Aaron Tracy

The police are there within minutes and they rush them all to the hospital.

Neil is only a few blocks away when the accident happens.

She hears the sirens pass, but she has no idea they're for her infant son.

When she walks into their apartment, the telephone is already ringing.

As soon as she receives the news, she hangs up and calls Dahl at his office.

She doesn't have the full story yet, doesn't sound overly alarmed.

Theo's been hurt, she tells him.

They say not too seriously.

We have to go to the hospital.

Dahl throws on a coat and gets ready to leave, but before he can get out the door, Susan calls from the hospital, hysterical, saying, hurry, hurry.

So, then I knew it was bad, Dahl says.

Theo is in emergency when we get there, Dahl continues.

They x-ray him and find lots of fractures.

Very critical shape, they say.

In her memoir, Neil goes even further, writing that the doctor pulled them aside after examining Theo.

He told them, we are doing everything we can, but he is going to die.

From that moment on, Neil essentially moves into the hospital, living off stale coffee, sleeping in a chair beside her son's bed, obsessed with the rhythms of his labored breathing.

When he sleeps, which is a lot of the time, Neil climbs two flights of stairs on unsteady legs to another kind of vigil.

In an upstairs room at this very same hospital is her old friend, the playwright Lillian Hellman, who's keeping watch over Dashiell Hammett, the famous detective novelist and her longtime romantic partner.

He's dying of lung cancer.