“What’s happened here? Another team fight?”
“No. April…Czernin…collapsed. You got anything…in her file…on medical history?” Sweat was running down my neck, and my back was wet with it.
“I didn’t check for that—I thought this was more of your gang warfare.”
I didn’t have energy to waste on anger. “Nope. Nature’s doing. Worried…about her heart. Check her file, call…her mother.”
Gault looked down at me, as if deciding whether she could take an order from me. Fortunately, at that moment, we had one of the South Side’s major miracles: an ambulance crew actually arrived, in under four minutes. I got gratefully to my feet and wiped sweat from my eyes.
While I gave the techs a sketch of what had happened, they moved in next to April with a portable defibrillator. They slid her onto a stretcher and pulled up her damp T-shirt to attach the pads, one below her left breast, the other on her right shoulder. The girls crowded in, anxious and titillated at the same time. As if we were in a movie, the techs told us to stand clear; I pulled the girls away while the techs administered a shock. Just as in a movie, April’s body jerked. They watched their monitor anxiously; no heartbeat. They had to shock her twice more before the muscle came back to life and began a sluggish beat, like an engine slowly turning over on a cold day. As soon as they were sure she was breathing, the techs packed up their equipment and began running across the gym with the stretcher.
I trotted along next to them. “Where are you taking her?”
“University of Chicago—it’s the closest pediatric trauma center. They’ll need an adult to admit her.”
“The school is trying to find the parents,” I said.
“You in a position to okay medical treatment?”
“I don’t know. I’m the basketball coach; she collapsed during practice, but I don’t think that gives me legal rights.”
“Up to you, but the kid needs an adult and an advocate.”
We were outside now. The ambulance had drawn a crowd, but the students stood back respectfully as the techs opened the door and slid April inside. I couldn’t let her go alone; I could see that.
I scrambled into the back and took her hand. “It’s okay, baby, you’ll be okay, you’ll see,” I kept murmuring, squeezing her hand while she lay semiconscious, her eyes blunking back in her head.
The heart monitor was the loudest sound in the world, louder than the siren, louder than my cell phone, which rang without my hearing it until the EMT crew told me to turn it off because it could interfere with their instruments. The irregular beeping bounced in my head like a basketball. A-pril’s still alive but isn’t stable, A-pril’s still alive but isn’t stable. It drowned any other thoughts, about By-Smart, or Andrés, or where Romeo Czernin might be. The sound seemed to go on forever, so when we arrived at the hospital I was startled to see we’d covered seven city miles in twelve minutes.
As soon as we pulled into the ambulance bay, the EMTs whisked April into the emergency room and left me to grapple with her paperwork, a frustrating bureaucratic battle, since I had no idea what kind of insurance her parents had. The school had a little policy on the athletes, but only for injuries sustained while playing; if this was a preexisting condition, the policy wouldn’t cover it.
When the ER staff saw I didn’t know enough to fill out the forms, they sent me off to a tiny cubicle to wrestle with an admissions official. After forty minutes, I felt like a boxer who’d been punched for thirteen rounds but couldn’t quite fall over. Because April had come in as a pediatric emergency, they were treating her, but they needed parental consent, and they needed to be paid—not, I need hardly add, in that order.
I couldn’t guarantee the payment, and I wasn’t legally able to give consent, so I tried to track down April’s mom at work, which was in itself a bureaucratic nightmare; it took me nine minutes to find someone with the authority to deliver a message to an employee working the floor, but that someone said Mrs. Czernin’s shift had ended at four and she wasn’t in the store any longer. She wasn’t at home, either, but the Czernins did have an answering machine, with a message delivered in the hesitant voice of someone uncomfortable with technology.
I tried Morrell again. He hadn’t been able to track down Marcena. Only because I’d run out of other ideas, I called Mary Ann McFarlane.