She didn’t answer.
He was terrified he’d get to the house and it would be empty, that the air within would no longer smell like lemons. That it never would again.
When he arrived, he took a deep breath before he inserted his key into the lock. When it still worked, he let out that breath and pushed open the door.
The place was empty of human habitation, but all her things were there. The painting was done. She’d bought a few throw rugs; she’d framed some of their photographs. One of his depicted a man fishing off a dock, his silhouette black against a magenta sky. What you couldn’t see was that the sky was magenta because of a raging forest fire in northern California, which had killed a dozen people and fried thousands of acres. Not one of his favorites, but a picture of starving children or a bombed wasteland was no doubt a decorating faux pas.
Her photograph was one of his favorites. A little blond girl wearing a hunter’s orange sweater, nose-to-nose with a black kitten, back arched like a Halloween cat.
Their wedding picture also hung in the hall. That gave him more hope than the turn of his key in the lock. Best of all, he smelled lemons the instant he crossed the threshold. Frankie might be gone now, but she’d been here recently.
He ran up the stairs. The bed had been slept in. Her pillow still had an indentation from her head. He laid his right where hers had been.
Where was she?
Wait. What day was it?
He was fuzzy since he’d been on a plane since … he couldn’t recall. Right now it felt like he’d boarded in Beirut a decade ago.
Charley glanced at his watch, a gift from Frankie that told him not only the time, but the day, date and year.
‘Wednesday. She’s at work, dummy.’
The last word came out slurred as he tumbled into sleep.
He awoke to twilight pushing against the windows and Frankie pushing against his shoulder. How long had she been trying to wake him? From the impatience in her ‘Charley, wake up!’ it had been quite a while.
‘Hey.’ He snatched her hand and held on when she would have pulled away. ‘You’re here.’
‘Why are you?’
‘What?’ He was fuzzier now than he’d been when he’d arrived.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I live here.’ A thought occurred to him. He’d made sure her things were still where they belonged, but were his? Had she tossed them out? Would she toss him out?
‘Don’t I?’ He sat up. ‘Live here?’
‘I don’t know, do you?’
A conversation made up of questions and no answers really wasn’t a conversation. He’d never realized that.
Charley crossed the floor and checked his closet. Kind of empty. His dresser appeared the same.
‘I … uh … threw your stuff on the lawn.’
Charley had walked through the front yard and seen no clothes. Maybe the neighbors had taken what they wanted. Like a fire sale.
‘Backyard.’ Frankie pointed in the other direction. ‘I was enjoying myself too much to share it with the world.’
The image of her tossing his stuff on to the lawn and laughing, maybe dancing too, caused that chill he’d had earlier to return. He’d really fucked up this time.
‘Fancy, please.’
She wrapped her arms around herself and turned her head, staring at their bathroom door but not at him. ‘Please, what?’
‘Forgive me. I …’ He wasn’t sure what to say.
He wouldn’t do it again? He would and she knew it.
He was sorry? He was.
She didn’t care.
He’d make it up to her? How? Could he give her back the day of fear, somehow make it go away? What if he plucked it from her brain so that she didn’t remember? Did that mean it had never happened at all?
Wouldn’t that be great? But as far as he knew there was no such technology.
‘I do forgive you.’
‘You do?’
‘Of course. You weren’t maliciously trying to scare me to death.’
Since that seemed to be rhetorical, he remained silent.
‘But I don’t want to go through that again. Ever.’
She held up her hand before he could speak, though he hadn’t planned to. He couldn’t promise she wouldn’t be scared to death again, and he shouldn’t.
‘I don’t want to go through it, but I probably will, and there’s something you should know about that.’
‘About what?’
‘About what happens when I’m so afraid I’ve lost you that I can barely breathe.’
Confusion filled him. She sounded like the condition was one she perpetually experienced, but if that were the case, this was the first he’d heard of it.
‘Hold on.’ He put his hand to his head, wavered a bit. When was the last time he’d eaten? ‘Just let me …’ He weaved toward the bathroom. ‘Throw some water on my face. I’m not all here right now.’
Frankie snorted, a sound that very clearly said without words: Right now? When were you ever all here?
He tried to catch her gaze, but she now stared at the ceiling. She looked as if she might start to whistle. It was a guilty expression, but he had no idea what she might be guilty of. She’d already admitted to tossing his clothes on to the lawn. All of a sudden he didn’t want to hear what she had to tell him.
Not now. Not ever.
Charley reached the bathroom, shut the door – he needed to get his head straight and he wasn’t sure he could do it with her watching – then turned on the faucet. He considered stripping down and jumping into a cold shower. But while he didn’t want to hear what she had to say, he also feared that if he didn’t get back out there and let her say it, she might just leave and not say anything to him ever again.
He hated this, and he had no one to blame but himself. Even so, a tiny niggle of annoyance pushed right at the center of his chest.
