Chapter 12: Intake
It is twenty-six minutes from that house to Lakebridge Children’s, and it took thirty-one, because of the rain.
I sat in the back with the car seat between me and the door.
Ethan had screamed when we put him in it, and then stopped, which frightened me more.
A fourteen-month-old who gives up on the strap fight is a fourteen-month-old who has something else going on.
I kept my hand flat on his right knee for the whole of the thirty-one minutes.
He held the red ring in his right hand the entire way. He would not put it down for the strap and I did not make him.
Victor sat in the front, beside the driver, and did not turn round once.
He made two telephone calls.
One was to a man called Aaronson and it lasted eleven seconds.
The second one he made with the phone at his ear for a long time without saying anything, and then he put it away without speaking.
I do not know who that was for. I have a guess and I am not going to put a guess in writing.
The emergency entrance at Lakebridge is under a canopy, and it is bright, and after that house it was like walking into a different century.
His name did things. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
We were in a room in eleven minutes. There was a woman with two children ahead of us who had been there since six.
I have thought about her a great deal and I have never worked out what I was supposed to have done about it.
The triage nurse was called Deborah and she was about fifty and she was extremely good.
She asked me, not him, what had happened. She asked me because I was the one holding him.
I said: “Fourteen months. Left forearm. He went down on a marble floor at seven thirty-eight. He hasn’t used the arm since. He’s guarding it.”
She said, “Are you his mother?”
I said no.
She said, “Are you the one who’s been with him?”
I said yes.
She said, “Then you stay right there and don’t let go of him.”
I have wanted to write to that woman for years and I have never known what to put.
The examination took nine minutes and I am not going to describe it.
I will give you what I wrote down, which is what I always give you.
Left forearm. Reduced movement. Point tenderness at the wrist end.
No skin broken. Circulation normal. Fingers warm.
Two views on the film. Twenty past nine.
The words that came back were: a displaced fracture of the distal radius.
That is it. That is the whole of the medical fact and it is the only time I will state it.
There was a cast three hours later and there is a chapter about the cast, and none of what I am about to write is worse than that sentence.
While they were taking the films I was sent out to registration with a clipboard.
They will not let you in for the films anyway, and somebody had to fill in the form.
Six pages. I filled in five of them from memory, because I knew all of it and Victor Blackwood did not.
Date of birth, twelve July 2025. Weight, nineteen pounds four ounces.
Allergies, none known.
Immunisations, complete to date, and the dates.
Primary care physician: Elias Moreno, MD. Address in Evanston. I knew the fax number by heart.
Then there is a box on page four of that form.
MOTHER — NAME.
I have filled that box in three times in my life and it has never once got easier.
Ana Reyes-Blackwood.
And then, because the form asks, there is a smaller box next to it, and it says DECEASED, and a date.
Nine December 2025.
She had been dead nine months and four days.
I did not know anything about it beyond that. I want to be very clear.
I had been in that house since the fourth of August 2025, and I had been in it on the ninth of December.
What I knew was the date and the two words on the certificate.
Nobody in that family ever said one syllable to me about how it happened, and I never asked, because you do not ask.
I wrote her name in the box in block capitals so that it would be legible, the way you are supposed to.
Then there was one more box, at the bottom, and it said RELATIONSHIP TO PATIENT.
I wrote NANNY. Then I looked at it for a second and I scratched it out and wrote CHILDCARE PROVIDER, because that is what goes on a form.
I handed the clipboard back at four minutes to ten.
The woman at the desk took it, checked page one, said, “Have a seat, please,” and did not look up again.
That is where the four hours started.