I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  SINGER ERIC CLAPTON’S SON, 4, DIES IN FALL. . . .

  Sheffer’s door swung open. “Hey, paisano. Sorry I’m late,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had. First thing this morning, my daughter says—”

  I held up my hand to shut her up. “I want my brother tested for HIV,” I said.

  She stopped in her tracks. “Any, uh . . . any particular reason?”

  I’d promised Drinkwater three times during our five-minute phone conversation the night before that I’d keep his name out of it. So I shrugged back at her. Just to be on the safe side, I said. Whenever I visited Thomas, he complained about sexual assaults.

  “We’ve gone over all this,” she said. “Remember? Those are delusions. Homosexual panics.” She sat down at her desk. “When he starts off on that track, the best way to handle him is—”

  “I don’t want him handled,” I said. “I want him tested.”

  “The wards are monitored day and night, Dominick. If there’s any prison rape going on, it’s in his head. Let it go.”

  I told her I could make the request through Dr. Chase if she preferred. Or through her supervisor. What was her name again?

  “Dr. Farber,” Sheffer said. She and Farber had a meeting scheduled for later that afternoon. If I really insisted, she could broach the subject with her then—let me know in the next couple of days what Farber had said.

  “If the meeting’s this afternoon, why can’t you let me know later this afternoon?”

  She clenched up a little. They had just added three new patients to her caseload, she said; her monthlies were two days overdue; her daughter had woken up that morning with an ear infection. If she could get back to me later that day, she would do that. If she couldn’t, I would just have to wait. She was dancing as fast as she could. “And anyway,” she said, “I already know what Dr. Farber’s going to say. If they started letting patients’ families call the shots on medical testing, it would open up the floodgates.”

  My brain ricocheted like a pinball; I was forming the idea as I spoke. “You been . . . you been following that mess out in Los Angeles, Sheffer? The way the cops beat that black guy to a pulp out there? . . . You seen the videotape of that?”

  “Yeah,” she said. I watched her try to figure out where I was going.

  “Pretty brutal, huh? Man, they savaged that guy.” My adrenaline was pumping; my sneakers were tapping against the floor, a thousand beats a minute. “Public’s probably not in much of a mood to tolerate brutality-in-uniform right now, huh?”

  She waited.

  “Remember . . . you remember that night last October when they checked my brother in down here? The way that guard roughed me up? You witnessed that, didn’t you? Popped your head out the door right in the middle of things?”

  Sheffer’s face looked neutral—official. She neither confirmed nor denied.

  “I followed your advice, by the way. Remember? You told me to have myself examined. And I did. Went down to the clinic. Had them take pictures and everything. That was good advice you gave me, Sheffer. To get things documented. Get proof.”

  She glanced up at the intercom on her wall. “What’s your point?” she said.

  “I just made my point, paisana,” I said. “Tell Dr. Farber I want Thomas tested.”

  At about five that afternoon, I received a call from the office of Dr. Richard Hume. Hume was Farber’s supervisor’s supervisor, if I had the food chain right. It was Hume who’d chaired the Security Board hearing that had sentenced my brother. His secretary asked me if I’d please hold. You had to love the power boys: they called you, then made you sit and wait for the privilege of talking to them.

  When Hume came on the line, he chatted with me like we were a couple of cronies down at the Elks Lodge. He was glad I’d raised my concern with Ms. Sheffer, he said. Inmates’ families were an integral part of the treatment team at Hatch; it was right there in black and white in the hospital’s mission statement. His feeling on this particular request, however—my request for an HIV test for my brother—was that it was unwarranted at this particular point in time. The Institute tested patients periodically, but on their own schedule. Dr. Hume said he hoped I could see things from the hospital’s position: that it was neither cost-effective nor a wise precedent for the administration to—”

  “I’ll pay for it,” I said. “I want it done by someone who’s not in-house, anyway. Not on the payroll down there. I’ll make all the arrangements and pick up the tab. Just tell me when I can bring someone in.”

  Dr. Hume said I didn’t understand. If they allowed patients’ families to dictate medical testing schedules, it could become a procedural nightmare. Thomas had been tested when he entered the hospital last October, he said. His next test would be—”

  “Who’s your boss?” I said.

  There was a pause on the other end. “Excuse me?”

  “Who do you answer to? Because I ain’t going away. Me or my pictures.”

  There was a pause. “Which pictures are those, Mr. Birdsey?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was in the dark about what I’d told Sheffer or just pretending he was. Couldn’t second-guess what Sheffer might have passed on. But I decided to go for broke. “The photographs of my black-and-blue groin,” I said. “My scrotum swollen up like a basketball. One of your goons down there roughed me up the night I checked my brother in. Kneed me a couple of good ones south of the equator. ‘Rodney Kinged’ me a little, I guess you could say. In front of witnesses.”

  I hadn’t thought any of this out yet—had just leapt without a net. But I was in it now. We were all in it—Sheffer, this talking head on the phone, my brother and me. “Got myself examined the day after it happened,” I said. “I wanted everything documented, you know what I’m saying? And now, Jesus, with all this stuff out there in L.A. The way people are feeling right now. . . . I just . . . I kind of figured you might want to okay that test for my brother. Spare yourself Excedrin headache number seven, you know?”

  No comment on the other end.

