I was raised Catholic. Every Saturday my mom used to drag me to church to confess my sins to our priest, Father Miller. At first, I hated it. As I got older, though, I began to like it. I liked the feeling of being forgiven.
Growing up, I’d always wanted to be a doctor just like my dad, but my grades were never great. After I finished my bachelor’s degree, I went to Haiti with a few other members of my church to volunteer at a hospital. I hoped volunteering would help convince God I was meant to be a doctor.
My last night in Haiti, I knelt next to my bed, and I prayed I’d be accepted into medical school. I didn’t care which one. I’d give anything, I said.
By the end of the year, I had my acceptance letter. I’d never felt happier.
After residency, I took a job at a hospital in Florida. I got married and started a family. I had the life I’d always dreamed of. After I turned fifty, though, everything began to fall apart.
First, both my parents died the same year. At my mom’s funeral in Boston, I talked to Father Miller, who, despite being eighty-one, was still leading the parish. He gave me his email and told me we should talk on Zoom sometime. He’d just learned how to make video calls.
Later that year, I took him up on his offer. We began talking every Sunday night on Zoom. I asked him if I could confess my sins. It had been decades since I’d gone to confession. He said we weren’t supposed to do confessions online, but he agreed that Zoom was better than nothing. He was the first person I told about my affair with the nurse.
“You’re married, Charles,” he told me. “You made a vow to your wife. A promise.”
“I know.”
“You need to stop seeing this woman. You need to tell your wife what you’ve done, too, and beg for her forgiveness.”
“You’re right, Father. I will.”
That was the first time I’d ever lied to Father Miller.
I kept seeing the nurse. I didn’t tell my wife anything. But she found out about the affair on her own eventually, and she filed for divorce.
I lost everything. My house, my daughter, my life.
That’s when Father Miller suggested I go volunteer at a hospital in Haiti again.
“There’s been a bad outbreak of cholera,” he told me. “They could really use your help right now.”
I took a week to think about it, and I decided to go.
Father Miller gave me the email address of a friend of his in Haiti, Père Toussaint. I emailed him, and he helped arrange a driver to pick me up from the airport and give me a ride to the house I’d be staying at in the mission compound in Cap-Haïtien.
As soon as we reached the city, I saw people sick with cholera lying on the street in front of the pastel yellow and pink houses, still and listless, buckets full of vomit beside them.
Père Toussaint was waiting for me at the compound’s front gate. He wore a white button-down shirt and a clerical collar.
“Thank you so much for coming, Doctor Charles,” he said.
“When Father Miller told me about the cholera outbreak, I wanted to help.”
“I used to be good friends with a Father Miller in Boston.”
I thought it was strange that he’d said “used to be,” but I didn’t ask him about it. A slip of the tongue, I thought.
He brought me to the house where I’d be staying. A twelve-foot-tall concrete wall surrounded the yard. The wall was topped with barbed wire.
Père Toussaint gave me the keys and then wished me good night.
I arrived at the hospital bright and early the next morning. One of the nurses, Guerline, introduced herself. She was young. Pretty. She wore her hair in a long braid. She’d worked at the hospital for the last two years, she said.
“Come. I’ll show you where everything is,” she said.
I followed her past the reception desk.
The hallways were filled with people lying on cots. The inpatient rooms were even more crowded, with the cots pressed together so tightly there was barely room to walk between them.
Guerline showed me the supply room at the very back of the hospital. “We keep all of our supplies locked up in these cabinets,” she told me. “I’ll try to get you a copy of the key. For now, though, if you need anything, let me know.”
Then she opened the door to the left of the cabinets and took me into a larger refrigerated room filled with corpses.
“We’re keeping the bodies here for now,” she said. “Just until the morgues have space again.”
A nurse ran into the supply room, shouting my name. “Doctor Charles!”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A mother just brought in her son. He’s very sick.”
I followed the nurse toward the reception desk.
The boy was young. Eight years old. Barely conscious. Badly dehydrated.
“How long has he been like this?” I asked his mother.
“He was very sick last night,” she said. “He had vomiting and diarrhea, but he was moving around fine. This morning, though, he couldn’t get out of bed. I had to drag him here.”
The boy’s name was Fabrice. I found him an empty cot in one of the inpatient rooms, and then I found a vein in his arm and connected him to a bag of Ringer’s lactate. I monitored him closely for the next hour, watching the bag of fluid. When it began running out, I asked Guerline for more.
