“Is she going to be okay?” Mercedes asked her parents. Their mouths moved about as much as Callie’s eyes: not at all. Mercedes couldn’t see her sister’s mouth; it was hidden by a complicated apparatus to help her breathe. Other machines performed other functions. A day ago, her sister had been flesh and blood, but with one bullet, Callie had become part robot.
“Mom, answer me.” The beeping and hissing of machines served as her mom’s answer.
“I’m calling Jade,” Mercedes said, but her mother shook her head forcefully.
“You’re needed here.” Her mom reached out to touch her, but Mercedes backed away.
Mercedes stared at her sister in the hospital bed. She looks so small, Mercedes thought, like a thin tree branch surrounded by a big white cloud. “What can I do?” Mercedes asked.
“Pray,” her parents said at the same time. Mercedes wondered where Pastor Curtis was. He was one of the first people her dad had called after he helped Mercedes’s mom off the floor and spoke with the police. Where was he? Or the doctors? Or anyone who could help Callie?
“I’m worried about Lincoln,” Mercedes whispered. “We should have told him the whole truth, not just that she got shot, but that she might never—”
“He doesn’t need to know that now.” Mercedes’s dad rose from the chair where he’d been sitting vigil for hours. “Anyway, once she’s better—”
“They said she’s not going to get better,” Mercedes said through tears. Her mother began to cry with her. Mercedes’s dad wrapped his long arms around the two of them, squeezing.
He held tight until the door opened. “How is she?” asked a tall man in a brown suit. Mercedes shook her head, not really answering. Mercedes couldn’t say aloud what she knew inside. Callie would never get better. She could not change it; she must accept it.
“Detective Lloyd Wheeler, Birmingham Police,” the card said. Under his contact info, the words “to protect and serve” mocked Mercedes, who knew she had done neither for her sister.