by Amy Lane
“I just want him to remember to use a rubber, okay?”
“You can’t make him remember to screw girls?”
“Hell, I couldn’t remember that half the time in college!”
A digestive silence while Donna, his supervisor, rearranged what she was about to say. Joe watched her do it, gave her time, and when she finally looked up, she had a serene smile on her face as she tried to convince them both that she wasn’t about to say something really bitchy.
“Well, thank heavens you’ve seen the light,” she tried. She had a broad face, the kind that blotched easily, with cheeks the texture of risen dough.
He just looked at her levelly without saying a thing until those cheeks blushed a patchy scarlet, and he walked away. He didn’t have to tell her he swung both ways, but holy God was it ever satisfying.
It didn’t matter. Donna gave it her approval, and Debbie… well, Debbie was so lonely, he didn’t see her not wanting visitors.
It turned out he was right.
He took Casey and Dev out to eat first at The Oar Cart, because they grilled a hell of a burger and because he wasn’t sure they would want to eat later. They talked like kids—car phones and how amazing it would be to have one, movies and which one they really wanted to see, movie stars and which one they really wanted to kiss. Tom Cruise from that fighter pilot movie Joe and Casey had watched on the VCR was a big favorite, closely followed by the blond guy from The Princess Bride. Casey considered, though, after Dev threw out that choice.
“I don’t know,” he said, throwing Joe an inscrutable look. “I kind of liked that Inigo Montoya guy. I thought he was pretty hot.”
“Yeah, but he’s old!” Dev complained, and Casey kept his eyes on Joe.
“Not that old. Only a few years older than Joe.”
Joe raised an eyebrow and Casey went back to playing the game with Dev, but the moment sat heavy. The problem with those moments was that although they were few and far between, Casey seemed to mean them wholeheartedly whenever they occurred. The kid was not forgetting his first crush, nor was he apparently ever forgetting that he would eventually be old enough for it to mean something.
But they finished their burgers happily, and Joe took them to Auburn General through the front door, and not the employee entrance that he usually used. He walked them down the gently colored taupe corridors with the muted red lines that gave directions, and made a sharp left into a unit marked ICU.
In the future, patients like the one they were about to visit would change the face of the intensive care unit. In the future, every ICU patient would have his own cubicle with clear Plexiglas partitions that would give doctors a view of the goings-on but also give patients privacy. In the future, there would be a station for nonlatex gloves and a sink in every cubicle, as well as hand sanitizer with moisturizer so the medical staff didn’t spend their lives with cracked, bleeding fingers. In the future, there would be a special box for needles or any other object that had touched blood and that people worried about and a place for face masks, should they be necessary. But that was in the future.
At the moment, there were four tiny cubicles in a row, each one big enough for the bed and a couple of people, all of them divided by the big sheets on rollers that had been used in the ER. There was no sink, no privacy screen, and no chairs or real room for a visitor to sit. There was just a bare floor, a floating cloth wall, and the smallish woman lying in the center of the bed.
Joe had actually been there on the day Debbie had first walked into the hospital, about two months before he’d seen Casey on the side of the road. She’d wanted to get rid of the Karposi’s sarcoma lesion that had developed on the side of her face. She’d been tall and chesty and a little bit plump, especially in the ass and thighs, but Joe had always been an ass and thigh man, so he’d thought she was damned attractive. She’d had toffee-brown hair and big brown eyes that had laugh wrinkles at the corners. And she’d had a full mouth that she’d tried not to press together in worry.
She’d gotten the lesion on her temple removed and had some blood work done, and that had been a year ago.
Joe had seen a lot of her since then.
They’d stopped removing the lesions when her recurring bouts of diarrhea got bad and every incision they made for the sarcoma got infected. At the moment, cervical cancer was the thing that was killing her.
Sort of.
The thing that was really killing her was AIDS.
Her pretty toffee-brown hair had mostly fallen out as her skin became a nightmare of flaky, cracked lesions. Her mouth was a mess of herpes sores. She weighed around ninety-five pounds. The only thing left of the pretty woman who had walked into the hospital was the big expressive brown eyes, but now they were clouded with fear, with pain, and with loneliness.
