Page 96 of Power Play

“It did. That’s what it does.” She came in and crouched on Iris’s other side and put her hand out and drew it back, because there was no work in the room for her to take. She got a washcloth under the cold tap instead and did Iris’s face. “What do you need?” Delaney said.

“To get her home.”

“Then we go home.”

Linda had a paper bag packed on the counter before I got to the front of the house, and she put it in my free hand. “She’ll be thirsty before she’s hungry. Broth first. Small cups. Don’t argue with her about the cup.”

“Thank you.”

“Tell Tom on your way past or he’ll be upset with me about it.”

Tom was upset anyway, and hid it by taking the bag off me and carrying it to the truck himself. Cole came out onto the driveway with his jaw tight.

“Is she⁠—”

“She’s fine. It’s a bug. Wren had it Tuesday.”

“Wren,” Cole said, flat, filing the name away.

Ryan stood in the driveway with his hands in his pockets and said the one useful thing anybody said all day, which was, “Text Maren the number tonight so she stops asking me.”

Delaney got in and turned around in her seat before I had the truck in reverse, and she stayed turned around for most of the drive home.

Iris got worse after dark. She hit a hundred and three point one by half past eight, and then the shivering started, hard enough to frighten anybody who hadn’t seen it before. Her teeth chattered and her knees drew up and her small back shook under my hand, and her skin stayed dry and hot through all of it.

I did what there was to do. I gave her the dose off the chart by weight and not by age, because the number next to the age was a guess by somebody who had never met my daughter. I wrote the time on the back of an envelope. I filled the medicine syringe with broth and she took it sip by sip as a game after refusing the cup on principle. I checked her breathing, and her color, and how fast she surfaced when I said her name.

My mother taught me this at a kitchen counter in Transcona when I was nine and down with croup. She put the bottle in my hand and made me read the chart back to her. I hadn’t needed a website since.

I ran the bath lukewarm and sat on the floor beside the tub with my sleeve in the water and let her be miserable at me.

Delaney was at the door. “Can I⁠—”

“Get the blue towel. The big one.”

She got the blue towel, the rough one off the low shelf that had never once been soft. She held it open and I lifted Iris out into it, all that wet weight doubling in my arms on the way, and Delaney wrapped her up. The two of them made one shape in the middle of my bathroom floor, dripping onto the tile between them. My daughter had her face in Delaney’s neck, and Delaney was looking at me over the knot of towel and hair with her jaw set and her own eyes wet.

I wanted to put my arms around both of them. I sat where I was with my wet sleeve.

Then Iris said, “I want Daddy,” and Delaney handed her over without a flicker and said, “Of course you do, love,” and laid a hand on the back of her wet head in passing.

“Night, Kovac.”

“Delaney.” She stopped in the hall with her back to me. I had about four sentences available and every one of them was either too much or not enough. “Thank you for the towel,” I said. It was the stupidest of the four.

“Anytime,” she said, and went, and she shut the casita door so quietly that no sound of it reached the bathroom.

The phone went all evening and I answered about a third of it.

Cole: is the kid ok?

Cole: i have soup. my mother’s soup. i can be there in forty

Cole: do not say no to this

I said no to it.

Cole: i am going to leave it on the porch and you cannot stop me