This is true; it just happened. It occurred to me that it would make a book. I write about it because it's intense.

I was in the ER with a 7-year-old girl, cute as a button, and it occurred to me that this time we shared was very important, more perhaps to her than to me, so I got off my phone (I had forgotten my glasses anyway) and just talked to her, or participated in whatever she was doing. She had become violent, had almost killed her twin sister, and was waiting to be placed somewhere and sent away. Yet she was a beautiful young girl, on her best behavior with me, and one side of her, that occupied most of her life, she was as cute as only 7-year-olds can be.

Outside the ER room there was actually a guard, 24/7. This was lucky because at one point I was on my phone and she just darted out. The guard followed her to the bathroom and she used it, but it could have been more than that. This girl was known to just run away and had done it several times.

One notable thing about the time we shared was her love of numbers. She impressed me by doing math problems; granted, she'd just type them in to the computer and report what it said, but she knew the numbers, liked what she was doing, and always got it right. She was proud of her own success and of course I praised her a lot. When I lent her my phone, she found the sudoku app right away; that's because it has nine numbers on its little app icon. She opened it up and I taught her how to do a sudoku. Way over her head, yes, but it was notable because she was fascinated even when it was clearly too complex.

Another time she started dancing. She put a song on her ipad and just sang and danced to it. The orderlies outside the door couldn't help but smile on their way past. She had a lively spirit. Cha cha now y'all! At this point I was feeling very seventy, while she was clearly seven. I just watched and enjoyed it.

I worried about the hospital crushing her spirit. Of course it will be hard on her. I also repeated to myself, as a mantra, it's not her fault that she couldn't control her anger, or her spirit, that she would hit and scratch and run away and try to strangle her sister. They would see their mother, who loves them, and who told them she wanted them back. But they weren't coming back, and that made them angry. They'd go back to us, or to someone else, and that just didn't go over too well. And the one twin could figure it out, and could handle it; this is the way it is. You get a new home, and you make the best of it. But this second twin, she couldn't control herself. She'd hit, scratch, run away, refuse to go anywhere, resist, do violence.

I tried not to let the tragedy overwhelm me while I was there with her. I could look at her and get very depressed: poor girl, she'll have trouble where she's going; or, I could just live in the moment, be with her, be someone she knew on her path, someone who liked math and encouraged her, or who just liked her. I chose the second, obviously. Even when I argued that we are seventy, we can't handle this, I couldn't help just loving her for who she was. She's a precious soul.

Her twin, in the end, is probably better off without her. Together they find what they have in common: seven-year-old exuberance, and run with it. Together they are clearly too much for us and bad things result. Perhaps if we were younger, more on top of it, they would never have gotten close enough to each other to do anything to get her in trouble. As it happened, she almost killed her sister right in front of the social worker. We didn't have to argue for intervention. It was inevitable from that point on.

I remember the sterile feeling of an ER room. I am grateful every time I'm in there and it's not about me. Next time, I keep thinking, it will be about me. I watch the orderlies and wonder if they will be as competent when it comes to dealing with whatever breakdown I'll have, whenever it happens, which I'm sure will be soon enough. They come in pairs, delivering a heart-measuring service, or oxygen, or whatever they do. Ultimately a placement arrived and two ambulance drivers came to gather her up and take her to a place in the city.

One was a man, the other was a woman. The woman was pretty good at making her feel that it would all be ok. Nevertheless they strapped her to a kind of gurney so they could wheel her into the ambulance and take her on their way. This was their job and they knew what they were doing. She was ok with it. She knew this was coming and that it was inevitable. My wife was on the phone at that point and we told her together that she would be ok and that she'd been very good, and that we loved her. What else can you do? We love her yet we're sending her off to a hospital where she'll be alone but with other kids like her, who can't control themselves, or whose anger is just too strong sometimes. In a way, it was kind of like a milestone in her life, when she went this direction, and certain things will never be the same again. It fills me with apprehension, and a little dread, and a little sorrow of mourning for a childhood gone in the wrong direction.

Yet my last emotion is mostly just tiredness. I've had three sons in hospitals like this one, at points where I didn't know what else to do, where the hospital was the only place for them, where, if you can't control your life spinning out of control, you have to spin it right into a hospital where drugs are going to calm it down for you. And nobody especially likes those drugs, but they are what we have to deal with this. I couldn't at that point argue for anything better, and that was true for my other kids too. The memories of those experiences in those hospital environments are still burned hard into my mind's walls. Boys get off into their own minds about who they are and sometimes it's just a little too far from reality and what are the rest of us to do? Everyone has their own opinion about the value of the hospital but believe me I wouldn't be there for any of these cases if I really knew a choice, or was able to carry it out.

When they had carried her out, it was easy enough for me to just stand up, grab our things, and walk right out, back to my car. I made a comment to an information guy about finding a newspaper with brackets in it, but he agreed with me: you can't find newspapers these days; he wouldn't even know where to tell me to look. Last night, St. Patrick's Day, the hospital had been full, with what one guy called "amateurs," people who didn't know how to drink in excess; now, in the morning, it was much more empty, but the orderlies were still able to dance a little, Cha cha now y'all, in the midst of their duties. Just another day at work, getting people back on their feet and back on their way. Up on the road, I saw the ambulance as it turned onto the ramp on the interstate. It had no windows except in front. I sent my prayers through the ambulance walls. We'll see her again, and she'll be a little different.