Chapter 13 — THE WEEK RUNS OUT

Two things happened in the third week of January and they happened four days apart.

The first is that Sarah stopped tolerating treatment.

Dr. Nwosu explained it to me in the corridor in language that I understood immediately even though every word of it was gentle. They were stopping the chemotherapy. They were moving to comfort. The estimate that had been six weeks in November was now, in January, being described to me as "days to a couple of weeks."

The second is that the Bluebird ran out.

Not the money — I had paid through the end of February.

Anil called me on a Tuesday morning and said the county health inspector had been in and there was an occupancy problem, which is a polite way of saying that a motel is not allowed to be a residence for unaccompanied minors, and that somebody had made a complaint, and that he was sorry and he was giving me a week.

I have never found out who complained. I have decided that I do not want to know, because the two most likely candidates are both people I still have to see at the hardware store.

So on the twenty-fourth of January, Eli and Mabel Harrison moved into my house.

I want to be extremely clear about the legal position of that, because it nearly destroyed everything four weeks later.

It was not authorised.

Their mother had not signed a consent. There was no court order. There was no county placement.

They were two children living in the house of a man who was, in the eyes of the law, a stranger with a completed home study application and no authority whatsoever.

Paula Okonkwo-Reid told me not to do it.

She said, on the phone, in a voice I had not heard her use: "Walter, if the county finds out before there's paper, they will remove them from your house, and every day they were there unauthorised will be in the file, and it will be characterised as you circumventing the process."

I said, "Where do you suggest they sleep?"

She was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, "Put the boy in the second bedroom and the girl in your room and you sleep on the couch, and I will start filing something tomorrow, and if anybody asks you, you say the mother verbally consented to a temporary arrangement in the presence of a witness."

"Did she?"

"Are you going to tell her?"

I went to the hospital that afternoon and I told Sarah.

She was very weak by then and it took her a while.

She said, "The girl gets the bed."

"That's what I did."

"Mabel wakes up at four sometimes. She doesn't cry. She just sits up."

"I know. She did it last night."

"What did you do?"

"I sat on the end of the bed."

Sarah closed her eyes.

"That's right," she said. "That's what you do. Don't talk to her. She goes back down."

That is my daughter, four days after they stopped treatment, teaching me how to handle her child at four in the morning.