by Wally Lamb
He grinned. Nodded in agreement. “I’m fuckin’ invincible.”
Driving home, I wondered why the news about Dessa wasn’t elating me. I’d been waiting for years to hear what Leo had just said. For years . . . She’d probably stay out there at that farmhouse, I figured. Or sell it, maybe. If she was going to sell, she’d better get that damn place repainted. Subtract five or six thousand from the asking price if she didn’t. It figured, though, didn’t it? Now that I’d just sold all my equipment, she’d probably want to get it painted. . . . But maybe she’d stay there. Live by herself for a while. I wondered what she’d do about that jazzy mailbox of theirs: paint over it? Leave it as is? Constantine-Mixx, happily ever after. . . . Much as I’d always wanted to hate Dan the Man, I’d never quite gotten the hang of it. From all reports, he was a nice enough guy—even Leo admitted it. He’d been decent to me that day on the phone, after my brother died. I had to give him that much. . . . But she wasn’t going to come back to me. Life didn’t work that way. You couldn’t just pick up where you’d left off. For my own mental health, I might as well nip that little fantasy right in the bud. You see that, Doc? Aren’t you proud of me? . . . It must have been hard for her, though, these last couple of months: deciding whether to go or stay. I wondered if it had anything to do with those kids over there. Those sick kids at the hospital. . . .
Joy was parked in front of the condo, already waiting for me. Fifteen minutes early. I drove right past her without even seeing her. I’d been looking for her Toyota, I guess—had had my head filled up with Dessa. I was out of the car, halfway to the house, when she called my name. Got out of this battle-scarred white Civic hatchback.
She opened the back door, fiddled with the car seat. Lifted the baby out and into her arms. Joy with a kid: if I wasn’t standing there, watching it with my own eyes . . .
The two of them came toward me.
Go away, I felt like shouting at her. Stay the fuck away from me.
Joy was nervous—laughing, tearing up a little. She looked awful. “It’s so good to see you, Dominick,” she said. She was too dressed up or something. Wearing too much makeup. In the sunlight, you could see where it ended, under her chin.
“This is Tyffanie,” she said. Was she sick or something? She almost looked sick.
The baby was already bigger than Angela. Well, older, too. My eyes bounced from the top of her head to her pierced ear to her little fingers. I couldn’t look at her face-on.
“Here,” I said. “Let me help you with this paraphernalia. Your traveling-light days are over, huh?” I grabbed the baby seat she’d been lugging, lifted the diaper bag strap off her shoulder. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “That’s right. What am I doing?” Put everything back down again. Unlocked the door with my shaky key.
“Same old place,” Joy said, when she walked in. In baby talk, she told Tyffanie that this was where Mommy used to live. Joy, who liked to talk dirty during sex—who’d come out with stuff that embarrassed me sometimes. Now she was talking baby talk.
When she’d asked me over the phone the night before what was new, I’d told her about my brother’s death, about selling my business. I’d skipped the news about Ray. There’d never been any love lost between those two: Ray and Joy. She mentioned Thomas now, again—told me how sorry she was. But life had to be a little easier now. Right?
Six months before, that remark would have pissed me off. Would have put me right on the defensive. But I let it go. It was and it wasn’t easier, I said. Had she had lunch yet? Did she want a sandwich?
That would be great, she said. The baby needed to be changed. Could she use the couch?
“Go ahead,” I said. “You don’t have to ask first. God.”
Out in the kitchen, I got plates, Sprites, sandwich stuff. Funny how I could look at that kid’s picture on my refrigerator fifty times a day but couldn’t face her in person. . . . Jesus, Joy looked bad. All that makeup: it was like she was trying too hard or something. “Turkey breast okay?” I called in.
“Sure. Great. Mustard, not mayo, if you’ve got it.”
