The little girl was obviously sick. Anybody in the waiting room could tell.
Joe Philips had been watching the girl for a few minutes, fascinated and amused. Her face was flushed but she didn’t seem to care. It was nice to see a girl—maybe five or six years old—keeping herself entertained using a purple pen to draw a pretty butterfly in a small notebook. She sat a couple of seats down from him and was alone. The woman who had been sitting next to her—surely her mother by the looks of it—had stepped away for a moment.
Probably checking to see if there are any doctors actually working at this time of night.
The air in the hospital felt stuffy enough that Joe took off his jacket, but the girl didn’t seem bothered in her heavy, oversized coat. The coat didn’t look like something bought new for the girl. It looked ratty, a used garment that the girl could grow into. Joe knew coats like that very well. Whenever he could find one at Goodwill that fit his massive frame, he’d take it.
“That’s a nice butterfly,” Joe finally said.
She looked over at him, but didn’t appear nervous like some kids did when talking to him. Joe knew the muscles and the tattoos that he couldn’t hide sounded off warning sirens to kids. But this young girl didn’t appear to be daunted. Maybe it was because there were several other strangers in this waiting room.
“I love butterflies,” she said. Then she pointed at his arms, obviously noting the colorful ink on them. “Do those wash off?”
“Afraid not.” He smiled, impressed that she wasn’t intimidated to ask a question about his tattoos. “What’s your name?”
“Lily.”
She looked like a lily with a wide smile that spread out over her face and expressive dark eyes. A strong, vibrant flower that was so full of colors and opened up so easily.
“Cool name,” he said. “Mine’s Joe.”
“I like my name. It’s different.”
He couldn’t get the grin off his face. This little girl was spunky. He liked her even more. Even with a stuffed-up nose and watery eyes, she still looked full of spirit.
“ ‘The modest Rose puts forth her thorn; but fairer still I hold the Lily white; who shall in tenderest Summer’s love delight. . . .’ ”
She didn’t ignore his quote but rather seem entranced by it, looking at him with curiosity.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a poem,” Joe said. “By a man named William Blake.”
“How do you know that?”
Feisty. I love it.
He gave her a nod. It was an honest question.
“Where I used to live, I had time to do a lot of reading.”
A lot of soul-searching, too.
The girl closed her notebook for a moment and then got off her chair to come sit down next to him. His presence and the paint on his arms didn’t alarm her in the least. Joe started to ask her about her mother but approaching footsteps answered that question.
“Lily! What-Are-You-Doing?”
There she is.
A woman rushed through the waiting room as if Lily were standing in the center of a highway. Her tired eyes appeared momentarily awakened when she saw who her daughter sat next to.
“Sorry,” Joe quickly said to the woman, but she didn’t even acknowledge him. “Please don’t be upset. It wasn’t her fault.”
Lily was still small enough for her mother to lift her up into her arms. The woman took a few steps back from Joe, the anger and anxiety obvious on her care-worn face.
“It’s fine, it’s not that,” the mother said in a breathless and beat-up tone. “I just . . . She’s sick and I can’t get anyone to even take a look at her.”
Those words pressed a button inside of Joe. This woman didn’t have to say anything more. They had been there since Joe arrived, and he’d already been waiting twenty minutes. The girl looked weak and sick even though she still acted like she was enduring it. The mother, however, looked frightened.
Not just of me. For her little girl.
“Just a minute,” Joe said, standing up and leaving the mother and daughter in peace.
He would have bet a hundred dollars (if he actually had that kind of money to bet) that Lily and her mother didn’t have insurance. He would also bet that if things were different—if Lily happened to have a different zip code and a different set of parents and maybe even a different outfit on—someone would probably be seeing her right this very moment. Of course, they probably would have come in much sooner. And they would have gone somewhere else, to some stuffy family practice in the suburbs, not to the county hospital late at night.
The guy he had greeted when he signed in looked bored out of his mind, sipping a Diet Coke and watching whatever he was watching on his computer screen. Joe stepped up to the counter and smiled, trying to be courteous and polite.
“That little girl over there is sick,” he told Mr. Diet Soda guy.
“That’s generally why people come in here.”
Ten years ago a comment like that would have resulted in the guy eating his soda can. But Joe kept his cool. He’d learned to do that the hard way.
“She obviously has a fever. She needs to see a doctor.”
“But it’s not above a hundred and three,” smart guy said. “So the severity algorithm puts her on the lower-priority list.”
Then the guy gave him a shrug. An oh-well-what-you-gonna-do sort of shrug. With this smirk on his skinny smirky face.
“It’s how it works,” he said.
Really?
He leaned over a little more so Diet Soda guy could get a real good look at the man he was talking to.
“So why don’t you input something that’ll put her next on the list. Unless you want the whatever-algorithm to put you ahead of her.”
Joe’s eyes didn’t waver, and his body didn’t shift. He knew what he probably looked like to this scrawny male nurse. And right now, Joe liked it. He enjoyed seeing the fear in this snotty little guy’s eyes. Smarts could get you through a lot of fancy doors, but they still didn’t get rid of those life-and-death fears everybody carries around with them.
“Are you threatening me?” the man behind the counter asked, both in disbelief and worry.
“Yes.”
Joe’s response came quick and sudden. The nurse’s response was slow to come and uncertain in its words.
“I’m gonna call security.”
The guy reached for the phone as Joe just shook his head and smiled.
“They won’t get here in time,” Joe told him.
He was bluffing, of course. He wasn’t going to harm this puny little soulless man. But he did want to instill the fear of God in him.
“Trust me,” Joe said in the meanest tone he could muster.
He’d been a reformed man for a while, but that still didn’t mean people were going to mess with him.
The guy behind the counter, sweat beads suddenly forming on his forehead, didn’t take any time to debate the situation. He swallowed and then cradled the phone. Then he turned and called back behind him.
“Gina? Can you take that little girl over there into room three?”
The know-it-all look was gone. Instead, the nurse looked back at Joe with defeat.
“Dr. Singh will be with you in a minute.”
Joe turned around and saw Lily and her mother staring at him. They, along with everybody else in the waiting room, had seen and heard the exchange. But the others didn’t matter to Joe.
For a brief moment, he locked eyes with the mother. Her apprehension was gone now. The world-weary look was still there, but something else was there, too. And as a nurse opened a door for Lily and her mother to go through, Joe could see the woman mouth silent words to him as they passed.
“Thank you.”
He smiled and nodded.
Joe felt better than he had felt in a very long time. And that was saying something.