I didn't touch her. I want that clear, because it was a near thing and I've thought about what would have happened if I had. I said her name. She didn't turn around.
Then the paramedics were behind me, and I stepped aside, and the stretcher wheels rattled on the concrete, and a woman's voice said, "Fire department, coming through, ma'am, I need you to move," and Verlene still didn't move. She turned, finally, half toward them, and planted her feet in the gate, with the pouch held up in front of her like a badge.
"Thank God. Thank God you're here. I need you to know before you touch him that that girl drugged him. She injected him with some kind of narcotic. I have the rest of it right here. The officer is going to arrest her, and I want you to know what she gave him so you can—"
The woman in front was Lieutenant Inga Bergstrom, a paramedic with Olathe Fire for sixteen years. She was about five foot four, with a gray-blond braid pinned up under her helmet and forearms like a farrier. Behind her was her partner, Femi Olawale, younger and taller, pulling the stretcher with a jump bag over his shoulder. Bergstrom didn't slow down. She took the pouch out of Verlene's hands. She didn't snatch it. She just took it, the way you'd take a pair of scissors from a toddler, and stepped past her through the gate, and unzipped it as she walked, and pulled out the carrying tube and popped it open and slid out the second auto-injector, and held it up in the sunlight, and looked at the label for maybe a quarter of a second.
Then she turned around, still walking backward toward Archie, and held it up so the whole pool could see it.
"Ma'am, this is epinephrine," she said. Her voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. Fifty people had gone silent to hear what came next. "It's adrenaline. It's not a narcotic. It's not a controlled substance. It's the exact drug I'm about to give your grandson, because it's the only thing that stops what's happening to him right now." She looked at Clem, at the spent pen in Sutter's hand, and back at Verlene. "Somebody gave him the first dose. That's why he's still breathing. And you've been holding his second one in your purse?"
Verlene didn't answer. She didn't move. She stood in the gate with her hands still up in front of her chest, empty now, holding the shape of the pouch that wasn't there anymore, and her mouth was open a little, and nothing came out of it. I've seen a deer freeze in my headlights on K-7 at two in the morning. I've never seen anybody freeze the way Verlene Quisenberry froze in that gate. It was like watching a building after the charges go off, in the half second before it knows it's supposed to fall.
Bergstrom was already on her knees by Archie. Femi had the oxygen out.
What happened next took about four minutes and looked, to me, like a pit crew. Bergstrom asked Clem, without turning her head, what time the first dose went in and what dose it was, and Clem said, "Two forty-two, point three milligrams, right lateral thigh," and Bergstrom said, "Good," the way a coach says it. She didn't use Clem's second pen. She handed it back to my daughter over her shoulder without looking, and Clem took it and held it in both hands like a candle. Femi had already cracked open a kit from the jump bag, and Bergstrom drew up a dose of epinephrine from a small glass vial into a syringe, checked it against the weight on a color-coded pediatric tape she'd laid alongside Archie's body from head to heel, and put it into the meat of his left thigh while Femi fitted a little oxygen mask over his face, a child's mask, clear plastic with a green elastic strap. Then they had him sitting up, propped against Femi's knee, because he was working so hard to breathe that lying flat had become worse, and Femi was clipping a pulse oximeter on his finger and Bergstrom was setting up a nebulizer, a mist of albuterol hissing into a second mask to open the small airways in his lungs, and talking to him the whole time in a voice as ordinary as a grocery clerk's.