The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  “Okay.” He couldn’t say no to her. “But we were talking about college.”

  “Oh God, Yale. I really don’t see myself enjoying the frat party scene. I’m going to, what, sit there in class with eighteen-year-olds?”

  The distance between eighteen and twenty-one seemed laughably small, but he didn’t say so. Besides, Fiona’s twenty-one might as well have been two hundred.

  “You could take classes here in the city. It wouldn’t be going off to college, with dorms and, like, drunk guys playing guitar at you. Just think of it as the classes, the degree. You don’t want to be a nanny forever, do you?”

  He regretted the words once they were out. But only half his brain was in the conversation. He was wondering, at the same time, if he would let Dr. Cheng talk him into doing something today. He didn’t want that. He wasn’t ready.

  He said, “Would your parents pay?”

  “They would, but I’m not taking a fucking penny from those people. Whatever they leave me when they die, I’m giving it straight to AIDS research.”

  She’d have taken money from Nora, though, Yale imagined. She’d have accepted a sketch. At least it was only a matter of pride; the money was there for her, it sounded like, if she ever truly needed it. But Fiona was stubborn. She’d never crawl back asking favors.

  “I’m supposed to call up my old high school teachers and ask for recommendations? I hardly even went to class.”

  “I’m sure they remember you. I’m sure it happens all the time.” The nurse stood, but it was only to reach something from a high shelf, and then she sat back down. “I’ll write a letter myself. An extra one. I do work at a university, technically. I mean, I oversee students.”

  Fiona busted up laughing at that, which is what he’d hoped for.

  And then the nurse was calling him back.

  Dr. Cheng had a framed photo of Mount Kilimanjaro on his wall, and the room smelled more like soup than rubbing alcohol. He looked right at you when he talked, paused deliberately every three sentences as if some superior had taught him in med school to do so. He went over Yale’s medical history, did a short physical exam. No paper gown, at least, but still, it felt like too much, like the start of something official. The thought came to Yale, as Dr. Cheng listened to his lungs, that this could be the man presiding over his final days. That in walking through this door, he’d potentially chosen a partnership more permanent than any other in his life. Till death do us part.

  “I understand you have some concerns,” Dr. Cheng said.

  Yale spat everything out so fast that he worried the doctor would think he was lying.

  Dr. Cheng slowly repeated the story, wrote things down, made sure he had the dates right. He said, “You’re concerned that you were infected back in December.”

  “Or sooner.”

  “December or sooner. In early January, did you experience any fatigue, fever, loss of appetite?”

  Yale shook his head.

  “Any rash, sore throat, headache, muscle ache? A cold?”

  “No.”

  “Have you noticed swollen lymph nodes?”

  “I wasn’t checking. But not now.”

  “I want to hear your questions and concerns about the test,” Dr. Cheng said and folded his hands across his knees.

  Yale said, “I’m not sure I want it today. I don’t want results that mean nothing.” He picked the cat hair off his sweater, piece by piece.

  “You know, if you contracted this a month ago or more, I’d say your results would be pretty solid. Would I want you to get retested three months from now? Absolutely. Do I need you to promise me you’ll avoid behaviors that would put yourself or others at risk? Yes.”

  He stopped and leaned forward, waiting until Yale started to talk.

  “I don’t know why I’m more scared this time. The first time, last year, it was like we’d gone back and forth between assuming we had it and thinking we were safe. But most of the time, deep down, I thought I did, you know? I’d check my tongue every morning for thrush. When we went in, it was—maybe it was a relief. It doesn’t feel that way now.”

  “It’s harder alone.”

  “Sure.” Yale managed to keep his voice steady.

  Dr. Cheng scooted closer. “Listen: You were exposed, yes. That’s not as definitive as it might feel. I’ve treated guys I slept with, Yale. And that was before the test. I assumed I had it too. And I don’t. Let’s not fall apart over something that hasn’t happened yet. We’ll get you the test today. You’ll feel better, I think, in the meantime. And we’ll make an appointment for the results”—he wheeled himself over to his desk calendar—“two weeks from today, the seventeenth.”

