"If you take him home," Bergstrom said, "and it comes back at nine o'clock tonight while he's asleep in your guest room, what are you going to give him?"
Verlene opened her mouth. She closed it.
"His pens are in your car," Bergstrom said, not unkindly. "I heard. In this heat. Ma'am, you can ride up front with Femi or you can follow us to Children's Mercy in Overland Park. But he's going."
She rode up front. I watched her climb into the cab of the ambulance in her white capris and her Flamingo visor, slowly, with one hand on the grab bar, like a woman twenty years older than she was. Femi shut the door for her. Through the window I could see her sitting with her hands in her lap, staring straight ahead through the windshield at the honey locusts.
As the ambulance pulled out, with its lights on and its siren off, Archie lifted one hand from his Chiefs towel inside the back window, toward the pool, toward nobody in particular, and waved.
Then it was quiet. Fifty people standing on a pool deck in ninety-one-degree heat, and nobody saying anything. The DJ, to his eternal credit, did not start the music again.
Clem sat down on the concrete where she'd been kneeling. Just sat, all at once, the way a marionette sits when you let go of the strings. She was still holding her second pen in both hands. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her, and she was cold and wet and shaking so hard her teeth clicked, and she put her forehead against my shoulder and said into my shirt, "I didn't think about it. I didn't think about anything. I just did the steps."
"I know."
"I wasn't even scared until she screamed."