After a long silence, he said, “Don’t you understand? I’m scared shitless. The report said that this is a new strain of HIV, one that moves quickly and is lethal. Oh my god, I could have given it to Shelly. Goddamn, Holly.”
“Dan, Holly would never knowingly expose you to anything.”
“Yeah, well, what if she didn’t know she had it?”
And that was the kicker. Dan said, “There’s something more.” Why wasn’t I surprised?
“Aunt Kay was right. The autopsy shows that Holly had given birth and the report also said she had a tattoo. I never saw any tattoo on her. It’s new, a picture of wings with the word Angel underneath.”
Lots of people have a tattoo with their kids’ names, but the wings . . . that brought images of heaven. Had Aunt Kay’s instincts been right? Did the wings mean Angel was dead?
“Ask at the hospital if Angel could have been born with HIV.”
He moaned. “Dan, do you want me to go with you?” It took a bit of time for him to answer. “No.”
“Call me when you know.” He hung up without replying. Aunt Kay was staring at me as if I was an alien. “Holly was HIV-positive.” She was shaking her head, her face white with shock.
“It’s worse than that. Dan said it was a new and lethal strain. The question is does Angel have it? Aren’t pregnant mothers tested for the HIV virus?”
We were silent for a moment and then Aunt Kay said, “Who could we ask?”
“I need a computer. We’re going to Brian’s.”
“I was right,” I said, reading the screen in front of me. “Pregnant women are tested at their first doctor’s visit and again at twenty-eight to thirty weeks. Holly would know if she had the virus and she would know if Angel had been born HIV-positive.”
Aunt Kay dug her fingers in her wooly hair. “Surely Holly would have told me if she was sick. She knew she could always come home to me.”
“Holly didn’t hint that she was ill?”
“Absolutely not. She could have moved in with me and looked after Angel for herself, but that wasn’t what Holly wanted. She wanted someone to take Angel full-time. She had plans. She was quite upbeat and acting like something good was about to happen.”
“Give me that picture of Angel.” Aunt Kay dug through her purse and handed the paper over.
I took it to Brian’s copier while Aunt Kay stood at the window looking out towards the pond. “Let’s go out, Sherri.”
“There’s a bull gator that lives out there. He’s going to be moved this week but in the meantime I’m not going near the water.”
She put both her hands on the glass and leaned forward. “I don’t see him. Let’s go outside.”
Something was happening with Aunt Kay. She’d been silent all the way back to Jacaranda. It wasn’t just the news about Holly. It was as if someone had turned off a light inside her, as if she were slipping away from me. She was frightening me but I didn’t know what to do.
I went to stand beside her and had a good look along the water. “Okay, but if I see him, I’m ditching you and beating it back inside.”
She clutched my arm with both hands as we made our way along the narrow brick path fronting the lanai. Breathing hard, like she couldn’t get enough oxygen, she stopped often and lifted her face to the sun. “I love this.”
We stepped onto the lawn and she paused. I dug my toes in the thick grass, so lush and deep that it felt more like a chenille bedspread than anything natural.
“Do you know what I’ve discovered in the last sixty years?” she said, still with her face turned skyward.
She didn’t really want an answer so I offered none.
“There’s no such thing as safe. We can’t make anyone safe, not even ourselves. Bad things happen. Cars crash and disease surprises us and no matter how much you want to save someone else it can’t be done. Thinking we can help is just ego saying we know best.”
I watched the water for any sign of the gator.
“I was just afraid of sitting around waiting for the end. I wanted to feel like I was doing something, and then I brought those brothers into your life.”
“Let’s go inside. It’s too hot for you out here.” I tried to turn her around.
She took no notice of me. “Doesn’t matter anyway, only temporary, it all ends the same. There is no happy ever after.”
She looked at me, her face intense, her hands clutching me. “It’s all rabbit’s feet and knocking on wood. And prayer . . . but there’s no one listening.” Her lips quivered.
“Holly’s death has been too much for you. This is shock and depression talking.”
“Or sanity. I tell you, Sherri, I’ve had enough.”
I felt her move slightly. Her eyes widened and she gave a gentle “Ah” of a sigh.
When the fire truck arrived, faster than I thought possible, I said, “She has a heart condition,” and struggled to remember the name. My brain wouldn’t work. “Something Wolfe.”
The rescuer didn’t look up from Aunt Kay. “Does she have medication for it?”
“Yes.”
“Get it.”
“I’m not sure . . .” I left it at that and ran into the house for her purse.
I handed over a vial of pills. “Is she still . . .” I couldn’t even finish the question.
He wrote down the information on the bottle and then handed me the pills. An ambulance arrived. The firefighters carried her towards the ambulance.
That’s when I stopped believing Aunt Kay was exaggerating her heart problems. One more thing I was wrong about.
It had been my week for making mistakes.
CHAPTER 40
Waiting outside the ICU was about as comfortable as sitting inside a freezer in my underwear. A nurse saw me shivering and stopped to see if I was all right.
