Walter smiled because the child was repeating something he had said to her many times. "Probably so. Now tell me how you spell tomorrow."
"With too many letters."
He laughed, but the laugh stayed in his throat when headlights passed slowly across the window. A police cruiser pulled to the curb. Two minutes later, an officer stood in Walter's living room with rain on the shoulders of his uniform and asked whether he was Tessa Brooks's father.
There had been a collision on the interstate. Tessa had been taken to St. Anne's. She was alive when the ambulance left the scene, but the officer could not tell him more.
June heard the word ambulance. She came into the hallway holding her spelling book against her chest and asked the question Walter would remember long after every other word of that night had blurred.
"Does she still have her hands?"
Tessa had once told June that her hands were the most important tools she owned because they helped people stand, hold cups, button shirts, and hug the people they loved. Walter knelt and promised they would ask the doctors. He did not promise anything about the answer.
He packed an extra sweater for June, her toothbrush, the purple backpack, and a small stuffed rabbit whose left ear had been sewn twice. He took eighty-three dollars from a coffee tin on the refrigerator. There was more money in his savings account, but the card linked to it had been frozen after a fraudulent charge, and the bank had told him a replacement would arrive next week.
At the hospital, an admitting clerk gave him a number and directed him to the surgical waiting area. Walter told her he was Tessa's father and showed his license. The address on Tessa's intake record was an apartment she had left two years before. Her emergency-contact form named Walter, but listed a telephone number he had disconnected when he retired from the city transit department.
The clerk frowned at her screen. "We'll have to verify the current contact information. Please have a seat."
He sat. June sat beside him. They watched the automatic doors open for people who were afraid, relieved, angry, or too tired to feel anything at all. Hours passed beneath fluorescent lights. At two in the morning, a surgeon told Walter that Tessa had injuries to her abdomen and pelvis, that she had undergone emergency surgery, and that the team had managed to control the bleeding. The next day would be important. So would the next several days.
Walter asked whether June could see her mother.
"Not yet," the surgeon said gently. "She needs intensive monitoring tonight."
June did not protest. She simply put her stuffed rabbit on the chair beside Walter and whispered, "She'll need him more than I do."