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“Where are you now?” I said.
“We’re at Linksfield Hospital.”
“Okay, I’m on my way.”
I jumped out of bed, ran down the corridor, and banged on Mlungisi’s door. “Dude, my
mom’s been shot! She’s in the hospital.” He jumped out of bed, too, and we got in the car and
raced to the hospital, which luckily was only fifteen minutes away.
At that point, I was upset but not terrified. Andrew had been so calm on the phone, no
crying, no panic in his voice, so I was thinking, She must be okay. It must not be that bad. I
called him back from the car to find out more.
“Andrew, what happened?”
“We were on our way home from church,” he said, again totally calm. “And Dad was
waiting for us at the house, and he got out of his car and started shooting.”
“But where? Where did he shoot her?”
“He shot her in her leg.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, relieved.
“And then he shot her in the head.”
When he said that, my body just let go. I remember the exact traffic light I was at. For a
moment there was a complete vacuum of sound, and then I cried tears like I had never cried
before. I collapsed in heaving sobs and moans. I cried as if every other thing I’d cried for in
my life had been a waste of crying. I cried so hard that if my present crying self could go back
in time and see my other crying selves, it would slap them and say, “That shit’s not worth
crying for.” My cry was not a cry of sadness. It was not catharsis. It wasn’t me feeling sorry
for myself. It was an expression of raw pain that came from an inability of my body to express
that pain in any other way, shape, or form. She was my mom. She was my teammate. It had
always been me and her together, me and her against the world. When Andrew said, “shot her
in the head,” I broke in two.
The light changed. I couldn’t even see the road, but I drove through the tears, thinking,
Just get there, just get there, just get there. We pulled up to the hospital, and I jumped out of
the car. There was an outdoor sitting area by the entrance to the emergency room. Andrew
was standing there waiting for me, alone, his clothes smeared with blood. He still looked
perfectly calm, completely stoic. Then the moment he looked up and saw me he broke down
and started bawling. It was like he’d been holding it together the whole morning and then
everything broke loose at once and he lost it. I ran to him and hugged him and he cried and
cried. His cry was different from mine, though. My cry was one of pain and anger. His cry was
one of helplessness.
I turned and ran into the emergency room. My mom was there in triage on a gurney. The
doctors were stabilizing her. Her whole body was soaked in blood. There was a hole in her
face, a gaping wound above her lip, part of her nose gone.
She was as calm and serene as I’d ever seen her. She could still open one eye, and she
turned and looked up at me and saw the look of horror on my face.
“It’s okay, baby,” she whispered, barely able to speak with the blood in her throat.
“It’s not okay.”