I’d already gotten the mustard out. What did she think—ten, eleven months and I would have forgotten she hated mayonnaise? . . . Weird: her asking permission to use the couch to change the baby. She’d ordered that damn thing. Out of a catalog. We’d had a fight about it the day it arrived. I’d flipped it upside down and wobbled the frame for her—had given her a demonstration about cheap construction, a lecture about why it was stupid to buy a twelve-hundred-dollar piece of furniture based on some pretty picture in a magazine. It was no wonder she’d run up all that debt that time: her eyes were bigger than her head. We’d always been a mismatch, her and me.
We ate at the kitchen table, the baby sitting between us in her yellow plastic seat. Whenever Joy talked baby talk to her, Tyffanie’s arms flailed. She looked nothing like that hospital picture anymore. She had her mother’s looks.
“Do you want to hold her?” Joy asked me. I said no, thanks, that was okay.
“Where’s that smile?” she asked Tyffanie. “Can you give Dominick a smile?” She looked over at me. “Do you want to be Dominick or Uncle Dominick?”
“Whatever,” I said. I was nothing to this kid.
She leaned toward Tyffanie. “Don’t you love the way babies smell?” she said. Their foreheads touched; Joy took a whiff. “Smell her, Dominick. Go ahead.” She slid the seat across the table to- ward me.
“That’s okay,” I said. Leaned back a little.
When she asked the baby if Uncle Dominick could “pwease smell her,” Tyffanie broke out in a grin so sweet and pure you could have put it on baby food jars. She was beautiful, really. Like mother, like daughter. Six weeks old and she already knew how to flirt.
I took a bite of my sandwich. Checked the wall clock. If they were only staying for fifteen minutes, Joy had better start eating. “So?” I said.
“So,” Joy repeated.
She bullshitted me for a while about how great everything was. Portsmouth was great, Tyffanie was great. She didn’t mention the asshole. If everything was so perfect, why’d she look so bad? Why were her eyes so jumpy-looking? The wreck of the Hesperus, I thought—that phrase my mother used to use.
Joy said she hadn’t really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who’d banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out.
She asked me again if I wanted to hold Tyffanie. I said no thanks.
“Oh, go ahead, Dominick,” she insisted. “Pick her up. She’s great with strangers.”
I shook my head. Took another bite of sandwich. This visit had been a mistake.
“Not that you’re a stranger,” she said. “I didn’t mean that. Hey, if I had been a better liar, you would have been this little girl’s daddy. Right?”
I just looked at her. She looked away, looked back at me again. “I am so sorry about the way I hurt you, Dominick,” she said. “I’m sorry about everything. You never should have gotten mixed up with a loser like me.”
I didn’t take my cue—tell her she wasn’t a loser. Tell her that all was forgiven now that she was a mommy. Now that she’d cracked the code on the meaning of life. Fifteen minutes, she’d promised, but she’d already been there twenty-five. Hadn’t even touched her damn sandwich yet. Eat! I wanted to scream at her. Eat and leave!
“So why’d you get her ears pierced?” I said.
Because she was just so pretty, Joy said. Because Tyffanie was Mommy’s pretty little girl. It was just cartilage there, she said. She’d checked with the pediatrician first; Tyffanie hadn’t felt a thing. She would never, ever do anything to hurt Tyffanie. “Your parents had you circumcised,” she said. “I know that for a fact. Did that hurt you?”
Tyffanie made her lips into an O—made spit bubbles, nonsense noises. Joy laughed and mimicked her. Abru
ptly, she stood and snatched her out of her seat, dangling her in front of me. “Here!” she said. “Hold her, Dominick! She’s great!”
The baby, legs ajerk, hung suspended between us.
They stayed another half hour or so. After they drove away, I found Tyffanie’s pacifier—her “binky,” Joy had called it. It was on the kitchen floor. So what? I told myself. She can pull into a convenience store someplace and get another one for seventy-nine cents. When I went into the living room, I saw that she’d forgotten the changing blanket, too. It was folded up neatly on the arm of the couch. I picked it up. Saw the envelope she’d hidden under it. Opened it like it was a letter bomb—which, in a way, it was.
It’s four in the morning. Tyffanie’s still asleep. I have awful news. . . .
She hoped she was going to find the courage to tell me what she had to tell me in person, she wrote; she was putting it down on paper in case she lost her nerve.
