on you,” I said. Tony shook his head and continued eating his spaghetti. “I think she’s probably just lonely,” he stated. “She’s new here. She doesn’t know anybody. Maybe she’s trying to make friends.” “By bringing my husband coffee every morning?” He chuckled. “Apparently I’m very approachable before eight a.m.” “Apparently.” “Jen.” He reached across the table and placed his hand over mine. “She’s younger than some of my apprentices. She’s a kid. I’m a fifty-four-year-old man with a bad knee who falls asleep during Jeopardy.” “You do fall asleep during Jeopardy.” “Every single night.” He squeezed my hand. “She’s lonely. That’s all.”
After that, it turned into a joke between us. Whenever Dakota appeared with another coffee, I’d tease Tony about his “morning delivery.” I’d ask if he planned to leave her a tip. I’d ask if the Daily Grind had made him employee of the month. When he returned home in the evening, I’d say, “How was your coffee date?” and he’d reply, “She’s starting to talk about our future, Jen. I think she wants a June wedding.” We laughed. We’d been married twenty-five years. We laughed at almost everything, because the alternative was crying, and we’d done enough of that early on. I wasn’t worried. That’s the truth. Tony never encouraged her. He was polite and friendly and that was all. He genuinely seemed to believe she was simply lonely, and honestly, I mostly believed it too. But Marlene at number seven did not believe it. She cornered me at the mailbox on the second Thursday. “Jennifer,” she said, in the low tone she uses for the very best gossip. “I don’t like to say anything.” Marlene loves to say things. It’s her favorite activity after bingo. “But that girl,” she remarked, nodding toward the gray house. “Every morning. With the coffee. I see it from my kitchen. The whole street sees it. People are talking.” “People can talk,” I said. “I’m just saying, honey. Young girl, lives alone, no job anyone can see, wears hats in the heat. Brings a married man coffee every morning.” She raised her eyebrows. “My cousin’s husband in Toledo, it started with coffee. Next thing you know, he’s living in a condo in Sandusky with a dental hygienist.” “Tony’s not moving to Sandusky, Marlene.” “I’m just saying.” I walked back to my house with the mail. And I’ll admit it. That night, lying in bed beside my snoring husband, a tiny worm of something crept into my chest. Not suspicion, precisely. Just discomfort. The sensation of something not being quite right. Two sugars, no cream. How did she know?
A week later, I was gathering my mail at the exact time Dakota was collecting hers. She smiled and waved. And before I could stop myself, I crossed the street. “Dakota,” I said. “Can I say something?” She stopped smiling. She held her mail against her chest. “Of course.” “The coffee,” I stated. “It’s very sweet of you. Really. But you don’t have to keep bringing it. Tony has a thermos. And people on the street are starting to talk, and I simply don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea.” I attempted a smile. “You know how neighborhoods are.” Something passed across her face. It was swift, but I caught it. Not embarrassment. Not anger. Something that resembled grief. Then she smiled. “I’m just trying to be nice,” she said quietly. “I know you are.” “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cause any trouble. I’ll stop.” And she retreated inside.
Following that, she stopped. For nearly a week, we didn’t spot her in the mornings. Tony walked out to his truck at six fifty with his thermos, alone, and the red door across the street remained closed. I’d expected to feel relieved. Instead I felt strange. Like I’d kicked a puppy. “You think I hurt her feelings?” I asked Tony. “Maybe a little,” he answered. “But you were right to speak up. It was getting weird.” “She looked so sad.” “She always looks sad, Jen,” Tony noted. “I don’t know what that girl’s carrying. But it’s not our business.” Her lights stayed on late every night that week. I could see them from our bedroom window. Sometimes at two, three in the morning. One night I got up for a glass of water and spotted her standing at her front window in the dark, gazing at our house. Just standing there. I stepped back from the window so she wouldn’t notice me. I didn’t tell Tony. I don’t know why. Then arrived the Tuesday. It was the second week of October. Cold and bright. The maple in our front yard had turned entirely red overnight, the way it does every year, like someone flipped a switch. I was standing at the kitchen window with my coffee, the way I always did, watching Tony walk out to his truck. And the red door across the street opened. Dakota came down her steps and across the street toward him. I set my mug down. This time, she wasn’t carrying coffee. She was carrying a folded piece of paper. She held it with both hands, the way you’d hold something fragile. When she reached Tony, she held it out. He looked surprised. He glanced at the house, as if checking to see if I was watching. I was. Then he accepted it. He unfolded it and began to read. I watched his face. I’ve been watching that face for twenty-september—twenty-seven years, two years of dating and twenty-five of marriage. I know every expression it makes. I know his tired face and his lying face and his I-forgot-to-pay-the-gas-bill face. I know the expression he wears when the Browns lose and the face he made when his father died. I watched his smile disappear. It didn’t fade. It vanished. Like someone had wiped it off with a cloth. He read it again. Slowly. His lips moved slightly. Then he looked up at Dakota, and his expression was one I had never witnessed before. Not in twenty-seven years. Pale. Stunned. Something approaching fear. She said something quietly. I couldn’t hear it through the glass. Tony didn’t reply. He simply stood there, clutching the paper. Dakota turned around and walked back across the street and into her house. She closed the red door behind her.