Frankie knew who he was, what he was, how he was. Why was now any different from any of the other times he’d forgotten to call? Sure, this time the place he’d been had gone boom, but still, once she knew he was fine, why hadn’t she been happy? Why couldn’t she move on?
Charley finished splashing his face, reached for a towel, dropped it into the trash. His hands weren’t steady. He really needed to eat something.
He retrieved the towel and froze, half bent over, staring at what lay beneath.
EPT Pregnancy Test.
‘Shit.’
Not only was the box open, but when he picked it up and shook it like a maraca, nothing came out.
He peered into the depths of the receptacle. The plastic pregnancy indicator lay at the bottom. He grabbed it, as well as the instructions on how to interpret the results. He read them through several times but even he could see the test was …
Positive.
‘Shit,’ he said again.
If he’d thought he was out of it going into the bathroom, that was nothing when compared to how he felt leaving it.
Frankie still stared at the ceiling. How long had he been in there? An instant? It felt like a year.
‘Is this what you wanted to tell me?’ He held up the stick.
She lowered her gaze.
He waited for her to flinch, to blanch, to pale.
Instead, she sighed. ‘No.’
‘No?’ he said louder than he’d ever said anything to her in their lives together.
She didn’t seem to notice.
‘It follows what I wanted to tell you. Direct result of. After effect.’
‘Fancy, you’re not making any sense.’ And someone really needed to.
She bit her lip, took a breath, stared at her feet and he had a moment of clarity that made him dizzy again.
She couldn’t meet his eyes, had been acting guilty since he’d arrived. She’d said she was pregnant as the direct result of something she needed to tell him. Something that had come about because of his idiocy in Beirut.
‘It’s not mine,’ he said.
She picked up the decorative lamp on the dresser, yanked the cord out of the wall and threw it at his head.
He dodged. The thing glanced off his shoulder and bounced harmlessly to the shag carpet.
‘Fuck you,’ she said in a conversational tone that was a direct contrast to her lamp throwing.
‘I …’ he began, and then stopped. He had no idea what to say, what to do, what to think.
That he’d suggested Frankie had cheated on him should have been laughable. However, the positive pregnancy test in his hand was making him say, think and do all sorts of crazy things. It was obviously having the same effect on her.
‘Did you know that whenever you’re in danger I puke?’
Since he was never around her when he was in danger … ‘No.’
‘The first time was in Mexico City. You walked in with blood all over your clothes and five stitches in your arm.’
‘Little asshole wanted my camera.’
‘Yes!’ She threw up her hands. ‘You couldn’t just give it to him?’
‘I tried. He cut me anyway. Not my fault.’
‘It’s never your fault. That’s not the point. The point is that it makes me physically ill to think of losing you.’
She had gotten sick in Mexico, he remembered, blamed it on the water. Had she been lying, or hadn’t she realized until later the reason behind the hours spent worshipping the porcelain god?
He’d known she got upset when he had close calls, which was why he’d stopped telling her about them, but he hadn’t known how upset.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘What could you do about it except worry? And what if you were worrying about me when you should have been paying attention to the next asshole with a knife who wanted your camera?’
‘OK. I see your point. But how does this all connect?’ He waved the pregnancy stick again. He should probably put it down.
Then wash his hands.
‘You remember the day you left for Beirut?’
‘Vaguely.’
She cast him a nasty glance and he held up his hands in surrender. He’d been telling the truth. Considering all that had happened since, he only vaguely remembered the last time he’d been in this house.
‘You were … uh … painting,’ he said.
He wished he could go back to that day and …
‘I was,’ she agreed. ‘After.’
‘After,’ he repeated, and she gifted him with another scathing glance, then pointed at the bed.
He peered at the mussed sheets for several seconds and then … ‘Oh!’
They’d woken for the first time in their new home and he’d said, Let’s christen the bedroom.
So they had. Then they’d christened the bathroom, too.
It was that memory – of warm sheets, warm Frankie, lemons and light and smooth skin Frankie – that he’d thought about in the middle of those dank, dark, still smelling of ashes, smoke and death nights in Beirut. Even though he’d feared Frankie might be gone from his life forever, she would never be gone from his memories.
‘You’re on the pill.’ He almost added right? but wanted to avoid more scathing glances.
Or a lamp to the head.
‘Which works great,’ she said. ‘Unless you throw it up.’
‘Throwing up one pill can do this?’ He waved the stick again.
‘Apparently, it only takes once.’ Her voice was dry.
He studied the plastic. ‘How accurate can a stick in a box be?’
‘Pretty accurate, but the instructions tell you to follow up with your physician.’
‘Excellent. Let’s go.’
‘Already went.’ Her gaze met his, not scathing, not sad, but kind of hopeful. ‘I’m about six weeks along.’
All the air rushed out of him and he sat on the bed so he wouldn’t sit on the floor.
She seemed to be waiting for something, but it took him a few minutes to figure out what it was. ‘You want me to go with you?’
He’d have to clear his schedule for a week or so, but he could. He would. For her.
