Condemned by My Sister novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Five Years
A prison doctor tells Eli he is dying, a cellmate beats him that night, and at the gate his sister is waiting; he refuses to go home, and Corbin climbs out of the car without his cane.
Dr. Ellerker watched me laugh and cry at the same time, and he put down his pen.
"It's leukemia, Eli. But it isn't the end."
"If we find a donor, you could have another five years."
He tied the rubber band around my arm and slid a needle into the back of my hand.
"This burns a little. Try to hold still."
I looked at the needle and felt nothing.
After five years in this place, a burn was the easiest thing I had been offered all year.
"Your blood type is AB negative," he said. "It's the hardest type there is to match. Almost nobody outside a sibling will do."
He frowned at his chart. "Is there any family we can test?"
"No," I said. "I don't have any family."
My voice cracked on the last word.
"I'm an orphan."
Dr. Ellerker looked at me for a long moment and then looked away.
Two officers came in and stood by the door.
"When the bag is empty, he goes straight back," one of them said. "He has one month left on his sentence."
That night, the block was dark and everyone was asleep.
I dragged myself into the cell and knocked my knee against the bottom bunk.
It creaked.
"You trying to get killed?" Vince Garner sat up and kicked me in the lower back.
I fell onto the concrete.
"Five years, Thurlow," he said. "You're hard to kill, you know that?"
Garner was serving life, and he hated that I would walk out in a month.
His fists came down on my shoulders and my ribs.
I was too weak from the drip to fight, so I curled up and covered my head.
An officer pounded on the bars. "Keep it down or the whole cell goes to solitary!"
Garner spat next to my face and let go.
"One month," he said. "I've got a month to finish this."
I crawled onto my own bunk and pulled the blanket over my head.
Then I cried where nobody could hear.
I wasn't crying about the beating.
I was crying because all of it, every day of the five years, had started with four words from my sister.
The night Corbin fell down our front stairs, she stood in the hall in her black suit and told the police, "My brother pushed him."
She never asked me what happened.
I fell asleep with my face wet.
In the morning an officer banged on the door and read from a sheet of paper.
"Thurlow. Early release came through last night. You're out today."
I stared at him.
He had to say it twice before I stood up.
They gave me a plastic bag with a belt and a watch in it, and a card with $212 loaded onto it.
Then the iron gate rolled open, and for the first time in five years the sky had no wall around it.
The air smelled like exhaust and wet grass.
A woman was waiting by a gray car at the curb.
She wore a black suit and her hair was pulled back tight.
"Eli."
My sister had her hands folded in front of her.
"You've gotten so thin," Marianne said. "Come home. Everything's ready. Your room is just as you left it."
It sounded so kind that I almost took a step toward her.
Then I remembered who had stood in the hall and condemned me, and who had never once written back.
"I'm not going home with you," I said.
Her face went still.
"Don't start this," she said. "Corbin came all this way to see you. He's been up since five."
The back door of the car opened.
Corbin got out fast and crossed the pavement to us in long, easy strides with his hands empty.
He looked up and saw me watching him.
He stopped, turned around, and went back to the car for his cane.
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