A few minutes later, she informed the Wattenbargers that Betty had tested positive for influenza A, the most severe version of the seasonal flu. Stacey asked about Betty’s rapid breathing and, for a second time, about her blue lips. The woman with the stethoscope blamed it all on Betty’s high fever. After reassuring Jeremy and Stacey that Betty’s lungs were clear, she said their daughter “should be fine.”
Soon, the Wattenbargers were told they could leave. As they headed toward the door, Betty stopped walking and turned toward Jeremy. She was asking to be picked up, something she asked of her father often. He had come to intuit such requests. His own rough childhood—there was no running water or electricity on the Midwestern farms he grew up on—had made him especially attentive to his daughters, and he had tried hard to better Betty’s and her older sister Annabelle’s lives. He danced and sang along with them to the television series Yo Gabba Gabba!, and he had even painted Betty’s room the same chartreuse green as her favorite monster on the show. Knowing his younger daughter well, Jeremy bent down, picked her up, and carried her out to the parking lot.
As they left, Stacey felt reassured. Because nobody at the urgent care had seemed troubled by her daughter’s condition, she even felt a little stupid for worrying so much. That evening, Betty took small sips of Pedialyte, sat at the dinner table, and ate a little. Stacey noticed that Betty’s cough had worsened since earlier in the day, so she gave her some cough syrup before bed. When sick, Betty tended to prefer her father. But in the middle of the night, she got into her parents’ bed and snuggled as close as she could to her mother, who relished the chance to hold her. Stacey often wondered whether Betty favored Jeremy because he hadn’t mourned the autism diagnosis to the extent that Stacey had. Perhaps, Stacey thought, Betty had turned toward her father because she felt slighted by her mother’s pain. As Stacey lay in bed with Betty next to her, she felt not only that Betty was improving but that a new chapter in their relationship might lie ahead.
The next morning, though, Betty was not better. In the shower, she fell over. Wanting to make his daughter comfortable, Jeremy brought her mattress into the living room and put it next to the fireplace. Moments later, he saw a dark substance coming out of Betty’s mouth. He yelled for Stacey, who ran in from a small room just off the kitchen. When she saw the dark liquid, her first thought was that it was the grape cough syrup she’d given Betty earlier that morning. But Jeremy knew it was blood. In a matter of seconds, he carried Betty outside and placed her in the back seat of his truck. With his horn blaring, he drove to the end of the street, ran a stop sign and two stoplights, and in under two minutes arrived at the Baylor Scott & White Emergency Hospital, where the emergency room staff sprang into action.