« ^ » “
For the rest of the night, without car keys or hotel room, I was a helpless participant in someone else’s drama.
Later I was glad that I’d been there for Dixie when she had no one else, but she hadn’t immediately needed my shoulder and I felt like an intruder.
While the guard summoned help, she left a message on her friend Pell’s machine, asking him to send the baby-sitter home and to hold the fort till she got there. Then we followed the ambulance over to the hospital and sat outside the ER while the trauma team worked to stabilize Chan’s breathing.
As a nurse took down his history and questioned Dixie about his allergies, I remembered that I’d seen a gold medic alert on one of his neck chains.
“He’s allergic to several things,” Dixie said, “especially bee and wasp stings. He almost went into shock the last time he was stung.”
Allergies? Could allergies have been the reason for his heavy breathing that spring in Maryland and not my fallen-woman status?
Dixie looked at me guiltily when the nurse was gone. “I must have just missed him. He knows I keep a stash of antihistamines in my office for my own hay fever, especially with pine pollen so bad right now. Maybe he felt an attack coming on and came looking for me.”
“If he’s that allergic, he must carry his own supply,” I argued.
“Maybe. Thank God Lynnette inherited Evelyn’s constitution and not his.”
Here in the ER waiting room with us were a black mother and an obviously feverish child who leaned against her mother’s comforting bulk with listless apathy.
A defeated looking middle-aged white couple—he in overalls, she in a faded print housedress—waited for someone to see them. The wife’s eyes were pools of anxiety and she kept asking him in low tones how he felt. He merely grunted and sat hunched over with his crossed hands pushing against his abdomen as if to hold back the pain that left him gray-faced and sweating.
Two shabbily dressed white teenagers whispered together on a corner couch and a large black woman with a dazed expression kept going up to the receptionist every few minutes to ask, “He’s gonna be okay, ain’t he?”
The black receptionist was patient, but obviously harried. “They still haven’t told me anything, Ms. Robinson. I promise I’ll let you know the minute they do.”
Two very bloody and very drunk white adolescent boys came rushing through the door, propelled by a white High Point policeman. They yelled that they were the victims of police brutality, probably maimed for life, and that their fathers would have his badge. The trouble was not that they really believed it but that their fathers probably believed it, too.
They alternated their belligerent threats with whining complaints and rather than sit there and listen to them, I went out to hunt up some coffee. It took a while but what I finally found smelled delicious and when I got back, Dixie sipped hers appreciatively.
“What happened to the Hardy boys?” I asked, but she looked at me blankly and I realized that very little about this waiting room was registering.
To take her mind off Chan, I said, “You mentioned earlier you wanted some legal advice?”
She sighed. “It seems so petty now with Chan like this.”
“It concerns him?”
She nodded. “I wanted an update on grandparents’ rights. You heard him earlier. Jacaranda’s merging with a company in Malaysia and he’s going to take that job. Uproot Lynnette and haul her off to Kuala Lumpur halfway around the world where I’ll never see her except in the summer. If I’m lucky.”
Tears filled her eyes. “She’s all I have left of Evelyn. What if he finds someone out there and remarries? What if she’s jealous of his first marriage with Evelyn and won’t let me visit Lynnette? Don’t I have any rights at all?”
“Well…” I said cautiously, “as a judge, I’m not allowed to give legal advice, but if you want to hear what a friend thinks—”
Dixie slumped back in the ugly plastic chair, discouraged. “I know, I know. As long as he’s a good father, I have no real rights, just what he chooses to give me.”
“
“Materially, yes.”
“But not emotionally?”
“How do I know, Deborah?”
“Don’t you?”
She gave a reluctant grin. “You really haven’t changed, have you? Okay. You’re right. He dotes on her and she adores him right back. But then, most females
“Like Drew Patterson?”
“Exactly like Drew. She’d marry him tomorrow and don’t I wish! She’s crazy about Lynnette, too, and even if they did move to Malaysia, she’d see to it that I stayed part of their life. But Chan—”
She broke off as a nurse came out and asked if we’d come with her. She led us into a small room furnished with only a few chairs and benches. A doctor in green scrubs was waiting for us. His face was young but his weary eyes
