"Dear Stacy,
"Who doesn't have an evil personality internally? The character that rules us occasionally and torments us often! But isn't it up to us to fight our animal personality before it comes to surface? I have overcome mine; I really believe in it. Many people listen to their inner evil more than to the right things they must do. Case and point, this six months old baby, her name is Jewel, who is born from an addicted mother; she is so sick that I don't think she had a chance; and what chance it will be when her brain is damaged and her heart doesn't function properly! When I look at her, my heart melts. I wish for her death even though my job as a nurse is to save her. But I also have a greater and more savage anger towards the mother. What business she had to bring a child into this world? I wish I had the power to put her away for life so she won't make more babies. Believe it or not she is pregnant again.
"Oh, I am sure if this is freedom, if it is, I may say that I've paid a great price for it, my dear Stacy! I am sad to see all these and think about happiness that I was after. I've come to conclusion that we don't possess happiness and we can't reward ourselves with happiness. I think happiness is only a state of mind.
"I've lived a very simple life. I idolize simplicity; nonetheless, sometimes I am bored. I feel like I want more. But then I immediately realized that my vocation in life is not me, is not pleasing me, but it is helping whom ever I can. Then I understand that my boredom is just a delightful loathing compare to fear and horror I lived with after... The feelings of past are my private luxury, Like the bank of Potomac River, the scent or the sound or color of Washington in autumn. There are all my secrets that I will neither share them nor refuse them. But I am confident; and I value that. I know I have a mission and I treasure that. My existence before was depended on others, but there are others now that their existence depend on me.
"I have to leave my letter unfinished because I was called to the hospital. The baby Jewel died yesterday evening. I have requested if her condition got worse and I am not at work, they call me and they did. The mother was there. She didn't show any emotion, no expression, nothing. She was like a piece of wood without feeling. Her stomach stuck out and showed that she was pregnant again. I swear I felt like killing her. The father was not around. In fact, no one knows who the father is. I cried. An old nurse, Mary, who has become like a mother to me, held me tight; and her eyes questioned mine. She doesn't know that I have also lost a baby. 'We're not supposed to show emotions. We just do our jobs.' That is what I read in Mary's face. Nonetheless, her eyes were dark and uncertain; and I noticed that her emotion, too, like mine, was impaired. Mary and I cried, holding each other while I remembered the eyes of the baby Jewel in pain, in fear. You know she doesn't know pain or fear anymore. She is dead now. I am sad for her short life but happy at the same time. I hate to say it, but I am alleviated that she is dead.
"Did I tell you that I've gotten my green card? I am proud of it. To be honest with you I was getting a little worried. Mr. Harold, my immigration lawyer in Washington, told me there was nothing to be worried about. He said that I had my A-Number in my passport and receiving the actual card was just a matter of waiting and patience. He was right, because when I was hired in the hospital, they accepted the lawyer's letter and the A-Number in my passport. They considered me a legal residence. All they asked me to do was to get a Texas Driver License, which I did.
"My dearest Stacy, I haven't had any letter from you. I know you've gotten all mine because if you haven't, they would all return to me. Are you still mad at me? Will you write to me! Let me know what you're doing. Have you finished school? I am taking some graduate courses. Write me about your parents, Charlie. Are you still together, married?
"Love, Anna"
*
Little creases of white clouds in the sky matured and the pale and wan sun gradually became invisible. The air, Anna felt, was pregnant with thunder. She could feel the rain behind that passionless sky. It was hot and damp and the humidity was unbearable. "We need some rain." She said with a stiff smile on her face that did not show the sorrow in her eyes. Joseph did not answer. Her heart was joyless while she wanted to be joyous. Then she wondered how could she be happy when the small world around her was so dark and bleak. That would be a false kind of happiness.
The man who laid in bed was just as motionless as her. She looked at him and saw his face was disguise, and his expression and that faded smile were not his. She felt as though his eyes could see through and beyond her, her pain, her torment. Nevertheless, it was his torment that she could not know, his pain that she could not feel, and his agonizing infernal she could not share or enter. They were all his own exclusive pain and fear.
The sunken sky now was in the process of a complete transformation. The early afternoon was gone, so did the persistence of holding the rain. Now it was a downpour. Thick rain that disturbed the silence of the room. The rain came like a streamlet. Then it intermingled with the branches that birds had made a nest; and sounded harmoniously with Anna's pounding heart.
She looked towards the bed. He was there, as before, with white face and unnatural eyes, nothing like when Anna had first met him. Those eyes now were lost, they were deplorable, and spiritless. She remembered his penetrating, sharp, and intelligent eyes the very first time at the church. What happened to them? Not his eyes! All those big things and little things, things that had meanings and things that were absurd, now were magnified in her mind. They had been all there as it was now, the present time, that she saw, felt, and heard. The gone times were all there, as they were now; and she could not understand it.
She went to be and touched his lifeless face. He rolled his eyes and looked at her with his absent eyes; then he kissed her hand. "Don't you think it's time?" His voice was weak, despondently weak.
"I don't know how to do it." She responded in despair. She paused for a moment and thought of his request. Did he really love her; if he did how could he request such thing? Didn't he know she would be in trouble if she did what he asked of her. She thought again hard and intense. "I think he loves himself more!" She said it in her speaking mind.
"You're a nurse practitioner. May be an overdose of morphine; don't you know that can do it?"
She looked bewildered. She knew how much he suffered. But asking her to do such an illegal act was beyond her imagination. "You just have enough morphine for your daily use." She had to pick up his daily morphine from pharmacy. The doctor had prohibited that he would have more than one day supply of morphine since one time he had asked the doctor to help him die. She knew in heart that he was right; an overdose of morphine in a weak body as his would do it; but what about her?
"Stop giving me morphine for a week, then you have enough."
"Oh, God, no, I won't, I can't do it. Pain will kill you." She cried hysterically.
"I am already dead. I don't care about the pain."
She shuddered and got up from bed and left the bedroom. In the kitchen, she poured brandy in a small glass, walked to the window, pulled up the drapes, and drank the brandy In one gulp. Her throat burned. Her eyes burned; and uncontrollable tears rushed down her face. Suddenly she remembered Steve in bed, drowned in his own blood. That was too far back, twenty seven years ago; but she saw it as it was now. Today, she was a middle aged woman. All these careless memories pricked her existence behind the kitchen window. Noting had forgotten. They were all fragments of her stigmatic life- a look, a glance over the shoulder, a sin, a word, a feeling. Then she realized that none of those, even her most secretive feelings, were eternal.
To Be Continued
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