Meet Amy...a little girl both Colton and you may never forget...

Must’ve been about...3 a.m., when I felt somebody move fast—super fast—out of the bed.

 Wyatt and I had gone to sleep with the kids between us, so that the slightest peep or wiggle would wake us up. And whatever Wyatt felt had made her scoop up Ty and run.

So all I saw was the back of her and Ty’s feet dangling down over her arm. So I eased my way out of bed as fast but as smoothly as I could since Taylor was still out like a light, and ran after her.

And when I got there, I couldn’t help it. I just had to bust out laughing.

She and Ty both were covered in stinky diarrhea poop--smelled like a pig sty in there, too. It was like the Slumdog outhouse scene, you know? Like they’d been rolling in it. Which they had, actually.

“Oh, you think it’s funny?” she said. But she was sort of laughing, too.

I got in there and bagged up the diaper that could never have held all that mess, while she tried to ease his little shirt up over his head without smearing a bunch of it all over his face. But he already had it on his face and everywhere else.

And she had a bunch of it on the front of her shirt and her thighs, too. She’d taken off her jeans—and bra—for bed, which was a good thing. But bless her heart, she was more concerned with getting him wiped down than getting herself clean, until I took over.

“Parenthood’s a blast innit?” I said. I had the baby in the sink. And he started to whine a little, because he was all feverish now, too. But when I started washing that stink off, he gave me grateful eyes and got quiet.

“I think this is probably ruined for good, don’t you?” she asked, holding her shirt with just a thumb and forefinger.

“Oh, yeah. Just dump it in there with the diapers. We’re going to have to get you another one from Kelli or something.”

“Well, it can wait ‘til they’re up, those two.”

“I kinda like that arrangement,” I told her. Looking right down at those nice tits of hers.

“You are incorrigible!” she said. But then she laughed and dumped the shirt in the diaper thing and grimaced. “God, the smell!”

“Yeah, pretty gross, huh? And where the hell did all that come from? They barely ate anything.”

She laughed and said, “And he’s so tiny!”

“Yeah, that, too,” I said, hoisting Ty up out of the sink. Which was a mistake, because he just as I got him into my arms, he let loose a little river of slime that ran over my arm and down my bare stomach and jeans.

I went, “DUDE,” while Wyatt got the last laugh. She tried to stop, but I think my expression made that impossible.

“Yeah, yuck it up,” I said. “I’ll come rub up against you.”

“What are you going to wear?”

I laughed then. My t-shirt was safe in the bedroom, but...I mean, how goofy would that look, walkin’ around in that and my boxer briefs?

Wyatt wiped Ty down while I got out of my jeans. And then I diapered him, and declared, “These guys are goin’ to Urgent Care right now. Don’t even try to stop me.”

“Better to err on the side of caution,” she said. “But you’ll need clothes first!”

“C’mon! Give ‘em a show, right? I got legs!”

She looked over at me and said, “You’ve got everything...” the way some guy would say it to a girl who’d stripped down to her undies. And of course, that cracked me up again.

We had to get Taylor up and strip down the stinky bed after that. So Wyatt put on her bra and got busy with me. And then Bonnie and Kelli came walking in all bleary eyed before we got very far with that, and shooed us away.

“Go get him some clothes,” Bonnie told Wyatt.

And Kelli said, “But don’t rush or anything,” and gave me a little twinkle. I guess she thought I had everything, too.

But we got the kids together and went to our place to hop in the shower and put on some clean clothes right quick. I sent texts to everyone so they’d know we’d run off to town, and why.

The kids were both a little hot but not as hot as they’d been when we all went to bed. I just wanted a pro to check them out and make sure we were on the road to recovery. But what I felt most, as I was driving down that two lane in the wee hours, was...peaceful. A new kind of peaceful.  Even with two sick kids in the back seat.

I had a woman who’d waded through stinky baby poop without batting an eye or complaining even a little bit. And the kids were obviously going to be fine in a couple of days or so, if we could keep them still—they were already shoving each other and laughing a little bit in the back seat.

So I reached over and got hold of her hand and said, “Thank you.”

“For?”

“Being you, I guess. Not freaking out, ever. You just...wade right in.”

