"Me neither," he said. Neither of us moved. We sat on the floor together with our backs against the dresser until it was almost five, not talking, watching her number on the glowing phone above us, and at some point his head came down on my shoulder, heavy, the way it used to in the car when he was small and we'd drive back from his grandfather's after dark, and his breathing went long and slow, and I didn't move until my arm went dead, and then I still didn't move.
On Monday I called the clinic from the Albertsons parking lot again, and this time I didn't wait for Abeyta to pull anything up. I told her. All of it. I told her about April and the follow app and the text thread and the oven timer and the stairs and the sixth. She was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped. Then she said, "Oh, Aileen," and then, "Okay. Okay. Thank you for telling me," and then she said that Dr. Ransford would call me that afternoon, which he did, and they cut Juni's overnight basal rate by almost a quarter, and the following week the line through the night was smooth and the nights were quiet — not every night, but most — and the first time it stayed in the gray from midnight to morning without one alarm, Juni came down to breakfast and showed me the graph on her phone like it was a report card. Abeyta also said some kids who don't wake to alarms do better on a pump that can stop itself when it sees a low coming, and that she'd start the insurance paperwork, and that it might take a while.
I talked to Darcy on Tuesday night in the break room at two in the morning. I told her the short version. She listened with her arms folded and her face giving away nothing, and then she said she couldn't let me have my phone on the floor — it wasn't her rule, it was the client's, the hospitals, something about photographs and controlled substances — and I said I understood. Then she said, "Give me your number," and wrote it on the back of a pick ticket, and said that her own phone stayed in the lead office, which was ten steps off the floor, and that she'd put my daughter's follow on it if I showed her how, and if it went off she'd come get me. "Don't tell anybody," she said, and went back out to the floor before I could thank her. I don't know how long that will last. I don't know what happens if Darcy gets transferred, or gets written up a third time, or just gets tired of it. There's a day-shift opening in receiving after the first of the year that I've put in for. It pays less. I've done the math on it. I've done it more than four times. It doesn't come out the same twice, and I've stopped expecting it to.
The pink phone went on Kellan's line. Tavish did it in about six minutes, and didn't ask any questions, and threw in a black case for free when he saw my son's face looking at the pink. Kellan set up the follow app before he set up anything else. I watched him do it at the kitchen table, his thumbs quick, and then he went into the alarm settings and set the low at seventy and the urgent low soon on and the volume all the way up, and then he set it so it would override silent mode, and then he checked it twice. Then he put it face down on the table and looked at it the way you'd look at a dog you weren't sure was going to bite.
"It's not for games," I said.
He looked at me, startled. And then — for the first time in I couldn't have told you how long — he laughed. Not much. Just a breath through his nose. But he did.
Juni has the receiver on her nightstand and her old phone, and a new phone is coming for her, refurbished, from the list, in about three weeks, when the sixth nights I've been working since September add up to it. She says she doesn't care if it's pink. She says she might want green.
I gave Kellan back his bag of money with the twist tie. He took the twenty-dollar bills out and put the rest back in my hand and said, "For her phone," and walked off before I could argue. The money's in the junk drawer. I haven't decided what to do with it yet.
He still wakes up at two-fifty. Most nights now there's nothing to wake up for, and on the nights I'm home I hear his door open anyway, and his feet on the carpet, the eight steps, and then nothing for a while, and I know he's standing outside her door listening to her breathe. Sometimes I go out and stand with him. Sometimes I don't, because I think he needs to do it by himself, and I think I need to let him, and I think it will stop on its own one of these nights, the way a limp goes away after the bone has healed. I don't know which night that will be. I don't know a lot of things yet. I don't know whether I'll get the job in receiving, or whether Darcy's phone in the lead office will still be there at Christmas, or how long it takes insurance to say yes to a pump, or what happens to this house in the spring.
But the old phone is still on my nightstand, plugged in, with the blue sock wrapped around it and a paperback holding the cord in place. The screen has three green stripes now. It dies every day, at forty percent, at thirty, at fifty-two once, for no reason at all. I bring it back every time. I hold the plug in with my thumb and wait, and say come on, come on, under my breath, until the lightning bolt comes up and the line comes up behind it, my daughter's line, jagged and blue, going on through the night. I don't need it. I've got my own phone, and his new one is louder than both. I keep it anyway.
It's the one that knows the way to her door.