The Yada Yada Prayer Group Gets Tough

by Neta Jackson

  Josh started to roll his eyes, but I jumped in. “It’s mostly for me, Josh, so I don’t lie awake worrying till you’re home safe. I’ll set it for fifteen minutes after your curfew to give you some leeway—and you can always call if you need more time. Just so we know.”

  “Whatever.” The back screen door banged behind him as he went out.

  The phone rang as Denny and Amanda divided the last of the pizza. “I’ll get it!” Amanda jumped up, sucking pizza sauce off her fingers as she dashed for the phone. A moment later she was back, her face wrinkled in a frown. “For Dad.” She handed the phone to Denny and whispered to me, “Sounds like Nony Sisulu-Smith, but she asked for Dad.”

  My ears perked up.

  Denny listened a moment. “No, not since we left the rally . . . He said he was going back to his office for a while . . . Don’t worry about us, Nony; we’re fine . . . Yeah, it got a little rowdy, but . . . No, they didn’t stick around either . . . By the way, Mark handled the situation very well. You would’ve been proud of him.” He laughed. “Hey. Tell those two young rascals Mr. Denny says, ‘Get in that bed!’ . . . Don’t worry, Nony. He probably turned off his cell and forgot to turn it on again . . . OK, then.”

  Denny came back to the table and reached for the last piece of pizza. “Nony. She’s worried. Mark’s not home yet and it’s past the boys’ bedtime, and he’s not answering his cell.”

  JOSH’S “CURFEW ALARM” didn’t awaken me, but the phone did.

  Riiing . . . riiing . . . riiing . . . riiing—

  I fumbled in the dark, practically lying across Denny to reach the phone on his side of the bed. He grunted in his sleep. The glowing red digits on the bedside clock said 12:35.

  Grr. If this was Josh asking to stay out later—

  “Hello?”

  “Jodi . . .” The voice on the other end broke and began to cry. Female. Accent.

  “Nony? Nony! What’s the matter? Are you OK?”

  Denny rose up on one elbow and leaned an ear close to the phone.

  “Jodi.” Nony’s voice was barely a whisper. “Can you and Denny come? Right away! The police . . . the police just left. One of our neighbors found Mark . . . badly beaten . . . behind our garage. They took him to Evanston Hospital. He’s unconscious . . . maybe lying there for hours. Oh, please. Come quickly!”

  24

  Denny snatched the phone. “Nony, wait. Come where? To your house? The hospital? . . . OK. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.” He practically slammed the phone down. “Hospital. She’s waking the boys, taking them with her. We’ll meet her there.”

  Heart pounding, I was already pulling on my jeans. Then I stopped, one leg in, one leg out. “Denny! We don’t have a car! Josh might be out another thirty minutes!” Or forty-five. I cursed myself for giving him an extra fifteen minutes.

  But to my surprise, a sliver of light peeked from beneath Josh’s bedroom door. I flung it open without knocking. “Thank God you’re home! Dad and I have to go to the hospital. It’s Mark. Stay with Amanda—”

  Josh vaulted from his bed, jerking off his earphones. “Hospital? What happened? What’s wrong with Dr. Smith?”

  Amanda came out of her room, rumpled with sleep, confused by the commotion. When Denny repeated Nony’s phone call, she burst into tears. “I want to come too!”

  Fear and disbelief propelled us out of the house in an amazingly short amount of time. By the time we backed the Dodge Caravan out of the garage, Denny had called Peter Douglass and Ben Garfield. As the minivan crossed Howard Avenue and sped through the near-empty streets of Evanston, I used the cell phone to call Stu and the Hickmans. I got Chris, who didn’t want to wake up his mom, but I told him I’d personally wring his neck if he didn’t.

  Between phone calls my thoughts tumbled, hardly distinguishable from my thudding heart. Oh God! Oh God! Not beaten up, not Mark! Was he hurt badly? Nony must be out of her mind with panic. Should I call the rest of Yada Yada? Maybe I should wait, see what the situation was, and make more calls later.

  The parking garage of Evanston Hospital, a six-story monolith usually packed with cars like a family-size can of sardines, swallowed us whole as we hurtled past the upright arm of the empty cashier’s booth. Artificial lights and shadows danced as Denny squealed around corners, passed rows of empty spaces, and pulled into the area marked Emergency Room Parking Only.