The second her door clicked shut, I was outside. I didn’t even put on shoes. I crossed our cold lawn in my slippers. “What did she write?” Tony folded the note. He folded it again, into a small square. He closed his fist around it. “It’s nothing.” “Tony, I just watched your face change. Give it to me.” He hesitated. He glanced at the gray house. He glanced at me. His eyes were wet. “Seriously, Jen,” he urged. “Let it go. Please. Just let me handle this.” That merely made me more determined. I’ve been married to Tony Moretti for twenty-five years. He has never once in all that time told me to let something go. He’s not that kind of man. He tells me everything. He told me the day he dented the truck. He told me the day he lost a big contract. He told me, once, very quietly at two in the morning, about a girl he’d liked in high school who’d died in a car crash, and how he still thought of her sometimes. He doesn’t keep secrets. And here he was, standing in our driveway with his hand closed around a piece of paper, asking me to let it go. “Give me the note,” I demanded. “Jen…” “Give me the note, Tony.” After a few seconds, he opened his hand. He held it out to me. His hand was shaking. I unfolded it. It was a page torn out of a spiral notebook, with the little ragged edges still on one side. The handwriting was neat and small, in purple ink. I started reading:
Mr. Moretti,
I’m sorry about the coffee. I know it was strange. I didn’t know how else to get close enough to see what kind of man you are before I asked you for anything. I know that’s not fair. I’m sorry.
My name is Dakota Reyes. My mother’s name was Lisa Reyes. You knew her in San Diego, in the summer of 1996, when you were in the Navy. She worked at the Coffee Cove on Shelter Island. She told me you drank it with two sugars and no cream, and that you said coffee without sugar was a punishment for people who’d done something wrong.
She died two years ago. Before she passed, she gave me a box of letters. One of them was addressed to you. It returned unopened in 1997. Return to sender. She never tried again.
I was born in March of 1997. You are my father.
I didn’t come here to ruin your life. I know you have a wife. I know you don’t have other children. I won’t bother you if you don’t want me to.
But I have acute myeloid leukemia. This is my second time. My doctors say I need a stem cell transplant, and I don’t have any brothers or sisters, and they haven’t found a match on the registry. They told me a parent can sometimes be a half match. They told me to find you.
I start my next round of chemo in two weeks. If you’re not willing, I’ll understand. I really will.
But I didn’t want to die without meeting you at least once.
Dakota
By the final line, my stomach had dropped. I didn’t ask Tony another question. I turned around and headed straight across the street. “Jennifer, wait!” But I was already climbing Dakota’s front steps. And that is how I ended up standing at a red door in my bathrobe and my slippers at six fifty-five on a Tuesday morning in October, with a crumpled note in my fist and my husband calling my name behind me. I knocked.
