His face fades and a loud buzzing is in my ears immediately. “Engelhardt needs medical.” There is a loud pop, I recognize as the door’s magnetic lock releases, and then the known sound of boots swiftly passing over the cement floor. My eyelids blink and then open as I try to focus on anything around me. The lights are bright, too bright. Burning pain scorches through my irises and settles into my temples. I can’t take it. The pain is too much. I force my eyes to close as tightly as I can, pulling a deep breath into my body. I do not want to be here. I’m not supposed to be here. I hold my breath while people yell things around me, hoping to find relief.
I don’t see him, but I feel his hand in mine. “I’ll find you in the stars, Delayni,” he promises, pressing his lips against my throat. My head falls back as a fit of laughter spills out of me. If he continues his search for me there, then it will be never-ending. No outside light is bright enough to reach me. Stars do not shine for dreadful outcasts like me. No. They are hung in the sky for those who deserve their beauty. Not someone incarcerated and in solitary confinement.
“Medical’s ETA is five minutes. Support her head. Sarge will have our asses if she gets hurt again.” The voice is clear enough I can make out it’s Briggs who is talking now.
“I knew we should have had DJ check her out while she was up here for med pass.” A female says in a raspy voice. “Get her to the floor before she bounces her skull of the wall.” Warmth wraps around my body and the hardness under me vanishes only to be replaced with another. I tell my eyelids to open, but they don’t listen. I don’t so much care about what is happening but do want to understand it. Usually when I come to its much later and I can’t recall the events leading up to being awake. I can probably count on my fingers how many times I found lucidity this quickly—even though I am not fully awake, I can hear what’s going on around me.
As the fog lifts, I make out more and more.
Cold leather-gloved hands cup around each side of my face, cradling my head for safety.
The distinct smell of cleaner that isn’t as strong as bleach but is unmistakable once you smell it soars into my nostrils, and as soon as it hits the back of my throat I gag. It only takes one good time of getting the cleaner used in prisons stuck in your nose and then it’s a smell you can identify for the rest of your life. I would know it anywhere.
I am back in lock up in the place where people are sent to be forgotten.
Shady Holler, North Carolina.
I hear a new voice, and the smell of latex is undeniable. My nose runs and my eyes water as soon as the putrid, overpowering scent of smelling salts soars up my nostrils. “C’mon, Leila. Open your eyes. Don’t make me fill out more paperwork tonight,” Dj, my favorite nurse, coaxes, pretending as if she’s joking, but is one-thousand percent serious. She will be the first to tell anyone how much paperwork has to be filled out when someone dies. She is an amazing nurse and treats all of us with respect as long as we show her the same courtesy. When I arrived, she did my intake assessment, and she was the first one to treat me like a human being and not an object. She told me it would be ok and to keep my head down. Even though I now know she shouldn’t have and could have gotten in a lot of trouble for doing it, she hugged me. I hugged her back and will always be eternally grateful for the kindness she has shown me.
“I-I-I’m good, DJ. I was just taking a little time off,” I mumble half-heartedly, forcing a weak smile and having no recollection of what I was doing before I found myself with him.
DJ pushes her sandy-brown shoulder length hair behind her ears and presses her lips together in a thin disapproving line. “Engelhardt, you’re going to kill yourself if you keep this up. Look at your hand. What the hell happened?”
Huh? What is she talking about? “Nothing is wrong with my…” My voice trails off when I raise my arms in the air over my body, trying to understand what she’s talking about.
Fresh blood is covering the biggest part of my left hand—the hand he held onto. My wrist rotates as I curiously look for a wound. Red streaks slide down my wrists and reach my elbow before DJ clears her throat. “Let me guess. You don’t know how it happened, right?” she asks in a snarky tone. Her eyes shoot to Briggs’ face and then scans across the rest of the officers in the room with us. Briggs shrugs, Arbo shakes his head, and Sarge’s eyes widen as she glares back at DJ, daring her to outright accuse her.
I don’t have an answer for her. I never know how I get where I do or the damage I’m left with. I don’t want to disappoint her, but I am also not lying to her. I have no more idea than she does if the officers are somehow responsible for my injuries. I saw him before coming here, but truthfully, no one care enough to question if I was hurt or not in the foster homes—I almost always was beaten but can’t remember if that’s when he came to me or not. My mind is a scattered mess. No clue if it is from PTSD, the countless meds I have been fed for as long as I can remember, or if something foul is at play.
