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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.”