Chapter 9 — THE HOSPITAL

Wren Elise Thorne was born at 3:52 in the morning on the twenty-third of October at St. Ambrose, five weeks and two days early, weighing four pounds eleven ounces.

I named her after the house.

People find that strange and I understand why.

Adam grew up in that house and he loved it and hated it in the exact proportions that people do, and he used to say that the only decent thing in it was the birds — there is a colony of house wrens that nests in the wisteria on the south wall every spring and has done since before he was born, and Gerald had refused for forty years to let anybody cut it back.

Adam used to sit out there in April with coffee and count them.

So she is Wren.

She was in the NICU for eighteen days, mostly for feeding, and she came home on the tenth of November, three days after the reading, to a one-room apartment above a hardware store on Bell Street with a cot wedged between the bed and the radiator.

The three days I want to tell you about are the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth of November.

On the eleventh, the hospital called about the newborn screening panel.

Every state does it. They stick the heel, they get five drops of blood on a card, they screen for about thirty-five metabolic and genetic conditions, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred you get a letter three weeks later saying normal.

They do not call you.

The woman on the phone was very good at her job and told me in the first eight words that my daughter was fine.

"Mrs. Thorne, your daughter's panel is normal. I'm calling about something else."

"Okay."

"We flag certain results for genetic counselling. It's not a health issue for Wren. It's an inheritance pattern thing."

"I don't understand."

"Your daughter has an unusual haemoglobin variant. It's benign. It's called Hb Kempsey and it's very rare — there are maybe a few hundred families in the country. It's autosomal dominant, which means one parent has it."

"I don't have it."

"That's why I'm calling," she said. "We tested you at intake because you had a fall. You don't carry it."

I sat down on the edge of the bed.

"Mrs. Thorne, that means she inherited it from her father."

"He's dead."

"I'm very sorry. We can sometimes trace these things through the paternal family, if that's something you'd want, but there's no medical need. I want to be clear about that. This will never affect her."

I said thank you and hung up.

Then I sat there for a while with my daughter asleep on my chest.

Because here is the thing.

Gerald Halloway had died in 2019 of a stroke at seventy-four, in that house, in a bed on the ground floor, and in the eight months before he died he had been in and out of St. Ambrose eleven times.

And in the folder of paperwork Margot had handed me after Adam's funeral — the one with the death certificates and the insurance and the deed to the plot — there was a discharge summary from 2018 with Gerald's blood work stapled to it.

I had read every page of that folder about forty times, in the specific way that grief makes you read things.

I got up. I put Wren in the cot.

I found the folder in a box under the window.

Gerald Halloway did not have Hb Kempsey.