Lazaro got up out of the chair, slowly, his hand on the rail of her stretcher. He stood there for a moment with his hand on the rail.
"We'll see," he said. "I'm not being cute. I mean we'll see. I don't know yet what I'm going to want. Ask me again when you're out of here."
He went to get Arliss Duchene.
The conversation behind the curtain took an hour and ten minutes. Lazaro knew because he watched the clock in the consultation room the whole time, and because Emi watched it too, the two of them sitting at opposite ends of the loveseat now, which was closer than before. Somewhere in the second half hour the boy had opened the apple juice and drunk it. Somewhere after that he had asked, without looking over, "Did you really used to drive an ambulance?" and Lazaro had said, "Rode in the back, mostly. Somebody else drove," and Emi had said, "Did you ever have to cut somebody out of a car with the jaws thing?" and Lazaro had said, "Forty-one times," and Emi had turned and looked at him with an expression that was not forgiveness but was, perhaps, the beginning of the shape of it. Then he had asked what the letters on Lazaro's neck said.
"It's Latin," Lazaro said. "PRIMUM NON NOCERE. It means, first, do no harm. It's what they tell doctors. I got it when I finished my paramedic training. I was twenty-six and thought I was going to save the whole world."
"People think it means something bad," Emi said.
"People think a lot of things."
"I thought it meant something bad." The boy looked at his sneakers. "Before. When we walked past. I thought you were maybe a murderer."
"I know."
"My mom always walked past on the other side too. Even though she said you were good. How come she did that?"