Chapter 3 — SARAH HARRISON

I drove them back to the Bluebird that night.

I want to be honest about why, because there was a decent reason and there was a coward's reason and both of them were operating.

The decent reason is that it was thirty-four degrees.

The coward's reason is that I was not ready to go to St. Brendan's.

Room 112 is on the back side, facing the propane tank and the field.

Eli had a key on a plastic diamond fob and he unlocked the door like a man coming home from work, and he went in first and turned on the light and checked the bathroom before he let his sister in.

He is ten and he checks the bathroom first.

Two double beds. A television bolted to a dresser. A kettle. A cardboard box on the floor with cereal, a jar of peanut butter, a sleeve of crackers and four cans of soup with no can opener, which meant somebody had bought soup without thinking it through, and I would learn later that the somebody was Sarah, on the day before the ambulance, when she was already too sick to be shopping.

There was a fold-out cot with a duffel bag on it.

There were two library books on the nightstand, both due back in July.

And on the wall above the smaller bed, stuck up with a piece of medical tape, there was a hand-drawn map.

I stood and looked at it for a long time.

It was drawn in ballpoint on the back of a pharmacy printout. Route 9 as a long line. A rectangle labelled BLUEBIRD with an X in it. Another rectangle further down labelled DINER, with an arrow.

And under the arrow, in an adult's handwriting — a woman's, small and slanted and shaky at the ends of the letters:

**ASK FOR MR HARRISON. TELL HIM YOUR NAME.**

That is my daughter's handwriting.

I would know it at a hundred yards.

She had drawn her ten-year-old a map to my building.

She had not written her own name on it.

She had written *tell him your name*, because she knew — and this is the thing I sat down on the end of that motel bed about — she knew that the name Harrison coming out of a child's mouth would do more than her own name would.

She had thought about it that carefully.

I said, "Eli."

"Yes sir."

"Did your mother tell you who I am?"

He was getting Mabel's shoes off. He did not look up.

"She said you're the man who owns the diner."

"That's all?"

"She said you'd help us."

"Did she say why?"

And Eli Harrison, ten years old, in a motel room on the north end of Route 9, said:

"No. She just said you would."

I did not cry in front of him.

I got to the car first.