I shake my head, eyeing her with widened eyes, hoping she understand my unspoken apology. I’m not lying. I really don’t know.
DJ checks my blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, before shinning a tiny light in my eyes and telling me to look at her nose while she does it. She jots down the results on the back of her glove, shoving her ink pen behind her ear.
“No one touched Engelhardt,” Tayvors yells from two cells down. I would know that voice anywhere. She’s the reason we’re both in lock up and only get an hour of yard time a day. Well, that’s what we’re supposed to get anyway, but with the constant staffing shortage, we don’t get it often. More like we get to walk around in the cage a few hours a week and don’t even mention getting to shower as often as we are supposed to be able to. Tayvors knows everyone’s business and has a tail longer than the Neuse River—meaning she is a rat. A snitch. To each their own, I tend to stay by myself, but the last time she got in hot water for snitching about someone else, she blamed me. Of course, I denied it, but that did not stop her celly, Moto, from jumping me in the shower. Moto is twice my weight and about six inches taller than I am. Her hands were around my neck and just as I was about to lose consciousness, I heard a man’s voice tell me to reach under the door. I figured if I was going to die naked and bloody, I may as well find out what was there. There, just beneath my fingertips was one of the best shiv’s I had ever seen. Not only had someone sharpened the end of a toothbrush to a point, but they also took they went the extra mile, leaving the surrounding parts wider with tinier spikes sticking out on each side. I remember smiling at the craftsmanship right before shoving it through Moto’s chest. We both got a write up, court sentence, and a couple new charges—those I didn’t deny my guilt, other than the contraband, but I was charged for it anyway.
I growl. Tayvors can’t hear me, but it’s for her. Still flat on my back, I lift both of my middle fingers up, hoping she sees them, because they are absolutely for her. DJ chuckles, “I don’t like her either.” Her honesty and her don’t-give-a-shit attitude are other reasons that she’s my favorite employee from medical.
This makes me smile and chuckle. Sarge glares at DJ and DJ shrugs. “What? It’s the truth.” She holds her hand out for me to take and helps me get to my feet. My whole body hurts. It feels like I have been thrown down a flight of stairs, or what I would image it would feel like. I wince and grit my teeth until I reach a standing position, glancing to DJ and then away.
“Sit,” she instructs, after Briggs and Arbo put the pitiful excuse for a mattress back into the metal frame we inmates get to call a mattress. I oblige her, carefully lowering into a sitting position, wincing, and then gritting my teeth as pain jolts up my left arm. DJ is not the only one who wants to know how I got injured. In the past, some of the officers said it looked like a seizure might have been the cause of my previous injuries, but I don’t have a history of epilepsy.
DJ pulls a handful of square gauze from her medical bag and pours normal saline on them, dabbing my cheeks. My eyebrows pull together in confusion. She said my hand was injured, not my face. Still, I don’t object. I sit quietly, letting her do her job. “Close your eyes,” she says, and I listen. “I don’t know who or what is doing this, but I’m afraid the next time will kill you, L.” She uses my nickname, swiping the gauze across my closed eyelids.
When she’s finished, I open my eyes and instinctively reach for my eyes. “Don’t,” DJ scolds me. My head jerks back, and I flatten my palms against the mattress as fast as humanly possible to keep from clocking her across her jawline. Some people scream when they’re startled, I swing. I’m a fighter at heart, although I do not look much like one at first glance.
“Why? What’s wrong with my eyes?” I ask, fighting the urge to reach for them again.
“Truthfully, I’m not sure. It looks like you cried blood. Do you feel ok?”
“More or less.” I shrug. This is not the worst I’ve ever felt. My run in with Moto landed me in an outside hospital for over a week and then I spent the next two weeks in the infirmary. Compared to that, I am golden.
“Ok. Well, I think you need to spend the night in medical, so we can watch you.” DJ gathers bloody gauze into her gloves, balling them under her fingers, before rolling her gloves off, and tossing them into the trash.
“I’m ok here.” My tone is as dull as the paint on the walls—institutional grey. I don’t care where I am at inside this place. Changing the location of the bunk will never make it easier to swallow the hard lump that seems to be almost permanently lodged in my throat from shame. The guilt of not knowing for sure if I’m a murderer or not is almost unbearable. If I could remember, I could fight for myself, proving my innocence, and get the hell out of Shady Holler.
“You have to sign a refusal of treatment.”
“Ok. Thank you, DJ. I’ll go.”