“I didn’t have much choice today.”

“Yeah, but a lotta women I know woulda been on the road for home right after, believe me. This is that raw life Tia was talking about. Waking up in a pool of poop.”

She laughed and shrugged.

“I’ve been slimed before,” she said. “At school, on the rez. And this was a much bigger kid. Poor thing—he couldn’t hold it in any longer. Explosive diarrhea, that time. Painted the walls.”

“Through his clothes?”

“No, he’d almost gotten his pants down. I was in a portable classroom that year that had its own bathroom. My last elementary job. And Kee—little Navajo boy—got sick very suddenly, almost like these two. But he was painfully shy—it was very deep rez, and those kids have a hard time getting used to white people sometimes. So he waited until he just couldn’t stand it any longer, so before we’d gotten his pants down all the way, it just flew.”

We had a little laugh. And then I kissed the back of the hand I was holding and said, “I bet there’s almost nothing you haven’t seen. As a teacher. Especially teaching where you taught.”

“I never saw anyone like you,” she said. I felt her look over and glanced to see what that looked like.

I’m glad I did. It was a great look. A warm smile. A happy smile.

“Talk to me about that,” I said. “I mean...are you getting used to me yet?”

“Maybe too much,” she said.

“How so?”

“I forget now. Who you are in the real world and what that means.”

“Forget the real world.”

“I have to live in it. Soon. I can’t forget that.”

“But I want you to try,” I told her—I took my eyes off the road again, so I could look over and let her see how serious I was.

“Cause I don’t see me finding another Wyatt down the road, to be honest—don’t start with the ‘You’re so young’ stuff, either. People get married at my age. All the time. So it’s possible to know you’ve found what you’re lookin’ for at my age.”

That rattled her so much she couldn’t come back at me. So I said, “I’m not proposin’ here—chillax.”

It didn’t help. She still looked a little weirded out. And she said, “I distinctly heard the m-word, though.”

“Yeah, you did. Cause it’s on the table. Or it outta be. One option, anyway.”

She looked out of the front window and said, “My mother married young. And regretted it forever.” It sounded sort of hard. Bitter, I guess.

“Your mother married to get out of the house, you said. It’s not even the same thing.”

She gave me a direct glare and said, “Cautionary tale.”

So I gave her one back, and said, “Well, that’s her story. All this, that happened this week? It’s the first chapter of ours. And it’ll have a much happier ending, trust me.”

“We’re always sure of what we’re sure of at 18,” she told me. With a voice I hadn’t heard before. Not a scolding one. Not a patronizing or teaching one, either.

I think it was that girl on the bicycle, talking. Like, she was channeling her, a kid my age, to tell me another story. In a voice and language I could hear better. I respected it, too. I did.

But I said, “Because we can still see straight at 18,” to see what her inner wild child would answer back.

Surprisingly enough, she just smiled, and gave me, “Well said...”

“But not convincing enough, right?”

“No, you laser right through the shells and masks. I’ve noticed that. I envy that.”

“So...?”

She got up and leaned between the seats to check the kids. The bicycle girl was gone.

“Is it all Slumdog again back there or what?” I asked.

“They’re dozing off, actually,” she said, returning. “It amazes me how content they are, even like this. You’ve done well, Dad.”

“Bonnie, you mean.”

She sat back down and gave me a little one shoulder rub.

“You, I mean. I don’t think I’ve ever met a more purposeful parent in my life. And I deal with parents all the time.”

“They’re my whole heart, I’m not going to lie.”

“Is that it? Is it a mother for the babies you’re looking for?”

 “Wow. Did you not hear anything Aisha said to you last night?”

She laughed and said, “I heard her.”

“But...”

“Are you excited for her? The whole Vegas thing?” she asked. And I don’t think it was a dodge. I think she really wanted to know. So I gave her another story to think about.

“She wants it bad,” I said. “She always has. Even when they were still on the pole, she would visualize herself on one of those stages there—she told me that all the time. Down to the color of the costume she’d have on if she was onstage. She’d pretend she was already there.”

“She was rehearsing her future.”

