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“I’m going to tell you the names of these medications and you tell me what to give you.”
“Damn it, leave. I don’t deserve this.”
He sounds downright hostile, but he’s incapacitated, so it’s not like he can stop me.
I untie the sheet and pick up the first medication, the words easy to read even though there’s hardly any light in the room. “Let’s see what druggie Santa has in the ol’ bag ... loperamide ... tetracycline ... prednisone ... lorazepam ... ondansetron ... ciprofloxacin ... ibuprofen ... metronidazole, saline bags, oxycodone ...”
“Amira, please. Go. You’re way too good to still be here.”
His pleading tone just makes me double down. “I’m not leaving. I can either read this medication book and figure it out myself, or you can tell me.”
He gets up on an elbow, trying to get into a sitting position. Blowing a breath out through his teeth, he struggles.
“Stay on your back and tell me what to give you.”
With a frustrated grunt, he slides off his elbow and drops back down to his back, groaning with pain.
“My dad beat the shit out of my mom and killed her when I was nine.” His tone is clipped. “My brother and I were raised by our grandparents. You’ve got romantic notions about men being better than they are because you don’t want to be alone. But I don’t deserve it. If you want to do something for me, leave. Please.”
Tears run from the corners of his eyes down his temples. My heart is so crushed by what he just told me that I can’t even respond for a few seconds.
“I’m so sorry,” I finally manage.
“That’s not why I told you. I can’t be the man you want me to be.”
“Are you going to tell me what to give you or not?”
“The oxy.”
“How many?”
“All of them.”
I sigh deeply, aggravated. “Fine. I’ll read the book.”
He turns his head to look at me, the torture in his eyes like a knife in my chest. “I’ve been putting the mission first my entire adult life. I’m tired. Let me go and keep fighting.”
“This isn’t you.”
“You don’t know me,” he grinds out, the fury in his voice taking me aback. “You’ll be better off without me.”
This conversation isn’t going anywhere. I get the books I took from the nurses’ station, wrap my bundle of pills back up, making sure I have the oxycodone, and take everything with me to the hallway.
This place is the opposite of sanitary. All I have is hand soap from the bathroom and the ability to boil water. Evander’s chances of making it still aren’t great.
But I won’t give up.
I forced Evander to take ciprofloxacin and metronidazole and drained and restitched his wound. For two days, his delirium continued. I started to discern from the things he was unknowingly saying that more of his nightmares are about his father than his time in Ingrid Voss’s dungeon.
All this time I’ve spent with him, and I had no idea he felt so broken inside. He mumbled his grandma’s name several times, and I remember him telling me she was the strongest woman he ever knew. I hope his grandparents loved him the way all children deserve, though it could never make up for what his father took from him.
His fever breaks on the third day, and he’s able to hobble to the bathroom to pee. It takes a week, and a lot of sleep, for him to really be himself again. He won’t even make eye contact with me, and he hasn’t said anything of substance since our conversation before I gave him the medicine.
“We’ll leave today,” he says on day eight.
“Are you sure you’re ready?”
“Yeah.”
