Wrath White - Hero

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.