April was in a room with three other kids. When we came in, she was watching television, her face puffy from the drugs she was taking. A giant teddy bear was propped up next to her in bed, brand new, holding a balloon that read, “Get Well Soon.”

April shifted her groggy gaze from Soul Train to her mother, but her face brightened when she saw me. “Coach! This is so cool, you coming to see me. You gonna let me come back to the team, even if I miss next week?”

“You can rejoin the team as soon as the docs and your mom say you’re ready to play. Great bear-where’d he come from?”

“Daddy.” She flicked a wary glance at her mother: the bear had probably already been the focus of a quarrel, but I found it heartbreaking, Bron wanting to do something for his daughter and coming up with this outsize toy.

We talked a little about basketball, about school, what she was missing in her biology class, while Sandra fussed with her pillows, straightened the sheets, pushed April to drink some juice (“You know the doctor said you have to have lots of fluids with this drug you’re taking.”).

By and by, a young resident came in. He had a chubby, cherubic face, complete with a circlet of soft dark curls, but he had an easy way about him, bantering lightly with April while he checked her pulse and asked her how much she was drinking and eating.

“You got that big bear there to try to scare me off, huh, but I don’t scare that easy. Keep him away from your boyfriend, though, boys your age can’t stand up to bears.”

After a few minutes, he left her with a nod and a wink, and ushered Sandra and me down the hall, out of April’s earshot. I introduced myself and explained my role in April’s life.

“Oh, you’re the heroine who saved her life. That how you got your arm in a sling?”

I hoped hearing the doctor call me a heroine would soften Sandra’s views of me. I explained briefly about my injury and asked what the story was on April.

“She has something we call Long QT Syndrome. I could show you the EKG and explain how we know and why we call it that, but what it really means is a kind of arrhythmia in the heart. With proper treatment, she can certainly lead a normal, productive life, but she absolutely has to give up basketball. If she keeps playing, I’m sorry to put it bluntly, Ms. Czernin, but the outcome could be very bad.”

Sandra nodded bleakly. She’d gone back to twisting her fingers together, thumbs pushing so hard that the backs of her hands were covered in purplish-red welts. I asked the resident what the proper treatment was.

“We’ve started her on a course of beta-blockers to stabilize her heart.” He went into a long explanation about the buildup of sodium ions in the chamber, and the function of beta-blockers in stabilizing the ion exchange, then added, “She should go to a pacemaker, to an implanted cardioverter defibrillator. Otherwise, I’m afraid, well, it’s a question of time before there’s another serious episode.”

His pager sounded. “If there’s anything else, please page me. I’ll be glad to talk to you at any time. We’re going to discharge April Monday if her heart is stable, and we’ll keep her on the beta-blockers for the time being.”

“Like I can afford those,” Sandra muttered. “Even with my employee discount, it’s going to be fifty bucks a week for her medication. What do they think, that only rich people get sick in this country?”

I tried to say something commiserating, but she turned on me again; our brief moment of rapport was gone. There was a limit to how much time as a punching bag I felt I owed her; I’d passed it some time back. I told her I’d keep in touch and headed down the hall to the stairwell.

On my way out the hospital’s front door, I almost collided with a tall teenager, who was entering from Maryland Avenue. I was intent on my own thoughts, and didn’t look at her until she gasped, “Coach.”

I stopped. “Josie Dorrado! This is great that you came to see April. She’s going to need lots of support in the weeks ahead.”

To my astonishment, instead of answering she turned crimson and dropped the pot of daisies she was holding. She half opened the door and made a flapping gesture with her right arm, signaling to someone outside to take off. I stepped over the plants and dirt and pushed open the door.

Josie clutched my left, my sore arm, trying to pull me back inside. I gave a squawk loud enough that she let go of me and muscled my way past her roughly to look at the street. A midnight blue Miata was heading up Maryland, but a group of heavyset women, slowly making their way across the street, blocked the license plate.

I turned back to Josie. “Who brought you here? Who do you know who can afford a sports car like that?”

“I came on the bus,” she said quickly.

“Oh? Which one?”

“The, uh, the, I didn’t notice the number. I just asked the driver-”

“To drop you at the hospital entrance. Josie, I’m ashamed of you for lying to me. You’re on my team; I need to be able to trust you.”

“Oh, Coach, you don’t understand. It’s not what you’re thinking, honest!”

“Excuse us.” The trio of heavyset women who’d been on the street were frowning magisterially at us. “Can you clean up your mess? We’d like to get into this hospital.”

We knelt down to clean up the flowers. The pot was plastic and had survived the fall. With a little help from the guard at the reception desk, who found me a brush, we got most of the dirt back in the pot and reorganized the flowers; they looked half dead, but I saw from the price sticker that Josie had got them at By-Smart for a dollar ninety-nine: you don’t get fresh, lively flowers for two bucks.

When we’d finished, I stared up at her thin face. “Josie, I can’t promise not to tell your mother if you’re going out with some older guy she doesn’t know or doesn’t approve of.”

“She knows him, she likes him, but she can’t-I can’t tell-you gotta promise-”

“Are you having sex with him?” I asked bluntly, as she floundered through unfinished sentences.

Red streaked her cheeks again. “No way!”

I pressed my lips together, thinking about her home, her mother’s second job, which would have to support the family now that Fly the Flag was gone, her sister’s baby, about Pastor Andrés and his strictures against birth control. “Josie, I will promise not to say anything to your mother for the time being if you make a promise to me.”

“What’s that?” she demanded, suspicious.

“Before you sleep with him, or with any boy, you must make him wear a condom.”

She turned an even darker shade of red. “But, Coach, I can’t-how can you-and the abstinence lady, she say they don’t even work.”

“She gave you bad advice, Josie. They aren’t a hundred percent effective, but they work most of the time. Do you want to end up like your sister Julia, watching telenovelas all day long? Or do you want to try for a life beyond babies, and clerking at By-Smart?”

Her eyes were wide and frightened, as if I’d offered her the choice between cutting off her head or talking to her mother. She had probably imagined passionate embraces, a wedding, anything but what it meant to lie with a boy. She looked at the door, at the floor, then suddenly bolted up the stairs into the interior of the hospital. I watched as a guard at the entrance stopped her, but when she looked back down at me I couldn’t bear the fear in her face. I turned on my heel and walked into the cold afternoon.