He almost laughed. "That's what I said three weeks ago."
"I know," she said. "You were right." She looked past him at the refrigerator, at the whiteboard, at the number. "Don't wipe the board. Leave it till I can do it. Leave her dots."
Then she went out, and down the step, and got into his sister's car, and he watched the taillights go up the alley and turn onto Cedar and disappear, and he went back in and closed the door.
He found the bottle behind the detergent and the one under the passenger seat of the CR-V, using the keys from the crisper drawer, and he poured them down the laundry sink, and then, because she had said that was all of them and she had said I think, he went through the house. He did it methodically, the way he went through a kitchen on a service call. He found one more, a small one, in the toe of a winter boot in the hall closet, and he stood holding it for a while before he poured it out too. Then he put the drawers back and swept the coffee grounds and put the cushions on the bench, and at eleven o'clock he went upstairs and found Linnea asleep with the headphones half off and the peas thawed into a damp lump on the pillow. He lay down on top of the covers beside her in his work clothes and did not sleep.
In the morning her cheek was a deep plum color, purple at the center and yellow-green at the edges, and the shape of the fingers was gone into it. He called her school and said she was sick. He called Saul, his boss in Leola, and said he had a family emergency and would not be on the Delaware call Monday, and Saul, who had two divorces behind him and a son in recovery in Arizona, said only, Take what you need, Em, we'll talk when you're ready.
Then he took his daughter to the pediatrician.
He had thought about it all night, what Hedy had said, and he did not pretend to himself in the waiting room that he didn't know what would happen. Dr. Okwuosa had been Linnea's doctor since she was born. She was a small brisk woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she looked at Linnea's face for a long time with a little flashlight, and asked Linnea gentle questions while Emery sat in the corner chair and kept his mouth shut, and Linnea answered them. Mommy had the grape juice. Mommy hit me. I hid the keys. Then Dr. Okwuosa sent Linnea out to the nurse for a sticker and closed the door and took off her glasses.
"You know I have to call this in," she said.
"I know."
"I want you to understand it's not a punishment. Not of you. Not even of her, necessarily. It's a door that has to be opened so somebody whose job it is can look through it."