He wanted to see the bullet.
For weeks, he had felt it, a bump and an ache, lodged just below his left shoulder. Sometimes other kids asked if they could touch it, and he'd say yes, but not too hard.
If asked, he might pull up his shirt and show the long, fresh scar that snaked from his breastbone to below his navel.
"Thirty staples," he might say, shyly, wondrously, but even the staples in his tender skin didn't grip his mind the way the bullet did.
He had carried the bullet in his small body since the August night it pierced his back near the base of his spinal cord and ripped upward, ravaging his pancreas, his stomach, his spleen, a kidney, his left lung. He sometimes texted his mother in the middle of the night to tell her that it hurt.
Now, on a gray October day, a doctor is about to cut the bullet out, and he's hoping for the chance to inspect the little metal invader.
In a surgery prep room at Lurie Children's Hospital, he sits in a chair, leaning on his mother's arm, while doctors and nurses bustle around.
"How do you prefer to be called?" a doctor asks.
"Tavon," he said. Not Tay-von. Tuh-von.
He'll be under general anesthesia, the doctor explains, so he'll get an astronaut mask. Would he like it to be scented?
Before he can decide which scent — cherry, candy, bubble gum? — another woman enters, a specialist trained in the fears of children.
"My guess," she tells him, "is your imagination is working like crazy right now."
As she talks, he looks away, silent. Withdrawn behavior, the specialist knows, is common in children who have been shot.
When she tells him he'll be given laughing gas, though, he laughs, and for a moment a different boy flashes into view, the old Tavon, charming, lighthearted, graced with an incandescent smile, a 10-year-old boy known as joyful.
"What are you scared of?" one of the relatives gathered around him murmurs. "You don't know? Something. You tired of it? I know. You know what? It's almost over."
He isn't eager to get back into a hospital bed. He spent most of August and September in one, stretched out on his back for so long that he still has a bald spot where his head chafed against the pillow.
But he does what needs to be done, no complaints except the slump of his shoulders.
He slips out of his red Chicago Bulls T-shirt and black pants, into a blue hospital gown.
Climbs into the rolling, metal bed.
Allows strangers to bundle him in white sheets from his chin to his toes, leaving only his small face free.
Lies there wide-eyed and quiet as relatives pray over him, whisper in his ear, promise him hot wings when the surgery is over.
Then it's time.
"Ready to go, kiddo?" the specialist in children's fears asks, and with barely a movement or a sound, Tavon begins to cry.
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Tavon Tanner tears up before surgery at Lurie Children's Hospital on Oct. 17, 2016, to remove a bullet that pierced his body in August.
(E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune) |
From the first day of January through the middle of December this year, 24 children 12 or younger were shot in Chicago.
Shot stepping out of a car. Playing in the street. In front of a home. Outside a Golden Fish & Chicken.
They were shot in the jaw, the chest, the face, the arm, the groin, the back, the foot, the leg, the abdomen, the head.
A 1-year-old in the back seat of a car was struck in the neck.
Jamia, Jaylene, Khlo'e, Tacarra, Zariah, Corey, Devon. Their names varied — some publicly named only as John or Jane Doe — but all were considered "unintended targets," children who just happened to be in the way when the bullets flew.
Toward the end of this violent summer, I got in touch, or tried to, with parents of several children who had been shot, hoping to learn how the attacks had changed their families' lives.
At one girl's home, relatives said they didn't know where she and her mother had gone, maybe to a shelter. The official address of one boy turned out to be a vacant lot.
One friendly woman opened her door and said she knew who had shot her daughter — a family acquaintance currently hiding in Milwaukee. She readily agreed to talk about it more, but when I tried later to reach her, she didn't answer her phone or her door.
I met the parents of another wounded girl one afternoon in the South Side neighborhood of Englewood. They were sitting on their porch while their daughter played with Barbie dolls. The woman invited me up, but it quickly became clear that the man wanted me to go.
"Why are you doing this story?" he asked.
A good question, fair.
Click here for the complete story.
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