Day by painful day, week by painful week passed, and Jackie was by Eric's side for every second of it, changing bandages, applying salves, and making sure he got enough to eat and to sleep.
She was there with him when the pain and a raging fever made him delirious, and mired him in memories of Ethiopia where she learnt in the bits and pieces that he had inadvertently revealed, that after Kwame and the men knocked him out he had been bound injured and bloodied to a post somewhere in the village, to stop him from interfering even more with their sacred practices.
Her stomach had clenched at the image of that, and she crooned and she soothed and she sang to him as she sponged him down. Slowly she brought him away from the shadows of his memories; holding him to reality, coaxing him to stay with her.
As Eric trashed and struggled through a haze of hallucinations and fitful dreams, Jackie pieced together that he had continued to fight them while bound and refused attention to his cracked ribs and knife wounds until someone had to knock him out again so they could attend to him.
She fought tears as she spooned water past his parched lips, and feathered her fingers on the jagged and raised scar under his jaw, and pressed kisses to his heated forehead and eyelids.
The day came when Ebele announced that it was time to slough off the dead tissue on his back so that new skin could grow under it.
"Take it, Eric," Jackie had begged him, holding out the milky liquid with trembling fingers, for she had heard stories from Kitty about this, and she knew that it would be excruciating.
He had refused with a sharp shake of his head, and accepted the piece of bark Ebele handed him wordlessly. And that was that.
Ebele began, and Jackie saw him turn instantly white as he bit down on the piece of bark he had slid between his teeth. Sweat popped out on his brow and a fine trembling took over his body. It soon became an uncontrollable shaking, the veins in his arms straining in his agony, and Jackie sank to her knees on the gritty floor before him, tears coursing down her face as she fisted both his hands in hers.
"Look at me, Eric. Look at me," she whispered, compelling him with her eyes alone to tap on to her strength and her energy.
They did this every day for several days and when it was done, the insides of Jackie's cheeks were as ragged and raw as the skin on his back had once been. Somehow, Ebele had worked a miracle with her herbs and poultices and practices and methods, or perhaps it was Eric himself and his determination to prevail; but with each passing day as his back knitted itself back together, he tried to do the same with his soul. For him, but mostly, for her.
An elaborate burial rite was conducted for Desta, one which the whole village was in attendance and participated in. It was a beautiful ceremony, foreign yet familiar to Jackie at the same time. They chanted, they danced, and their drums beat out a solemn tattoo, a grieving ba boom ba boom that Jackie felt all the way to the deepest corners of her heart.
They mourned their dead, and Jackie mourned with them, heart wrenching and aching for the smiling boy that had come to mean so much to her, and for his mother whom she had truly come to consider as a close friend. She stood together with them, a part of them; so different and yet so alike; and she had never felt so much like she belonged before in her life.
Eric stood beside her, stoic and stone-faced, but his fingers gripped hers with an almost bruising force, and she alone knew of his inner struggle. She saw emotion overtake him only once, when they lowered Desta into the ground; a slight shudder to his shoulders, a flicker of his eyelids, a sudden intake of breath.
She pressed her body into his, and he pressed his back into hers, and together they leaned on each other, and together they supported each other.
She didn't see him shed a single tear, but three days later she found him wild-eyed and shaking with grief, on his knees on the ground, a broken glass that once held water smashed in his fist.
She flew towards him, an almost inhuman cry tearing out of her, and held his haggard face between her hands, uncaring of blood from his hand seeping into the linen of her dress.
"Eric, please," she cried, "Don't." Tears fell down her face and splashed onto her lap, mingling with his blood as it dripped from his hand. "Don't do this alone, you're not alone." She stroked his face with her thumbs and swiped furiously at snot and tears from her own. Her voice came out broken and hoarse as she choked out, "I was there. I knew him, Eric. I knew him too."
He met her eyes, and she saw something in them change, and suddenly he was cradling her in his arms and rocking her in return.
"I'm sorry, Jackie," he whispered in cracked tones. "I'm sorry."
She shook her head, and pressed an open-mouthed kiss to the side of his face, crying into his skin. She thought of Ethiopia and Desta. He might not have saved their bodies, but she believed that he had given them all something even more than that. He had given the people who had loved them more than what they would have gotten. She thought of herself, and how he had saved her. She pulled back and pulled his face down to hers, staring deep into his green eyes with her own dark ones. "Don't ever be sorry for anything again."
He looked back at her with feeling, and they mourned together, and with each other, drowning all their sorry's and sorrows in the safety of each others' arms.
"Have you thought of going back there? Ethiopia," she asked him quietly much later as she sat by the table carefully removing glass chips embedded in the skin of his palm.
The candlelight flickered and threw orange shadows up on the walls. Jackie reached over and pulled the kerosene lamp closer so she could see better. She glanced up at him as he didn't answer, and continued gently, "To... bury your ghosts."
She saw a muscle tic in his jaw, and rubbed the backs of her fingers against the inside of his wrist soothingly. "You don't have to answer, Eric."
He didn't.
But she hoped she had gotten to him, but she knew that if he didn't, and continued to carry them for the rest of his life, if he let her, she would willingly carry it together with him.
Every day, just before sunset, they would make their way slowly and on Eric's part — stiffly, to the little spot just outside the village, under the spreading umbrella of the tree that overlooked the endlessness of the crop fields on the right, and denseness of the forest to the left.
She had taken over his classes in the meantime, most of them anyway, and had fallen in love with it.
She had been nervous at first, for she didn't want to let them down and let Eric down, but after she overcame her initial reservations and insecurities, and just let herself be, she found that she had a sort of affinity for it.
She had none of Eric's propensity for structure and logic nor his brand of level-headed calm, but she more than made up for it in liveliness and creativity and a knack for telling stories that held them all spellbound.
The children loved her, and she loved the children in return; the exuberance of their banter, the enthusiasm in their questions and their wide-eyed and toothy grins.
"Miss Jackie! Tell us about yer country!" They would ask her, always fascinated and ever curious about places away from their own.
And Jackie would hop on the teacher's table, arrange her skirts around her, and regale them with stories of Red and Kitty, of Fez and Donna, of Hyde and Kelso, and all about the land of Red, White and Blue.