I’m not going to lie to you: I paused. I paused hard. In that moment, what I heard the nurse saying was, “All of your money will be gone,” and then I started to think, Well…what is she, fifty? That’s pretty good, right? She’s lived a good life.
I genuinely did not know what to do. I stared at the nurse as the shock of what she’d said sunk in. My mind raced through a dozen different scenarios. What if I spend that money and then she dies anyway? Do I get a refund? I actually imagined my mother, as frugal as she was, waking up from a coma and saying, “You spent how much? You idiot. You should have saved that money to look after your brothers.” And what about my brothers? They would be my responsibility now. I would have to raise the family, which I couldn’t do if I was millions in debt, and it was always my mother’s solemn vow that raising my brothers was the one thing I would never have to do. Even as my career took off, she’d refused any help I offered. “I don’t want you paying for your mother the same way I had to pay for mine,” she’d say. “I don’t want you raising your brothers the same way Abel had to raise his.”
My mother’s greatest fear was that I would end up paying the black tax, that I would get trapped by the cycle of poverty and violence that came before me. She had always promised me that I would be the one to break that cycle. I would be the one to move forward and not back. And as I looked at that nurse outside the emergency room, I was petrified that the moment I handed her my credit card, the cycle would just continue and I’d get sucked right back in.
People say all the time that they’d do anything for the people they love. But would you really? Would you do anything? Would you give everything? I don’t know that a child knows that kind of selfless love. A mother, yes. A mother will clutch her children and jump from a moving car to keep them from harm. She will do it without thinking. But I don’t think the child knows how to do that, not instinctively. It’s something the child has to learn.
I pressed my credit card into the nurse’s hand.
“Do whatever you have to do. Just please help my mom.”
We spent the rest of the day in limbo, waiting, not knowing, pacing around the hospital, family members stopping by. Several hours later, the doctor finally came out of the emergency room to give us an update.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Your mother is stable,” he said. “She’s out of surgery.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
He thought for a moment about what he was going to say.
“I don’t like to use this word,” he said, “because I’m a man of science and I don’t believe in it. But what happened to your mother today was a miracle. I never say that, because I hate it when people say it, but I don’t have any other way to explain this.”
The bullet that hit my mother in the butt, he said, was a through-and-through. It went in, came out, and didn’t do any real damage. The other bullet went through the back of her head, entering below the skull at the top of her neck. It missed the spinal cord by a hair, missed the medulla oblongata, and traveled through her head just underneath the brain, missing every major vein, artery, and nerve. With the trajectory the bullet was on, it was headed straight for her left eye socket and would have blown out her eye, but at the last second it slowed down, hit her cheekbone instead, shattered her cheekbone, ricocheted off, and came out through her left nostril. On the gurney in the emergency room, the blood had made the wound look much worse than it was. The bullet took off only a tiny flap of skin on the side of her nostril, and it came out clean, with no bullet fragments left inside. She didn’t even need surgery. They stopped the bleeding, stitched her up in back, stitched her up in front, and let her heal.
“There was nothing we can do, because there’s nothing we need to do,” the doctor said.
My mother was out of the hospital in four days. She was back at work in seven.
—
The doctors kept her sedated the rest of that day and night to rest. They told all of us to go home. “She’s stable,” they said. “There’s nothing you can do here. Go home and sleep.” So we did.
I went back first thing the next morning to be with my mother in her room and wait for her to wake up. When I walked in she was still asleep. The back of her head was bandaged. She had stitches in her face and gauze covering her nose and her left eye. She looked frail and weak, tired, one of the few times in my life I’d ever seen her look that way.
I sat close by her bed, holding her hand, waiting and watching her breathe, a flood of thoughts going through my mind. I was still afraid I was going to lose her. I was angry at myself for not being there, angry at the police for all the times they didn’t arrest Abel. I told myself I should have killed him years ago, which was ridiculous to think because I’m not capable of killing anyone, but I thought it anyway. I was angry at the world, angry at God. Because all my mom does is pray. If there’s a fan club for Jesus, my mom is definitely in the top 100, and this is what she gets?
After an hour or so of waiting, she opened her unbandaged eye. The second she did, I lost it. I started bawling. She asked for some water and I gave her a cup, and she leaned forward a bit to sip through the straw. I kept bawling and bawling and bawling. I couldn’t control myself.
“Shh,” she said. “Don’t cry, baby. Shhhhh. Don’t cry.”
“How can I not cry, Mom? You almost died.”
“No, I wasn’t going to die. I wasn’t going to die. It’s okay. I wasn’t going to die.”
“But I thought you were dead.” I kept bawling and bawling. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“No, baby. Baby, don’t cry. Trevor. Trevor, listen. Listen to me. Listen.”
“What?” I said, tears streaming down my face.
“My child, you must look on the bright side.”
“What? What are you talking about, ‘the bright side’? Mom, you were shot in the face. There is no bright side.”
“Of course there is. Now you’re officially the best-looking person in the family.”
She broke out in a huge smile and started laughing. Through my tears, I started laughing, too. I was bawling my eyes out and laughing hysterically at the same time. We sat there and she squeezed my hand and we cracked each other up the way we always did, mother and son, laughing together through the pain in an intensive-care recovery room on a bright and sunny and beautiful day.
When my mother was shot, so much happened so quickly. We were only able to piece the whole story together after the fact, as we collected all the different accounts from everyone who was there. Waiting around at the hospital that day, we had so many unanswered questions, like, What happened to Isaac? Where was Isaac? We only found out after we found him and he told us.
When Andrew sped off with my mom, leaving the four-year-old alone on the front lawn, Abel walked over to his youngest, picked him up, put the boy in his car, and drove away. As they drove, Isaac turned to his dad.
“Dad, why did you kill Mom?” he asked, at that point assuming, as we all did, that my mom was dead.
“Because I’m very unhappy,” Abel replied. “Because I’m very sad.”
“Yeah, but you shouldn’t kill Mom. Where are we going now?”
“I’m going to drop you off at your uncle’s house.”
“And where are you going?”
“I’m going to kill myself.”
“But don’t kill yourself, Dad.”
“No, I’m going to kill myself.”
The uncle Abel was talking about was not a real uncle but a friend. He dropped Isaac off with this friend and then he drove off. He spent that day and went to everyone, relatives and friends, and said his goodbyes. He even told people what he had done. “This is what I’ve done. I’ve killed her, and I’m now on the way to kill myself. Goodbye.” He spent the whole day on this strange farewell tour, until finally one of his cousins called him out.
“You need to man up,” the cousin said. “This is the coward’s way. You need to turn yourself in. If you were man enough to do this, you have to be man enough to face the consequences.”