On the Friday morning they parted with a careful show of normality.
At work Mike had three cases to review for his report to the Federal Election Commission, but he couldn’t focus. At eleven he started to call the clinic a couple of times but hung up as soon as it rang. The third time, the nurse answered. When Mike asked for his test results there was a pause, then: ‘Hello, Mr Hess. Yes, we have your results. Are you free to come down to the clinic this afternoon? There are a few things the doctor would like to go through with you.’
During an afternoon meeting that Pete was attending but hardly managing to follow, his secretary slipped him a note to say he had a call waiting.
‘It’s bad news.’ Mike’s voice on the end of the line was expression less. ‘Can you come get me? I’m at the apartment.’
EIGHTEEN
1993
It took a half-hour for Pete to extricate himself from the meeting. He drove to their apartment building, where Mike was in the lobby with cases packed for the weekend.
They did not embrace.
Pete slid back behind the wheel and Mike climbed into the passenger seat.
Shock and anger, fear and resentment vied with love and pity in the cramped space of the car.
Pete turned the key.
‘Mike . . .’
‘Yeah, what?’
‘Mike, how could you—’
‘How could I what?’
The words were spat out hard.
Pete reached to put his hand on Mike’s knee, but it was pushed away.
He hit the accelerator and headed for the GW Parkway.
‘Tell me what he said, Mike.’
‘What do you mean? He said I got AIDS, that’s what.’
Pete hit the horn and the guy in front looked round.
‘Just like that? On the phone?’
‘No, I went to see him. Then I went back to the office. Then I couldn’t stay there, so I went back to the apartment.’
For some reason the ordering of the facts seemed suddenly important. They were circling round the big questions, playing for time with the little details.
‘And did he say . . . how bad it is?’
Pete sensed the futility of the question. Mike threw up his hands, furious, terrified.
‘Fuck, Pete! Of course it’s bad. It’s the fucking end, OK? The fucking end of everything!’
Mike was breathing in short sobs that racked his body. Pete felt tears beneath the anger and the same frightened cocktail of emotions inside himself. He wanted to comfort him, slap him, kiss him.
‘So where did it come from, Mike?’
The question arose from fear. If Mike was infected then he must be infected too, but Mike didn’t seem to get it. His response stemmed from terror, the egotism of the condemned man.
‘Well, you must have given it to me, Pete!’
The words were unjust and shocking, but also an acknowledgment that Pete was a sharer in this terrible thing.
The car in front braked and they screeched to a halt an inch from its fender.
‘God, Mike, this is madness,’ Pete said. ‘You know I didn’t give it to you . . . But if you’ve got it, then so have I, that’s for sure.’
‘Yeah,’ Mike half whispered. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’
Suddenly, tears were streaming down Mike’s face and Pete felt them in his eyes too. He couldn’t wipe them away because his hands were on the wheel, and because he couldn’t wipe them away he couldn’t see to drive. Through his tears he heard himself say, ‘Well, at least it means we don’t have to get old . . .’ And he gave a little laugh, as if there were some silver lining after all.
Mike’s reply was heart-wrenching. ‘But I always wanted to get old,’ he sobbed. ‘I wanted to grow old with you.’
The weekend at the house in Shepherdstown was etched with grief and exhaustion. Pete feared he too was facing death but would have to wait until Monday for the test that would confirm his fate. By Sunday morning he was resigned: he was going to die.
Mike was able to think more calmly and apologized for his behaviour.
‘I was going crazy, ’ he said as they ate their breakfast on the back porch of the house. The horses were grazing in the field that sloped down to the river. ‘I never should have said those things – accused you. Whatever else is true or untrue, we’re in this together and there needs to be no resentments to drive us apart.’
Life was divided now into the before and after: before, when death had been a figure of speech beyond the horizon, and after, when death was a reality, a certainty that coloured thought and action.
‘I feel calm right now,’ Pete murmured. ‘I have moments when I forget what has happened and it’s like things are normal again.’
‘Yes,’ Mike said. ‘As if life will carry on just how it was. But then . . . the awful, dreadful knowledge that it won’t carry on. That it’ll never be the same. It’s like being in hell.’
They went for a walk through the fields and found themselves on the bank of the Potomac. Pete sat on a rock at the water’s edge and waited for Mike to join him, but Mike paced along the shore, walked away, then turned suddenly towards him.
‘I don’t know where I got it, Pete. You asked me where I got it, but I don’t know and that’s the truth.’
Mike had lost the serenity that had surfaced at breakfast; now he was tormented again and angry.
‘That’s the most terrible thing. I don’t know where this came from and I don’t know why it’s happened to me. It’s so fucking unfair! I never did anything that millions of other people didn’t do. So why me? Why am I the one that gets it when they don’t?’
Pete said nothing. Mike tried to sting him into a response.
‘This is the 1990s, for fuck’s sake; it’s not the eighties when everyone got infected. It’s like we dodged the bullet in the bad times and now suddenly this comes along!’