“We don’t have any more,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“All that’s left are two cases of oral rehydration solution.”
“Then get me a bottle of the rehydration solution.”
She got me one. I tried to get Fabrice to drink it, but as soon as the liquid hit his stomach, he threw up into the plastic bucket under his cot.
His mother got on her knees, unrolled a cigarette, and sprinkled the tobacco on the floor. She started speaking in Creole, repeating the words, “Papa Legba, Ago-e.”
I asked Guerline what she was doing.
“She’s praying to Papa Legba,” Guerline told me. “A Vodou spirit. The keeper of the door between this world and the next one.”
Fabrice’s mother finished her prayer and then she took her son’s hand. She kissed him on the forehead.
“Is he going to be all right, Doctor?” she asked me.
“He needs to be strong,” I said.
I was exhausted. Guerline was leaving for the night, and she offered to give me a ride home.
I told Fabrice’s mother to keep trying to get him to drink, and that I’d check on him first thing in the morning.
When I got back to the hospital the next morning, though, I learned that Fabrice was dead. A bottle of rehydration solution was next to his cot, still almost full.
Father Miller’s face appeared on my laptop screen. His gray beard had grown longer. His eyes were tinted red.
“There’s nothing else I could have done,” I said. “If I’d had a few more bags of Ringer’s lactate, though, maybe he’d still be alive.”
“You tried your best. That’s all anybody can ask of you.”
“I just don’t understand how God can allow suffering like this. That poor boy. His poor mother, too. She must be devastated.”
Father Miller started to say something, but then the video froze.
“Can you still hear me?” I asked.
The call dropped. I took my headphones off.
I heard a noise. Something scratching at my bedroom window. I went to see what it was.
Fabrice stood outside the window, pressing his face against the glass. His skin looked gray and waxy. His eyes had turned solid white.
I stepped backward, but then my legs gave out, and I fell to the floor.
“I’m very thirsty, Doctor Charles,” Fabrice said. “Can I come inside and have a glass of water?”
He walked to the front of my house. The door handle jiggled. Thankfully, I’d remembered to lock it.
“Please,” Fabrice said. “My mouth is so dry.”
I finally managed to stand. I got my phone and called security. A guard arrived, but by then the yard was empty.
Fabrice had disappeared.
At the hospital the next day, I ran into Guerline in the staff room. As we drank our coffee, I told her what had happened.
“Lots of Haitians believe a person’s spirit has two parts,” she said. “The Gwo Bon Anj and the Ti Bon Anj. Sometimes when people die, the Ti Bon Anj stays behind, and it goes looking for the people it remembers.”
Guerline and I didn’t even have time to finish our coffees. A husband brought his wife into the hospital, shouting for help.
The rest of the day was a blur of chaos. Of patients and death and dwindling supplies. The next three days were no different. Then I had Sunday off to rest.
Sunday night, I called Father Miller, and I told him about my first week. The stress, the chaos, the suffering, and the friends I’d made.
“You seem to like Guerline a lot,” he said.
“I really do.”
“Just remember, you’re in Haiti to help people. You’re not there for yourself.”
“I know, but I’m being very professional. I might ask her out for dinner one night, though.”
I heard that same scratching on my window. I looked over my shoulder.
“Is everything all right?” Father Miller asked.
“I think I hear someone outside.”
I took my headphones off and walked into my bedroom. Just like before, Fabrice stood outside the window, staring at me with his white eyes.
I remembered what Guerline had told me about the Ti Bon Anj.
“I can’t help you,” I told Fabrice. “I wish I could, but I can’t. You need to leave.”
He dragged his nails across the window. “I don’t want your help, Charles,” he said. His voice didn’t sound like it had before. It had become harsher. Grittier. “Are you trying to fuck Guerline like you fucked that other nurse?”
“Were you listening to my conversation with Father Miller?”
“I’ve been listening to your confessions for a long time, Charles.”
He walked around to the front of my house and tried opening the door.
“You’re a liar,” he told me. “A cheater. Your poor wife. Your poor daughter. You destroyed your family for what? Because you couldn’t keep your dick in your pants? Then you come here to Haiti to play the role of the savior. To pretend to be a good Christian doctor and redeem yourself.” He laughed. “You’ve fooled a lot of people, but you haven’t fooled me. I know exactly who you are.”
I went to the door and looked through the peephole. Fabrice looked back at me with his egg-white eyes.
