“Bram?”
I startle and look over at Levy, who’s pointing to the pan in front of me. I look down and mutter a curse before walking the pan to the trash can and dumping the contents.
“You okay, brother?” Levy asks, handing me the carton of eggs.
“I’m okay. I just didn’t sleep well last night. Gonna need some extra coffee to get through this day.”
I’m not somebody who easily lets people in, but my brother and I have always been close, even if we are complete opposites.
I’m starched collars and pressed slacks, he’s old band T-shirts and blue jeans. I go to the barber for a trim every other week, and Levy’s schedule for hair maintenance is spotty at best. I write lists, he writes poems. I like to dissect thought patterns, and he likes to let horses help people listen to themselves.
While we are different, neither of us looks at the other with judgment. I admire his free spirit, and he admires my practical attention to detail. We’ve always been there for each other, and finding this job was a stroke of luck and exactly what we needed.
As much as we are open with each other, I can’t imagine sharing what went on with Nacho in our prison sessions. I’ve always been the kind of person to take charge, but I’d never done anything like that with a patient or a lover. I don’t even know if I could describe it.
I liked telling him what to do.
Sounds like nothing, but in our limited time together, it was everything.
As I crack new eggs into the pan, I laugh, thinking about how naive I’d been to think a prison system would mesh with my need to keep order.
Nothing is orderly in a prison system.
Moments before I’d walked into that life-changing first session, I’d been informed one of my longtime patients had died by suicide. His parole had been denied again and, despite the fact we’d talked about that possibility, the moment he was placed in his cell, he grabbed the syringe he’d stolen from medical and took a massive overdose of his homemade prison meth.
I should’ve cancelled the session, but my newest prisoner assignment, Ignacio Rivera, had killed a known rapist in self-defense. He was on the shortlist for early release due to good behavior, and the warden wanted to verify we weren’t releasing a dangerous criminal into the wild.
I’d known from his records that he was a good man I could help, and I’d needed a fucking win. According to his file, he’d asked to be called Nacho, but when he’d defiantly flirted with me right out of the gate, something inside me snapped. I’d decided right then and there thatIgnaciowould listen to me. That this one would make something of his life, so help me, God.
As a therapist, I am painfully aware of how irrational my actions were, but I had to be right about Ignacio Rivera. Had to.
When Nacho was released, I realized I wasn’t built for prison therapy. Or maybe I just couldn’t keep returning to that depressing building, knowing I’d never see him again. I should have felt far more guilty about our dynamic, but if I’m honest with myself, I just missed it.
And him. God, I missedhim.
In the meantime, Levy had been enjoying his work as an equine therapist with the educational programs in the Waco area but could never make a decent living. So, I quit my job at the prison and moved in with my brother. Lost in a holding pattern, I did PRN work for the local hospital network while waiting for a sign. A sign for what? I had no idea.
While helping non-incarcerated patients is, I guess, easier at some level, dealing with Big Medicine reminds me far too much of Big Prison. For the most part, the doctors and nurses want what’s best for the patients, but this country’s healthcare system doesn’t give a cold shit about the people under its care.
Having already fudged my ethics in prison, I found it easy to alter insurance paperwork so patients with severe mental health issues could get their medications and return to their families. On more than one occasion, I’d worked with our hospital chaplain to misdirect or delay an immigration officer to give a patient time to slip out the door.
My boss had warned me on several occasions that the local head of ICE was complaining about the hospital’s inability to hold on to undocumented patients. She often did this while pushing a problematic case folder across the desk to give me the opportunity to do it again.
When the county district attorney threatened to file charges, pertinent video tapes suddenly went missing and they had to withdraw their threats. To this day, I don’t know if the chaplain or my boss stole the tapes, and I’ve never asked.
Several months later, Charlie Wills reached out to Levy and offered him a job at an equine therapy center. Levy discovered Charlie also had an opening for an experienced trauma therapist, and it felt like my sign had finally shown up. I’d go with my brother and stop living this half-life.
Time to start over in a new place.
The fact I’d directed Nacho to apply for a job in the same area hadn’t swayed my decision in the slightest. Besides, I had no way of knowing if he’d gotten the job.
The interview with Charlie had gone better than expected. He’d offered us the positions on the spot, pending a background check. We come from a rough neighborhood, but neither of us has anything on our records, so it was a lock.
A new start for the therapy brothers.
While waiting on the official offer from Charlie, I casually perused Instagram and happened to find Nacho’s account. I’d been amazed at how quickly I verified he got the fencing job and was living just outside of Johnson City. Not that any of that is relevant.
From a professional standpoint, it’s completely, utterly irrelevant.
