Hero

Chapter Nine

The first thing Adelle was aware of when she came awake was the pins and needles feeling in her right arm and shoulder.

Then, the pain.

She came awake suddenly, the sunlight streaming in through the blinds in her bedroom stabbing into her eyes. She tried to move and felt the rough texture of the restraints that bound her right arm to the bed’s armrest. With that came the sensation of dampness settling beneath her buttocks, her lower back, and the back of her upper thighs.

She’d wet herself again.

Natsinet breezed in the room, her features all business.

“Up and at ‘em. We’ve gotta get you out of this bed and get those sheets changed.”

Natsinet released the belts she’d used to bind Adelle’s right arm to the guardrail and set them on a chair. As the nurse helped Adelle out of the bed and into the wheelchair, she felt a flare of burning pain at the small of her back.

“When I’m finished changing the sheets I’ll give you a sponge bath and get you into a fresh gown.”

Adelle allowed herself to be helped into a sitting position in the wheelchair and wheeled out of the room. Now that she had the unrestricted use of her right arm again, she began thinking of a way to use it to get out of here.

Natsinet hummed a tune to herself as she stripped the bed. Adelle cast her eyes around the living room, looking for a heavy, solid object she could use to bash the nurse in the head with. The past five days had been an exercise in physical and mental torture. After using the stun gun, Natsinet had followed up on the so-called physical therapy the following morning by binding Adelle’s right arm to the guard rail and tying both her legs down to the bed to inhibit movement in her right side, which had been relatively unaffected by the stroke. This was called constraint-induced movement therapy, Natsinet said. The key was to limit movement of the unaffected part of a stroke patient’s body, restraining it if necessary, and encourage the patient to move those limbs affected in the stroke. This form of exercise rewired the brain, and Natsinet told her that it was a common therapy to help stroke patients regain the use of the parts of the body rendered partially paralyzed. For the first few hours of the therapy Adelle believed her. Natsinet sat on the edge of the bed and moved her left arm for her through a series of rotations and exercises. Then she encouraged Adelle to lift her arm. Adelle tried; she summoned all her strength, all her energy, and thought she detected a tiny hint of movement in her fingers, but that was it.

When Natsinet pulled out the cigarette lighter and ignited it, making a nice flame with a spin of the wheel, she had that look in her face again. The look she wore that first day. That look of evil.

“How about you move that arm now?” Natsinet asked as she moved the flame close to Adelle’s forearm.

Adelle had felt the heat of the flame as it grew close to her skin and she felt herself panic. Get that thing away from me!

Despite the fact that she’d lost the power to move her left side, her nerves were still functioning. She could still feel pain.

“Come on, Mrs. Smith,” Natsinet said, bringing the flame of the lighter within kissing distance of her arm. “Move your arm away from the flame.”

Adelle tried to. And as she summoned the strength to move her arm she thought, you wouldn’t dare burn me, you bitch!

But Natsinet did.

She’d burned Adelle several times throughout the course of the past five days. She also utilized the stun gun. There were faint first-degree burns along her left arm, torso, and down her left leg, each in various stages of healing. Her muscles ached from the electricity that had been pumped into her nervous system from the stun gun. Each time Natsinet came in to her room to begin therapy, Adelle would try to yell for help and get away but she couldn’t. With her right side firmly secured, she couldn’t fight back. All she could do was try to move the stroke-affected part of her body away from the pain. Trying to do so in her condition was physically exhausting. At the end of these so-called therapy sessions she was drenched in sweat and urine, her heart racing with panic.

Natsinet always left her to lie in her sweat and urine sodden clothes. Today was the first day in almost a week she was able to get out of them and get cleaned up.

The burns itched more than hurt now and she refrained from scratching them. She also felt an itching pain along her lower back and buttocks, primarily where her urine had pooled on the bed. Please God, I hope I’m not getting bedsores, Adelle thought. In her condition, infected bedsores could be lethal.

Natsinet gathered the sheets and placed them on the floor. Then she wheeled Adelle into the bathroom, helped her out of her clothes, and gently assisted her out of the wheelchair. Her touch was sensitive, caring; the way a nurse’s touch should be. She guided Adelle to the closed toilet seat and helped her sit down on it. Adelle didn’t feel the least bit embarrassed by her nakedness around the Natsinet. All of her humility had been beaten out of her over the past five days and modesty at this point would have been meaningless.

Natsinet turned the water in the bathtub on and let it run warm.

“I have a fresh change of bed clothes for you,” she said. “First I’ll give you a sponge bath, okay?”

Adelle nodded.

As Natsinet bathed her Adelle listened to the woman talk. She had no idea what was going on in her mind, but she realized the best course of action was to observe her quietly. Let her think she was being submissive, convince her that she had accepted her fate.

