“Hello?” she answered.
“I—Imani?” I choked out.
“Yeah?”
“I need you to come home.”
“What? Why?”
“Isa! Hello?”
I kept trying to find the words but failed repeatedly. After a few minutes of listening to me stutter and stammer, she got annoyed and yelled at me to just spit it out, so I did with tears running down my face.
“No, Imani, you need to listen to me. You need to come home. It’s…it’s Mom.”
She sucked her teeth. “Are you playing with me or just trying to be dramatic right now?”
“I’m serious, Imani,” I trembled.
“You two on speaking terms again? Since when did that happen?”
I sniffed. “No.”
“Then, what about her? What’s wrong with her?”
“She was in an accident, Imani,” I stated as calmly as I could.
The line went dead silent for a few seconds. “H–hello?”
“Is–is she okay?”
That was the million-dollar question. The one question I knew she’d ask but secretly hoped she wouldn’t.
“Isa? Talk to me! What the hell is going on?”
“You need to get on a plane and come home.”
“Is it bad?”
I sighed. “Just come. Book a flight as soon as you can and get here.”
“Okay. I’ll see what I can do and call you back. Bye.”
Imani called me about thirty minutes later and said she had booked a flight. All I could do after that was go home and get some rest. As I made my way down the long corridor, I saw doctors wheeling a man out of surgery, and I stood to the side to allow them to pass by. I tore my eyes down to the man lying on the gurney and saw the same tattoo on his arm as I’d seen on Bleu’s earlier that night. My eyes widened, and I froze as I watched the nurses and doctors racing around, going in and out of the recovery room they wheeled him in, and then two cops took their post outside his door. Once I put it together, I raced over to the officers as quickly as my feet would allow.
“Can I see who is in that room?”
“No.”
“You don’t understand! I think I know him!” I panicked.
“Are you family?” he asked, giving me a sympathetic look, but the other remained silent.
“Y–yes! I think that’s my brother in there! Please, I’m the only family he has left!”
“Talk to his doctors,” one said while pointing to the nurse’s station, where four nurses huddled around the small flat screen TV watching the news.
The accident was all the reporter on screen could talk about. There were still helicopters, and dozens of first responder vehicles, including police, ambulances, and fire trucks, lined up and down the bridge. I stood, frozen in place, listening to the reporter run down the entire accident. My mother was coming over the bridge from Seven Pines in the middle of all the heavy rain and thunderstorms and neglected to see the construction worker holding the stop sign on her side of the bridge. To avoid hitting the construction worker, she swerved to the other lane, and the rain caused her car to hydroplane. She jumped the median and crashed into Bleu’s car on the opposite side of the bridge before dying at the scene.