For a long time, nothing happened. I almost knocked again. Then the door swung open. Dakota stood there. She’d removed her beanie. Beneath it, her head was nearly bare. Just a soft dark fuzz, like a baby bird. Her scalp was pale and you could trace the blue veins beneath the skin. Without the hat, she looked about sixteen years old. She gazed at the note in my hand. Then she gazed at my face. She didn’t say anything. She simply waited. Like someone standing before a firing squad. I had crossed that street with a speech. I don’t even remember what it was anymore. Something about how dare she. Something about my husband. Something about how she couldn’t simply show up and drop a bomb on our lives. None of it came out. Because I was looking into her eyes. Big and dark brown, with thick lashes, and a tiny fleck of gold in the left one. And I was witnessing, suddenly, all the things I hadn’t allowed myself to see for a month. The shape of her chin. The way her eyebrows lifted in the middle when she worried. The small crease beside her mouth. Tony’s chin. Tony’s eyebrows. Tony’s crease. I’d been looking at it every day across the street, and I hadn’t noticed it, because I hadn’t wanted to notice it. “Is it true?” I asked. My voice emerged as a whisper. “Yes,” she said. “How do you know? How can you be sure?” She reached into the pocket of her sweater and pulled out a folded photograph. She extended it toward me. It was old and faded, with soft rounded corners. A young sailor in dress whites, with his arm around a laughing girl with long dark hair. They were standing on a pier, with boats behind them. The sailor was grinning. He had all his hair, and it was black, not gray. He had a chipped front tooth that I knew had been fixed in 2001, because I was there when he got it fixed. It was Tony. Twenty-four years old. I’d never seen a picture of him that young. His mother had lost the albums in a basement flood. “My mom kept it on her nightstand,” Dakota said quietly. “My whole life. I asked her once who he was. She said he was the best summer of her life. And that he didn’t know about me. And that it wasn’t his fault.” Behind me, I heard Tony’s footsteps on the walk. He halted at the bottom of the steps. I turned around and looked at him. He was looking past me at Dakota. At her bare head. His face was gray. “Lisa,” he uttered. His voice cracked. “Lisa Reyes. I didn’t know. I swear to God, Jen. I didn’t know.” I looked from him to her. From her to him. And then I did something I’m not proud of. I couldn’t help it. It simply poured out of me. I handed Dakota back her photograph. I thrust the crumpled note into Tony’s hand. And I walked down the steps past my husband and across the street and into my house, and I closed the door, and I locked it. I sank down onto the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets. And I wept like I hadn’t wept in seventeen years.
You need to understand something about Tony and me. We met in 1999 at a friend’s barbecue in Akron. He was twenty-seven, out of the Navy, two years into his electrician’s apprenticeship. I was twenty-four and working the front desk at a dentist’s office. He spilled a beer on my shoe and spent the next three hours apologizing, and by the close of the evening, I’d decided I was going to marry him. We married in June of 2001. We began trying for a baby the following year. It didn’t happen. For two years, nothing happened. Then the tests. Then the specialists. Then the shots, the hormones, the procedures. The doctor’s office with the fish tank and the pictures of babies on the wall. The waiting. The phone calls that always arrived on a Thursday. In 2004, after our second round of IVF, I grew pregnant. Her name was going to be Grace. We found out it was a girl at sixteen weeks. Tony painted the spare bedroom yellow. He built a crib himself, out of oak, in the garage, staying up until midnight sanding it. I bought a little white dress with ducks on it. At twenty-two weeks, she died. I won’t tell you about that day. I can’t. I’ll simply tell you that I held her in a hospital room for two hours, and she was perfect, and she was the size of Tony’s hand, and she possessed his chin. We tried three more times after that. Three more rounds. Nothing. In 2009, my doctor sat me down and explained, as gently as anyone has ever explained anything to anyone, that it was time to stop. We looked into adoption. The waiting lists were long. The agencies wanted things we didn’t possess. We were tired. We were so tired. We were grieving Grace, and we were grieving every baby that never arrived, and somewhere amidst all that grieving, we simply stopped. Tony took the crib apart and stored it in the attic. I painted the yellow room blue and turned it into a sewing room. I never sew. The sewing machine has been sitting in there for fifteen years. We built a good life, Tony and me. I want you to know that. We traveled to Italy for our twentieth anniversary. We share a cabin on Lake Erie every August. We have friends, and nieces and nephews, and a Sunday crossword habit, and a dog named Bruno who died in 2022 that I still miss. We laughed at almost everything. We were happy. But there was always a hole. Shaped like a little girl with his chin. And now, across the street, there was a grown woman with his chin. Twenty-nine years old. Born in March of 1997. Four years before we married. Eight years before Grace. He’d had a daughter the entire time. And I hadn’t been able to give him one.