“You’re not Fabrice, are you?” I asked. “You’re a devil. A demon.”
He laughed again.
I sat on the couch in my living room. I covered my ears and closed my eyes.
“Just leave me alone,” I said. “Please go away.”
He laughed a while longer, but then he left.
I tried calling Father Miller back, but he didn’t answer.
I closed my blinds, and then I moved my mattress into the hallway, where I slept far away from the windows.
On Monday, I found Guerline in the staff room.
“He came back again last night,” I told her. “But this time, he wasn’t Fabrice. He looked like Fabrice, but he was someone else. He knew things about me, too. Things that only me and my priest could know.”
Guerline put her hand on my arm. “Are you okay? I know the last few days must have been hard.”
“I’m fine. I’m not going crazy or anything. I just…”
Before I could finish my sentence, another nurse walked into the staff room and asked for help.
The next few hours, I ran from one patient to the next. It wasn’t until two pm that I finally had a chance to sit down and eat something.
“Père Toussaint is here,” a nurse told me. “If you have time, he’d like to talk to you.”
I found him in the waiting room. He wore the same white button-down shirt.
“I heard you’ve been doing a great job,” he said. “Everyone here says they don’t know what they’re going to do when you go back home to Florida. Are you sure you can’t stay a while longer?”
“I wish I could, but I don’t think my hospital in Florida will let me take any more time off.”
“Florida is nice, isn’t it? I’d love to visit sometime. I haven’t been to the United States since Father Miller’s funeral two years ago.”
“His funeral? What do you mean?”
“He was diagnosed with stomach cancer. The hospital caught it late, and it progressed quickly.”
I felt nauseous. I stopped listening to what Père Toussaint was saying. “I’m sorry. I need to go.”
I stumbled to the bathroom and knelt in front of one of the toilets.
At my mother’s funeral, Father Miller had looked pale, but he hadn’t said anything about cancer. Had he really died shortly afterward? And if he had, who had I been talking to on Zoom this whole time? Who had suggested I volunteer in Haiti?
“Are you in there, Doctor Charles?” Guerline asked.
“I am. Just a minute please.”
“We need your help. There’s a young girl barely breathing.”
You’re fine, I told myself. Father Miller isn’t dead. Père Toussaint is probably just misremembering, confusing Father Miller with another priest he knows. We’ll both laugh about this later.
I left the bathroom and then went with Guerline to the reception desk.
I did what I could for the girl and then checked in on the other patients. I lost track of time. It was nearly nine pm when I noticed that a man in Room 3 had died.
I found Guerline and asked her for help moving the body. We wheeled the cot to the refrigerated room and then lowered it to the ground. Guerline lifted the man’s legs, I took his shoulders, and then we moved him onto the floor and covered his body with a blanket.
The door to the room slammed shut behind us.
“What was that?” I asked.
“There’s a draft,” Guerline said. “It must have blown the door shut.”
As she walked toward the door, one of the corpses near the back wall stood up. The blanket covering him fell to the ground.
“Guerline!” I yelled.
I looked back at her, but she was gone.
The corpse walked toward me.
It was Fabrice.
I stepped backward, nearly tripping over one of the bodies on the floor.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
“I’ve come for your soul.”
I backed up against the wall and inched my way toward the door. I tried to pull it open, but it was locked.
“Do you remember the promise you made the last time you were in Haiti?” Fabrice asked. “‘I’d give anything,’ you said. And I gave you what you wanted. I made all your dreams come true. Without me, you wouldn’t’ve had a chance.”
The prayer. So he was the one who’d answered it. Not God.
“Is Father Miller dead? It’s you I’ve been talking to?”
“You’re not supposed to do confessions on Zoom. It’s too easy for other things to listen. Didn’t anyone ever warn you?”
A man walked up behind Fabrice. He was tall and thin. He wore a long, dark coat and held a cane.
He reached toward me. “Come with me now, Charles,” he said.
I sank to the floor. “God, please help me. I’m sorry for all my sins. I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever done wrong.”
The man stood over me. He placed his hand on my chest and then dug his fingers into my ribs, snapping them in half.
I screamed in pain. Blood poured from my chest.
He shoved his hand inside me and started feeling my organs. My heart, my lungs, my liver. When he finally took his hand out, he held a glowing spark of light.
He placed the spark in a clay jar. Then he put the jar in his coat pocket, opened the locked door, and left.