  Jogging through the automatic sliding doors, we saw Marcus and Michael Smith, sweatshirts pulled over matching Spider-Man pajamas and wearing gym shoes with no socks, huddled in waiting room chairs on either side of their mother. Nony lifted her face to us, streaked with fresh tears, her braided hair hidden beneath a snug black and gold scarf tied in the back. She stood up, and we all hugged. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for coming. I didn’t want to leave the boys alone, but now I can go in with Mark.”

  “What are they—?” Denny started.

  Nony shook her head. “I don’t know. They haven’t told me anything yet.” She disappeared through the doors marked Do

  NOT ENTER. HOSPITAL PERSONNEL ONLY.

  Amanda sat down cross-legged on the floor of the waiting room, and Michael, small for his ten years, cuddled into the curve of her arm. Marcus, at twelve the spitting image of his father, touched fists with Josh and sank back into the padded waiting room chair, shoulders hunched.

  We waited. Neither Denny nor I spoke. I couldn’t sit. I paced. How could this happen? What happened? God! I railed in my spirit. This isn’t supposed to happen! Didn’t we pray?

  Peter and Avis hurried through the automatic doors a half-hour later, Stu on their heels, her tousled long hair caught up in a butterfly clip. Jeans, sweats—the attire of middle-of-the-night dashes to the hospital. Denny and Peter shook hands grimly. Peter muttered, “Don’t need to guess who did this. Does Nony know?”

  Denny shook his head slightly, nodding toward the two boys. Peter pressed his lips together.

  Stu pulled me aside. “Does Nony know what? How does Peter know who did it? What happened, anyway? Is it serious?”

  I wanted to throttle her. Too many questions! Didn’t have answers anyway. I just shook my head. None of that was important right now. Only one thing mattered: was Mark OK?

  We needed to pray!

  I caught Avis’s eye. As if reading my mind, she said, “Let’s pray.”

  We pulled together in an awkward clump, holding hands. Even Michael and Marcus joined the circle, clinging to Amanda and Josh.

  “Lord of heaven, Satan’s having a heyday right now. But he’s gone too far!” Avis made no effort to pray softly, and a frowzy-haired woman sitting nearby got up and moved to a chair on the other side of the room. “We’re drawing a line in the sand, Satan. You’ve gone this far but no further! We’re standing here in the gap, wearing the armor of God, ready to face the enemy!” She paused a moment, as if shifting her focus. “Jesus! By the authority of Your name and the power of Your shed blood, we say, ‘Enough!’ Mark belongs to You! By Your stripes he is healed!” Her voice choked up with emotion. “Oh Jesus, Jesus . . .”

  I heard sniffles and peeked. Marcus was crying, trying to stifle the tears, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Poor kid. He’s scared to death about his father. A lump stuck in my own throat.

  “God, I don’t know what happened; I only know that Mark is hurt.” Stu, not much of a pray-out-loud person, gripped my hand as if holding on to a life preserver. “Please, Lord, You healed a lot of people when You walked this earth. I’m asking You to take care of our brother, Mark Smith. Whatever’s wrong, make it right.”

  Whatever’s wrong. We still didn’t know how badly Mark was hurt. I glanced up, trying to peer beyond the doors. Where’s Nony?

  A small voice whimpered, “Please, God, don’t let my daddy die.”

  That undid me. Tears spilled over, my nose started running, and I had to let go of Denny’s and Stu’s hands to fish in the pocket of my jeans for a tissue. None, of course. I slipped away until I fo
und a box of hospital tissues.

  When I came back to the circle, somebody had started the Lord’s Prayer. “—Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us—”

  I heard a gagging sound. Male. As if the word forgive had gotten stuck in the throat.

  “—And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”

  A hush followed, as the words of the prayer got a dose of reality there in that emergency waiting room. “Your will be done”? “Deliver us from evil”? as if the phrases themselves hung in the air, waiting to hear how bad it was, after Mark Smith had been beaten and left lying in the alley behind his house, maybe for hours.

