Canon
I’m tryingto be patient.
They took Neevah back an hour and a half ago, and no word. I’ve started pacing because apparently that’s supposed to help.
“Pacing won’t help,” Takira says, not lifting her eyes from the ESSENCE magazine she’s reading.
“I know that.”
Still pacing.
“Then stop.”
Shit.
“Is this what they do?” I demand of her . . . and the empty waiting room. “They just leave people out here wondering for hours if their loved ones are okay?”
The magazine lowers and her eyes set on me, sharp and alert. “Love?”
Shit again.
I haven’t even said that to Neevah. I’ll be damned if Takira hears it before she does.
“Loved ones.” I stop pacing. “Friends. Relatives. You know what I mean.”
“Oh, I do.” She gives me another one of those stupid secret grins. “I see you, Canon.”
“Speaking of relatives, should we call her mom? Or . . .”
Her sister?
I know things haven’t been great between Neevah and her family, but they would want to know this, right? But does Neevah want them involved?
“I think we wait on that.” Takira sets ESSENCE aside. “As strained as things have been with her sister, I don’t think we can assume anything.”
“She mentioned she and her mom had a good talk at Christmas.”
“Yeah, but it’s all been weird for so many years, I think we let Neevah decide when she brings them in.”
Takira’s phone rings, and she frowns down at the screen, rolling her eyes. “Somebody from set. I had to drop what I was doing to leave. Lemme get this. I’ll be right back.”
She answers and walks up the hall, disappearing around the corner.
A long sigh exits my body, and it feels like my first full breath I’ve expelled since I saw Neevah fall. My hands ache from being clenched so tightly. First around the wheel driving here. And ever since they took her away. But when I open my fists . . .
I hold my hands out, watching the fingers tremor, a reflection of the quake happening inside of me. I had to drive here. I could not let the ambulance take her. No one else knows because no one else was there the night they took my mother for the last time in a wail of sirens and a specter of flashing lights. Her palliative nurse had left for the evening. I was home for the weekend from school.
Bacterial pneumonia.
In the end, that’s what took her—a complication of the disease she had fought so valiantly that snuck through the back door.
I’ll never forget the sound of her gasping for air, fighting until the end for every breath.
The idea of seeing, hearing Neevah taken away in an ambulance the way they took Mama . . . in the moment, I couldn’t withstand it, so I prayed to God and chased the devil to drive her here in record time.
Slowly, deliberately, I curl my shaking fingers back into fists. It’s a time for control. Not to indulge emotions or to be plagued by fears. Neevah needs me to be strong. To be here, which means I can’t walk out, fleeing the warring scents of disinfectant and disease and the eerie, careful quiet of a waiting room.
I have to stay.