She never came upstairs.
She left a hardcover book about horses at the front desk, addressed to Addie, with no note.
Alicia kept it.
I believe now that she was a frightened mother who never recovered from losing a nine-year-old girl.
That doesn’t excuse a single thing she did.
Ian signed the divorce papers without contest.
He moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Ankeny, with a mattress, a chair, and a stack of children’s books.
In March, Alicia let him sit in the hallway outside Addie’s room, on a plastic chair, for one hour.
Addie looked at him through the glass for a long time.
“You’re late,” she said finally, through the intercom.
“I know,” said Ian.
“About nine years.”
“I know.”
She went back to her book.
He stayed in the chair for the full hour, and he came again the next week, and the week after.
I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive him completely.
But I know that when he looks at Addie, he doesn’t look like a man afraid of his mother anymore.
In April, Alicia and I started something we’d talked about in the cafeteria, over bad coffee.
We called it Antonia’s Gift.
It began with one folding table in the lobby of Lakeside Children’s, every Wednesday night, with a pot of tea and a stack of paperwork.
Families facing transplants come to sign forms they can’t understand.
I read every page and tell them what it means.
I tell them who’s allowed to witness, who isn’t, and what questions to ask.
“Read before you sign” is the first thing I say.
Alicia runs the lodging fund for parents who need a bed near the hospital.
Last month, a lawyer from Cedar Rapids sent us a check and a note.
It said, I’d like to be the person who asks first.
In June, on a warm Saturday, Dr. Zimmerman called.
“Her counts are climbing,” she said. “The graft has taken.”
I sat down on the kitchen floor.
My mother found me there, laughing and crying into a dish towel, with Antonia asleep in a sling on my chest.
Two weeks after that, Addie came to my parents’ backyard for the first time.
She was ten days out of isolation, thin and pale, with a soft brown fuzz of new hair and a straw hat three sizes too big.
She stopped at the edge of the grass.
“Is that her?”
“That’s her.”
I knelt and carefully placed the baby in her arms.
Addie held her the way she held her library books, with her whole body.
Antonia opened her dark, serious eyes and studied Addie’s face.
Then my daughter’s mouth curved into a small, crooked, lopsided smile.
It was the first one she had ever given anyone.
It was a left-cheek smile, with a dimple.
“She has my dimple,” Addie whispered.
“She likes you,” I said.
Addie looked up at me with her fierce little face.
“I drew her another horse,” she announced. “It’s in my bag.”
The first horse is taped above Antonia’s crib.
It’s a pencil drawing, on a torn-out piece of notebook paper, of a horse with a very long mane, galloping over a very small hill.
She looks at it every night.