That’s what I was crying about on the kitchen floor. Not about Tony cheating. He hadn’t cheated. He hadn’t even met me yet. Not about the coffee. Not about Dakota’s lie regarding buying an extra. I was weeping because the one thing I had wanted most in my entire life had walked across the street bearing two cups of coffee, and it wasn’t mine. Tony knocked on the kitchen door after about twenty minutes. He possessed a key, but he didn’t use it. He knocked, softly, the way you’d knock on a hospital room. “Jen,” he said through the door. “Please let me in.” I got up off the floor and unlocked it. He entered. He studied my face. Then he placed his arms around me in the middle of the kitchen and held on, and I could feel him trembling. “I didn’t know,” he said into my hair. “I swear. I swear to God, Jen. I didn’t know.” “I know you didn’t.” “Lisa. We were together for three months. That summer. Then my ship transferred to Norfolk with two weeks’ notice. I wrote her. I wrote her three times. She never wrote back. I thought she’d moved on.” He pulled back and gazed at me. “When I passed through San Diego in ‘98, I went to the Coffee Cove. They said she’d quit. Nobody knew where she went. I looked, Jen. I did look.” “I believe you.” “I didn’t tell you about her because there was nothing to tell. It was one summer. A long time before you.” His eyes were full. “If I’d known there was a baby. If I’d known…” “What would you have done?” He was quiet for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted honestly. “I was twenty-four. I don’t know. But I would have done something. I would never have let her grow up thinking I didn’t care.” I looked at him. This good, kind, stubborn man I’d been married to for twenty-five years. “She looks like you,” I said. His face crumpled. “I know,” he whispered. “I saw it. On the steps. She has my mother’s eyes.” “She has Grace’s chin,” I said. And then neither of us could speak for a long time.
We called in sick to work. Both of us. For the first time since 2004. We sat at the kitchen table all morning with the note between us, smoothed flat. Tony read it about fifty times. Every time he reached the last line, he had to pause. “Leukemia,” he kept repeating. “Twenty-nine years old. Second time.” “She’s been sick this entire time,” I said. “The hats. She’s been wearing hats since August. Marlene kept asking about the hats.” “And I thought she was lonely.” Tony buried his face in his hands. “I kept saying she was lonely.” “She was,” I remarked. “She is.” Around noon, Tony looked up at me. “I have to get tested, Jen,” he stated. “For the transplant. I have to.” “I know.” “I’m going to call her doctor. Today. And I’m going to do whatever they need me to do.” “I know, Tony.” He studied me for a long moment. “But I need to know you’re okay with it,” he said. “Because if you’re not, I need to know that too. I’m not going to do this behind your back. And I’m not going to ask you to be okay with something you’re not okay with.” I looked at him across the table. And I’ll be honest with you. The part of me that had been weeping on the kitchen floor wanted to say no. Wanted to say, she’s not ours, she’s Lisa’s, she’s someone else’s sad story, let her find someone else. Wanted to lock the door and draw the blinds and return to the life we’d enjoyed on Sunday, where I teased him about his morning delivery and nobody across the street possessed his chin. But I thought about Grace. About holding her in that hospital room for two hours. About how I would have walked through fire for one more hour. For one more minute. Somewhere out there, Lisa Reyes had walked through fire for twenty-seven years to raise this girl alone. And now Lisa was gone. And her daughter was across the street in an empty house with no hair, waiting to discover if her father would save her life. “Call her doctor,” I instructed.
Tony underwent testing at the Cleveland Clinic the following Monday. They swabbed the inside of his cheek and drew six tubes of blood. They estimated the results would take a week or two. I didn’t accompany him. I told him I had to work. That was a lie. I simply couldn’t manage it yet. Dakota accompanied him. She drove herself to the Clinic and met him in the waiting room. Tony told me afterward that they sat beside each other in plastic chairs for an hour and didn’t speak much. That she’d brought two coffees from the Daily Grind. Two sugars, no cream. “She said she didn’t know what else to bring,” Tony recalled. He chuckled slightly. “I told her coffee was perfect.” “What did you discuss?” “Her mom, mostly. Lisa.” He gazed at his hands. “She was a nurse’s aide. Worked nights at a nursing home in Phoenix for twenty years. Raised Dakota by herself. Never married. Dakota said she dated a bit but never brought anyone home.” He swallowed. “She said Lisa used to tell her stories about me. About that summer. How I tried to teach her to fish off the pier and caught her sunhat. How I sang Springsteen poorly in the car.” He shook his head. “I don’t even remember half of it. Lisa remembered all of it.” “ mejoras… She loved you,” I said. “I don’t know about that.” “She kept your picture on her nightstand for twenty-nine years, Tony.” He didn’t answer that.
