Remember when I was telling you about the ridiculously outrageous time I accidentally got myself trapped working for a drug lord in Dominican Republic? It's time for more of that story.
This is Part 10 of my experience getting caught up in an undisclosed amount of trouble in Dominican Republic as a young girl trying to find her way through a broken heart. Things spiraled out of control to the point where all of a sudden murder was on the table and special forces lurked around, waiting to hear this very tale.
Last time we ended here:
âGet your sh*t together and I mean now!â
Realizing I only had one option and that was the red pill... why did it have to be a red pill of all colors? I was really wishing I could have had the option of blue. Swallowing what I was given, I looked at Em and down the rabbit hole I went.
In the seemingly frozen moment following, I could feel the foreign red-gelled pill invading my senses.
It stuck to the sides of my throat as I tried to will it down with the limited saliva I had to offer it. Was it resisting me?
Stuck⊠the feeling was too close to home.
I felt stuck just like the pill, both of us moving slowly in the direction we were meant to go, but in a warp space where time slowed down, giving the illusion it wasnât moving at all.
I focused my attention on Emilyâs once gentle face, now painted with lines of stress and torment.
It was then that I realized I genuinely felt bad for her (maybe it was the pill she just gave me but my perspective changed drastically⊠talk about the Matrix!)
Here she was, a beautiful blonde, 20-something-year-old, new mother with a baby to a father involved in the drug circus rigmarole going on here and somehow she landed herself on the street corner, buying me some candy colored drugs in limited Spanish, yelling at me to get my act together.
What world was I living in?
After those piercingly strong words flew out of her mouth and slapped me in the face, she met my gaze and when our eyes crossed paths in that moment, she sighed what seemed to be an enormously heavy cloud and sunk into a field of tears.
She appeared to suddenly become more susceptible to gravity as her whole body gave way to be magnetized to the ground. She was sobbing so intensely that I could hardly make out her words but seeing her defeated like that made me feel like I was living her pain through watching her in such agony.
Inside my own chest, every movement was amplified. I could feel my heart tearing at the seams, bursting with sympathy for this poor girl. My eyes frantically searched the street around us, âwhat were people going to think when they saw two tiny white girls having a meltdown on the side of the road?â
Suddenly giving way to my own thoughts, feelings and fears, shame confronted me with vengeance. This woman was knee-buckled, heaved over crying her eyes out on the scorching hot pavement in a foreign land.
I was complaining about living an unbearable hell but what about what she was going through? Did I ever stop to care? Did I ever think to ask?
I felt heat burn my cheeks as the shame overcame me for complaining about my situation in comparison since she was the one sleeping with the damn devil and mothering his offspring.
Grabbing her arms and steering her to a ledge, away from the doctor who was staring at us wondering what to do, I got her leaning against some bricks. After some hyperventilating and watering the ground with her sweat, tears and well, snot⊠she began to tell me her story.
It seemed as though it was coming from another place inside her, like she couldnât make the conscious decision to tell me this and yet it was flinging itself out of her mouth and into my ears as if telling me would grant her release from it all.
What kind of pill did I take? Too late nowâŠ
The blazing hot sun was threatening to burn a hole through my entire body and yet I remained in place, shielding Em with my limited capability while she told me her story.
Even though I knew part of it already, it was as if she was taking a cover off, unleashing all of the pain sheâd been storing inside as she confided in me the pain of her soul.
A few months prior, in love and confused, she had been chasing Jamesâ love with heartbreaking lack of success. Young and naĂŻve, Em was beyond herself head over heels for the older, bad guy stereotype offering her constant opportunity to question her self-worth. James had a criminal past and carried around a looming chip on his shoulder. He was a joker, packed full of confidence (er cockiness) and had exactly the DGAF attitude that girls trip all over themselves for.
The two had been âdatingâ (cough... sleeping together) on and off for years and while Em was dedicated and committed to âmaking James a better manâ, he was reckless, confrontational and testing her patience and understanding while he incessantly pushed her to new limits.
Frustrated by his apparent lack of will to be reined in, Em decided to push boundaries of her own. With a hand from fate, she found herself pregnant and hoped desperately that it would secure her place in Jamesâs life and heart.
However, despite the fact that she had a living being growing inside of her and was about to give birth to their child, James remained an untamable wild spirit who refused the confines of traditional culture leaving Em young, pregnant and still having to fight for his love and attention.
With her confidence fading as James crawled his way in and out of different beds at night and chased reliability away with a stick (what rhymes with stick?), she became depressed, desperate for a proper father for her unborn son.
In an effort to win him over through gaining his respect, she launched herself into their business, investing and putting her energy into helping it succeed. She quit her own job and worked tirelessly day in and day out coordinating, scheduling, and organizing the business into creation and finally, properties were purchased with her name on the papers.