  “Doesn’t the first test only take a few days? I want you to tell me if that’s positive. I want to know.”

  Dr. Cheng shook his head. “I can’t do that. Any positive would be preliminary. A positive ELISA gets repeated, then sent out for the Western blot. Lots of reasons you could have a false positive on the ELISA. Syphilis, for one. Drug use. Multiple pregnancies.”

  It wouldn’t have been funny if Dr. Cheng’s delivery weren’t so deadpan, but Yale found himself looking up, smiling. He could deal with this guy at his sickbed.

  “A negative ELISA is pretty damn negative, but I can’t tell you I’ll call you with that, because then if you don’t get the call—right? You understand.”

  “You think I’d jump off a bridge.”

  Dr. Cheng asked if Yale would like to talk to a counselor—no, not yet—and told him they’d give him a slip of paper with a number on it. A corresponding number would go into the chart. “I don’t even write down that we’re running the test,” he said. “I put a special symbol. If my records were seized, all they’d see is some funny shapes. This isn’t a shame thing, I want you to understand. Sometimes we associate secrecy with shame. This is simply about protecting you. Do you have questions about confidentiality?”

  Yale didn’t need the shame lecture, but it was a nice delay. He tried to think of a question that would take some time, but he couldn’t.

  Dr. Cheng said, “I’m going to stay in the room while Gretchen draws your blood,” and he did just that. Yale looked away; he always had a problem with his own blood, watching it rise up the vial. “We have some party favors,” Dr. Cheng said and presented Yale with an opaque plastic bag of rubbers. “You’ve got five different kinds in here. Several of each. Do you know how to use them?”

  Yale said he did. He’d put one, laughing, on a banana, at one of the meetings Charlie had organized in their apartment. Charlie had introduced him to the group as “my spokesmodel for prophylactic application!” But he’d never actually worn one. He’d had a couple used on him, before he was with Charlie, and he hadn’t particularly appreciated the feeling. Yale wondered if he’d ever use these, or if they’d languish in their bag as he spent the rest of his life, long or short, celibate.

  Gretchen was done. Yale walked back to the waiting room, his sleeve still rolled up, and when he saw Fiona—God was he happy to see her—he pointed to the bandage in the crook of his elbow, the cotton ball.

  Her eyes were red, but she said, “I’m going to buy you a lollipop. I am! There has to be one around here somewhere. I’m buying you a lollipop.”

  2015

  Fiona chose her outfit carefully: gray slacks, blue blouse, black heels.

  She could have taken the Métro, but she didn’t want to worry about changing lines, getting smelly. So she crossed the bridge away from the movie set and took a taxi all the way to the eighteenth, to an address that turned out to be at the bottom of Montmartre.

  Cecily had said, “Remember that you have time. You don’t have to solve it all at once.” But Cecily didn’t know Claire—the way one wrong move might make her vanish. And Cecily, although she’d been hungry for the few details Fiona could provide about their granddaught
er, hadn’t wanted to come to Paris. “I’d make things worse,” she said. Since when was Cecily the expert on anything?

  Fiona hadn’t been sure what to expect from a “bar-tabac,” but really it was just a bar. A cozy dive you might as easily have found in Rogers Park. Film posters, little Christmas lights running along the shelves of bottles. It was just before noon, and there were a few patrons, mostly men, mostly alone.

  She couldn’t feel her feet.

  Fiona held her shoulders back and approached the woman at the bar—definitely not Claire—and said, “Je cherche Claire Blanchard. Elle est ici?”

  The woman looked at Fiona, an Oh, you’re her look, and said something quick that Fiona couldn’t follow. She disappeared through the door at the end of the bar.

  And then: Claire. Pushing the hair from her face. Taking a huge, bracing breath.

  Those were Claire’s eyes, the dark lashes. The marbled brown of her irises.

  The other woman stood behind her, peered at Fiona. She asked Claire something quietly, and Claire nodded.

