Chapter 16
“Chris! Come home now! I think your sister is dying!”
After hearing his mother’s frantic plea, it took Chris only three steps to get to top speed as he leapt off of Dana’s porch and hit the ground running. He didn’t know what was going on, but the panic in Vivian’s voice told him it wasn’t good. Chris ran past two bus stops on the way to his house. Even though he kept an eye out for the bus as he was running, he didn’t have time to wait for the slow-ass Cleveland transportation system. As he ran, horrific thoughts passed through his mind. Was his sister going to die? How would his mother cope with it if she did? How would he, himself, deal with it? Since the sidewalk was full of pedestrians, Chris had to dodge quite a few of them on the way.
“Hey, watch it,” an elderly man yelled as Chris nearly knocked him to the ground. Luckily for Chris, his house was on the same side of the street he was running on, so he didn’t have to worry about darting into traffic and getting hit by any cars. By the time he got to the corner of his street, Chris was winded. His frantic sprint had pretty much absorbed all the air from his lungs, but Chris knew that he couldn’t rest long. He bent over for a second to catch his breath, but when he stood back up to start running again, his heart skipped a beat.
From the corner, he could see the flashing lights of an ambulance in front of his house. Ignoring his fatigue as well as the cramp forming in the side of his stomach, Chris sprinted toward his house. The closer he got to his destination, the more his insides knotted up. Images of his sister’s chest being pushed in and out to resuscitate her flashed through his mind, causing him to panic. He reached his front door just in time to see the paramedics wheeling his sister out of the house on a gurney. His mother was right behind them, weeping heavily.
“Ma, what happened?” Chris asked, trying to maintain his composure.
“I’m not sure. I went into her room to check on her, and she was shaking real bad. I dialed 911, and by the time they got here, she had gone into convulsions.”
“Are you riding with us to the hospital, ma’am?” one of the paramedics asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“What hospital y’all takin’ her to?”
“We’re taking her to the emergency room at Euclid Meridia.”
Chris grabbed his mother and hugged her. “Go ahead, Mama. I’ll lock up the house and meet you there.”
Chris watched helplessly as the ambulance drove off with his sister and mother in tow. After they were gone, he quickly ran upstairs and stuffed his gun under his bed. When he came back outside, several of his neighbors were standing around wondering what had happened.
One woman whom Chris had seen his mother talking to on occasion walked up to him and asked him if everything was okay. With tears starting to leak from his eyes, Chris told her that he didn’t know. He offered to pay her and give her gas money to take him to meet his mother at the emergency room.
“Keep your money, Chris. Let’s go,” she said, leading him toward her car.
* * *
The light blue sky rapidly turned gray as Chris and his mother sat in the waiting room. Chris glanced at his mother, who had prayed no fewer than three times since they’d been there. Chris’s gut feeling told him that his sister’s cancer had returned, but he didn’t dare say that out loud. His mother was having enough of a hard time dealing with what was happening now. Chris silently prayed to God that he was wrong.
His relationship with his mother and sister was one of the few things he treasured in this world. When the doctor came out, Chris’s knees threatened to give out. Vivian’s nerves were shot. There was no one else in the waiting room, so when he started walking through the area, he could only be coming for them. The doctor was a tall man with a long, angular head and Middle Eastern features. The name on his smock read DR. TAL-IB. His eyes were sunken in, and he looked as if he hadn’t been to sleep in days.
“How is she, Doctor?” Chris’s mom asked before he’d even reached them.
The doctor didn’t say a word at first. He just led them to the hard sofa and motioned for them to sit down. He didn’t mince words as he rubbed his face and got right to it.
“Your daughter’s cancer has returned,” he said, staring directly into her face.
“Oh, my God!” Vivian cried as she grabbed Chris for support. “What happened?” she asked.
“At this point, we’re unsure, ma’am. We’re currently running a series of tests on her to try to pinpoint exactly what occurred.”
“Unsure?” Chris jumped to his feet with his fists balled up at his side. “The fuck you mean y’all unsure? That’s my baby sister in there!”
“Chris! Stop that, right now,” Vivian yelled.
Not wanting to hear anymore, Chris stormed out through the automatic sliding glass doors. He was moving so fast he almost ran into them before they had a chance to open. Once he got outside, he snatched his bandana off and rubbed his head. He turned around and looked back through the glass. His mother’s hands were up motioning toward him. Chris could only guess that she was apologizing for his actions. Chris knew he was wrong for going off on the doctor, but that was his little sister lying in that room.
Chris turned his back to the glass and sat down on the ledge. He smiled slightly as he remembered the fun he and his little sister used to have when they were younger. After about ten minutes, Chris gathered the strength to get up and go back inside. When he got back inside, his mother just stared at him.
“Ma, I’m sorry,” he said, misreading her look. “I just don’t want nothing to happen to my sister.”
“She needs an operation, Chris,” Vivian said as if he hadn’t just said a word. “She needs a bone marrow transplant. While we were talking, another doctor came out and said that they located where the cancer returned in her body. They said they can do the operation, but it’s very expensive. The type of insurance we have won’t cover it. Oh God, what are we gonna do?”
Chris’s mother burst into tears and collapsed in his arms. Never in all of Chris’s 17 years had he hated the system as much as he did at this moment. His young mind couldn’t or wouldn’t understand why the hospital couldn’t just do the surgery and save his sister’s life.
“They won’t do the surgery because the insurance won’t cover it?” Chris asked.
“Yes, they will do it, but where are we going to get the money to pay for it? We’re barely making ends meet now. It doesn’t matter, though. I don’t care if we have to live on beans for the next five years, as long as they do whatever they have to do to save my baby.”
“How much is the surgery, Ma?”
“The doctor said it could cost as much as three hundred thousand dollars.”
Chris had some money from the two heists that he and his fellow Young Lionz had pulled, but nothing close to that. “We’ll figure something out, Mama.”
“I hope so, son.”
Vivian got up to go to the bathroom. As soon as she was out of sight, Chris reached for his phone. He had to make some paper, and fast. He looked at the screen to dial and saw that he had a voicemail message. With everything going on, he never even felt his phone vibrate. He punched in his code and saw that it was from Bishop.
“Yo, what’s up, Chris. Hit me back up when you get this message. Antwan done came up on a way to make some major paper.”
Chris couldn’t believe his luck. Just when he needed money the most, it seemed like fate would fall on his side. His smile soon faded as he thought about the amount of money he would have after they split it five ways. He then shrugged his shoulders and smiled again. Any money beats no money.
He started wondering how he and his mother were going to get home when he looked through the hospital glass and saw someone getting out of a cab. Knowing that he needed to hurry, Chris jumped up and sprinted outside. The cab was just about to pull away when Chris called out, “Yo, homie, hol’ up. Me and my moms need a ride home.”
The cabbie looked around suspiciously. When he didn’t see anyone other than Chris, he started to pull off. He’d already gotten robbed at gunpoint once this month, and it had made him leery. But then he heard a woman calling someone named Chris and took a chance that the lad just may have been telling the truth. Yet he flinched when Chris reached into his pocket. His fear was quickly replaced by greed as he eyed the roll of bills in Chris’s hand. His attitude changed in an instant as he even got out of the cab to hold the door open for Chris’s mother.
During the long ride home, Chris stared at his mother, who in turn just stared out the window. Seeing her like this broke Chris’s heart. His mother wanted to stay with her daughter, but the doctor told her that she needed her rest and to come back early the next morning. As tears slowly rolled down his mother’s face, Chris became more determined than ever to get the necessary paper.