Nobody visited patients in this end of the ICU.
Those eyes lit up when she saw Joe, though, and then blinked at Casey and Dev, who were cowering back near the curtain.
“Hey, Joe,” she said, his name coming out like a sigh of blessing. “These your humping bunnies?”
“Oh God,” Dev whimpered from behind them. “You told her?”
Joe spared a glance for Casey’s boyfriend, who was so pale his blemishes and freckles stood out in blotchy relief, and his narrow face looked like an eel’s.
“Deb is about to give you guys some very private info, Mr. I-don’t-need-a-fucking-condom, so you’d better put on your smoking jacket, grab your pipe and slippers, and sit down and pretend to be a grown-up, okay?”
A dry, husking laugh sounded from the bed. “Oh Joey-angel, keep your pantyhose on. They’re babies. You remember what it was like to be a baby?”
Joe remembered Tim’s body, smooth and willing beneath his in the moonlight on the way home from band practice, the way the little bottle of vegetable oil that he’d tucked in his backpack had come in mighty handy once they’d progressed that far. There hadn’t been any fear then, not in 1973, and he wished bitterly that Casey had grown up then instead of now.
“I want them to stay babies, Deb,” he said softly, pulling a folding chair from the wall and sitting down next to her. Quite naturally, he took her hand. She closed her eyes, and not because her skin was tender and sore, either. Nobody touched people in this wing; nobody hugged them or kissed them on the cheek. But Joe had been brought up to believe that human touch was part of healing and that you could not ease the body without easing the spirit. Just because he didn’t expect God to show up and make it all better didn’t mean he believed simple human contact wasn’t a gift Joe had in his power to bestow.
“They can’t stay babies when their bodies are rotting from the inside out.”
Deb closed her eyes again and nodded. “Yeah, I get it. You want to keep them safe. You’re a good man, Angel.” She looked over at Casey and Dev in the corner. “Kids, you know this man’s the best, right? Lots of evil motherfuckers out there. I almost died thinking every man out in the world was a dick and every girl’s a bitch, but Joey—he made it better. I’m gonna die thinking there’s good people in the world, and maybe I’m one.”
“It’s the truth,” Joe said softly. “You up to this?”
“Yeah, Joe,” Deb said, smiling at him. Something in her smile, the way her eyes grew bright, and the vision of what she’d looked like that late-summer day, walking in through the front door of the hospital as Joe was walking out, superimposed itself on the disintegrating shell of fractured skin and rotting organs that lay on the bed. For a moment, she was a pretty girl, worried about appearing vain, but gorgeous, shaking back thick hair in the sun. “I’ll do anything you need me to,” she was saying softly, and Joe closed his eyes and kept that vision there, knowing she’d love to appear beautiful, even in his mind.
“I just need you to talk to them honest,” Joe said, eyes still closed. “I need you to tell them shit you wish someone had told you.” He opened his eyes and still saw her, a beautiful woman with a charming smile.
“Yeah, Ang
el. I’ll do anything for you.” Joe went to stand up so Casey could move closer, and Deb gave a little hurt whine, her hand clenching on his. The skin on the back crackled and bled, and Joe sat down again.
“Casey, do me a favor?”
“Yeah, Joe?”
“Look in that cupboard over there in the corner—you see that?”
He did, and Joe had Casey pull out a box of disposable latex gloves, the kind that made some people’s hands itch, and put on a pair.
“I’m gonna get up, Deb, okay? But Casey’s gonna hold your hand, is that all right?”
Deb’s eyes grew limpid and sorrowful. “He’s not gonna want to hold my hand, Joe. I’m scary.”
Joe shook his head and glared at Casey, daring him to contradict. “You’re beautiful, sweetheart. Did I ever tell you that? That first day I saw you, walking out of the hospital while I came on shift? I swear to God, I almost hit on you right there.” He stood up and gestured for Casey to sit down. “You had the greatest smile—and your eyes. Oh God, you’ve got the most beautiful brown eyes I’ve ever seen. I look in those eyes, and I think happy summer days, probably for the rest of my life, okay?” Her hand was all bones and dry, cracking skin, but he gently put it in Casey’s, and Casey took a deep breath and clasped his hand over it.
