WHO: Blaze, Camila, and Eddie WHEN: Flashback: Blaze is about to start kindergarten, Camila is around 18. Eddie has very recently turned 30. Around the same timeline as the last baby thread. WHERE: Wolfe Residence SUMMARY: One night when Eddie is on a stakeout and Camila is babysitting, it turns out that Eddie's former wife really should have mentioned that peanut allergy sometime before she left on her European world adventure. WARNINGS: A child has a bad allergic reaction. Child in a life-threatening situation. An upset Camila, even before Moira entered her life. Blaze used to be a cute kid and that could also depress some people. There are a lot of sad things in this log.
His dad had to go catch people doing adultery, and Blaze’s mom was over the sea for good, so that meant his dad had called The Babysitter. This one was named Camila and she was a girl. Blaze was not sure he liked girls anymore because girls kissed. But Camila hadn’t tried to kiss him the last time she’d been The Babysitter, so Blaze had decided she was still okay, even if she was a girl.
For a minute, his dad had just been talking to Camila, but now his dad was gone. Blaze looked up at The Babysitter. “So,” he said. “What do you want to do?”
Camila knelt down so that she was on his level, this, she had read somewhere, was a good thing to do. At least she thought it had been about children… maybe it was dogs. “We could play a game?” She offered. “Or read a book?” Three options would probably be good. “And your dad said you need a snack later.”
“I like games,” Blaze said. “What games do you know? I can read you a story if you want me to, but later. Later because it’s not dark enough outside yet.” Blaze didn’t know how to read yet, but it was okay because there were pictures. Blaze just used the pictures to decide what the words were. He could read Camila any book with pictures in it.
“We should go check on the snacks and make sure there are any.” Blaze hadn’t eaten very much earlier because he didn’t like foods that were green or yellow anymore. He started walking toward the kitchen. “The last babysitter ate all the snacks. Then he watched a movie with monsters in it. Can you believe it? Then he said ‘Don’t tell your dad.’”
“Sounds like a plan.” Camila nodded before standing to her full height and following Blaze towards the kitchen as she listened to his story. “He ate all of your snacks and let you watch a scary movie, that is almost unbelievable, but I do believe it. Did you tell your dad then?”
Blaze shook his head. “I don’t need to at the moment. My dad is a pie. That means as soon as it’s his day off, he’s going to find out. I made him a clue.” But just in case his dad didn’t, Blaze hadn’t said ‘okay, I won’t tell him’, he’d just said nothing at all, so it wasn’t a promise.
Camila tried valiantly not to laugh but ended up exhaling out of her nose as she grinned down at the child. “That’s really nice of you, what kind of clue was it?” She asked as they approached the refrigerator.
“A picture kind of clue.” Blaze ran over to the cupboard where they kept the popcorn and pulled the piece of paper off that he’d taped to the inside. He walked back over and handed it to Camila. He’d made a bunch of squiggle lines and shapes until he felt like the picture looked enough like a monster. He’d given it red eyes just so Eddie would be sure.
“Oooh,” Camila cooed as she took the picture. “Yes, I see, it’s very scary. Clearly a monster.” She glanced over at the cupboard. “And that’s a good hiding place too.” She wondered if she’d ever been this inventive as a child. Probably, just in different ways.
A smile spread into a beam across the little kid’s face. “Really?! No way! That’s exactly what I was trying to draw!” She’d got it! “How did you know that? You could be a investigator too!” He nodded a moment later. “It goes by the popcorn, because the location of a clue is another clue.”
“Because popcorn means movie?” Camila guessed in a humoring tone. No. She had definitely not been this bright as a child. Not that she could remember anyway. “Speaking of popcorn, is that what you want for a snack? Maybe with some apple or …”
Blaze nodded. “They’re connected.” She got it! But when she made the snack suggestion, he shook his head. “There’s only one bag left.” They had to save the location. Especially since Blaze couldn’t reach the tv. “What do you like to eat?”
“Well,” Camila peered into the popcorn cupboard, shoving aside chip bags and a box of cookies. “I like a lot of things, but it looks like you have some mac and cheese here, or …” A half finished jar of Jif was hiding in the shadows. “Peanut butter. Do you like Peanut butter and jelly? I always liked it better with bananas but I know most people like jelly.”