  Peter Douglass expelled a sharp breath, as though trying not to explode. “Don’t know if I can pray that right now, God—that part about ‘as we forgive those who sin against us.’ I admit it, Lord. I’m angry! I’m furious. Some of us have a good idea who did this, and it wasn’t an accident. I know vengeance belongs to You, but I’d sure like to see those thugs pay for this.”

  “Help us, Jesus,” murmured Avis.

  My own emotions felt strung too tightly to pray aloud; others probably felt the same way. Avis closed the prayer time with a verse from Psalm 50, the one about “call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me.” “We’re calling, Lord. Hear the prayers of our hearts!”

  Our prayer circle broke up, but I felt grateful. Avis understood our silence.

  We waited some more. The hands of the clock inched past three o’clock. Michael fell asleep, his head on Amanda’s lap. Marcus and Josh went hunting for a vending machine. Avis sat with her Bible on her lap—did she go anywhere without her Bible?—reading the Psalms. Peter paced, patting his shirt pocket from time to time as if looking for a cigarette. I smiled slightly. He must’ve been a smoker in another life. At that moment, I understood the urge. I wanted something to do with my hands. Something to calm me down.

  I slumped against Denny, grateful for his arm tight around my shoulder, even though his grip hurt my shoulder, still aching from the fall that afternoon . . .

  The fall. The rally at the Rock. Mark treating the White Pride spokesman respectfully, in spite of the man’s abusive words. Josh accused of being a skinhead, of being“one of them.” Mark standing on the wall. The kid in the red tie threatening, “We know where you live.”

  Nony appeared. I didn’t see her coming; she was just there. We all jumped.

  Mark! Is he—? The unspoken, unfinished question from every heart hung in the air.

  Exhaustion lined Nony’s exquisite face. She spoke almost as if in a trance. “They’re still doing tests. A CAT scan, an MRI, a PET scan, and . . . something else. An EEG, I think. Not sure what it stands for . . .”

  “Nony, sit down.” Avis put an arm around her and guided her to a chair.

  Amanda started to shake Michael’s sleeping form, but Nony held up her hand. “No,” she whispered. “Don’t wake him. In a moment.” She looked at each of us in turn, as if orienting herself to where she was. “He’s still unconscious. They say he’s badly hurt—head trauma mostly. Eye injuries, hemorrhaging . . . but they don’t know how much. The police said it looks like he was struck”—her voice wavered—“with a brick. Several times. Also some broken ribs and bruising on his side, as though he were kicked—”

  “Mama!” Marcus reappeared with a can of pop, Josh on his heels. Michael woke up at the sound of his brother’s cry, and Nony gathered her two young sons into her arms, trying to answer their barrage of questions simply. “Daddy’s head is hurt. They’re doing a lot of tests. We’ll know more when they finish the tests . . . Yes, somebody hurt Daddy, but we don’t know who—oh!”

  Nony stood up as two men in rumpled sport coats and open shirt collars came out of the Hospital Personnel Only doors and headed our way. “Detective Maxwell. Detective Rollo,” she acknowledged.

  A sense of déjà vu made me feel weak in the knees. Police asking us to leave the hospital room at Cook County so they could talk to Delores’s son José after he’d been caught in gang crossfire a year ago. Police looming beside my hospital bed a couple of months later while I was crazy with pain and fear, to ask me about the car accident at the corner of Howard and Chicago that left a boy dead—

  I groped for an empty chair and sat down.

  The older of the two detectives, a flabby-faced man with heavy-lidded eyes, picked at his teeth with his little fingernail. “These the friends you said may have seen your husband this afternoon?”

  “Yes.” Nony looked at us apologetically. “I’m not sure which of you were at that rally this afternoon, but, please, tell the detectives whatever you can about what happened.” Her large eyes said, And me.

  The detectives interviewed each of us in turn, and asked where they could reach Ben Garfield and Carl Hickman.

  “We know who did this,” Peter Douglass insisted. “One of those White Pride guys threatened Mark after the rally. He said, ‘We know where you live.’ ”

  Nony’s eyes widened; fear tightened the muscles in her face. She drew Marcus and Michael closer.

  “That so?” Detective Maxwell eyed the rest of us. We all nodded.

  Except Josh. He hesitated. “Well, not exactly.” We all looked at him. He shifted uncomfortably. “What I mean is, the guy muttered something to Dr. Smith, and my dad asked what he said. Dr. Smith didn’t want to tell us, but my dad and Mr. Douglass insisted. That’s when he told us what the guy said: ‘I know where you live.’ Like a threat.”

