Chapter 1 - Beside the Green Minivan
I kept holding my mother after she told me she was okay.
Her face was getting pale, and there was blood at the back of her head.
“I'm OK,” she had said.
I wanted to believe her badly enough that, for a moment, I tried to make what I was seeing fit those words.
I stayed close and spoke to her because I did not know what else to do.
“I'm here, Mom.”
The green minivan was beside us on West Maxwell Avenue, outside our home in Spokane.
It was October 26, 2026, and until that day I had never thought of the space beside that van as somewhere I could lose her.
I had come running after the sound of the collision.
I had not gotten a clear look at the person behind the wheel.
By the time I reached her, the vehicle that struck her was gone.
That was something I would have to explain afterward, even though I hated how little I could tell anyone.
I could describe my mother on the ground.
I could repeat what she said.
I could not point down the street and give the police a name.
When first responders reached us, I had to let them take over.
I moved back because they needed room, not because I was ready to stop holding her.
From a few steps away, I watched people work around the person who usually knew what everyone else needed.
My mother was forty-six.
Her name was Smaah Adam, but I was not used to hearing strangers ask about her by her full name while I stood there unable to help.
They took her to Sacred Heart Medical Center.
At the hospital, I waited for someone to tell us what would happen next.
I kept returning to the one thing she had given me beside the minivan.
She had spoken to me.
She had known I was there.
I treated those facts like reasons to expect good news, although nobody had promised me any.
Every time someone came toward the waiting area, I looked up.
When someone passed without stopping, I looked down again.
I could not settle my hands anywhere.
I wanted information, but I also dreaded the moment someone would finally have to give it to us.
My mother died at the hospital.
When we were told, I understood the words before I understood what they meant for the rest of our lives.
I still expected another sentence about what the doctors would try next.
There was no next treatment for me to wait through.
Later, I learned through reporting about the court records that her injuries included fractures to her pelvis and femur, internal bleeding, and head trauma.
I also read that she had said, “Help me,” at the hospital before losing consciousness.
I had not heard those words myself.
Learning about them afterward hurt in a different way, because there was another part of her suffering that I had not been there to hear.
What I had heard was her trying to reassure me.
I did not know how to carry that back to my five siblings.
Our mother had raised all six of us, and now we needed her most at the very moment we were being told she could not come home.
I could tell them where she had been taken.
I could tell them I had stayed beside her until help arrived.
But I had no answer for why the person who struck her had left her there.
