Just like Ellie…

“Thank you again. May I ask your name?”

He hesitated, then said, “Hill…Tier Hill.”

Tier…an odd name. I wanted to ask him about the sound but just then Ellie started to sob.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“It stopped! It finally stopped!”

And then she passed out again.

The police and EMTs arrived together and made me back off while they checked Ellie. I looked around for the stranger. I wanted to ask him more about what he’d heard, but he was gone. Then one of the EMTs grabbed my arm.

“That’s your daughter, right?” Something hostile in her expression.

“Yes…”

“Where’d she get those burns?”

“What burns?”

“She’s burned all over.”

Panicked, I pushed past the police and the EMTs to Ellie’s side. They had one arm out of her sleeve—to start an IV, I suppose—but her skin was covered with red, angry, inch-wide blisters. They’d pulled up her sweater to reveal her abdomen and the blisters were even bigger there.

“What?” I screamed. “What did you do to her?”

“That’s what we were about to ask you,” said a cop. “Her clothes aren’t burned. She must have had those when she got dressed.”

“No wonder she’s passed out,” said another EMT. “Those look like third-degree burns.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off those horrible marks. “But we just walked all the way across the park.”

“Really?” said a black cop. “A woman over there says she saw a man carrying her out of the park.”

No…they couldn’t think…

Before I could reply, an EMT shouted, “She’s going into shock. We’ve got to get her to a burn unit and fast!”

4

And so it went.

They raced Ellie to Columbia-Presbyterian’s burn center and into its hyperbaric oxygen chamber. For a while the city’s Administration for Children’s Services was all over Beth and me, but video monitoring around the park showed Ellie in no distress at the Balto statue, so they eventually let us be.

No one ever figured out the origin of her burns. I mentioned the sound in the Sheep Meadow that only Ellie could hear as a possible source, but this earned me suspicious looks that I knew would eventually graduate to questions about my fitness as a mother if I persisted, so I zipped my lips.

The burn center—officially the William Randolph Hearst Burn Center—wasn’t in Washington Heights at the main Columbia-Pres location, but on East Sixty-eighth Street, not too many blocks from our Airbnb place. Way east. Past York Avenue. Any farther on and it would have been floating on the East River.

I stayed there for days straight. Not that I had much choice at first, what with the predicted “Snowmageddon” blizzard shutting down the city, but I wasn’t leaving Ellie’s side until I knew she was going to live.

Finally they gave me the word that her blood pressure and other vital signs had stabilized. The big danger now was sepsis. If they could keep her burns free from infection, she’d make it, although she faced a very long road to recovery.