Pete gazed at the distress in his lover’s face and felt resentment swell beneath his pity. If Mike didn’t know where he got infected, Pete had a pretty good idea. For a moment he wanted to ask, ‘What about all the nights you went out cruising and never asked who you were going with? What about the lost weekends you got so drunk or stoned you couldn’t remember where you’d been?’ But he said nothing. Mike was consumed by the furious envy of the condemned man for those who still have hope. At their backs the torrent of the Potomac roared in its eternal inexorable rush to the sea.
NINETEEN
1993
Pete opened the envelope, glanced at the paper and thrust it immediately back inside. He found it hard to say what he felt – relief, yes, but guilt too, disappointment almost, as if this were a failure, a rejected audition, the abandonment of a quest on which his partner would now embark without him.
Mike was silent when Pete told him his test was negative.
He lay on the couch in their apartment and stared at the ceiling.
‘I’m glad,’ he whispered at last. ‘I’m glad you will live. I’m glad I’ve been spared the guilt of making you share this with me.’
They went together to the Infectious Diseases Department of GW Hospital. Mike registered with the AIDS support service. He remembered the days he had spent waiting for David Carlin to die and thought how different things were when you were the one waiting for death. The specialist was in his mid-thirties, with rimless glasses and a tic that made it look like he was winking.
‘Well, Mr Hess,’ he said with a wink, ‘your numbers are not great. Your CD4 count is 200, which is exactly the threshold of full-blown AIDS. Now that of course is merely a snapshot of where you are today, so we’ll need to monitor your blood counts over the coming months to see if they are falling, falling rapidly or remaining steady. Do you have an idea how long you have been HIV positive? It would help us determine how aggressively the virus is behaving.’
Mike shrugged and said he honestly did not know.
‘No matter.’ The doctor winked. ‘We’ll put you on AZT as a matter
of urgency. It’s expensive, but I see you have FEHB cover, so that should be OK. Now, lifestyle. You’re an educated man so I guess I don’t need to labour the point, but in your condition you are highly infectious. There must be no unprotected sex and you must take the greatest of care with bodily fluids. The other side of the coin is that your own immune system is badly weakened and you will be prone to infections that a man of your age would normally resist – your bouts of pneumonia were almost certainly the first of them.’
In most spheres of life Mike was confident in the way he dealt with people, but the medical profession cowed him. Pete had noticed this before and knew there were things Mike should be asking.
‘There are a couple of questions that I have, if it’s OK?’ Pete said. ‘First of all, can you say how long the infection might have been there? And also what effect is the AZT likely to have in a case like this?’
The doctor put his hand to his face as if the stop the tic in his eye.
‘To your first question, I cannot say with any precision. The virus could have been in incubation for many months or even years and is only now making its presence felt. As for AZT, it’s been around since 1987 and there’s no doubt it has slowed the advance of AIDS in patients in the early stages. Unfortunately, there has been research this year in England which concludes the drug is not effective in delaying fullblown AIDS. In this instance, Mr Hess, your T-cell count is already very low and I’m not certain AZT will—’
‘In that case,’ Pete said quietly, ‘I think you need to tell us what the prospects are . . .’
‘Well, that of course is a question for the patient himself to pose. Mr Hess?’
The doctor looked to Mike, who nodded silently.
‘Then I’m afraid the news is not great. In my experience, patients with your level of T- cells have survived for approximately a year, although with AZT it can be closer to two.’
In the weeks following his diagnosis Mike could barely sleep. In the semi-conscious borderlands, his thoughts rushed down dark, narrow streets, one dead end after another, always seeking the one that would lead him to the light. But there was blackness everywhere. Finally, he dreamt of sunshine and nuns’ white habits brushing softly past him. There was a half-opened door in his dream, a chink in the gloom, and Mike put his hand on the door handle. He sensed it was one of those old manual locks that could be flicked open with little effort. His hand was on it, beginning to lift, beginning to imagine the light beyond.
In the office he covered up the thoughts that never left him and concentrated on the work in hand. One day when he reached for the DC phone directory to look up the number of a political lobbyist, it fell open at the page that listed international travel agents.
Mike thought about telling Mary he was going to Ireland, but in the end he decided against it. Very few people knew about his illness – only Pete, Susan and the doctors – and if he invited Mary to come with him, he would have to explain more than he wanted to at the moment. Pete told him it was a great idea. It would give him something to focus on, and at the very least they could have two weeks’ holiday together in a place that would take their minds off their troubles at home. In the weeks before they left, Pete found himself having to temper Mike’s exhilarated expectation, certainty almost, that this time he would find his mother. He asked him how he would feel if he failed again, but Mike was not listening. There was something desperate in his search now.
For Mike, in the shadow of the unknown, the reunion with his mother seemed the key to unlocking the sorrow and the pain, a last chance to find the answers to the puzzle of his life. Because if I don’t find out now, he told himself, I never will. And I have to find out who I am before I am no more.
TWENTY
August 1993
They arrived in Roscrea in early August and took a room in the old manor house that stands a mile down the road from Sean Ross Abbey. The place was owned by two sisters in their eighties whose family had lived there for a century but was heirless now. Grace Darcy was the older of the two, blind and dependent on her sister Ellen to guide her, but with a strange serenity about her and an unnatural ability to read people’s voices. Over breakfast on the first morning the sisters asked why they had come to Ireland. Mike explained the story of his birth and adoption, and Grace’s face grew serious.