Adelle had read about kidnap victims who were held in long periods of captivity that came down with something known as ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, in which the victim came to see the kidnapper as their guardian, somebody they could trust. The kidnapper usually let their guard down around this time. That’s how Patty Hearst had finally escaped from the Symbionese Liberation Army. If Adelle could get Natsinet to let down her guard, maybe she’d be strong enough to do something like knock the bitch upside her head and get the hell out of there.

“You’ll have a nurse come in this weekend, starting this afternoon,” Natsinet said, rubbing the warm sponge down her back. The bathroom floor was damp with soapy water.

“Once we have you cleaned up and refreshed you’ll have your meds and I’ll straighten up around here. I’ll only be gone two days, so—”

Adelle looked at Natsinet, a questioning look in her eye. Two days? I thought you were going to be gone a whole week?

“Oh yes, only two days,” Natsinet said, smiling. “I arranged it with Hospice Nursing. I don’t want anyone else interfering with our program. We’ve been making such great progress together don’t you think?”

Are you out of your mind?

Adelle could only look at Natsinet with a sense of mind-numbing horror.

Natsinet continued washing Adelle, pausing every so often to rinse out the sponge.

“Do you know what it’s like to grow up as the child of a so-called mixed race marriage, Mrs. Smith? It can be a blessing and a curse, depending on how you deal with it. I admit, sometimes I didn’t deal with it very well. I let those…feelings…that anger…simmer for a long time. My father was a physician in Eritrea. My mother was a missionary, from Philadelphia. Her family came to this country from Scotland two hundred years ago. She met my father while she was in Eritrea and she was enchanted with him. They conceived me before they married, and my father emigrated here. Despite his medical training, he was unable to practice medicine in this country. He found work as a…in a less prestigious position. I was raised in the suburbs and I still remember the look people gave us when we were anywhere in public—the mall, a grocery store, the movie theater. They were subtle, disapproving glances. Even though they didn’t outright say it, I could feel what they were thinking: what was that Black man, that African, doing with a White woman?”

Adelle was stunned. She didn’t know how to react. Of course, she’d heard similar stories from mixed race couples and had always had an answer for them; you followed Malcolm X’s advice: be polite, be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays their hand on you, send them to the cemetery. She’d always empathized with the struggles of mixed-race children. But things were different now. She was incapacitated. And she was at the mercy of a woman who was obviously very disturbed. She didn’t care what this bitch had gone through as a child. She just wanted her dead.

“Some of the White kids at school called me nigger and my mother taught me to never take that kind of shit,” Natsinet continued. “I had my share of fights in school. In time, they left me alone.”

Adelle could see herself saying, good for you if she had her speech. Instead she could only nod.

“Needless to say, the adult world is no better. Sometimes, I think it’s worse.”

Natsinet finished with Adelle’s sponge bath. She draped a fresh towel over her, drying her off.

“I figured that my mind and my education would help me reach my goals. That the color of my skin would never be a burden to achieving my dreams. I learned the hard way that even a woman with my mixed heritage will still have problems assimilating in society. Hard to believe that this kind of mentality persists in this day and age, doesn’t it? But it does, and I suppose it isn’t as prevalent as it was maybe twenty or thirty years ago, but it’s still there. I was determined that nothing was going to hold me back. And you know what?” She crouched down in front of Adelle, gently drying her arms. The nurse’s demeanor was almost sunny, friendly. “Nothing did because I didn’t let it. Yes, I faced discrimination a few times, but I never let that stop me. I can’t change the mind of the willfully ignorant. But I can change my world, and choose to associate with those of like minds. I could choose to make something of myself and fight for my rights no matter what. And that’s what I did. I didn’t let anybody stop me. I went to college and got my nursing degree. And then the first job I got was at an inner city hospital, as an ER nurse watching the dregs of society come in after they’d mangled each other in fights and robberies and getting messed up on drugs and then…it just became…all…too…much.”

She leaned toward Adelle and there was that fire in her eyes now. That spark that told her the crazy part of Natsinet was about to come out.