She was HIV-positive.
She’d found out during Tyffanie’s pregnancy—during what should have been one of the happiest times of her life. Thad’s lifestyle had finally caught up with him—with both of them. He wasn’t as careful as he always claimed with his little “other relationships.” It shows you how much he ever really cared about me, right?
The baby had been tested three times—twice out in California and once here, up in New Hampshire. By some miracle, she seemed to be free of the virus. They’re pretty sure, anyway; she has to keep being tested up to her eighteenth month. Then they’ll be sure. But three different doctors have said they thought she’ll be fine. That it would have shown up by now. She hung on to that: the possibility that she hadn’t screwed up things for Tyffanie. Some days it was the only thing that had kept her from going off the deep end.
Thad’s never even seen her. Great father, huh? Almost as good as mine was.
The Duchess had taken off for Mexico during Joy’s seventh month, according to her letter. He and this other guy were chasing after some new “cure” that the U.S. wouldn’t approve. Thad had full-blown AIDS. He told her he needed whatever money he had for his own treatments, and they’d had a big fight. What had she ever seen in that self-centered scumbag, anyway? Because that was what he was—scum. He had wrecked her entire life, and she wasn’t just talking about HIV.
She’d driven east by herself, just her and the baby, after a big blowout with her mother and her mother’s “subhuman” husband. The trip had been hard; she’d had to stop all the time for Tyffanie, sometimes in places she wasn’t too comfortable about stopping in. She’d spent way more of her money than she’d planned to. But she was glad she’d done it—come back east. She was moving back to Three Rivers at the end of the month. That was partly what this visit had been about—setting things up, finding a place to stay. She’d rented a little third-floor apartment over on Coleman Court. She was moving in on August first. She’d already gotten a waitressing job—down at Denny’s, Monday through Wednesday nights to start. It was just temporary. She’d look for a job with benefits when she got back. Her landlady was going to take care of Tyffanie on the nights she worked. This woman had some major “issues”—she weighed over three hundred pounds, for one thing—but she was a licensed day care provider. She was great with kids from what Joy could see. That was all that counted.
Tyffanie and I were the only two people in the world that meant anything to her, she wrote. She loved me. She still loved me. I realized that even before Thad and I were halfway to California—realized that I’d made another one of my huge mistakes. But for my sake, she wished I had never even walked up to the membership desk at Hardbodies that day. Because if we hadn’t met, she wouldn’t have had the chance to wreck my life.
You have to get tested, Dominick. I feel so ashamed. I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know. . . .
I stood there, numb. Thought, in succession, these things: Were we both going to die, then—Thomas and me? . . . Where did you even get an AIDS test? . . . If I died, who was going to shave Ray?
I have absolutely no right in the world to ask you this, Dominick. But I don’t have a choice. I’m desperate. I know I’m going to be too afraid to ask you this when I see you.
If your HIV test is negative—if you don’t have the virus—would you please, please, please consider taking Tyffanie? Only if I get real sick. If it turns into AIDS. Maybe it will never even come to that. Not everyone who has HIV comes down with AIDS. Maybe there’ll be a cure. I know I have no right to ask, but I’m scared to death that Tyffanie is going to end up with strangers. Bad people. There were so many of them out there, she said. Joy didn’t want her mother raising the baby. She was fifty-one years old. She had never wanted her own kids. I have to know that Tyffanie has a chance in life, Dominick. Maybe it’s what God wants. He took your own little daughter away from you. Maybe he wants me to die so you can have my little girl. . . .
I let the letter fall. Got to the bathroom and gave up my lunch.
I drove up to Farmington that Friday. Paid my twenty bucks. They assigned me a confidential number, drew my blood. The woman at the window told me I had to let three business days pass and then call the lab at the end of the third day. Which was Wednesday in my case, she said. The test results usually came back around three, so I should call between four and five-thirty.
I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t tell anyone. Leo would tell Angie and she’d tell Dessa. What could Dr. Patel say that would make any difference?
