Later that night, there was a call from the hospital. Chino and Mrs. Hardin went to see her. The body in the bed, stuffed with tubes, looked incomprehensible to Chino. Deborah’s tiny body had blown up as if she had already been filled with embalming fluid. Her face and hands were distended and misshapen. The nurses said Deborah had been trying to rob a woman on the bus, and when the police arrived to arrest her, they beat her. But her liver was already destroyed and she had water on the brain. Deborah would never wake up again. She was thirty-three years old. At the funeral, Deborah’s
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