Honeybun rose from the couch to offer Griffin a look at his phone. “Hollywood Reporter’s got a story up,” he announced.
“Yeah, I figured, the writer called me this morning.” Griffin shooed the phone away. “This line producer from Fox and Friends called me a little while ago, looking for footage to use for B-roll on whatever they’re doing. I politely told them they could blow me.”
“What does that sound like? ‘Might you please consider blowing me’?”
“Something like that,” Griffin said absently, “more of a British accent.”
“There’s a meme rolling on Twitter—that Culture Club song, ‘It’s a Miracle,’ playing over cell footage of Cameron on top of the guy. You see it?”
“Saw it. First of many, I’m sure.” A sigh. “That tide’s gonna keep rising.”
“At least it’s Friday. Shit’ll die down over the weekend.” Honeybun’s features shifted into a lumpy frown. “So is Cameron answering yet?”
“Crickets,” Griffin said.
“Not even texts?”
Griffin shook his head, looking pained. “Tanya’s saying to give him time.” He passed his own phone to Honeybun so he could read Tanya’s last text message to him: He’s pretty tore ^ bout evrtng. Not sure wot hapnd. I’ll let u kno when shit calms dwn.
“She’s not sure what happened,” handing it back, “or he’s not sure?”
“You’re reading it same as I am.”
Honeybun crossed his arms. “You still don’t think I’m right?”
“What I think, and what everybody knows,” Griffin said, with a wide roll of his eyes, “is that you’ve got the loosest gaydar settings in North America.”
“I said it that first night. At dinner, the very first night.”
“You were joking.”
“You took it as a joke. You take everything as a joke.”
“Because it was a joke. I laugh at ridiculous shit, okay? Just like Roy Porter. You remember him—from the Hoss Trammell show? How queer was he?”
“Um, as a three-dollar bill? Look like Tarzan, suck like Jane?”
“Jesus, Bun.” Griffin lifted his gaze to the ceiling. “You just hate anyone not being on your menu.”
“Oh, please. I just know a vegan option when I see it.”
“Look,” said Griffin, that pained look back on his face, “can we do this some other time, when it’d be more fun? I kinda got too much going on to be entertaining your sexual fantasies right now. I’m trying to hold this fucking thing together, and by that I’m talking about me,” patting his chest, “as much as the show.”
“Of course, sorry.” Honeybun backed away with his hands up. “I didn’t mean to knock your blinders out of place.”
Griffin’s face knotted as he watched Honeybun walk away. “Anyway,” he called after him, “gay guys don’t fight like that.”
Honeybun wheeled around. “Oh right, I forgot. We just tickle and bite. Case closed, Javier.”
Griffin’s phone rang just as Casey was approaching him. Answering the call, he said to his agent, “Hold on, Roger, just one sec,” saying to Casey, “What is it?”
Casey told him he’d found a flight out in the morning. He was booking it.
“I really wish you’d give me some more time here,” Griffin said.
“If I’m gonna be sitting on a couch not getting paid,” shrugging, “I’d rather be doing it back home with my lady.”
With his eyes closed tight Griffin ran a hand across his forehead as though wiping something thick and viscous from it. “If the network gets on board,” he said slowly, “and Cameron comes back online, these next few days are gonna be our money shots. We’re finally gonna be cooking on a hot stove.”
“Dude, I’ll be a phone call away,” said Casey, as emptily as Griffin had ever heard a person speak.
* * *
Several hours later on that same cold and drizzle-gray Friday, across the bay in Biloxi, Dr. Janice Lorimar-Cuevas was walking through the hospital’s canteen when she passed a face she recognized.
Janice hardly ever frequented the canteen, but she hadn’t eaten a thing since her morning smoothie—a habit she understood she needed to change. She’d awakened vomiting the previous morning, and knowing this had nothing to do with the glass and a half of champagne she’d drunk at the Biloxi Yacht Club’s New Year’s Eve party she immediately dispatched Nap to Walgreen’s. They’d watched the pregnancy test results emerge together, the green plus sign seeping into view beneath the little plastic window, Nap brought to speechless tears and Janice sitting stunned on the edge of the bed, running the ramifications through her mind as a microprocessor assimilates data. She was pregnant. And now, a day after this discovery, she was feeling obliged to whet her already-sharp habits, in this case to nourish that zygotic presence growing inside her, even if that meant stomaching canteen food.