I visited Ray as usual. Brought him his clean laundry, shaved him, chatted with him and his buddies. One afternoon, passing the wheelchair “sentries,” I locked eyes with that shriveled-up human skeleton who sat out there. Princess Evil Eye. She was staring at me something fierce that day—like she knew what was up, what I was waiting to hear about. But this time I stood there and stared back at her. Gave it back to her. . . . It made no sense, really; it was pathetic. Little kids were dying every day from cancer, car accidents, AIDS. The other day in the paper, they’d run a story about a seventeen-year-old boy who’d put up a yearlong fight waiting for a bone marrow match he’d never gotten. But there she sat: a geriatric nuisance, a vegetable with a beating heart. They must have to bathe her, shovel food into her, wipe up whatever came out the other end. What a waste, I thought. What a fucked-up universe. She gets to hang on to life and, meanwhile, over there at that children’s hospice . . .
“Something bothering you?” Ray asked me.
“Huh? No. Why?”
“I don’t know. It just seems like something’s eating you.” I waved away the remark—told him I was fine. What was he, a shrink now?
Was something eating me?
The nights were bad; that was when the worst panics fell over me. I slept in fits and starts, sitting bolt upright from noises I thought I heard, from dreams. One night the phone rang at 2:00 A.M. I couldn’t answer it. I was sure it would be Joy. Whatever my test said, I wasn’t doing it—cleaning up her mess for her. She had no right to even ask. I was nobody’s father.
Tuesday night—the night before I was due to call for my test results: that was when I hit bottom. Crying jags, the shakes. I went out for a drive to calm down and ran right through a red light at Broad and Benson. No one was coming the other way, thank God, but they could have been. That was the point: someone could have been coming. I guess I was a little screwy by then from all that sleep deprivation.
I admired the irony of it, in a way: the way God had waited all those years and then had finally gotten around to me after all. Had finally zapped me for being the son of a bitch brother. I’d never figured that out: why God had given Thomas schizophrenia and not me. But now I thought I glimpsed the master plan. The Lord Almighty had been saving me for something else. The AIDS virus: the disease you couldn’t win against no matter how well you played defense. And He was a jokester, too: that little scare He’d given me when I thought Thomas had the disease. But that had turned out to be a false alarm. Previews of coming attractions. He’d been saving
the HIV card to play on me. . . .
I kept thinking about that goofy priest—the one at my brother’s burial service. The guy in the sandals. Father LaVie, who’d beaten cancer. The padre with the amazing shrinking tumor. . . . They’d imported him from somewhere else because all the priests at St. Anthony’s were busy that day. He’d told me where he’d driven in from, but I’d forgotten. I opened the phone book to the list of towns. Danbury, Danielson. . . . That was it. He’d said he was pinch-hitting at a rectory up in Danielson.
It was Father LaVie who answered. Sure he remembered me, he said. And how about this for a coincidence: he’d just read an article that day about twins who survived their siblings and had started thinking about me. How difficult it must be to mourn a twin. So how was I? What could he do for me?
I rambled on, in no particular order, about Ray’s gangrene, Angela, the weight my brother had put on me. About what a bully my grandfather had been and how I’d bullied Thomas all our lives because I was insecure in my mother’s love. About Joy’s visit, her news. “Every time I take a step forward, I get clobbered,” I told him. “God must really hate me.”
Father LaVie promised me that there was meaning to be mined from suffering—that God was merciful, whether we understood His ways or not. This is pap, I thought—Hallmark greeting card theology. But when I hung up, I felt calmer. Better. Whatever that test result was going to say, it was beyond my control. All I could do now was hang on. Pray for a merciful, not an ironic, god.
On Wednesday afternoon, I called the test center. Got busy signals until four-forty-five. The woman had me repeat my number. “Okay, just a second,” she said.
I closed my eyes. Gripped the receiver. I had it: I knew I did. I’d gotten the virus to pay for the sins I’d committed against my brother, my mother, my wife. . . .
The phone clunked. “Okay,” she said. “It’s here. Non-reactive.”