“So many great things have taken place because of leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King. So much advancement has been undertaken in race relations. Hell, look at the Asians in this country? They were slaves during and after the Civil War, Mrs. Smith. Now look at them; they own half the businesses in this country. They’re all computer scientists and doctors. Hispanics are the largest growing minority group in this country, and one of them is the Attorney General of this country while another one wants to run for president. Even Black people are doing better. There are more Black-owned business now, more Black people are getting advanced degrees and making something of themselves. Yet some people,” she emphasized the word some by glaring at Adelle, “will say we’re selling out to the White man. Some people give those that still may hold a tiny spark of racism and ignorant prejudice in their minds excuse to believe that we never should’ve been given the same rights as everyone else. I mean, look at the shit hole you’re living in? You think this is the White man’s fault? You think the White man is keeping these people in this shitty section of town? You think the White man created these living conditions? Bullshit! But that’s all I hear on the news whenever something fucked up happens down here. You yell and scream the loudest, blame it all on the White man. I don’t hear Native Americans complain about the shit holes they live in. You ever been on an Indian reservation, Mrs. Smith? You should sometime. It’s like driving through this neighborhood. No, I take that back. It’s worse.”

Adelle didn’t know what point Natsinet was trying to make, but she’d been through Indian reservations before. And yes, some of the living conditions were deplorable. That, she agreed with Natsinet on. As to the rest of it, the woman was on some kind of ramble that Adelle could not make heads or tails out of.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is you spend all that time fighting for your rights, downright demanding them, going to jail for them, and then things in society change and what happens? You’re still here, in this filthy neighborhood. The police still run through here kicking down doors and cracking heads. There’s still drugs and prostitution on every corner. And these people,” She gestured around the bathroom, as if indicating the area and the apartments outside, “they choose to stay here. Yeah, some of them can’t afford to leave, but those that can…they stay! Why do they stay? It’s like they like living this way. It’s like they enjoy the crime and the filth. And why do they steal from each other, and sell each other drugs and sell the bodies of their women and daughters to each other? Tell me that? That’s why I get those looks from White people. They are looking at me and seeing you! That’s why my childhood was so fucked up. Because they thought I was just another crying, begging, stealing, lazy-ass nigger like the rest of you.”

If Adelle were on top of herself in mind and body, she would have shot to her feet with an angry retort. Now she could only run her reply over in her head as she sat mute.

You think they have a choice? Most of these people are struggling just to afford the places they have now! You think they can just up and move to a nicer neighborhood? How the hell are they going to afford the rents? You try scrounging up first, last, and a deposit on minimum wage! These people are trapped! Trapped in the welfare system, trapped in low paying jobs, trapped by inadequate educations. Where the hell are they going to go? Goddammit, the reason I stay here is to provide an inspiration for those that do have a chance to leave! I stay here because I want to help them get out! And I do help them get out! For every goddamn drug dealer out selling crack, I steer five other kids on to college and a life out of the streets. That’s why I stay!

“You don’t have an answer for that do you?”

Adelle could only grunt, trying to force the words out. “Grrrrr…”

“No, that’s okay.” Natsinet silenced her by placing a finger over Adelle’s lips. “Come on, let’s get some fresh clothes on you.”

Natsinet helped Adelle into the living room and dressed her in a fresh pair of clothes. It was the first time in more than a week that Adelle had sat in her own living room. Her mind was racing again with a plan of escape as Natsinet quickly put fresh sheets on her bed. She was still trying to figure out what kind of trauma the nurse might have gone through as a child to make her bottle up all that hostility and anger, all of that self-loathing. Natsinet had definitely suffered some sort of blow against her racial identity while growing up, something that affected her self-image drastically but that she’d kept hidden, buried for all these years. And it had started to come bubbling to the surface while she was working in the ER.

It was obvious she’d had a good life in her formative years. It sounded like she never made the attempt to know other Black people, especially those of lower income. Natsinet’s racial hatred was even worse than some of the White people she’d met during her Civil Rights marches thirty years ago, the ones who had thrown eggs and rocks and bottles at her and hurled disgusting and degrading racial epithets at her. It seemed Natsinet identified more with her mother’s side, her White side, than her Black side, though she seemed to have no problem with Black people who were successful in assimilating with White society.

But there was something else…something Adelle couldn’t quite put her finger on, something that was deeply wrong about the nurse, something that convinced Adelle that if she didn’t somehow escape from this woman her life would be in serious jeopardy.

Natsinet came to collect Adelle just as she was gathering up the willpower and the strength to hobble over to the end table to pick up a picture frame—it was heavy enough to crack a skull with. Instead, Natsinet helped her up and got her back into bed. Adelle felt better being in bed with fresh sheets, a fresh pillowcase supporting her head.

“Now remember,” Natsinet said, standing at Adelle’s left side. The nurse took her arm and with one swift move pushed her sleeve up and gave her an injection with a syringe she’d had hidden below her line of sight. “If you say anything about what happened, they won’t believe you. The sleeves of your gown will hide the worst of the burns. Besides, they’ll likely be gone by tomorrow.”

No, Adelle thought, already feeling her consciousness slip away.

“I’ll see you when you wake up,” Natsinet said, smiling.

Wake up?

And then, darkness.