Janice reversed a few steps. The woman she’d recognized was sitting by herself with a cardboard cup of mostly uneaten soup in front of her, its skimmed surface testifying to her disinterest. She had her palms pressed flat to the table, as though she’d decided to get up but abandoned the effort midstream. Every inch of her face and bust—the way her raw eyes were sagging, the downturned set of her mouth, the wayward strands of hair stuck to her forehead, the inward droop of her delicate shoulders—was broadcasting distress.
“You—you own the Biz-E-Bee, right?” Janice said to her.
Lê Thị Hat looked up nodding. She took Janice in with a slow, clunky focus. “Oh, you. You’re his doctor. I saw you on TV one time.”
“Cameron, you mean.”
Hat nodded again. “He won’t answer his phone.” Her voice sounded tired and bitter and not entirely directed Janice’s way.
Janice hesitated. “You saw the paper this morning…”
“Stupid,” said Hat, as though to spit the word into her soup.
This was Janice’s turn to nod, though what was stupidest about it, in her mind, was Cameron having quit his antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds two months earlier. Much of what had happened to Cameron in the preceding four and a half months had shocked her—but not this. Having treated hundreds of PTSD sufferers over the years, veterans struggling with their return from Iraq or Afghanistan, she knew the syndrome’s hallmarks: hypervigilance, hypersensitivity, a loss of authority over anger. At one thirty a.m. in a barroom, top-dressed with alcohol, unbuffered by any medications, it wasn’t hard to imagine those hallmarks getting packed into a fist. With her patients who declined medication, she’d found, often the question wasn’t if but when, their fuse long or short but almost always sparking. “It sure did sound that way,” she said to Hat.
“Why would he do that?” Hat withdrew her hands from the table and gathered them into little fists of her own. “Someone who gets a miracle, they don’t act that way.”
Janice tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“God doesn’t give a gift like that to someone who’ll use it for wrong.” Her fists were tight now, raised to her chest as though to spar. “Not when there’s someone else who’d use it for good. When there’s someone else who doesn’t act like that…”
Hat clearly had someone specific in mind. “Are you here,” Janice probed, “to visit someone?”
Hat drew air into her nose and bobbed her head in staccato nods, but when she made to speak nothing came out. Lubricating her voice with anger allowed it to emerge, though incoherently, and in spurts: “They’re letting him die. The doctors are, the ones over in that building. They’re just letting him die.”
“Letting who die?”
Virgil Poleman was the answer, Gil. Hat and Quỳnh had admitted him on December 29. Through November and early December the chemotherapy hadn’t been working the way the VA oncologist liked to see, slowing the cancer rather than shrinking or stalling it, but then, com
e Christmas, Gil showed a strange and rosy turnaround—a four-day burst of vitality. No one mentioned it too deeply, so as not to curse it with scrutiny, but it was hard not to view it—through the lens of hope, and furthermore through the lens filter of Christmas—as the miracle for which he and Hat had been praying. Gil’s energy spiked, he slept soundly through the night, he was lucid and engaging, and when a suntanned blonde in her fifties came into the store he flirted with her so relentlessly that she looked burnt, not tanned, as she backed her way giggling out the door, reddened by the exuberance of this stick figure’s attraction.
Hat tried broaching the miracle prospects with Quỳnh (“Do you think, I mean, could it be…?”) but he swiftly shut her down. “My brain can’t take thinking about it,” he gently snapped. “It’s too much, too much.” But she knew he was thinking about it, same as she was; he was just too superstitious to admit it. For those four days, as she watched Gil laugh and eat and pray and appear to revert, if only flickeringly, to the Gil who’d come parachuting into their lives back in August—for those four days, all her doubts about Cameron that Euclide Abbascia’s questions had fertilized were subsumed by her hopes for Gil, by what she recognized as pure faith. If his turnaround was real, if Gil’s cancer was retreating, if by some beautiful sacred power Gil was being cured, then it meant that same power was what’d lifted Cameron to his feet, too. And what that meant (she tried and failed not to think) was that the Biz-E-Bee, like Lourdes, was the recipient of God’s grace, not merely the site of healings but their cause. Seeing Little Kim nestled in Gil’s toothpick arms on the couch, Hat was struck dizzy by the notion of a link between him and Cameron and Little Kim’s against-all-odds recovery as an infant in the NICU, her breath stolen straight out of her lungs.