Blaze used to love mac and cheese, but since he’d decided to go off of green and yellow foods, it was out. He smiled at her and looked excited. “I’ve never had that,” Blaze said. At least not that he could remember. His mom would give him different foods for different days but it was the same foods in a week. She said it made life easy. “I like bananas.” Bananas were not yellow. They were white. The peel was a tricker.
“Well, this will be fun then!” Camila grinned as she reached for the peanut butter, and then opened another cupboard to find plates. She pulled one of the bananas from the counter and handed it to Blaze. “Why don’t you start by peeling that.”
Blaze turned it over to figure out where to start. He started with the top, but it didn’t break when he twisted it. Blaze moved to the bottom. The bottom was easier. “I got it.” He gave The Babysitter the banana, and then went and threw the peel in the trash.
“Thank you,” Camila broke the banana into pieces before searching for a spoon in one of the nearby drawers. She was eventually victorious. “So you just take a little of this,” she explained as she scooped peanut butter out of the jar and onto the plate. “And dip the banana in it.”
Blaze took one of the end pieces because it looked like a good dipper piece. He used it to scoop a big gob of peanut butter and swallowed the whole thing. “It’s really sticky,” Blaze started to observe, but then he started wheezing. He accidentally knocked the plate onto the floor.
Camila’s relaxed, somewhat pleased expression seemed to evaporate. She crouched down to his level again. “Blaze? You okay?” But then the plate fell and it was very apparent that something was wrong. Her mind started to race, cycling back to the emergency numbers that Mr. Wolfe had pointed out before he left. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.
The peanut butter was gluing his throat! Blaze couldn’t make words get past the glue. The pipe in his neck was closing because of the peanut butter. The little boy crumpled and started making horrible choking noises. He clawed at his neck but there wasn’t a door to let the air in or out. He was dizzy.
“Blaze?” Camila had jumped up to grab for the telephone and dial the three numbers that no one ever wanted to dial. The phone was ringing. “Can you just try to breathe deep? Breathe through your nose, can you just ---”
The little boy tried to listen but he couldn’t hear the words at that point. Only the panic. Everything was hot and he was very scared. As he tried to breathe, he crawled toward her. Blaze made it a foot and stopped where he was on the floor.
The line picked up. What was her emergency?
“I’m babysitting and I don’t think -- I don’t think he can breathe?” Hysteria was starting to set in, apparently, her last few words tasted salty as tears leaked from Camila’s eyes. She spoke in a rush. “He was eating and then -- it’s not choking it’s -- please send someone right now --” She gave the address, her face felt hot. “I don’t know what to do can you please send someone right now? He’s not -- it’s hard for him to breathe -- I’m not sure if he’s breathing. Please.”
Ten minutes. He didn’t have ten minutes.
Thankfully the doctor/vet’s office had been in possession of an epipen, thankfully Camila had been reassured that not waiting for the paramedics to get there had been the right decision. But as she sat, hands shaking as she stared at her haphazardly parked car, it was difficult to imagine what she could possibly say when the phone stopped ringing.
“Hello?”
Camila breathed in, even that sounded shaky.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Wolfe?”
“Yes. Camila? Is everything okay?”
The silence stretched for a few seconds before Camila realized that this was a bad thing. That she couldn’t just put the conversation on pause.
“It is now but there was a -- an accident? I’m so sorry, Mr. Wolfe, you didn’t mention a peanut allergy, and the peanut butter was in the cupboard and --”
“What peanut -- what happened? Is Blaze okay?”
“He’s okay now. We’re at the doctor’s if you could come.”
“I’ll be right there.”
The glue in his throat was gone but the doctor said Blaze had to stay at the hospital for some hours in case he stopped breathing one more time. The blue coat doctors had driven him to the hospital in a van and then the white coat doctors took him from the blue coat doctors. There were a lot of doctors at the hospital, probably five hundred, and there was a man with a nail in his hand that made Blaze close his eyes tight.
His dad had come in a car and was talking to a nurse. You could tell the difference between a doctor and a nurse because nurses wore pajamas and doctors wore coats. Blaze was sitting on a bed while he waited for the nurse to finish. There were a lot of beds at a hospital, probably five hundred so all the doctors had a place to sleep. When the nurse left, it was Blaze’s first chance to talk to his dad.