“Cold, very cold in here,” I said between chattering teeth. “I’ll get you a blanket.”
“Wait,” I called. “When can I see Aunt Kay . . . Mrs. Fairchild?”
“I’ll ask.”
She came back with a flannel sheet and wrapped it around me. “I heated it.”
“Heaven.” I tried to smile.
“They’re doing an echocardiogram,” the nurse said. “You can see her shortly.”
At least Aunt Kay was still alive. That was something.
It seemed forever before the door opened and the nurse said, “You can come in now.”
Aunt Kay was hooked to a load of machinery that hummed and beeped. It was a world with no before and no after, just the here and now, marked by the immediacy of the pulse of a machine.
Aunt Kay’s black, piercing eyes found me and she reached up to remove the oxygen mask. The nurse stopped her hand. “Leave it.”
Aunt Kay looked like she wanted to argue.
“Leave it.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “We’ll talk tomorrow.” She closed her eyes.
The machines hummed on and the nurse left. Aunt Kay’s eyes opened and the mask came down again. “I want you to . . .”
The machinery changed tempo.
“Shush,” I put her oxygen mask back over her face and held her hand. I tried to pull my hand out of hers to get a chair, but she grabbed on tight and wouldn’t release me. I hooked my right foot around the leg of the chair and dragged it closer so I could sit down. I held her hand and the machines beeped on.
When I left the hospital it had rained and stepping outside was like walking into a sauna. Steam rose from the pavement, the smell of it filling my nose and mixing with the odor of tar and dust. The drought might have lessened but the heat hadn’t let up.
I called Clay and told him about Aunt Kay. Over and over during our conversation I said, “I’m fine.” Why do we always say that? Just once I’d like to say, “I’
m a walking basket case.” Truthfully, I’m probably not a very good judge of my emotional state since I’ve spent so much of my life lying about it.
“We need to talk,” Clay said.
“Not now.” I’d had all the bad news I could handle for one day. “I can’t think.”
“Okay, just so you know it’s coming.”
Clay called Tully and he was at Brian’s waiting for me when I got there. Tully was convinced I shouldn’t be alone so he’d come to Brian’s to check on me. Tully Jenkins, the beer-swigging, dangerloving man in the role of caregiver was an outlandish thought. I even thought Clay was crazy to leave Tully to look after the animals on the ranch. Perhaps Tully had changed, even if my view of him hadn’t. He’d had a long adolescence, but perhaps maturity had finally found him. Not once in the last year had he disappeared without telling anyone where he was going and the all-night poker games seemed to be a thing of the past. Even his drinking was well within the world of normal.
Tully stared at me intently and then held out his hand. “Give me that phone thing.”
I handed my cell over to him. “Why don’t you just get one of your own?”
He held my cell at the end of his arm and squinted at it. “Don’t need one.”
“Only because you use everyone else’s.” He leaned his head back and tried to lengthen his arm.
I retrieved my phone. “What number do you want?” He told me. I dialed it and then handed it to him.
“Hi Bernice,” he said. I left the room.
CHAPTER 41
Brian was already cooking dinner. I dipped a spoon into the pot of chili he was stirring. His face was beet red and sweat glued his shirt to his back. “What do you think? It’s got chocolate in it.”
“Best chili I ever tasted.” I went to the cupboard and got down the bowls as Tully stuck his head in the door and said, “This thing is buzzing.” He handed me my cell.
I left the kitchen, taking the bowls with me into the dining room, so I could talk to Marley in private.
I told her about Aunt Kay and then I said, “There’s something else.”
“What’s that?”
“Clay may have taken up with Laura again. He says we have to talk.”
Dead silence. “Marley?”
“It can’t be.”
“Never bet against the stupidity of men.”
“You only say that because of Jimmy. Jimmy would shag an alligator given half a chance. Clay is not Jimmy.”
I set the bowls on table mats. “Laura’s up in Cedar Key with Clay right now.”
“How do you know?”
I told her. “Clay has a good reason for Laura being in Cedar Key with him but I hear Miss Emma in my head saying, ‘I ain’t got no use for lame excuses.’” Miss Emma ran the Sunset when I first came back to Jac and every time someone was late or screwed up she’d say, “I ain’t got no use for lame excuses. What I needs is bums in chairs and your feet on the ground running.”
“You love Clay, don’t you?” Marley asked. “Yeah,” I said and then I added, “but not like Jimmy.”
“Thank god for that. No one should go insane twice. Clay’s a great guy.”
“And it’s the best sex I’ve ever had.”
“Another good thing. So fight for him.”
“I may not get the chance.”
“Want me to come into town?”
“Can you stop bad things from happening?”
“Nope.”
“See, what I need is a superhero. Or maybe a magic potion.”
“I haven’t got one of those either.”
“Well then, you don’t need to come to Jac.” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “Got it all under control.”
“I’ve heard that before, usually right before you do something really stupid.” There was a heartbeat of silence and then she added, “God, don’t shoot Laura, will you?”