For the following week, I stayed away from the gray house. I went to work. I returned home. I didn’t peek out the kitchen window in the mornings. Tony went over a few times. He’d return home quiet and thoughtful and share small details. Dakota enjoyed old movies. Dakota had a cat named Pancake who’d remained with a friend in Phoenix because she was too ill to care for him. Dakota had located Tony by researching Navy records and then an old high school yearbook online, and had driven past our house three times before renting the place across the street. “Why across the street?” I asked. “Why not simply knock on the door?” “She said she was frightened,” Tony replied. “That I’d slam the door in her face. She wanted to see me first. What kind of person I was. She said the coffee was the only way she could think of to talk to me without explaining everything.” “And the two sugars was a test.” “I think so,” Tony said. “I think she wanted to see if I’d notice.” “You didn’t notice.” “No,” he admitted. “I didn’t.”
The test results arrived on a Thursday, the way bad news and good news both always seem to arrive. Tony was a half match. A haploidentical donor, the doctor termed it. Not perfect, but sufficient. Her team at the Clinic wanted to proceed as rapidly as possible. Dakota had one final round of chemo to drive her into remission, and then Tony would receive injections for five days to push his stem cells into his blood, and then they’d harvest them from his arm with a machine, and then they’d infuse them into Dakota. “It’s not like donating a kidney,” Tony explained to me that night. “They don’t cut me open. It’s more like giving blood for a really long time. Six hours, maybe. Then I go home.” “And her?” He fell silent. “Her part’s harder,” he stated ultimately. “A lot harder. They have to wipe out her entire immune system first with high-dose chemo. Then they give her my cells. And then we wait, and hope they take, and hope her body doesn’t fight them.” He looked at me. “The doctor said a lot of things can go wrong. Infections. Something called graft versus host disease. She’ll be in the hospital for a month, maybe more. And she can’t be alone after. Not for a hundred days. Someone has to be with her. All the time.” “And who’s going to do that?” He didn’t reply. “Tony. Who’s going to be with her?” “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll take time off. I’ll figure it out. I’ll…” “You run a company with six guys who can’t locate their own toolboxes,” I pointed out. “You can’t take three months off.” “Then I’ll figure something else out.”
I lay awake all that night. I listened to Tony failing to sleep beside me. Around three in the morning, I arose and went to the kitchen for water. Dakota’s light was burning across the street. I stood at the window for a long time. Then, through her front window, I spotted her. She was sitting on her sofa, wrapped in a blanket, with her knees drawn up to her chest. She wasn’t watching TV. She wasn’t reading. She was simply sitting there, very still, in the middle of the night. Alone. I thought about Grace. I thought about the yellow room I’d painted blue. I returned to bed. I didn’t sleep.
The following day was Saturday. I was raking leaves in the front yard. Tony was at a job site, responding to an emergency call. Across the street, Dakota emerged to collect her mail. Drowsy and exhausted, she was halfway down her driveway when she stopped. She placed her hand against her mailbox. She swayed. Then she folded up like a lawn chair and collapsed onto the concrete. I dropped the rake. I sprinted across the street faster than I’ve run in twenty years. She was conscious when I reached her. Barely. Her face was the color of paper and she was breathing rapidly. There was blood on her lip where she’d bitten it. “I’m okay,” she murmured. “I’m okay. I just grew dizzy.” “You’re not okay. You’re burning up.” I placed my hand on her forehead. It felt like touching a stove. “Where are your keys?” “In the house. Mrs. Moretti, I’m fine. I just need to lie down.” “Jennifer,” I corrected gently. “My name is Jennifer. And you’re heading to the hospital.”
I guided her into my car. I don’t know how. She weighed almost nothing. I drove to the Clinic emergency room with my hazard lights flashing, forty minutes on the highway, bypassing two yellow lights and one that was definitely red. She lay in the passenger seat with her eyes closed, shivering, wrapped in the blanket I keep in my trunk. “Neutropenic fever,” the ER physician announced an hour later, after they’d drawn her blood and placed her on IV antibiotics. “她的白血球计数因化疗已几乎为零 (Her white count is almost zero from the chemo). She has no immune system right now. A fever like this can turn septic very rapidly.” He gazed at me. “You did the right thing, bringing her here. Another few hours, it could have been far worse. Are you family?” I opened my mouth. I didn’t know what to say. “Yes,” I stated finally. He nodded and stepped away. I sat in the plastic chair beside her bed. They’d placed her in an isolation room with a specialized door, and I had to don a mask and a gown and gloves.