And then it toggled off, just as suddenly as it’d begun. Gil didn’t rise at his new-normal hour on December 29, and five hours later still hadn’t. When Hat went in to check on him, she found him on his side, his body pearled with furious beads of sweat, his breathing slow and gurgly, bile yellowing his eyes. He didn’t recognize Hat, mistaking her for his mother. He just couldn’t milk the cows, he told her, felt too sick to do it. Hat got a thermometer into him: 103.8 degrees. With that she drove Gil to the Gulf Coast Veterans hospital, which was where she’d been intermittently camping out—sometimes swapping shifts with Quỳnh, Little Kim sometimes alongside her—ever since.
But no one was doing anything for Gil, so far as Hat could tell. The doctors and nurses, all the interchangeable white coats, seemed to be doing less than she’d been doing—her, just a shopkeeper who’d accidentally adopted a scuffed-up old man from Alabama who’d shown up at her store carrying an inflatable crucifix. With leaky eyes she said it again to Janice: “I don’t know why they’re letting him die.”
“Let me walk over with you,” Janice offered, the sight of the congealing soup having quashed her appetite anyway. “Maybe I can find something out for you.”
Entering Gil’s room, in the acute inpatient ward three floors above her own office, Janice could see, without need to scan his chart, that Gil was dying. The skin of his arms was mottled and bluish, indicating decreased blood perfusion. His sleeping breathing was alternating rapid breaths with none at all, a pattern known medically as Cheyne-Stokes breathing and a reliable sign of a heart shutting down. Still, she conferred with the nurse on duty. Gil had an infection his body wasn’t fighting, the nurse told her. T-cell and neutrophil counts were bottoming out. They were administering antibiotics and a blood-growth stimulant, but at this point, with system failure setting in, palliative care was really the only course remaining. Janice and the nurse glanced down the hallway to where Hat stood watching them with her hands bunched at her middle. “She has medical POA if you want to talk to her,” the nurse said. “He might surprise us, but I think it’s a matter of hours.”
Janice gently pulled Hat into the room, the heart monitor dripping a too-slow cadence of beeps. “No one’s letting him die, Mrs. Lê,” she told her. “There just isn’t anything left to do to stop it.”
“That’s not true,” Hat whispered, scrunching her face as if to prevent her from inhaling Janice’s words. “They just need to give him a little more time. They can do that.”
This didn’t strike Janice as an abstract appeal for time, that indefinite extension for which family members commonly pleaded; Janice was sensing a featheredge of specificity again. “More time for what?”
“For the miracle,” Hat blurted, and seeing Janice’s face harden, if only slightly, she sped her voice into a wet rush: “He almost had it. Last week, we saw it. If they’ll just look at the cancer, they’ll see it too. It was happening. I swear it was. You’ve seen this happen, you know. This is just, what he’s got—it’s a cold, that’s what they told me, he can’t die from a cold. If they’d just look at the cancer…”
She stumbled forward in what Janice first thought was a faint, Janice throwing out her arms to catch her. Then to her surprise Janice found herself holding this small woman who was weeping into her shoulder. “It’s okay,” Janice whispered. “It’s okay.”
Hat threw her head back, her eyes slick and smeary. “I don’t even know him,” she said, swatting in the direction of the bed. “He came to the store after what happened to Cameron. My husband was right, it was crazy to let him stay.” She wiped her nose and cheeks with the side of her hand, looking astounded by the wetness there. “Why am I crying? I never cry. Why am I crying?”
