"I did say that." Bergstrom went back to her work. "You did this exactly right, kiddo. You know that, right? Everything. The call, the dose, the position. You hear me?"
My daughter nodded. Her chin was shaking. She was still holding the pen.
Sutter had been standing a few feet off with the spent auto-injector in his hand, and when Bergstrom said that, I watched him look at it again, and look at Clem, and look at the woman in the gate. Then he put the pen into a little plastic bag from his vest pocket and walked over to Verlene and said, in a low voice the body camera caught perfectly, "Ma'am, I'm going to need you to step out of that gate and come stand over here with me, please."
She did. She went where he pointed, to the shade beside the clubhouse wall, and stood there with her arms at her sides. She hadn't said a word since Bergstrom held up the pen.
They loaded Archie onto the stretcher sitting up, with the nebulizer still going, his goggles still pushed up on his forehead. Somebody had found his flip-flops. Somebody else had found his Chiefs towel and tucked it around his legs. As they got him to the gate, Verlene came out of the shade, fast, and Sutter took a step after her and then let her go, because she wasn't going for anybody. She was going for the stretcher.
"I'll take him home," she said to Bergstrom. Her voice was strange, high and careful. "He's better. Look at him. He's better now. I'll take him home and I'll call his pediatrician first thing tomorrow. I'm his guardian. I can refuse transport. I know I can refuse."
Bergstrom stopped the stretcher. She did it gently. Femi kept a hand on Archie's shoulder.
"Ma'am, he's better because he has two doses of epinephrine in him," she said. "That's going to wear off. Epinephrine works fast, and it doesn't last long. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. You already saw that happen once today. It came back on him about twelve minutes after the first shot. And there's something else. With a reaction like this, sometimes it comes back hours later, after everybody thinks it's over. It's called a biphasic reaction. It can happen two hours later, six hours later, sometimes the next day, and it can be as bad as the first one or worse. That's why every child who gets epinephrine for anaphylaxis goes to the emergency department and gets watched for hours. Every one. That's not me being cautious. That's the protocol, and the protocol is written in blood."
"But he's—"