As I walked through the doors and marched down the corridor, I realized I was praying—the automatic, half-hearted prayer of a nonbeliever beseeching the lost deity of his childhood to intervene on his behalf. Please let the child live. Please let her be okay. I had walked through hospital doors hundreds of times. I had seen hundreds of patients in dire need, but one of the secrets to good care is to not empathize too much, to keep your head, to remain calm. I wasn’t calm, and it was more than alarm for Eglantine. There was rage in my step, rage in my belly and chest, and the prayer changed to a chant against Lane. Monster, bad father, shit. I strode down the hall, rhythmic fury pushing me ahead. Completely absorbed, I knocked into an old woman, who was slowly propelling herself forward in a wheelchair. I leaned down and apologized. She lifted her wizened face to mine, smiled, and said in a thick accent I couldn’t identify, “Never mind, child.”

Her voice stopped me. She had called me “child,” as if I had suddenly lost many years and about thirty inches. I found the nearest men’s room, ducked into it, and retreated to a stall for several minutes where I sat down, put my head in my hands, and listened to a man’s piss gush into the urinal outside. My anger turned to despair behind that door. I felt broken. Even now, I can’t interpret with any accuracy the overwhelming sadness that flooded me. It was not the pain of compassion; it was shame and misery for myself, and a doomed sense of repetition brought on by the vengeful phrases that had propelled me, one foot after the other, toward the pediatric E.R.

WHEN I SAT down beside Miranda, she barely moved, and when she told me the story of Eggy’s fall, she spoke to the floor. I gazed at her tense hands in her lap, with their long fingers and short nails. Lane had picked up his daughter after school and taken her to his apartment, as he did every other Friday. He was on the telephone talking to his dealer, while Eggy played with her string in the next room. Because of the excessive heat in the building, he had left his bedroom window open. While Lane talked, Eggy must have been tying things together. He heard her scream, ran into the other room, saw the open window, string knotted from bedpost to fire escape, and his daughter lying below. The drop from Lane’s first-floor apartment on Avenue A wasn’t far, but the child must have hit her head and lost consciousness immediately. Miranda lifted her chin and spoke to the wall. “He wasn’t paying attention,” she said. She paused. “How many times have I not paid attention.” Her voice sank at the end of the sentence. It was not a question.