‘We’ve had orphans staying here before,’ she said. ‘And we have seen the sorrow they go through. Sometimes it is not a good idea to search for your mother; sometimes it turns out badly.’
Mike and Pete looked at each other, and Mike felt a chill skitter over the skin on his neck.
‘What . . . do you mean?’ he asked.
Grace shook her head.
‘Sometimes it turns out badly.’
Mike wanted Pete with him when he went to the abbey, and Pete wanted to see where Mike had spent his first years in the world. It was after eleven when they parked their hire car on the gravelled drive and the sun was already high in the sky. Mike knocked on the door of the old house and it was opened immediately by a pretty young nun with green eyes and freckles, who greeted them with a smile. When Mike said what he had come for, she looked puzzled.
‘Oh now, it’s been twenty years or more since we had any orphans here, and I’m not sure how much we can help you. What did you say your name was again?’
‘Michael Hess, but I was born Anthony Lee; that’s the name that would appear in your records, my real name.’
Mike smiled encouragingly at the girl. ‘May we come inside, please?’
She stood back from the doorway to let them through.
‘I have come all the way from America and I am not leaving here without finding my mother,’ he said gently but deliberately. ‘May I please speak with Mother Barbara?’
The young nun gave him a look of sympathy.
‘I’m so sorry, ’ she said. ‘Mother Barbara died three years ago, in 1990 – July the twentieth, it was. She’s buried in the nuns’ cemetery just over the path there; you can see her grave on the way out.’
Mike had not expected this. Why had he not thought? Of course, she was an old woman! Why had he not checked before he came all this way on an errand that now looked doomed to failure? But then another name surfaced, a name he had glimpsed only once, when he had surreptitiously opened Doc’s letter to the Notre Dame Admissions office a quarter-century ago.
‘Sister Hildegarde!’ he exclaimed. ‘Sister Hildegarde is the woman who brokered my adoption papers.’ Then, with a look of foreboding, ‘She’s not dead, is she?’
The young nun laughed. ‘Indeed she is not. Sister Hildegarde is eighty-six years old, so she is, but, God be praised, she’s still with us. Will I go and ask if she can see you?’
Mike felt like hugging her. ‘Yes, Sister, please go ask her. I’d be so grateful.’
Mike and Pete sat in the parlour and waited. They drank the nuns’ tea and ate the nuns’ biscuits, and the ormolu clock above the fireplace ticked off a half-hour, then another. When eventually footsteps sounded in the hall and the door creaked open, the nun who shuffled in on slippered feet was tiny and frail. Even if he had been capable of recalling their last meeting forty years earlier, Mike would not have recognized her: the vigorous despot who had struck fear into the hearts of fallen women had shrunk to an ethereal old lady with white hair tucked beneath her blue linen wimple and a thick woollen cardigan over her long habit despite the heat of the August day. The two men leapt to their feet, but Sister Hildegarde waved her hand for them to be seated.
‘There’s no need for any of that here.’ Her voice was thin and breathy but to Mike it seemed full of warmth and humanity; he felt drawn to her.
‘Oh, Sister, thank you so much for agreeing to see us,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you how much this means to me.’
‘Then I take it you are Anthony?’ Sister Hildegarde shook Mike’s hand and turned to smile at Pete. ‘I think, if you don’t mind, Anthony and I should have this conversation alone. There is such a lot of emot
ion on these occasions and we must be sensitive to the feelings of our children. Our children are our most important priority in everything we do.’
Pete rose to his feet.
‘Of course. I completely understand. I think I’ll go take a look at your gardens, if you don’t mind.’ He rested a hand lightly on Mike’s shoulder for a second, then left the room.
‘It’s so comforting to know that you were here when I was born,’ Mike said as he pulled up a chair for Sister Hildegarde at the plain wooden table. ‘I’m sure you must have been a great help to my mother and all the other girls who came to you.’
The nun gave him a glance, as if trying to discern any hint of mockery in his voice.
‘Well, you know, the girls did not stay with us long, but we did our best for them.’
Mike felt a sudden surge of excitement. She was not going to refuse to talk with him; there was not going to be a repeat of the sterile confrontation he had had with Mother Barbara.
‘So how long was my mother here, Sister?’ Mike asked. ‘It’s a question that has always haunted me – whether she cared for me or whether she just abandoned me . . .’
Sister Hildegarde gazed at the man beside her, wondering if she could place him among all the children she had dealt with and eventually deciding that, yes, he must be the boy she had taken to Shannon with the little girl the adopters tried to send back as a defective. She remembered his mother too, the pretty young thing from Newcastle West with the slight cast in her eye, always cooing and fussing over her baby and panicking whenever he got sick.
‘Well, she may have been here just for a little while,’ she said at length. ‘That was the way of things back in those days, but it’s impossible to be certain.’
‘Oh, OK. That’s . . . I had kind of hoped . . . But anyway, what I really wanted to ask is, do you have any records of my mother . . . anything that could help me?’
Sister Hildegarde gave him a look of sympathy.
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