Fixin’ Tyrone (32 page)

Mia checked her watch and it was already after five. She called the office to tell Miss Tenery she wouldn’t be in tomorrow.

“Is everything all right?”

“No. My sister is in the hospital. I’m here with her.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do?”

“No. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Very well.”

Mia disconnected. She was about to call Tyrone to see if he made it inside okay, but a nurse summoned her to the front of the room. It was a Caucasian lady with dark hair, a large nose, and large eyes.

“You can come back now.”

Mia followed the woman through narrow hallways made even more cramped by stretchers set up along one side. All of the stretchers had patients on them in varying stages of disarray. Some family members had pulled up chairs next to their loved ones.

Mia hoped they had an actual
room
for Crystal, and she was in luck. The nurse led her to a screened-off section where Crystal’s unconscious body lay. She had a new oxygen line on her face, a catheter snaking between her legs, and EKG leads attached to her torso and legs. Mia expected
more
machinery.

“Is she okay?” she asked before the nurse could run off.

“Well, her O2 stats are looking good. We didn’t have to intubate her. That’s good, but she
did
test positive for heroin. She actually has high levels of the drug in her bloodstream. Someone should be by in a minute to get a drug history on her.”

“I don’t know anything about her drug history,” Mia said. “She told me she only used it twice.”

“That’s fine,” the nurse said. “Any information you have is good.” She turned to walk away, but Mia put a hand on her shoulder.

“So, what’s going on? Are y’all treating her? Does she have a prognosis yet, or what?”

“No, ma’am. Your physician is Dr. Brown. He’s already looked at her. He’ll be back in a little while to talk with you.” Again she tried to leave.

“But is she
all right
?” Mia asked.

“She’s stable,” the nurse said. She sounded slightly perturbed, but Mia didn’t give a damn. Maybe the woman had a stereotype about the kinds of patients who overdosed, but this particular dopehead was important to Mia. She needed to know that Crystal’s caregivers felt the same way.

“Listen, this is my sister. This is her first problem with drugs, and this is the first time I’ve seen an overdose. I need to know what’s going on.”

The nurse sighed. “Look, she isn’t my patient. We’re pretty busy, but someone will be in here to talk to you shortly. Without seeing your sister’s chart, I can only give you the basics.”

“That’s fine,” Mia said. “Give me the basics.”

“Well, she’s ingested a large amount of heroin. I don’t believe it’s fatal, but I really don’t know. I think she’d be intubated if she were critical.”

“What’s intubated?”

“If her O2 stats were low, they would put a tube down her throat to supply air directly to her lungs. But she’s breathing okay on her own. We monitor her stats and basically wait for the heroin to wear off. When she wakes up, she gets a stern lecture, and then we send her home. That’s pretty much all we can do.”

“So, she’s not in a coma or anything? She’s gonna wake up?”

“We assume she’ll wake up,” the nurse said. “Heroin is basically a sedative. Take too much, and it’ll knock you out, but that’s not usually the big problem.
Excessive
amounts of heroin leads to respiratory distress in most patients. If
that
was happening, you’d have a lot of people in there with your sister, but, as you can see, she’s all right.”

Mia still wasn’t convinced. “But I saw this one movie where they gave this girl a shot—
directly in the heart
— when she had . . .” She trailed off because the nurse was chuckling and shaking her head.

“That’s
Hollywood
. Your sister’s nowhere near that bad. Look at her. She’s
asleep
.”

Mia thanked the nurse and allowed her to run off to another of many errands. The lady was snippy, and a bit uncompassionate, but the information she gave Mia was dead on. No one else Mia talked to could add very much to that preliminary synopsis.

Mia turned and walked into the room where her sister lay. Crystal had been undressed. She now wore a traditional hospital gown with the opening in the back. She lay on her back, her body perfectly aligned, with her arms down along her sides and her feet meeting at the ankles.

It was a terrible reaction, but Mia thought the girl looked dead. She couldn’t get it out of her mind. Crystal looked just as she would on the metal slab in the coroner’s office. All she needed was the toe tag.

Mia started to cry again. She found a napkin in her purse and blew her nose. She stood next to the stretcher and watched the erratic lines skating on the monitor above Crystal’s head. The readings meant nothing to her, but Mia watched them anyway. She knew what it meant if one of those lines flattened out.

Mia shook her head slowly.

“Why you have to be so stupid?” she asked and stroked the girl’s hair. She knew Crystal was going to bump her head at some point, but this went
way
past what Mia had expected.
Way, way
past.

* * *

The police showed up before the doctor did. It was the same two officers who came to the house earlier. They told Mia a rape test had been administered, and there wa
s
semen present, but there were no signs of forced intercourse. Mia told them maybe her sister being totally unconscious might have something to do with that. They said that because Sydney was her boyfriend, they couldn’t necessarily assume a rape had taken place. They said they would have to wait until Crystal woke up and simply ask her if the sex was consensual.

Mia told them about the attack on her own person, and the policemen were eager to take down that information.

“We can definitely pick him up for the assault. Maybe he won’t make bail for a couple days. By then, hopefully your sister will be awake, and we can talk to her about the sexual assault.”

That didn’t seem like enough, but as long as it got Sydney off the streets Mia was fine with it.

Crystal’s doctor finally came to the room thirty minutes later, but he didn’t tell Mia anything she didn’t already know. Crystal had a substantial amount of heroin in her system, but apparently it wasn’t life threatening. She was already breathing by herself, which was the only big hurdle she had to overcome. There was no antidote for heroin. They would send Crystal up to her own room shortly, and from there all they could do was wait for her to wake up.

