And Juni was ten. She had her phone with the alarm on it, loud, a blaring rising tone I could hear through two closed doors. She knew how to treat a low. She'd known since she was seven. She had juice boxes in a basket by her bed and glucose tabs in her nightstand and a nasal glucagon spray in the kitchen drawer that Kellan and I had both been trained on. Her endocrinologist's nurse, a soft-spoken woman named Abeyta who had known Juni since diagnosis, had told me in the spring that lots of kids her age managed overnights with an older sibling in the house as backup, as long as the alarms were reliable. I had asked Kellan. I had sat at the end of his bed one afternoon in April and said, if you ever hear her alarm and it doesn't stop, you go in. And he had said, "Yeah, okay." Like that. Yeah, okay. And I had believed that would be enough, because I needed it to be.
On the morning of the seventh I came out of the warehouse into a pink sky with frost on the windshields and sat down in my car and opened my locker bag and turned on my phone and the graph loaded and I stopped breathing.
At six minutes after two, the line had gone under fifty-five, into the deep red where the app stopped showing a number and just said LOW. It had stayed there. It had stayed there for two hours and thirty-five minutes. At four-forty-one it had come up, fast, a steep climb like a ladder, and it had kept climbing until about six, when it came back into the gray and leveled off like nothing had ever happened.
I called her. It rang and rang. I called Kellan and it went straight to voicemail, and I remember thinking even in that moment, of course, that phone, of course. I called the house line we still kept for reasons I could not have explained. I was already driving. I drove the eleven miles home on Highway 30 in nine minutes and I didn't see any of it, and I came in the front door at five to seven with my coat still on, and Juniper was sitting at the kitchen table in her vest eating Cheerios out of a mug.
"Hi, Mom," she said.
I went down on my knees on the linoleum and took her face in my hands and looked at her, and she let me, and she was fine. Pale. Tired, a little gray under the eyes. But fine. She smelled like the orange juice we kept for lows.
"What happened? What happened, baby? You were low for two and a half hours."
And she told me. She said she must have slept through her alarm. She said the phone was under her pillow and she must have rolled on it. She said she woke up at like four-forty and felt shaky and sweaty and she drank two juices and ate a granola bar and went back to sleep. She said it very calmly. She said, "I'm okay, Mom. I handled it," and she patted my wrist, actually patted it, the way you'd pat a dog that was scared of thunder.
Kellan was standing in the kitchen doorway. He had his hood up and his backpack on and he was looking at the floor.
"Did you hear anything?" I said to him. "Her alarm?"
He shook his head. "No."
"Nothing?"