Chapter 19 — THE WITNESS

The two witnesses on that consent were Paula's paralegal, who drove up from Hudson, and Renata Cruz.

I want to explain how that happened because it was not planned.

We needed a second witness who was not a relative and not the notary. Paula's paralegal was one. The plan was for a hospital staff member to be the other, and the woman who was going to do it got pulled into something on another floor, and we had a notary standing there with a stamp and a woman in a bed who had about forty minutes of alertness a day.

I said I would find somebody in the corridor.

And Renata Cruz was in the corridor, because she had finished a shift at eleven and driven to St. Brendan's and been sitting in the fourth-floor waiting area for two hours without telling anybody, which she had apparently been doing on and off for six weeks.

I did not know that.

Nobody knew that.

She came in and she signed her name under my daughter's, and then she stood back against the wall, and Sarah looked at her for a moment and said, "You work at the diner."

"Yes ma'am."

"You told me his schedule."

Renata said, "I'm sorry."

And my daughter, on the second of March, said:

"Don't be. It's the only reason I knew when to sit down."

Sarah Joan Harrison died at 4:50 in the morning on the twenty-first of March.

I was there. Eli was there. Mabel was asleep on two chairs pushed together with my coat over her.

It was not dramatic and I am not going to make it dramatic.

She had been mostly unconscious for two days. Her breathing changed at about four. A nurse named Petra came in and stood on the other side of the bed and did not do anything, which was the correct thing to do and which I understood was a decision she had made.

There was no ventilator. There was no corridor. There was nobody standing outside with a pen.

Because my daughter had written it down herself in a UPS Store on Route 9 for six dollars, five months earlier, so that no one would ever have to decide anything about her.

She spent her whole life on that.

At about ten past five Eli said, "Is that it?" and I said yes, and he sat down on the floor with his back against the bed and stayed there for about twenty minutes and then stood up and said, "I have to be there when Mabel wakes up."

He was ten.

He went and sat on the chairs next to his sister and waited for her to open her eyes so that she would not find out alone.