Debbie was smiling at him, and Casey managed a shy smile back, like Joe, looking at her eyes and not at the rest of her body, racked with weeping sores.
“A little firmer, baby,” she rasped. “I’m already broken. It takes some pressure for me to know you’re there.”
Casey’s hand grew a little tighter, and Deb sighed and relaxed.
“So here it is,” she said softly. “The whole true story about how Debbie Lightner went from chubby brunette to horror show extra. Are you ready?”
“Did it have something to do with not using a condom?” Casey asked, and she laughed dryly.
“You’re quick, kid. But it’s more than that. See, I had this boyfriend, and I loved the holy fucking shit out of him. You ever love someone like that?”
Casey’s eyes darted sideways—not to Dev, who had crept forward and was standing on his left, but to Joe, who had moved a little down the bed. “Yeah,” he said.
Joe sighed and grimaced and then started to move unobtrusively to the back of the room. He wanted to move to the other curtained cubicle, because that one had a sink, so he could wash and sanitize his hands, but he had to get there first without interrupting Deb. He moved toward the curtain quietly, pausing to look at Casey occasionally, but listening to Debbie’s story all the way.
“Yeah. Me too. So I loved the holy fucking shit out of this guy, and I think he loved me too. In fact, I know he loved me too, but he also loved dick, and that was a problem.”
“Wait!” Dev said, sounding surprised. “Who the hell is Dick?”
Casey and Deb met eyes then—Joe saw it. They met eyes, and Deb started to giggle, and so did Casey, and Casey shook his head. “Not Dick-Richard, moron! He was gay!”
Dev opened his mouth and closed it again. “But if he was gay, why was he sleeping with you?”
“Because,” Casey said, looking at Debbie and grimacing. “Because sometimes when you tell your parents you’re gay, they don’t go out and get a membership in PFLAG, you lucky fucker. Sometimes they kick you out of the fucking house and let you live on the streets.”
“Oh, baby,” she said, her voice raw. “Did that happen to you?”
Joe grimaced and looked over his shoulder in time to meet Casey’s eyes. “Yeah,” Casey muttered, staring Joe down like he was pulling Joe’s strength through the air. “Yeah. Joe found me.”
“Mmm… so he’s your angel too.”
“Yeah. What happened to Dick-Richard, Debbie?” Casey looked back down at her, and for a minute, Joe gave in and prayed. Please let him see her pretty, God. She wants him to see her pretty.
“He wasn’t a bad guy, you know?” she said like she was begging him to understand. “But I got this thing taken off my face, and he… he got freaked out, so he went and got tested. And… yeah. Yeah, he’d been fooling around in all the wrong places, and he gave me fucking AIDS, you know?”
“I’m sorry,” Casey murmured, and Joe finally broke eye contact to move through the curtain, careful not to disturb Vince, who was in the bed next door. Vince didn’t have long to go. He was out of it most of the time, and he was asleep now, grunting quietly in pain. Joe hurried to the sink and washed his hands in hot water, cursing his lapse. Glove protocols had just become stringent in the past year, and when you were talking to a patient like a friend, it got hard to remember, even when her blood was as lethal as a weapon. Joe washed with the harsh, powdered soap and then dried off. He grabbed a couple of gloves from the counter for good measure. He laid a soft hand on Vince’s shoulder to quiet him before sneaking back behind the curtain gap to hear the rest of Debbie’s story.
He’d heard it before, several times. Deb was pretty lucid right now, but not always. She rambled. Steve, her boyfriend, had been the love of her life. He’d been her first sex and her first love, and she would love him until she died.
Even though he’d died six months ago in a hotel room with a revolver in his mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” Casey was saying again as Joe came back in the room.