  25

  The two detectives looked at each other. “What? You don’t believe us?” Peter snapped. “Mark wanted to brush it off; he didn’t take it seriously. But look what happened! They knew where he lived!”

  Detective Maxwell spoke with irritating patience. “I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. We’ll check it out. But if none of you actually heard this guy make a threat, we can’t arrest him on hearsay.” His notebook snapped shut. “We’ll need to ask Dr. Smith himself. If . . . uh, when he regains consciousness.”

  Nony sank weakly into a chair.

  “We’re sorry about what happened, Mrs. Smith.” Detective Rollo tried to smooth over his partner’s blunt persona. “For both you and your boys. We’ll be in touch. We will catch whoever did this to your husband. And we wish your husband the best.”

  The detectives had barely disappeared when Josh blurted, “You mean they can’t go after that guy? I mean, if somebody tells you ahead of time he’s been threatened, isn’t that enough to at least check it out?” My son backed into a chair and put his head in his hands. “Why did I say anything? We know he said it.”

  Denny started to say something, but it was Nony who reached over and touched Josh on his knee. “Josh, you did the right thing. Better to have the truth come out up-front than later. It will all be for the best.” But she looked up at the rest of us, standing around. “That’s really what Mark told you? That one of the White Pride people said—”

  “Mrs. Smith?” A white-coated doctor appeared. “I’m Dr. King. Do you mind stepping this way? We have some preliminary test results and need to—”

  “Is my husband going to be all right?”

  The doctor, who looked all of thirty and badly in need of sleep, cleared his throat. “He’s stable. But his injuries are serious and we need your permission . . .” He beckoned. “Can you come this way?”

  Nony took a hesitant step. “Could I . . . could someone come with me? If decisions need to be made?”

  Stu offered to stay with the young people, and Peter, Avis, Denny, and I ended up with Nony in a curtained partition in the emergency room. The situation, the doctor explained gravely, was that Mark had a skull fracture, with possible bleeding in the brain—an “epidural hematoma,” he called it. Mark’s other injuries—broken ribs, damage to
his eyes, many lacerations—would be treated as soon as possible, but they needed Nony’s permission to perform immediate surgery before the bleeding did damage to his brain.

  “How . . . ?” Nony looked bewildered.

  The doctor looked uncomfortable. “We need to drill a small hole in the skull to drain the blood and relieve the pressure.”

  “Oh God,” Nony moaned. I turned away. Drill a hole?

  “Mrs. Smith, please.” The doctor’s voice was kind but urgent. “Time is critical.”

  Nony signed the necessary papers. A nurse told us we could move to the family waiting room on the surgical floor and directed us to the appropriate elevator. On the fifth floor, the small family waiting room was empty, but we pretty much filled it.

  No one needed to tell us to pray.

  THE HANDS OF THE CLOCK in the waiting room moved with agonizing slowness; at other times, the time seemed to leap forward. Where did the last hour go?

  As daylight filled the sky beyond the rose and green hospital décor, Dr. King returned, saying the surgery had gone well, and they were now dealing with Mark’s other injuries. As soon as he arrived in the ICU, Nony could see him. He ushered her to a private room with a phone so that she could make some phone calls.

  Phone calls. I should call the rest of Yada Yada. I glanced at the sign that said No Cell Phones and headed for the elevator. “Mom?” Amanda came running after me. “I’m hungry. Can we get something to eat? Something for the boys too?”

  Duh. Of course. We’d been up all night. I suddenly realized how tired I was. How tired everyone must be. “We’ll get something for everyone, OK?”

  I sent Amanda to the cafeteria with my one and only credit card—huh! That was a first!—and told her to pick up bagels or sweet rolls, juice, and coffee; I’d come back to help her carry it upstairs after I made my calls from the parking lot.

  I called Florida first to give an update. “Girl, ’bout time ya called!” She was practically yelling. “Carl and I be wearin’ a path in the floor, goin’ nuts. How’s Mark? What’s happenin’? How’s Nony?” I filled her in as best I could, heard her croak something under her breath when I said they had to drill a hole in his head.