James was ecstatic and now seeing Emily through new eyes, as a partner on whom he relied, he started to soften. By the time the baby was about to be born, they had moved to Dominican Republic to start their business and create a new life together and Em was radiating with happiness over what she believed to be exactly what she wanted.
Time passed and Em was getting closer to delivery every day while they were hacking away getting everything moving on their new island life. Forgetting to take care of herself, putting James and the business first, she felt complications and became frightened about having the child in a foreign country.
James sent her back home to have the baby there without him while he stayed down south and continued working. Getting on the plane alone to go give birth to their son, she felt a deepened pang of hatred for him.
Against his resistance, she came back with the new baby boy and continued back into how things had been before she left but things were different. James was overloaded with ideas and visions and the sound of a baby crying turned him into an image of the hulk, bursting with anger and ripping his patience at the seams.
All of the responsibility of taking care of the baby was left on Emâs shoulders while at the same time she was expected to oversee the business while her man was out every night running the streets doing God knows what with God knows who.
Having the new born baby meant that she couldnât be out on foot, doing the same leg work as the guys (Kyle had come onboard by that point!) so she had no way of keeping track of James.
It did leave a lot of slack for her to pick up clerical, online aspects and at that, she jumped for the opportunity to retain worth in Jamesâ eyes. (Sad, right?)
One of her first tasks (and most important at that) had been finding and hiring the right employees, the best bartenders available to fly down and work for their new company. Part of that job description entailed being âOKâ or âdesensitizedâ to the lesser common aspects such as the well⊠drug running. (Oh yeah, because it had now come to that... but Em wasnât completely in the loop yet!)
They had received a mountain of applications to sift through and decide on and in the end, she decided to choose me. They had trusted her with that decision and it added a burden of stress onto her already filled shoulders.
Flash forward to where we were now. Here we were with sh*t hitting the fan, the business spiraling out of control and I was acting differently about it all than they had anticipated and defying their objectives. Apparently Em was supposed to have found someone who would have been kosher with the whole illegal aspect of everything they were doing.
I could tell she was feeling ashamed too. I truly donât believe she knew the extent to which the business was getting involved in when she was looking for people to hire on. Her wide eyed grander vision was that they were to own and operate a bar and a party boat, everything else seemed to come in after that. Obviously, I wasnât very interested in playing that role however and it wasnât boding well for her as they lived in constant fear I would âoutâ them.
Seeing the pain this beautiful, young girl was in (when she shouldnât have been part of this either) made me feel selfish for tying my own thoughts and opinions based off what I deemed to be âgoodâ and âbad.â
Who made me the moral goddess of right and wrong? I committed to something and whether or not the mechanics behind it were positive or negative, did that really matter?
My mom always told me ânobody likes a quitterâ and âdonât be such a negative Nancy.â Maybe I needed to try to see if I could see outside of the bubble one more time. I mean, I wasnât being hurt. I wasnât doing anything wrong. How could I change my behavior to help Emily and her baby? I could just turn a blind eye to it all and just do my job right?
Why did I need to know anything more?
I felt a deep pain in my heart for Emily and as I held her while she cried, I decided that she was just like me, trapped here in a situation she originally thought she wanted, but only in hindsight was she able to truly assess it and be painstakingly found with the truth she didnât sign up for.
I knew how I was feeling but hearing her over the next couple of hours changed my mind from wanting to get on the next plane to trying to figure out how to get her and her baby out of there as well.
The next thing she did, I probably could have predicted and honestly, I wasnât about to try to stop her. I was feeling completely in line with everything she was saying. The abuse and trauma she was living in every day was far superior to me being told to stay in my apartment.
Even if I did get interrogated at some point by the Special Forces or even ransacked by the enemies of my bosses, it all seemed like a walk in the park compared to my friendâs misery.
If you're following along, I wonder how you're feeling about Emily now. Do you feel the same way I did? Her character was playing a more background role before this but just wait and see what she gets (me) into next!
If you've yet to read the series, here is the introduction, Welcome to DR, Part 1
My Confusion and Panic in Part 3
My favourite, The Reveal (of the Terrifying Secret) Part 4.
An Intro to Kat Part 4.5
The More You Know Part 5
Kat Gone Wild Part 6
Kyle's Prisoner, Part 7
Adam's Drunken Incrimination Party, Part 8
Jailbreak, Part 9
If you're hanging by a thread (like my pal @kubbyelizabeth) and want to know the moment the next part is published, let me know in the comments and I will keep you updated!
I hope you stick around to read what happens next. I'm baring my secrets to the world and it feels so... naked! I swore I would deny this stuff for my whole life. I hope my mum never gets her hands on this! If you're asking yourself how the hell I got here, check out the links to the first chapters to catch up!
From January 2014- June 2017 I have been what you would call a vagabond, a nomad, even a gypsy by definition of the words. I had what they all have in common: no fixed home...and no fixed income but the wildest stories.
Until next time,
(watch out for those online jobs!)
XO,
đ
