Chapter 18 — NINETEEN DAYS

I went to St. Brendan's that afternoon with two folders and I did not bring the guardianship consent.

That is the only clever thing I did in eleven months and I did it by accident, because I had left it on the kitchen table.

She was awake.

I sat down and I put the photocopy of her mother's directive on the blanket, and the yellow paper next to it.

She looked at them both for a long time.

Then she said, "You went in the bag."

"Eli told me it was there. He said don't let anybody read it except a doctor."

"That's what I told him."

"I'm not a doctor."

"No," she said. "You're the alternate."

I said, "Sarah, why is it Renee first?"

And my daughter said, with about a quarter of a smile:

"Because in October I hadn't met you yet."

We sat there.

Then she said, "You built a room."

"Who told you?"

"Eli. He measures it. He's been telling me the dimensions every day for three weeks like a real estate agent."

She reached over — it took her about ten seconds to move her arm eight inches — and she put two fingers on the photocopy of her mother's writing.

"She was right," Sarah said. "About all of it. She knew exactly what I'd do."

"She did."

"I've been angry at you since I was seventeen and I found out I was wrong at nineteen and I couldn't—" She stopped and breathed. "There's no *way in*, Dad. Nobody tells you that. After about the third year there's no sentence you can start with."

I said, "You sent a ten-year-old with a map."

She laughed and it did not turn into coughing this time.

"I sent a ten-year-old with a map," she agreed.

"You could have just come in."

"I know."

"Three times."

"I know."

She was quiet for a moment and then she said, "The coffee's terrible, by the way."

"It's the same coffee it was in 1998."

"I know. That's the problem."

She signed the guardianship consent on the second of March, which is nineteen days before she died.

Paula brought it. A notary came up from the hospital's legal office. Two witnesses.

There is a section on that form where the parent may state reasons.

Most people write one line. Most people write nothing.

Sarah dictated hers because by then she could not write more than a signature, and Paula wrote it down and read it back to her twice, and she changed one word.

It says:

*I am nominating my father because he does what he says he is going to do and because he has never once in his life made a promise he could not keep, which is a very hard thing to live with and the only thing I want for my children.*

The word she changed was in the last clause.

Paula had written *the best thing I can give my children*.

Sarah changed it to *the only thing I want for my children*, because, she said, she was not giving them anything. She had nothing left to give anybody and she was not going to pretend otherwise in a legal document.

That is my daughter, nineteen days out, correcting a lawyer's draft for accuracy.