He found an empty stretch of bleacher near the bottom, behind the Cutler Springs bench, and sat down with Rosie beside him. His hands hadn't stopped shaking. He looked at them, the scarred knuckles and the black under the nails that never quite came out, and he thought, I held up three fingers, and he didn't know why that should make him want to cry again, but it did.
"Daddy."
"Yeah, Rosebud."
"She won."
"She won."
"So now it's after."
He looked at her. She had her hand in her coat pocket again, and her face had gone solemn, the way it did when she was about to confess to something—a broken glass, a crayon on the wall.
"Okay," he said. "Now it's after. What did you want to tell me?"
Rosie took her hand out of her pocket. In it was a sheet of paper, folded into eighths, soft and gray at the creases from being handled all day. She unfolded it on her knee and smoothed it flat with both palms, carefully, the way Lena smoothed Dani's tournament brackets before she stuck them up, and then held it out to him.
"Daddy," she said, "this was on the fridge yesterday."
He took it.
It was a printed sheet, the kind you get handed at a doctor's office, with a hospital logo at the top—Lakeview Medical Center, First Hill, Seattle—and beneath it, in bold letters, MARROW DONOR: YOUR COLLECTION DAY. Beneath that was a list. Please arrive at 5:30 a.m. Do not eat or drink anything after midnight. Your marrow will be collected under general anesthesia from the back of your pelvic bones. The procedure takes one to two hours. Most donors stay overnight for observation. You may experience significant soreness in your lower back and hips for several days. You must have a support person to drive you home. Your support person's name:
On the line after that, in Lena's small, slanting handwriting, was the word Tom.
It had been crossed out. Not scribbled over, just one straight line through it, neat, the way she crossed things off a grocery list. Beside it she had written Marisol R. (work) and a phone number.
He read it twice. He read the rest.
At the top of the page, above the hospital logo, in pen, Lena had written the date—Saturday, February 21—and circled it, and beside the circle had written: MOVED UP from 3/7. Her counts dropping. Can't wait. Can't change.
Below that, squeezed into the margin: Recipient: female, 16. AML.
And below that, bigger, underlined twice: Dani finals ~6pm?? Ask nurse — phone in recovery? Stream.
And at the very bottom of the page, under the last printed paragraph, which said something about hydration and walking and not lifting anything heavier than ten pounds for a week, she had written one more line. The handwriting was different there, smaller, pressed hard into the paper as if she'd written it late at night.