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“Treat those cuts and scrapes with antibiotic ointment, please,” I instruct the nurse. She nods and gets to work.
“Good job,” I tell everyone. I look over to see Jack standing there with a proud gleam in his eye. He nods once at me, and I swallow down a smile of pride.
***
Ilie in bed and turnon my little clip-on reading light, a medical book in my hands. My living quarters are in a tent. I have next to no privacy, just some kind of makeshift walls that remind me of office cubicles. I have a bed and a dresser here, and we all share a bathroom.
I don’t complain because again, I deserve to be uncomfortable. I deserve to be here, helping people and saving lives. It’s the least I can do. It’s sort of my sentence for another life lost because of me.
My first week here I helped save two patients from dying from cardiac arrest. The AED machine is old, but it did the trick. It helped to heal my black heart to know I’d made a small difference.
And I continue to do so. I don’t know how long I’ll be here, but I’ll stay until I feel like I deserve happiness and love. Right now, I don’t. The crushing guilt over Mr. Stamp and his orphaned daughter haunts me.
This was how I felt in prison. Every night the little girl’s blue eyes would haunt my dreams. I had nightmares about her dad sneaking into my cell and stabbing me. It took a couple of years inside that place for the nightmares to stop. Or maybe they hadn’t. Maybe I just got used to them—knew I deserved them, and learned to live with them. Guilt and shame over distracted driving and not paying attention after a fun night out with the guys that had cost a woman her life.
“Distracted driving is just as bad as driving chemically impaired,”the judge lectured me at my sentencing hearing.“Mix them together and it’s a recipe for disaster. I sentence you to six years in a Colorado State correctional facility, with no possibility of parole until at least five years.”
I close my eyes and try to shake off the judge’s haunting words that plagued me every single day of my incarceration. But while there, I never denied what I did. When another convict would ask me what I did, I was completely honest. Some felt sympathy, others were disgusted. And rightly so. After all, what I did was disgusting. I was never bullied for it though, since a lot of them were in there for much more heinous things. The Whites would try to make me join in while “punishing” some of them with locks in socks and beatings to the body, avoiding the head and face so the staff wouldn’t see. But I always refused. One of their beatings resulted in a death. I knew who’d killed the pedophile, I just played dumb when asked by the staff. His murder was still “unsolved” when I left.
I do not like thinking about those days. No matter what he did, it was disturbing to watch a man die, to see a human take his last bloody, frothy breath. To listen to his screams in the next cubicle until they were nothing but a gurgling cry that eventually stopped.
I blow out a breath and open the medical book. A lot of this stuff I already know, but my training in first-aid was brief as I was studying sports medicine. I didn’t think I would need it, but I do here. Every one of us is a “dak” here and is expected to be able to treat everything from a scraped knee to a lung infection. Thankfully there are other doctors and nurses here who are more skilled at spotting that stuff, since our equipment is practically prehistoric.
I glance at the cell phone on my small dresser. It’s plugged in to charge, but that generally takes all night, so I plug it in before I sleep. However, being the glutton for punishment I am, I reach for it and power it on to read over the texts.
Christa:I hate you for leaving without saying goodbye.
Christa:I thought we had something, and you just left. I could have helped you through your pain, but you just left. You’re a fucking coward, Eric.
Christa:I’m sorry for my last text. You’re not a coward. I’m just hurting. I miss you so much. Can’t we talk?
I close my eyes and power down the phone. Yes, I want to talk to her. To hear her sweet voice, her boisterous laugh, her soft sighs. But I can’t. She needs to move on from me and find a guy who isn’t a murderer, because she’s right. Iama coward. I couldn’t face anyone so I ran away here to try to catch my breath and try to make amends for what I did to the Stamp family. Christa needs to forget about me, and just ghosting her calls and texts is best. Besides, the cell service over here is pathetic at best, and we pay by the minute on these phones designed specifically for the very few cell providers offered here in Kenya.
With the book open on my chest, I fold my hands over the top of it and close my eyes, picturing Christa’s beautiful smile and her soft, curvy body with my hands around it. I sigh, remembering her sweet kisses and the warmth of her chocolate-brown eyes with the little yellow flecks in the center. Her full red lips and the tiny smattering of freckles on her nose that only I could see because only I got that close to her face.
Her beautiful pierced pink nipples and her creamy flat stomach. Those thick, juicy thighs I couldn’t get enough of.
I drift off to sleep and dream about the girl I can never have again because she’s worthy of better. She deserves the world and I deserve hell.
