PART 1
For thirteen hours, my fourteen-year-old was in theatre.
And in those thirteen hours, not one member of my family came to sit with me.
Not for an hour. Not for twenty minutes. Not to drop off a coffee and leave.
I want that established before anything else, because everything that follows is about what I did with that information and not about what they did.
My name is Jorren. I am forty. My daughter is called Wrenna and she is fourteen.
My parents live twenty minutes from that hospital. I have driven it about four hundred times. It is twenty minutes in traffic and eleven without.
My younger brother works from home.
Every one of them knew the date.
They knew the time. They knew exactly how serious it was, because I had told all three of them in the same message four days earlier — and all three replied.
My mother sent a heart. My father sent a thumb. My brother sent four words about how she would be fine.
Nobody asked which hospital.
My phone stayed silent.
No calls.
Nobody came. Not one text asking how she was, at any point, in thirteen hours and then in three days afterwards.
I checked that phone about four hundred times. I know, because I counted at one point, in the fourth hour, to give myself something to do.
I sat in a relatives’ room with a vending machine and four plastic chairs.
From about seven in the morning until nearly nine at night. I know the ceiling of that room. I could draw the water stain.
A woman called Prudence, whose husband was in a different theatre, gave me half a sandwich at about four o’clock and sat with me for eleven minutes and then her name was called.
She is the only person who sat with me that day and I have never seen her again.
Three days later my father finally got in touch.
For about one second, something in my chest let go.
I was in a chair beside her bed. I saw his name come up and I thought: there it is.
I thought he was finally asking about his granddaughter, and I had already decided to be gracious about the three days.
Then I read it.
PART 2
He needed three thousand five hundred dollars.
My brother and his fiancée were putting on an engagement celebration in the Bahamas and the costs had climbed higher than expected.