“There it is! And I think it’s what made the guys like her so much. She put her whole soul into it. You don’t get a lot of guys makin’ it rain hundreds in Tucson, but she would have a few every week. Lawyers and dudes who owned big businesses—she worked some private clubs. Where they could go even at lunch time, if you can believe that. They’d bring clients in sometimes, to see the show. And the club owners went nuts trying to steal her from each other. It was crazy. She was underage at first, too, but they got her fake papers just so she could keep bringin’ in that bank, you know?”

“You should hear how proud you sound.”

“Of pole dancing, no less—I know.”

“She made it more than just pole dancing. And I can hear it when you talk about it.”

“That can’t be Urgent Care,” I said—there’d been this sign on the highway, but when we got there it was just a couple of portable buildings. Prefab jobs that looked all beat up and dingy.

“Oh, out here it could be,” Wyatt said. “I’ve seen worse.”

“Well, not for my kids,” I told her.

“How far is the nearest real hospital?”

“Another hour maybe. Maybe more, I’d have to GPS it.”

She sighed and said, “Well, let’s start here, at least. If they think it’s necessary or we aren’t pleased with what we find, we can take them to Emergency.”

I glared at the old buildings for a moment. And then I shrugged and said, “Okay, I’ll give it a look see...”

It was worse inside, though. It was crowded with locals all crammed together in rows of those old molded plastic school chairs—the ones that are always either sort of royal blue or bubble gum pink. And it smelled like piss and B.O. and the industrial strength disinfectant they doused it with trying to keep it clean.

But decades of blood, sweat, tears and dirt was ground into everything. And the Indian woman at the little check in window looked like she was scared of us. The way she said, “Can I help you?” was more like, “Are you lost or something?”

I went over and did all the paperwork and whatnot, with the kids slung around me. Wyatt stood there hugging herself like she was trying to make herself a smaller target for the germs and viruses that had to be hanging in the air.

I didn’t even want to sit down. But then I looked at all the basset hound faces watching us, and it shamed me into finding us a couple of chairs.

And then, I saw Amy. I will never forget her name or that morning, because of how ashamed of myself she made me feel.

She was a little cueball head—a chemo patient, with burning eyes. Cute kid. Mexican or Indian. But sicker than my kids had been since after they kicked Maddie’s drugs right after they were born. Sicker than they would ever be—at least I hoped so.

But I wished she wasn’t so sick, the moment I laid eyes on her. She was leaned over with half her body on her mother’s lap. And her mother looked like the most exhausted woman on earth. And now she’d been up before dawn, taking her kid to Urgent Care.

You could see she was a pretty woman. But everything on her face was starting to turn downward at the corners, into a permanent, dull eyed frown. No more life in the eyes. She was just getting by, day to day, crisis to crisis.

I found out her daughter’s name when the clerk called out, “Amy Anderson?!” The little cueball sat up, and my heart broke even more. She was skin and bones. And those eyes were sort of sunk back in her skull.

Her mother said, “Wait here...” and went over to the window.

And that clerk goes, “She just has IHS?”

“Indian Health will pay if it’s the only place we could go. We been here lots of times.”

“We only have general practice here. So they can’t...I mean—“

“She’s got the flu or something.”

“But if she’s on treatments or something like that, then we might not be able to give her what we give the other ones.”

“They seen her lots of times.”

“I’m just saying what’s here in her records. That what she’s taking, they’re not sure she should be coming here. They want you to—“

I got up then—Wyatt tried to grab me, but I got away too fast.

And I went over there and said, “Kid’s sick! You can see she’s sick! What’s the problem?!”

The mother sort of frowned at me like, “What the hell do you care?”

And the clerk got all scared again and said, “I’m trying to explain, sir.”

“So if she can’t go here, where can she go? Cause we’ll go with her.”

“I’m telling her,” the clerk said.

“Is there ambulance service or anything? To take her?”

I knew I was getting weird, but I was mad. And the mother said, “I can’t pay for that. I don’t think they would pay for that...” But there was some light in those tired eyes. Search lights, trying to figure out what the hell my problem was.

So I said, “I’ll pay for it. Just...if they have it, I’d like to pay. I know it sounds weird, but I can.”