Mia asked about a possible coma, but the doctor was positive she would wake up on her own. And since Crystal never stopped breathing, there wasn’t expected to be any brain damage, either. Mia was glad to hear all of this, but it did little to calm her nerves. She was left alone with her sister for another fifteen minutes, and then a teenage girl wearing Dickies appeared in the doorway.

“Hi. I’m April. I’ll be taking her up to her room.”

“
You’re
patient transport?” Mia asked. The girl was no more than seventeen and didn’t look physically up to the task.

“I know I’m
small
,” April said with a smile, “but I only have to push the stretcher. Once we get upstairs, the techs will help me get her in the bed.”

Mia nodded and collected the few items she had in the small room. She then followed the teenager halfway across the hospital, or so it seemed. They finally got on an elevator and came out on the fifth floor of the Peterson tower.

“This is a telemetry floor,” the transporter said, breathing a little harder because they were on carpet now.

Mia stood outside of room 521 as they transferred Crystal from her stretcher to the bed. Once she was settled, a medical assistant came in and recorded Crystal’s vital signs. After that, Mia was left alone with her sister again. She looked around and had to admit the room was comfortable. There was a recliner, a sink, telephone, television, and bathroom—all the amenities of home, except they were so far from home it was nauseating.

Mia caressed her sister’s hand for a while and tried to coddle her from this interminable slumber, but nothing she said made those beautiful eyes open. She finally sat back in the recliner and fished her cell phone from her purse. Tyrone hadn’t called since the last time she talked to him. Mia appreciated his patience and understanding. Certain guys like
Eric
would have tried to reach her a dozen times by now.

She dialed the numbers to her house phone, and Tyrone answered after only a couple of rings.

“Hello? Mia?”

“Yeah. It’s me.”

“How’s it going over there? Yo sister all right?”

Mia told him what the doctors and nurses told her, and Tyrone was glad Crystal wasn’t in ICU. He was not happy to hear that Crystal’s boyfriend was still on the loose, however.

“Did you tell them what he did to you?”

“Yeah, and they say they will arrest him for that. Once Crystal wakes up, they might add more charges.”

“What you say his name was?” Tyrone asked.

“Why?”

“I just wanna know. I might know him.”

“His name is Sydney.”

“What he drive?”

“Why, Tyrone?”

“I told you. I want to know if I know him.”

“I don’t want you getting in trouble behind this. The police are going to get him.”

“But just in case they don’t,” Tyrone said, “what he drive?”

“A gray Cutlass with twenty-inch rims. He’s dark-skinned. Wears a lot of fake silver jewelry.” Mia felt she was doing something dangerous, but her anger and pain overrode her conscious.

Tyrone didn’t say anything.

“How are the kids?” Mia asked.

“They fine. What about you?”

“I cleaned that cut on my face. It looked a lot worse than it was. It’s just a little scratch. My shoulder still hurts. And my back. I haven’t taken off my coat yet, so I don’t know what it looks like back there.”

“They didn’t look at your injuries?”

“No. I didn’t say anything about it.”

“Do you want me to bring the kids up there?”

“No. Not tonight. I might bring them tomorrow when she wakes up.”

“What time do you want me to put them to bed?”

“They usually go to sleep at about nine-thirty or ten. But I should be home by then.”

“Oh, you’re coming home?”

“Yeah. I’ll probably leave in just a little bit if she doesn’t wake up.”

“You can stay if you want,” Tyrone said. “I can take care of TC and Mica.”

“I know you can. It’s not that. I want to be there before they go to sleep. I need to talk to them about what’s going on.”

“All right,” Tyrone said. “Well, call me and let me know.”

Mia said she would and hung up the phone.

* * *

At 7:45 a.m. Crystal’s eyelids fluttered a little, but did not open. That was the only movement Mia saw in her for the rest of the night. She gave Crystal’s nurses her cell phone number and told them to call at any hour if Crystal woke up.

Mia was on the highway by 9:10 p.m.

* * *

Back at home, the children were excited about their mom’s arrival. They both ran to the door to greet her, but Tyrone stood off and watched her with a funky look on his face. Mia knew what was wrong with him, but kept a smile on in front of the kids.

“What happened to your cheek?” TC asked.

“It’s okay,” Mia said. “I slipped and fell, but it’s all right.”

Mica thought she could kiss it and make it better, and Mia leaned down to let her.

She told them she was going to take a shower and talk to them about their aunt when she got done. Tyrone followed her into her bathroom and closed the door behind him.

Mia looked at herself in the mirror, and watched Tyrone’s reflection over her shoulder. The scratch on her face had started to swell, and now looked like a long welt. Tyrone approached from behind and wrapped his arms around her stomach, his face set in unmasked anguish.

“Stop looking like that,” Mia said.

“I can’t believe that nigga put his hands on you,” he said. “You got a scar on yo face.”

“It’ll heal,” she promised.

“But still . . .” Tyrone brought his hands up to her collar and removed her soiled sports coat. He let it fall to the floor and then unbuttoned her blouse, still from behind. Through the mirror Mia studied his features. She rubbed the top of her head on his chin. Once he had the buttons free, Mia slid her arms out of the shirt. Tyrone dropped the garment to the floor. Mia looked after it and saw a few spots of blood on the back, none bigger than a dime.

She had on just her bra now, but Mia didn’t feel at all self-conscious about the size of her breasts. Tyrone held her bare sides, and then traced his fingers up her spine. His right hand moved slowly and came to rest on one of Mia’s sore spots.