  She looked thin but healthy—her cheeks pink, her hair back in a sloppy twist—and startled, caught off guard. Which she couldn’t have been.

  Fiona had imagined a thousand conversations they might have, a hundred ways the morning could end, but she hadn’t thought through what to do with her face, her body. Claire smiled tightly, an embarrassed smile.

  What Fiona said, eventually, was “Hi.”

  Claire came around the bar and gave her a brief hug, the kind of hug you’d give a distant aunt. She said, “It’s good to see you.”

  Fiona felt, of all things, angry and ridiculous. That she’d spent this time and money and despair to find someone who would hug her so casually, who wouldn’t collapse in her arms and ask to be rescued. This strange adult standing here, so collected. Her hair had darkened a bit, and her face had changed in ways that had nothing to do with her thinness; the bones had settled, the eye sockets deepened. She didn’t look at all like a college freshman, and not like the sun-washed, pixelated young woman in the video either.

  Fiona said, “Can we go somewhere to chat?”

  “I thought we could stay here.” She said it firmly, as if she’d practiced. As if the woman behind the bar were going to make sure Claire wasn’t abducted today.

  They sat in the corner under a TV showing a soccer match. The scattered patrons looked in that direction, but it was at the game, not at Fiona and Claire. Fiona wished for something to drink or eat, something to anchor them to the table. Something to lend this meeting the timeline of a meal, guarantee it would last longer than a minute.

  Fiona said, “I need to know that you’re okay.” She wanted to touch Claire’s hands, to feel if they were rough now, or still soft. She wanted to tuck her hair behind her ear.

  Claire said, “We’re fine.”

  “You have a little girl.”

  Claire smiled. “I’m teaching her English, don’t worry.”

  “That wasn’t really my concern.”

  Claire pulled a phone from the pocket of the apron Fiona just now registered her wearing—a white apron around her waist over a black skirt, a black shirt. “Hold on,” she said, and she thumbed the phone and then placed it on the table in front of Fiona. A little girl on a three-wheeled scooter, curls blowing in her face.

  Fiona wanted to snatch the phone up, scroll through the pictures one by one, see how far back they went, how far forward. Instead she said, “She’s beautiful.”

  “Kurt got married. He watches Nicolette sometimes while I work.”

  She’d pronounced it the French way, Nee-co-lette, and Fiona couldn’t bear to ask yet if the child was named after Nico, after the uncle Claire had never known but in whose shadow she’d grown up. She feared both answers equally. She said, “Is she in school?”

  “She’s only three.”

  “You had her in Colorado?”

  Claire got up and grabbed a cocktail napkin off the bar to blow her nose. Fiona worried she wouldn’t sit back down, but she did. She said, “Yeah, well. That was the beginning of the end. They—it was a home birth, and it didn’t go very well.”

  “Oh. Oh God, honey.”

  “I was bleeding a lot, like a lot, and they wouldn’t let me call an ambulance. So Kurt stole the car—there was one car—and he drove us. I nearly died. I was in the hospital for a week. They took us back though, after that. I think they figured we could’ve sued them.”

  Your mother was supposed to be there when you had a baby, was supposed to yell at doctors for you and make sure you were resting. If Fiona had allowed her own mother in the hospital, would things have gone differently? Would her mother have insisted on putting baby Claire on her chest, making sure they bonded as they slept? The thought hit her hard, right in the abdomen, and so did the realization that what Claire had done to her was exactly what she’d done to her own mother. She hadn’t even thought to call her mother till Claire was two days old. She’d—oh, God.

  “How did you pay the hospital bill?”

  “Um. We didn’t pay it, actually. Like, we got out of there before they tracked us down.”

  “That’s when you left?”

  “Nicolette was a month old. We waited around and gathered some cash. I mean, we weren’t supposed to have our own money, but Kurt would run the till at the farmers’ market, so. And he wrote to this friend in Paris who helped us. Which is who he ended up marrying.”