“Because you’re losing someone,” Janice said. It was all she could think to say, though something told her, rightly, that there was more to it than that. Or not rightly, in a sense: because Hat, in that instant, realized that she was losing someone—only it wasn’t Gil. It was God.
This realization came more as a physical sensation than a thought, something bursting inside her and leaving in its place a dark and vacant hollow. It wasn’t rational, even by the standards of faith, and in some sense it was profoundly and grotesquely irrational. Witnessing a miracle—and despite her doubts that was still what she believed she’d seen—should’ve buttressed her faith, she thought, should’ve stiffened it beyond measure, and yet in some paradoxical way it’d provoked instead a crisis in faith, conferring upon her less an affirmation than a test: the photo-negative of biblical trials in which calamity wobbles faith but wondrous signs cement it. God granting Cameron his legs while bequeathing nothing to Gil: It wasn’t that Hat deemed Gil more deserving than Cameron, despite what she’d said earlier to Janice. That’d just been her voicing her frustration at the terrible asymmetry—Cameron smacking a guy in a bar as Gil lay gasping. No, it was the randomness of it, the unaccountable unfairness of it all, and with this in mind she flashed back to when she was an eight-year-old girl on that creaking wooden boat out in the Gulf of Thailand, her head burrowed into the lap of the elderly nun counting off her Hail Marys with the same slow meter of Gil’s heart monitor. It had never crossed her mind that there were other girls, clutching other nuns in the exact same way, who hadn’t survived that same voyage, who’d been raped and thrown overboard by pirates, and that perhaps the nun’s placid certitude, so long inspiring, was in fact a kind of indifference: Everything is okay, until it isn’t. A baleful shudder ran through her, eliciting more pats on her back from Janice.
Like an audience to this realization, in her mind’s eye, came the faces of all the people who’d cavalcaded the Biz-E-Bee these past four months, seeking healing inside that eight-by-twelve-foot orange rectangle painted on the asphalt. What had she and Quỳnh been providing them—selling them, really? No one had spent more time inside that rectangle than Gil, long faith-cooled hours in the sun, and look at him now. Whatever’d happened to Cameron, divinely wrought or otherwise, had nothing to do with the store, she decided, had nothing whatsoever to do with that postage stamp of crumbly asphalt. She’d get Ollie to scrub the paint from the parking lot tomorrow, she thought. She didn’t care what Qu�
�nh would say. It wasn’t right to encourage people to stand there. It wasn’t.
She looked up blinking at Janice as though emerging from a dream. Janice asked if she was okay, and Hat shivered her head yes, embarrassed to have wept on this stranger, apologizing for the damp splotches on her white coat as she pulled herself away seeking tissues.
“Let’s just sit a spell,” Janice said, leading Hat to a chair beside Gil’s bed.
Furtively, she checked the time. Nap had gone and spilled their pregnancy news to his parents, despite Janice’s admonition not to do so at this early stage, and they’d be arriving for dinner shortly. But Janice wasn’t late yet. Plus her father-in-law, much like her own father, never begrudged an elongated cocktail hour.
Janice asked about Gil’s family: Yes, Hat told her, she’d gotten in touch with them. An ex-wife and a daughter were coming from Birmingham that night, albeit reluctantly. Gil hadn’t been the best husband and father, back in his drinking days—Gil himself admitted that, and the ex-wife’s and daughter’s tones had seemed to confirm it. Janice wasn’t naïve, she knew how humanity operated, but something about that estrangement struck her as unimaginable—the baby inside her was almost nothing, manifest only as a morning’s vomit and a plus sign on a plastic test stick, and yet, just two days in, she felt overcome by maternal resolve, by a sterling willingness to sacrifice anything and everything for that faint glimmer of an embryo. The centrality and importance of her own life had already begun to fade, its energy transferring to the presence in her womb. Hearing someone else articulate this, she would’ve blithely chalked it up to hormones; yet this felt anything but chemical.
Eventually, as Gil beside them wheezed then stopped, each cycle alarming Hat anew, their conversation narrowed to the person connecting them. “Earlier, when we were in the canteen,” Janice reminded her. “You said Cameron wasn’t answering. Have you been in touch with him since what happened yesterday morning?”
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