Page 113 of Power Play

I bought the watch on a Tuesday and spent an hour on a ten-minute job, because of the contacts.

It was a kid’s watch. It told time, took a blurry photo, and sent voice messages to the numbers a parent approved, and it did nothing else. It had no internet and no strangers. I put in the numbers I wanted her to be able to reach and it locked out the rest of the world, which was the entire reason I’d bought it. Iris was going to be at a hotel downtown for stretches of a week, with her mother, twenty minutes and another life away from me, and I wanted my daughter able to reach me from a bathtub if she felt like it, and I wanted her to know she could.

The screen asked for contacts. I put in my number and labeled it Dad. Then the cursor sat blinking in the second field, and I put in Delaney’s, and labeled it Delaney, because if it wasn’t me Iris wanted at ten at night it was going to be her, and I’d rather my kid reach the right person on the first try than the switchboard.

There was a third field. The watch held three.

I studied it for a while. Then I left it empty and closed the box.

I gave it to her the morning Katya flew in. I crouched down in the kitchen to her level and buckled it on her wrist, which was the size of a roll of quarters, and showed her the one button that mattered.

“You press here,” I said. “Then you talk. It sends to me.”

“Or D?”

“Or D. Both are in there.”

She studied the two names on the little screen, mouthing them, Dad and Delaney, and then she looked up at me with my own eyes and asked the question I’d spent an hour not answering for myself.

“Where’s Mommy?”

“She’ll be with you,” I said. “So you won’t need to call her. She’ll be right there.”

It was true, and it was a dodge, and Iris took the true part and let the rest go, a habit she’d picked up from watching me do it in front of her all her life. She pressed the button and held the watch up to her mouth and said, “Testing. This is Iris. Over,” and let go, and three feet away my phone buzzed on the counter with a voice memo of my own kid saying testing this is Iris over in a hotel-detective voice, and I played it twice.

“It works,” I said. Then I told her the rest, flat, and meant every word. “Use it whenever you want. Day. Night. You don’t have to have a reason. You press it, I hear it. That’s the deal.”

She took me at my word, completely and without any sense of proportion, and for the rest of the week my life was narrated to me in real time by a wrist.

Katya came down the escalator at the airport in sunglasses she pushed up into her hair, and she was laughing before she reached us because Iris had started telling her a story from the far side of baggage claim, at volume, and she crouched and got both arms around her and the two of them hung on while the crowd split and went around them.

“Look at you,” Katya said into her hair. “You got so big. You got enormous.”

“I’m the tallest one in my class.”

“You’re practically a grown-up.”

She had the good laugh. I’d quit resenting it a long time ago. It was real, and it was warm, and Iris lit up under it, and I stood there holding the small suitcase and the backpack I’d packed and the folder of what a person needed to know about Iris for a week, the pediatrician, the allergy that wasn’t serious but mattered, the fact that she’d swear she wasn’t tired right up until the second she was unconscious. Katya took Iris and the suitcase and, after a beat, the folder, which she tucked under her arm without reading. It held what I knew about my daughter and no one else did, her life narrowed to a week. She wasn’t going to open it, and I’d known it while I put it together, and I’d done it anyway, because the packing was my part, whether or not anyone at the far end ever read it. Then my daughter walked off between her mother’s hand and a rolling bag toward a week I wasn’t in.

“She’s so much easier now,” Katya said over her shoulder, warm, meaning it as the compliment it wasn’t.

“She’s four,” I said.

“She’s her own person.”

I didn’t say any of the replies available to me. Iris was still within earshot, hanging off her mother’s hand, looking back at me over her own shoulder with her free arm up in a wave, and I gave her the wave back and let them go through the doors.

In the truck, before I’d got out of the lot, the watch sent its first transmission.

Iris: the car has a TV in the back. Mommy’s car. There’s a screen. Daddy there’s a screen!

I texted Delaney one line from a red light.

Me: she’s off. she has the watch.

Delaney: oh no

Delaney: oh no she has a direct line