I sit in the waiting room, and fiddle with my phone. The battery is low, but I hadn’t planned on going anywhere for long, so I obsess over the battery bar, fiddle with phone settings.

The Professor messages me, but all I have are a few dull facts: I’m in a waiting room, waiting.

For all the size of the waiting area and all the activity passing through, it’s remarkably quiet. I hadn’t planned on going anywhere, so I have nothing to do except sit, and watch, and from time to time, check my phone, then shut it off quickly to conserve power.

A man gets off the elevator, and strides purposefully through the lobby, then sits nearby. He checks his phone and makes several calls, mostly about work; they are not interesting enough to listen to, or loud enough to be annoying, so I lose interest, and don’t notice when he leaves or where he goes.

I wish I had charged my phone, but I don’t know what I’d do with it, even if the battery was full: I don’t feel like talking to anyone; I don’t want to play games.

I leaf through the People magazines lying nearby, then get up in search of other magazines, finding none but losing my spot on the sofa in the process. I settle in a chair, which isn’t as comfortable.

Music fills the lobby, briefly: someone in a wheelchair near the window plays a song I don’t recognize on a brass instrument I can’t identify. The door opens, and the music stops as the wheelchair is pushed outside.

Mid-afternoon. Several hours have passed, and nobody has said anything to me. There’s a new nurse at the front desk, so I inquire about The Child, Where is she? How is she?

The social worker is busy with someone else. She hasn’t been seen yet.

I ask where I can get a cup of coffee, and she directs me up the hall, to a little stand that is closing down for the day. I’m don’t really want anything, but the walk breaks up the waiting. I buy two things: a big cookie with pink frosting, and a cup of coffee. When The Child was three, every trip to the coffee shop involved a Big Pink Cookie; she was so entranced by them that I found a Christmas ornament with a pink cookie and an angelic elf and gave it to her to hang each year, the start of her own collection, for the tree of her own that she’d have someday.

I put the pink cookie in my bag, and return to the lobby. No one has called my name, but there’s space on the sofa again, and someone has left a newspaper.

A woman walks by with a dog, then more dogs appear, and finally a photographer. They clear the area to my left, apologizing for disturbing me, but I don’t mind, and I watch as three labs and a sheltie are carefully posed and photographed with hospital staff. Then everyone is done, and I’m alone in the lobby again.

I do the crossword puzzle, and the other crossword puzzle, and the jumble, and the word hunt. I try to read the cartoons but most of them aren’t familiar, and the ones that are familiar aren’t funny. I try to read the news but can’t muster any outrage or even interest in the express lane tolling fiasco that seems to be at the forefront of everyone else’s mind.

I check in with the new nurse at the front desk. The Child has still not been seen by anyone, so I ask if I can see her and they send me back.

She’s in a room with a glass wall, with a nurse stationed outside and a nurses’ station nearby. She’s in hospital garb, and her clothing, as well as her phone, have been confiscated. I ask what she’s been doing and she says, waiting. I offer her the pink cookie; she takes it and seems pleased. She asks me to bring her a book from home.

Five hours after we arrived together, I leave, alone. At home, I walk the dogs, then eat dinner with them, standing in the kitchen with leftover shawarma. Then I put the foster dog back into his crate and drive back to the hospital.

I bring her the book she requested, and resume waiting in the lobby, where I discover a phone charging station, so I charge my phone even though I can’t call The Child on it and can’t really think of anyone else I want to talk to. Eventually I move to a sofa, where I’m able to stretch out, and nobody seems to notice when I fall asleep.

Ten or more hours after we first arrived, a social worker wakes me up. I’m ushered into a small, empty room, where I tell this woman I’ve never met about months of arguing, poor grades, tantrums and threats and isolation. Though I am expected to talk, she is not obligated to tell me what has been said, and doesn’t, simply saying what I already know: suicide threats were made and considered credible. She offers me three options, all of them involving a psychiatric facility: The Child can go voluntarily, I can choose to send her, or if we both say no, the social worker can overrule us and send her.

She seems ready to discuss each option, but I cut her short: If The Child chooses to go, then she goes. If The Child chooses not to go, then I choose to send her.

She seems satisfied with the conversation, as I am: It is the only control I seem to have at the moment, so I exercise it. Then I go home, don’t sleep, and get up again in the morning.

We arrive at the hospital emergency room, and wait the required distance from the admissions desk until it is our turn, and I have to tell the nurse why we are here. My daughter made suicide threats, I whisper.

She nods and takes my insurance card and gestures toward the waiting area.

I sit on a sofa, facing the vast windows that let in what little light Seattle has to offer this time of year. The Child sits next to me.

I wonder if putting an arm around her will make her angry, or if not putting an arm around her set her off, so I do neither, and pat her arm lightly instead.

A nurse arrives and takes her behind the doors to the triage area, and then I am sitting alone, breathing disinfected air, staring past the corporate Christmas tree at the looming sky outside.

We meet in the office of The School Head. The conference table, like the rest of the office, is spare and modern, with a square glass bowl of tiny, colorful jelly beans at the center, next to a box of tissues.

The Counselor and School Head each have pads of paper with nothing written on them. The Counselor speaks first.

The Child told her boyfriend about her suicide plan.

The boyfriend told the Counselor about the conversation.

The Counselor interviewed The Child, and concluded the threats were credible.

The conversation is peppered with private, personal details, made public now, even though the door is closed and it’s just the three of us in a confidential meeting. They talk about my mother’s two cousins who committed suicide, my schizophrenic aunt, and The Child’s plan to hang herself from the rafters of the garage. I acknowledge the facts and people and deaths, but struggle to find the logic: the cousins died long before The Child was ever born, and I don’t think there are any rafters in my garage. If there are I can’t picture them, and while I’m trying to visualize my garage and sort out the mess of details the conversation has moved back to reality and what must happen now.

The Counselor suggests a hospital nearby would be the best place to take her, and mentions other places, treatment facilities, and I realize I should be writing this down, but I don’t have a pen or paper. The School Head hands me a blank sheet and a pen.

Everything is calm and restrained and I’m still not sure why I’m there or what I’m supposed to do; I was prepared for a different meeting, and keep expecting that meeting to begin.

This is not a disciplinary hearing, says the School Head.

I ask for directions to the hospital, and they seem relieved, and begin to describe the route as I realize that I know where to go. They retrieve The Child and sit with her in another room as I make hurried phone calls, to my office, explaining I need to leave for the day, and to my friend, who used to be Mayor and isn’t afraid to speak in public, and ask her to give the speech I am supposed to give the next day. She tells me: I’ve got it, do what you need to.