Everybody was looking at me like I was nuts. So Wyatt came over and said, “If you want to go, he can help,” to give her a sane voice she could trust maybe.

“We’ll all of us go there,” I said.

And the mother said, to Wyatt, “It’s a long way. I wanted to see somebody now.”

It was a nice way of saying “No.” But then Wyatt seemed to take my side.

“It could be hours,” she said. “It’s very busy here. If there’s a way to get there a little quicker, maybe we should do it.”

“They gotta come all the way from town and then they gotta go all the way to Flag if you want that kinda hospital,” the clerk said. She was getting pissed now. Like we’d insulted her personally.

“I want the best you can get us to the fastest,” I said. Which...didn’t make sense but I think you get what I meant. She did.

She said, “And it’s not an emergency, either.”

So I said, “Anything happens to that one is an emergency—get a private one, if you have to. They’ve got ‘em, don’t they?”

I had my IPhone out already. Wyatt sort of smiled quietly and told the clerk, “If you can find something, you probably should.”

But I was running it down to my peeps, who were back to me ‘way before the clerk could even find whatever the hell she was rummaging around for back there.

And when Wyatt saw the little smile in my eyes, she said, “Let me guess...”

And I said, “Fastest way,” to her. And to the mother I said, “We can fly ‘er there. Won’t take long at all.”

She didn’t know what to say. She looked at Wyatt, then at me, then at her sick baby—that’s what did it. She looked at Amy.

And she said, “In a plane?”

“Helo. Helicopter,” I said. “It’s comin’ right now. We’re all goin’.”

That got everybody buzzing and grunting and grumbling. And if I could’ve got a whole squadron of ‘em I would’ve. I was tempted to order a big old tour bus, actually. But I remembered the beating I took that night, and that they’d been partly right to give it to me.

Yeah, they were sick and going to have to wait for hours. But it wasn’t up to me all the time, to do these things. It wasn’t right, even, in a way. It was like showing off. Or telling them they couldn’t handle their own business.

But Amy didn’t have a lot of time. You could see that. And the stupid stuff her mother had been listening to was only wasting what little she did have. I felt solid about helping her.

But I checked Wyatt’s eyes to make sure. And they were fine. Proud, even. Though she tried not to show it too much. She rubbed my arm and said, “Let’s sit,” and then, to the mother, “You’ll hear it when it comes. And you can decide then.”

“She goin’ with you or what?” the clerk asked. Like she hadn’t heard what Wyatt said.

“I don’t know yet,” the mother told her, with some bite to it.

“Well, if he’s gonna be taking you there’s other people here could go in her place.”

“Do you see that child?” Wyatt finally snapped. I loved it. I swear I did. I wanted to marry that woman that very day, for hissing at her like that.

“Oh, she seen ‘er. We come in and outta here damned near every other day,” the mother said. “I don’t know why all of a sudden it’s a federal case.”

“There’s some good doctors we could get for her,” I said. “Real good ones. If you’ll let me. Will you let me?”

She stared at me for a minute. But then, those frowny features of hers almost turned upwards.

And she said, “Who are you? That you can do all this stuff?”

“He’s Santa Claus,” some woman in the waiting room called out. And everybody started laughing then. The whole feel of the place changed, too.

The mother just smiled at me. Like maybe she was starting to believe there was one.

While we were waiting at the real hospital, Amy woke up some and played peekaboo with Wyatt. And then she laid in Wyatt’s arms while her mother went to get all the paperwork done. And Wyatt taught us all this little song, while she rocked Amy in her arms. It went:

Thanks a lot

Thanks for the sun in the sky

Thanks a lot

Thanks for the clouds so high

Thanks for the animals, thanks for the land, thanks for the people everywhere...

Thanks a lot...

Thanks for all I’ve got...

 And for a minute there, we were all woo woo and full of big hope.

But we would find out that Amy had died in the hospital a few days after that. Bleeding from how the chemo had just eaten away at her guts. And because her blood had quit clotting because of the chemo, too.

Wyatt cried like she was a relative. I threw a bottle of water across the room we were in and broke a lamp—the office in our sky villa in Vegas, it was. A universe away from Amy’s world. The world she had just flown away from. And I hated the world, for a while after that.