I wanted a long soak in a tub where no one could get at me.
Every day I identified more and more with Holly. Delving into her life had left me shaken and assessing my own situation in a new light. Like her, I always have this rock-firm belief that something will shake loose, something good will happen, even when past experience proves it isn’t true. I hug my dreams close to me like a child with a stuffed animal, unwilling to give up on them like any sensible person would. If you give up on your dreams, what do you have left?
Just as I climbed into the tub my cell rang. I picked it up off the floor and checked. Marley was calling me back before the wave had ebbed on my descent into the water. I considered not answering but that would only piss her off. She doesn’t like being ignored. “Yeah,” I said.
“Start at the beginning and tell me everything.”
“You already know everything.”
“Pretend I don’t. Make believe I’m slow and not the sharp woman I really am. Start with Aunt Kay showing up.”
I started at the beginning. When I came to the part where Laura was up in Cedar Key and Clay had something to tell me but I didn’t know what it was she said, “Shit.” And then again, “Shit. This can’t be happening.”
“My sentiments exactly.”
“Oh shit, Sherri. He wouldn’t do that, would he?”
“He tells me Laura Kemp is there to decorate the model suites so he can sell them.”
“Call him and tell him to get down here. You can’t wait until he decides to tell you what’s happening.”
I used my toe to turn on the hot water. “Trust me, I can wait.”
“Don’t you want to know the truth?”
“In my opinion, truth is not necessary for a comfortable life. I’ve never been real fond of reality, and I have enough imagination to keep it at bay.”
“Then call and tell him you’re worried. You can at least do that, can’t you?”
“Do you realize how much of my life takes place on a telephone?” I turned off the hot water. “Sometimes I just want to talk to him face to face, especially when it’s something important. I’m not gonna call.”
“Then just tell him you need him to get his ass back here. Tell him about Ryan. That’ll get his attention.”
“Nope.”
“Why?”
“Because he already thinks I’m crazy.”
“Well, so do I!”
“Not like Clay does. He hasn’t come out and said it but he thinks I’m imagining things, thinks I need medical help. The only thing standing between me and some heavy therapy is my inability to pay.”
“So you’re just going to sit there and do nothing?”
“Seems like it.”
“Honest to god, sometimes I think you’ve turned stupidity into an art form.”
I sank down in the tub, letting the water lap up to my chin and listened to her lecture.
When she ran out of breath, I said, “And there’s another thing I haven’t told you about my week.”
“No kidding? Better than this? I can’t wait to hear it. What?”
I heard a voice from beyond the bathroom door. I sat up in the tub so fast a wave of water washed over the side. Marley started to ask a question but I went, “Shhh.”
And there it came again, the voice I so didn’t want ever to hear again.
CHAPTER 42
“Is that Bernice?” Marley whispered.
The horror I felt was reflected in Marley’s voice, like I’d left the bathroom door open and Ted Bundy had snuck in.
Marley hissed, “What’s she doing there?”
“Ah, that’s the other thing I meant to tell you.”
“What?”
“Bernice and Tully are having an affair.”
A startled shriek came out of the phone followed by the oddest nois
es, like Marley was having some kind of a fit.
“I’m so glad you’re enjoying this.” I opened the drain. “If I got hit by a bus, I suppose you’d get a good laugh out of that too.”
She couldn’t answer.
I stood up and reached for a towel. “Now I’m going out there and I’m going to pour myself a really big glass of wine. Not even Tully can expect me to face that bitch sober.”
The new Tully was convinced I was in shock and thought alcohol would be a bad idea. The old Tully would have raced me to the bottle.
God, it was awful. Bernice trying to be sympathetic and kind and all the time her eyes were on Tully, anxious and hanging on to his every word, watching him to see how all of this was going to play out for them. She was threatened.
I’d never seen a sign of weakness in her before. Not once, through Jimmy’s drug use and scrapes with the law, or even his death. Bernice’s strength came from her anger, holding it aloft like a torch to guide her, always finding someone else to blame for whatever trouble descended on them. Now this Amazon of a woman was quivering at the thought of losing my old man.
The truth jolted me. I felt a brief flame of power until I realized how ridiculous that made me, wanting to destroy my dad’s happiness to get some kind of revenge on Bernice.
I wrapped Brian’s terrycloth housecoat tighter around me and snugged up the belt. “Look, Tully, I’m in for the night. Actually I’m going off to bed early. Why don’t you and Bernice take off?”
Tully’s face was screwed up in concern. He was probably asking himself what a responsible adult would do in this situation.
I went to him and sat on the arm of his chair, wrapping my arms around his shoulders and kissing his cheek. “Thank you for being there for me, Dad, but you have to stop worrying now.” I looked down into his face. “Take Bernice and go home.”
“Are you sure?” He didn’t quite believe I wasn’t about to fall apart. It was like me not wanting to leave Aunt Kay, afraid if I stepped out of the hospital to make a call, something awful would happen.
I glanced at Bernice. Her face was lit up like Christmas and she was already halfway to her feet.
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