I first became worried about the bullet in my mother's head two days after she died. I was afraid the bullet was going to explode. In truth, it was bullet fragments, and they weren't what ended my mother's life. She was the rarest of cases: a woman who had survived her own murder.
The mortician—unaware of the assault my mother had survived all those years ago, when she was kidnapped, raped, and shot—struggled to understand my panic and my question. While my mother was alive, the crimes perpetrated on her in that alley remained abstract to me—a story. I knew one fact for sure, that had the bullet been, in the words of the neurosurgeon who treated her, "a hair over," she wouldn't have survived. I wouldn't have ever been born. |
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