  “Honey,” Fiona said, “I’m just glad you’re out.” She meant both things—the cult and the relationship.

  Claire said, “I was working in an art supply shop for a while.” She smiled. “You would’ve liked it. It’s been around for two hundred years. Monet bought his brushes there.”

  “Which one?”

  Claire looked at her strangely—why would Fiona know the names of art supply shops in Paris?—and instead of telling her she’d searched them all, looking for her, Fiona said, “Aunt Nora might have shopped there.”

  Claire said, “It was a good job. And then Kurt stole from the store. He came in when I was closing up, and he took stuff, a bunch of times. I didn’t know he was doing it. I still got fired. But I didn’t get arrested. He did. Which is when we broke up.”

  “Is he on drugs?”

  “He’s totally clean now. I wouldn’t let him watch Nicolette if he weren’t.”

  Fiona gave her a look.

  Claire said, “Mo-o-om.” An imitation of a whiny teenager. It would have been funnier if she hadn’t been a teenager the last time Fiona saw her. She said, “What brings you to Paris?” No irony in her voice.

  Fiona said, “I just thought it would be fun to spend three years and several thousand dollars tracking down my daughter. You know, and see the Eiffel Tower too.”

  “Oh.” Claire looked annoyed, but also like she was trying to hide that she was pleased. “You didn’t need to come all this way.”

  “Claire, you have a kid now. Do you not get it? Wouldn’t you—if your daughter—” Fiona couldn’t bring herself to say the child’s name. It would be an invasion, a privilege she hadn’t been invited to enjoy.

  Claire said, “That’s different.”

  An accusation, maybe, but instead of taking the bait, Fiona said, “Your dad is fine.”

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  “I mean, we have Google here. You can see when he’s doing lectures. And your store seemed okay, so I figured you were fine.”

  Fiona wanted to ask if she understood that she had denied her parents the right, for the past three years, to know if she was alive or dead. She wanted, at least, to know why. But that was something to work out down the road. In this conversation, it would be a bomb.

  She said, “Karen has breast cancer. That’s why he’s not here. She’s starting radiation.”

  Claire looked o
nly mildly concerned. “Is it bad?”

  “I mean, it’s cancer. But it sounds treatable.”

  “She’s gonna get way too into that pink ribbon stuff, isn’t she. She’s gonna go on all the marches and never shut up about it.”

  Years ago, Fiona might have admonished her—she’d always been careful to speak respectfully of Karen, maintain good relations—but she let herself laugh, and it felt wonderful.

  Fiona took an envelope from her purse and wrote Damian’s number on the back. “He’s going through a lot,” she said, “and if he could hear your voice I know it would help.”

  Claire accepted the envelope noncommittally, stuck it under the band of her apron.

  Fiona whispered. “Are you here legally?”

  “It’s complicated. I’m not about to get arrested or anything. I’ve overstayed. But I can get it sorted out.”

  “Why not just come home? To Chicago?”

  “Tell me you didn’t keep my bedroom preserved.”

  She hadn’t, thank God, or that would have stung. Claire’s bed was still there, and her dresser and her books, but right after she first took off for Colorado Fiona had moved the sewing table in there, and then things had spread.

  Fiona said, “I’ll be here another week or two. Do you remember Richard Campo?” It was a silly question. A photo that Richard had taken of baby Claire crying in Damian’s arms was one of his more canonical works. It still hung in MASS MoCa. Claire wrote her college essay about that picture. “He has an opening at the Pompidou on Monday. I’m staying with him.” She was tempted to imply that this was the main reason she’d come over, that Claire was secondary, but why? For pride? It had been her failing with Claire all along—pretending not to love her as much as she did. Trying to steel herself against a broken heart, the way she would with a boyfriend. (The first time she and Damian had gone to couples therapy, the therapist had finally said, “What are you afraid will happen if you open yourself up to him completely?” And Fiona, already crying, had shouted: “He would die!” It clearly wasn’t what the therapist had expected to hear. He hadn’t been a very good therapist.)