My Son's Girlfriend Destroyed My Family novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Four Vials

Luke opens the locked cabinet with his own key and the antivenom starts forty-two minutes late; Glenda keeps her video to herself, and a stranger texts her: Ask Alan about the Macon depot.

"Luke," I said. "Look at his hand."

He didn't look at it.

He was holding Shelby by both elbows, and she was crying into his scrubs.

"She came at me," Shelby said. "I told her to wait her turn, and she went wild."

Teddy made a small sound against my neck.

It was not a cry.

It was the sound he made when he was trying not to be sick.

"Luke!" I said, and my voice broke on his name. "He can't feel his fingers."

Luke's head came up.

He looked at Teddy's hand, and I watched him see it.

The swelling had climbed past the wrist to the middle of the forearm, and the skin was a shiny purple.

The color drained out of his face.

"Get a bed," he said to nobody. "Bay four. Now."

A charge nurse in a gray cardigan had come out of the supply room behind him.

She had been standing there the whole time.

"Bay four," she said, and took Teddy's legs.

Between the two of them they lifted him out of my arms.

I let go, and my hands would not stop shaking.

They ran him down the hall, and I ran after them with blood in my eye.

"Antivenom," Luke said as he ran. "Crotalidae, four vials, and a line."

"It's locked," the charge nurse said. "Shelby has the key."

Luke stopped.

I had never seen my son's face do what it did then.

"I have a key," he said quietly. "Get the line in."

He turned around and went back up the hall, past Shelby, who put her hand out.

"Luke, wait, you don't understand what she..."

"Move your hand, Shelby."

She moved it.

The cabinet was behind the desk.

I heard the key turn and a door open, and I heard Luke say, "Four vials. Start it now."

Then I was standing at Teddy's bedside with a stranger's hand on my arm, and the clock on the wall said 5:02.

We had come through the sliding doors at 4:21.

The antivenom started dripping at 5:03.

Teddy lay on the narrow bed with his eyes half shut and a clear tube taped into his good arm.

"Mama?" he whispered.

"I'm right here."

"Did the lady get mad because I got bit?"

"No, baby. She was mad at me."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing," I said. "I promise. I didn't do a thing."

His eyes slid shut.

The charge nurse checked his pulse and wrote something down, and she did not look at me when she said, "He's responding. Give it twenty minutes."

I sat down in the plastic chair because my knees had stopped working.

A young doctor came and looked at my face and said I needed stitches in the eyebrow.

"After he's stable," I said.

He went away without arguing.

When I looked up Luke was standing in the doorway, with his arms hanging at his sides.

He looked at the monitor, and then at me.

"His numbers are coming back up," he said. "He's going to be okay, Mom."

"I know. Thank you for the key."

He nodded.

Then he said, carefully, "Can I ask you what happened out there?"

I stared at him.

"You were standing in the hall. You saw my face."

"I saw the end of it. Shelby says you came through the desk and grabbed her."

"With a child on my arm?"

"I'm not saying she's right." He rubbed his eyes. "I'm saying I need to hear what you said to her. Something set her off."

"I said copperhead," I said. "I said seven years old. I said, 'Please get my son Luke.'"

"And she hit you with a clipboard because of that."

"She hit me because she thinks you and I..."

I couldn't finish it.

I looked at him, and he looked at his shoes.

"She told you," I said. "She told you I'm some woman who chased you here."

"She's upset. She's been on since six this morning." He was talking too fast. "I'll talk to her. It's going to be all right."

My phone was still in my hand.

The video was on it, and every second of it was true.

I could have held it up in front of his face right then.

I didn't.

He would say he was sorry and that Shelby was overtired, and by Monday it would be a misunderstanding.

I wanted the people who had stood there and watched to see it too.

"Not tonight," I said.

"Mom..."

"Go see about your brother's chart, Luke."

He went.

The phone buzzed in my hand a minute later, a text from a number I had never saved.

It said: Ask Alan about the Macon depot.

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