“Aw, honey, don’t be,” Deb said, her voice surprisingly steady. “It’s just… I think Joe wanted you to know. He wanted you to know that even real love ain’t always enough. That it ain’t always real enough to last. You need to protect yourself until you’re sure. And you need to protect the people you’re with too.”
Joe saw Casey turn white, and he moved quickly behind the kid and bent down to whisper, “We’ll make sure,” in his ear before squeezing his shoulder.
“Thanks, Deb,” Casey said softly after shivering a little. “We’ll be careful.”
“Good.” Deb’s eyes were fluttering shut. She’d been awake around half an hour now, and it was pretty exhausting for her. “Joe really loves you, you know? It would kill him if you got sick.”
Casey sat up a little straighter and put his free hand on top of Joe’s. “Well, he’s my angel too. I’ll try and make him happy.”
They left shortly after that. Joe had Casey dispose of the latex gloves in the little trash can, and then bent down and kissed Debbie softly on top of what was left of her hair.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, beautiful,” he said softly, and she nodded, her eyes closed.
“I’ll live for it, Joey-angel,” she told him, and he made sure the lights were down before they slipped past the gap in the curtain and slid out. He kept his arm anchored securely around both Casey’s and Dev’s shoulders as they went through the hallway. Both kids were shaking so badly he was surprised they could still stand up.
He steered them to the cafeteria, where he got them both ice cream and watched as they ate automatically, their almost-seventeen-year-old metabolisms kicking in when their complete upset might have overridden the need for sweets. He waited until their hands stopped shaking, and then said, “Okay, guys. Any thoughts?”
“Condoms,” Dev mumbled, wiping his cheek with the back of his hand. “Condoms forever and ever and fucking ever.”
Casey patted his hand softly, then looked up and met Joe’s eyes. “Testing,” he said quietly. “I need to be tested.”
Joe grimaced. Yeah. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I didn’t think of it when I found you. I should have. I’m sorry. I should have. But last year, this shit was just really starting to hit. We’re still not prepared. No one’s thinking it through yet. It’s not part of the way we just… you know, behave. It’s not part of who we are yet. But you’re right. You need to be tested.”
“What about me?” Dev asked, his voice breaking, and Joe grabbed his hand too. Casey’s was dry and steady as a rock, but Dev’s was clammy and shaking.
“We’ll wait until Casey gets his results back, okay? If they’re negative, we’ll talk about one thing. If they’re
positive, we’ll talk about another. Are we okay?”
“I’m not old enough for this!” Dev said, his voice sharp. “I’m not old enough to end up here. I’m not old enough to test for AIDS, I’m not, I’m not—”
“The hell you’re not!” Joe hissed, because the boy’s voice was rising and breaking. “You’re old enough to have sex, you’re old enough to think about this. Yeah, I know—you used to be able to fuck and all you had to worry about was crabs or knocking a girl up. We can’t do that anymore, and we can’t go back. If you can’t look yourself in the mirror and say ‘I’m gonna get laid tonight, and I need some fucking condoms’, you’re not old enough to do it. But once you start putting your peter some place besides your pants, you’ve got to cowboy up, do you hear me?”
“I… I… how do I even buy condoms?” Dev asked, his voice cracking again, and Casey reached across the table and whapped the top of his head.
“You walk into Raley’s, find the family planning section, and get them,” he snapped, out of patience. “If a teenaged girl can get a pregnancy test, you sure as shit can get a rubber and some goddamned lube!”
Joe shot Casey a droll look, and Casey grimaced and flushed.
“You talk to a lot of girls who get pregnancy tests?” Joe asked, trying to lighten things up just a little.
“It’s a continuation school,” Casey muttered. “Ninety percent of the girls there are mommies.”
Joe blinked. He hadn’t thought about that, and didn’t he feel hella stupid?
“Well, you can learn all sorts of things at school, can’t you?”
Casey snickered, and then Dev giggled, and both boys took a bite of ice cream.
They both calmed down, and that was good, but so was the fact that they thought it was real. Meeting Debbie wasn’t like health class, where you could blow off the teacher because she was old and clueless and wore polyester suits. This was like real, where someone who had just become a friend was going to die, and nothing was going to change that.