Arnot Ogden Medical Center put them in what it called the family consultation room, which was a windowless box off the emergency department with a loveseat in a stain-resistant fabric, two armchairs, a box of tissues, a framed print of a covered bridge, and a sign on the wall reminding everyone that the hospital had a chaplain on call twenty-four hours. Officer Ostrowe got Emi a can of apple juice from somewhere and a bag of pretzels and then went out into the hall to make phone calls. The door didn't quite latch behind her. Lazaro could hear her voice, low, saying words he knew, saying "mandated" and "intake" and "no other caregiver identified."
Emi sat in the corner of the loveseat as far from Lazaro as he could get, which was not very far. He did not open the apple juice. He held it in both hands like it was something he had been asked to guard.
For a long time neither of them said anything. Lazaro sat in the armchair with his bad leg straight out in front of him and looked at the covered bridge. It was one he knew, the one up at Newfield, red with a little white trim. He had ridden out to see it once in the summer, years ago, before everything, back when the Shovelhead ran and he had believed, the way you believe things in your thirties, that he would always be the kind of man people were glad to see coming.
"You told," Emi said finally.
Lazaro turned his head. "I did."
"She said they would take me."
"I know she did."
"So now they're going to take me. Because of you." The boy's voice was flat and hard, and his eyes were dry now, but he wasn't looking at Lazaro; he was looking at the juice can. "That lady out there is calling them right now. I heard her."
"She is," Lazaro said. "I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not good at it and you'd know. She's calling Social Services, because that's the law when a kid's parent gets hurt like this and there's nobody else at home. Somebody from DSS is going to come and talk to you and talk to your mom. I don't know what they'll decide. I don't think it's as simple as they come and take you away and you never see her again. That's not usually how it goes. But I don't know. That's the truth."
"Then why did you do it?"
Lazaro thought about how to answer that. He had a lot of answers. He had the answer they taught you in the academy, which was that the patient's life comes first and everything else is secondary. He had the answer from his own years on the ambulance, which was that he had seen what happened to people who went down on fentanyl and came back with one dose and then went back under twenty minutes later when the naloxone wore off and the opioid didn't, and there was nobody watching, and nobody called, and in the morning somebody found them. He had a different answer too, one that sat lower down in him and was harder to say.