‘I don’t have to go back for a month.’ She smiled at him, and it was so close to her old smile the knot in his chest loosened just a bit.
This wouldn’t be easy, but together maybe they could make everything all right.
‘If you’re here then,’ she continued, ‘I’d be glad for you to come along. If you’re not …’ She shrugged as if she were dismissing the lack of a spoon at the dinner table. ‘I’ll manage. You can come next time.’
‘There’d better not be a next time.’
Confusion flickered in her previously happy eyes.
‘And why wait a month? Shouldn’t you get it done right away?’
Confusion fled. Everything stilled.
‘What is it you think I’m getting done?’
‘An abortion.’
She choked, coughed.
‘We agreed not to bring children into this world.’ After what he’d just witnessed in Beirut, he was still on board with that decision.
‘We agreed not to try.’
If he’d been panicked at the thought of her being gone when he arrived, and then that she might throw him out, and later that she was pregnant by another man, he discovered he hadn’t known panicked at all.
‘I thought you believed in a woman’s right to choose,’ he said.
‘I choose to have a baby.’
‘What about what I choose?’
Her hands went to her stomach. He didn’t think she knew she’d made the gesture, which made it all the more poignant and telling.
‘You don’t choose us?’ she asked softly.
‘I choose us.’ He flicked his finger back and forth between the two of them.
‘Us now includes one more.’
‘It doesn’t have to.’
Her face hardened into that of a woman she’d never been before, one he’d never thought to see.
A mother.
‘Yes, it does.’
He tried one last time. ‘Hundreds of women have died, thousands have marched so that you could have the right to an abortion.’
‘They’ve died and they’ve marched so that I have the right not to have an abortion, too, Charley.’
Hannah
Washington DC. Spring, 1991
‘I’ve heard that they have all sorts of new meds that can help someone who’s HIV positive live for years.’
‘Heath isn’t HIV positive, Mother. He has AIDS.’
And had probably had it for a while now.
Hannah thought back to when he’d been coughing so much she’d wanted to smother him just to make him stop. That memory gave her the shivers now, both because of her annoyance at Heath for refusing to go to the doctor and for her easy acceptance of the same. But the symptoms had gone away, making her, and Heath, believe he’d only had a cold.
Even earlier that year, when he’d had a sore throat and a fever, he’d blamed a virus.
He’d been right. Blame the HIV virus.
Since the night of Heath’s beating, when her whole world changed, Hannah had become very knowledgeable about HIV and AIDS. There was so much misinformation out there. Her mother seemed to have read all of it.
‘Can’t they give him the new meds anyway? Won’t it kill whatever he’s got?’
‘No, whatever he’s got is going to kill him.’
‘Hannah! You need to be positive!’
She tried, but mostly she failed. Because facts were facts and they weren’t very positive.
HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, caused the immune system of whoever was infected with it to shut down. Eventually patients contracted a disease that killed them.
In the early eighties, doctors had been stumped by previously healthy young men presenting with old men’s diseases, such as rare lung infections or aggressive cancers. A few years later they identified LAV (lymphadenopathy-associated virus) as the culprit.
Fast forward four more years
before AZT, an antiviral drug, was approved for those who had tested positive for HIV. AZT slowed down the damage to the immune system caused by HIV, but in the end it could not prevent AIDS.
‘What are the doctors doing?’ her mother demanded.
More than you are.
Hannah kept the thought to herself. Her parents were sending money. That’s what they did. What they did not do was talk to Heath very often, come and help, or even visit other than the one time following the beating. Heath had still been unconscious after surgery – lucky him – because their parents had not known what to say or do besides stare and ask questions that only proved they had no idea about the life their son lived, or the life he would soon be living, which would invariably lead to death. They’d left before he’d woken, and they hadn’t been back.
‘They’re treating his symptoms.’
‘Which are?’
They had this conversation every week, which was how often Belinda called. Monday morning, nine a.m. on the dot, as soon as she reached her sunny Fifth Avenue office.
As Hannah heard the clatter of a keyboard during their conversations, she assumed her mother took notes so she could relate to their father the contents of every phone call.
Otherwise she was working.
Hannah wouldn’t put it past her, nor would she put it past their father to ignore this problem as he’d ignored every other.
‘The mouth lesions are almost gone,’ Hannah said.
Heath had refused to go to work while he’d had them.
‘I look like I have herpes!’
Actually the lesions were herpes, but Hannah had refrained from saying so.
Aunt Carol was being her typical angelic self. She allowed Heath to work at home if he wasn’t well enough to come to the office, or even if he didn’t think he was well enough to come to the office. She allowed him to work at the office if he wanted to. And when either of them thanked her she waved them off and said, ‘I’ll take Heath whenever and however I can get him. He’s my best employee. And my favorite.’
Heath had an equal affection for both Carol and his job. He loved You with a near obsessive devotion. Sometimes Hannah thought he mourned not working more than he mourned not being the Heath he used to be.
‘That’s a relief,’ their mother continued. ‘He looked like a leper.’
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