“I’m sorry I throwed up at the vet,” he said, quiet. “Where did Camila go?” Blaze moved his head around to look for her.
“Hey, buddy.” Eddie pulled the hospital room chair as close to the bed as he could get it before taking a seat. He was tired. Things like this were exhausting, physically and mentally. It took him a few seconds to process what Blaze had said and a few more to formulate a response.
“People throw up at the vet all the time.” He murmured as he brushed his son’s hair back from his forehead. “Nobody minds.” He glanced toward the door for a second before adding. “Camila went home with her parents. How are you feeling?”
“Oh, I didn’t know she had parents!” Blaze had never thought about Camila like that because Camila was so big. Big enough to be a mom. And she was a babysitter. He didn’t feel good, but he felt a lot better than before. “I couldn’t breathe. So I fell down. Is Camila mad?”
The laugh feeling came, Eddie felt his chest puff up a little, but no sound came out. He was mostly just thankful that Blaze was here. “No, buddy, she’s not mad. You just scared her a little that’s all.”
His eyes widened. “I wasn’t trying to scare her. I promise.” There was a kid in preschool who would hide in the cupboards and jump out, but Blaze did not do that, because scaring was mean to babysitters. “I was just trying to eat.” Which was now a scarier thought than a monster or a kid jumping out of a cupboard. Blaze didn’t want to eat any foods anymore. He was just going to drink drinks that didn’t have any foods in them.
“No, no,” Eddie hastened to explain. “It’s not like that, sometimes people scare each other without meaning to -- it’s not bad. It just means that the other person cares about you and doesn’t want to see you stop breathing. Do you understand?”
Blaze thought about it. “Oh. That must be why scares has cares in it.” Scare was care with one snake in front of it. Sss looked like a snake because that was the sound snakes made. A snake made caring scaring. Not breathing was scary like snakes because snakes made you not breathe when they wrapped around your neck, and both of them could kill you. Blaze thought he got it. “I won’t stop breathing again, I promise. We just won’t do snacks next time. We can read books or play her games instead. Deal? You can tell her, okay?”
This time Eddie did manage a small laugh, at least until his son started going on about snacks. But now wasn’t the time to explain exactly what a peanut allergy was or why it hadn’t been discovered before, Blaze needed to rest, and Eddie needed to call his ex-wife. “I’ll tell her. Do you think you can rest for a little while?”
Resting wasn’t sleeping, so Blaze already was. But he nodded. He was quiet. “Do you have to go back to a stakeout now?”
“No, no.” Eddie shook his head as he spoke. “I’m going to be right here, bud. I might step out to use the restroom or get you some water but apart from that -- I’ll be right here.”
Blaze sat up a little but his voice was almost a whisper. “For how long?”
“Until you’re ready to go home,” Eddie answered.
“..So a minute?”
“It might be a little longer than that buddy, we have to talk to the doctor again but after that..” Eddie trailed off. “We’re going home. No more stakeouts for a little while. We can do something fun tomorrow, how’s that?”
Blaze hadn’t figured out how long a minute was and he didn’t understand the numbers on a clock yet, but he did know ‘a little longer’ meant a very very long time. The hope in his eyes fell a little, but at the same time, his dad was saying that he was going to stay for that long. He was going to stay with Blaze and he wasn’t going to go on a stakeout tonight or a whole other day. And he wanted to do something fun. Like playing.
It soothed Blaze’s fears that Eddie was about to go away.
There was a beat. “I like you better than my mom,” Blaze said.
The words seemed to produce an instant physical reaction, a slight smile and a twist of Eddie’s gut. There was some small part of him, he realized, some small petty part of him that enjoyed hearing those words. But then there was a larger sweeping feeling of almost overwhelming sadness. It bothered him that Blaze saw his mother so little, it bothered him in ways that he couldn’t quite articulate, and yet, there was nothing he could really do about it.
There was a lecture to be had of course, something about how it was possible to love people in different ways but not put any one person above others. But he was too tired to give it now. So instead he reached for his son’s hand and replied. “I like you too, buddy.”
Blaze looked at him and then took the hand. He held his daddy’s hand until he fell asleep.
In the chair next to his bed, Eddie slowly relaxed as he thanked his lucky stars for this narrow escape.