I stood and felt my chest. The blood was gone, but the hole was still there, my heart beating inside it.
I left the refrigerated room and walked back toward the reception desk. I heard Guerline shouting my name.
“Where did you go?” she asked. “You just disappeared.”
“I’ve been in the refrigerated room this whole time.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I saw a man with a coat and a cane. He reached into my chest and took out a spark.”
I unbuttoned my shirt and showed her my heart. Her face turned pale. “Kalfou.”
“I don’t feel well.”
The walls spun around me. Guerline helped me walk to the staff room. I sat on one of the chairs, but then suddenly, the staff room disappeared. I was in the dark. A complete, never-ending blackness.
“Where did you go, Guerline?” I yelled.
There was a flash of light, and I was back in the staff room again.
“I need to take you to a priest,” Guerline told me.
“Père Toussaint?”
“Not a Catholic priest.”
She helped me to my feet and brought me to her car outside. We left Cap-Haïtien and drove down the highway.
My eyes flashed with light again. For a moment, I was back in the darkness, but then I heard Guerline shouting my name.
We parked next to a wooden hut and a few wire cages filled with chickens.
The priest ran outside. He wore a red robe and dozens of necklaces.
“He’s a doctor at my hospital,” Guerline said. “I think Kalfou has taken his Ti Bon Anj. Last week, a boy named Fabrice died at the hospital. His mother called to Papa Legba before he died. Since then, the boy has been coming to the doctor’s window.”
Light flashed in my eyes again. The next thing I knew, I was inside the hut, sitting on the floor across from the priest.
“Kalfou has been waiting for you for a long time,” he told me. “When the boy’s mother called to Papa Legba, she gave Kalfou a way through to this world. Legba is not the only one who stands at the crossroads.”
Kalfou stood behind the priest, his eyes burning red.
“How do I get my soul back?” I asked the priest.
“You need to make a trade with him.”
“What does he want?”
“You’ll need to ask him yourself.”
The priest stood and left the hut. Kalfou sat where the priest had been sitting.
I made the sign of the cross.
“I know who you are, Satan,” I said. “I never offered you anything. You’re lying to me.”
“I have no reason to lie to you. You asked to make a trade, and I took you up on it. If you want your soul back, you’ll need to give me another soul to replace yours. Do you agree?”
He held out his hand.
I shook it.
When I looked down at my chest, the hole had closed. All that remained were five thick scars. A scar for each place Kalfou’s fingers had torn through my ribs.
Two weeks later, another mother brought her son into the hospital. Like Fabrice, the boy was gaunt and sunken-eyed, deathly sick with cholera. He looked around the same age as Fabrice, too. Maybe a little older. Unlike Fabrice, though, he recovered quickly. A few days after he was brought into the hospital, he was talking again. Smiling even. But then Kalfou called me, wearing Father Miller’s face. He wanted the boy. That was the trade.
A soul for a soul, he said.
The next night, right before dawn, when only a few nurses were left making their rounds, I wheeled the boy’s cot into the supply room. He didn’t wake up. I found a heavy blanket and held it over his face. He struggled for a moment, kicking and clawing at my hands, but then he went still.
I called for Guerline.
“I noticed he’d died while I was making my rounds,” I said.
She looked at me strangely, but she’d seen so much death already that she didn’t question it.
We brought the boy into the refrigerated room and moved his body onto the floor.
“You never told me what happened when you were alone in that hut,” Guerline said.
“Kalfou and I made a deal,” I told her. “But if I tell you what it is, it doesn’t count anymore.”
I took a week to think about it, and I decided to go back home to Florida. I lied to everyone at the hospital. I said something had come up at home, and I left a month early. But really, I just needed to get away from there.
Three years passed. The dull ache in my chest finally went away. So did the nightmares of that cold, empty darkness. The guilt stayed with me, though, eating away at me. The guilt and the scars.
At the hospital, every time I see a dead body, I still stop what I’m doing, reach under my shirt, and press my fingers into the scars on my chest. Then I remember everything again.
Kalfou reaching into my chest and pulling out that beautiful spark.
I know I’m not supposed to confess online. I know anything could be listening to me. But I don’t have anyone else to tell, and I need someone to forgive me.
You can forgive anything, can’t you? So long as I’m sorry? Because I am sorry. I’m on my knees swearing to you that I’m very, very sorry for what I’ve done.