  “I mean, how’s one little test going to cause any ‘procedural nightmares,’ right? If everything checks out okay, I just go away. Me and my complaint.”

  Hume asked me if there was any particular reason why I felt an HIV test might be warranted. Drinkwater’s face flashed before me. Keep my name out of it.

  “My brother talks all the time about guys breaking into his cell at night,” I said. “It’s probably his paranoia—I realize that. I just want to—what do you call it?—err on the side of caution. Don’t you?”

  I waited out his big speech about State of Connecticut policy and Hatch’s unswerving concern for patients’ well-being. Thanked him for the call. Told him I’d be contacting my attorney.

  There was dead air for several seconds. “Well, you do what you have to do, Mr. Birdsey,” he finally said. “And we’ll do the same. Because unless I’m reading you incorrectly, what you’re doing here is attempting to bribe me. And if you think—”

  “Hey, look, Big Shot,” I said. “All I’m trying to do is defend a guy who can’t defend himself. A guy who doesn’t belong anywhere near that happy little funhouse you run down there. All I want to do is make sure no one down there has been butt-fucking my brother.”

  He hung up in my ear.

  I stood there, my heart pounding like a son of a bitch. Goddamn it, Birdsey! That was exactly the way not to—I lobbed the fucking phone across the room. Watched it bounce against the refrigerator door and clatter back across the floor. Land at my feet.

  Well, asshole, I told myself. You just did something. For better or worse, you just put something in motion.

  A couple of beers later, Hume’s secretary called back. The test I’d requested for my brother had been scheduled for Monday afternoon of the following week. Thomas’s physical would be conducted by hospital personnel, his blood screened by a representative of the Haynes Pathobiology Laboratory.

  I tried to think past the beer buzz I’d
started. Hume was doing an about-face? Giving me a reasonable facsimile of what I wanted? The victory spooked me. “Why’d he change his mind?” I said.

  The secretary said she knew nothing about it; she was merely passing along a message from “the boss.”

  “Then put ‘the boss’ back on,” I said. “I’ll ask him myself.”

  A minute or more later, she came back on the line. Dr. Hume had stepped away from his desk, she said. When I told her I’d hold until he “stepped back,” it was, oh, wait a minute. His attaché case wasn’t there. He must have already left for the day.

  “Then give him a message,” I said. “Tell him I’m bringing my own doctor for my brother’s test.”

  Why had he caved in? Was he running scared about something? I’d go over to the clinic first thing in the morning—try and talk to that Chinese doctor, Dr. Yup—the one who’d had friends killed in Tiananmen Square. She’d called what that guard had done to me “oppression.” I wanted Dr. Yup to examine my brother.

  Sheffer called the next afternoon, sounding shell-shocked. “Dominick?” she said. “Can you meet me later on today? Something’s come up.”

  “Is he hurt?” I said. “Did someone hurt him?”

  Uh-uh, she said; there was no new incident. But when I told her I could be down at Hatch in half an hour, she hesitated. Asked me if we could meet someplace else—someplace outside of Three Rivers, maybe. Her shift was over at four-thirty, she said. How about that little coffee place up across from the university? The Sugar Shack—did I know where that was? She could get there by, say, five-fifteen?

  Why was she suggesting someplace a half-hour drive away? I told her I’d be there. Asked her again if my brother was all right.

  Nothing bad had happened to him that day, she said. Beyond that, she wasn’t sure of anything anymore. She’d explain when she got there.

  The coffee I’d bought her when I got to the doughnut shop was stone cold by the time she finally walked in. She sat and gulped it anyway. She looked like hell.

  “How’s your daughter?” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Jesse? Why? What do you mean?”

  “Her ear infection?”

  “Oh. Better. The doctor put her on Amoxicillin. Thanks for asking.” She fished out a pack of cigarettes. “Can you smoke here?” she said. “Is that a sin at this place?” I pushed the little tinfoil ashtray over to her side of the table.

  I told her I was pretty sure I knew what she was going to tell me—that I’d figured it out on the drive up there. “He’s positive, right? They got nervous and jumped the gun on the test. He’s got it.”

  She shook her head. I was right about their jumping the gun, she said; they’d done blood work on Thomas that afternoon. But the results weren’t in yet. They wouldn’t know anything until Monday morning.

  “So they’ll already have the results by the time he’s examined officially. Right?”

  She nodded. Picked up her coffee cup and started shredding it. “Dominick?” she said. “What I’m going to tell you may not even be about Thomas, okay? Not directly, anyway. And maybe not even indirectly. Just remember that.” Her face contorted a little, the same way Dessa’s did when she was struggling not to cry. She took a long drag off her cigarette. Exhaled. It was killing me, but I sat there and waited. Kept my mouth shut for once in my life.

  She asked me if I recalled a conversation we had had several months back about one of the psych aides down at Hatch—a guy named Duane Taylor. I’d commented about him the day I’d stood at her office window and watched Thomas out on recreation break. It was before my security clearance had come through—before I’d won the right to visit my brother face-to-face. Did I remember?

  I saw Thomas standing out in that rec area, waiting to get his cigarette lit while Duane Taylor entertained his pets. Ignored my brother’s existence. “Dude with the cowboy hat, right?” I said. Sheffer nodded.

  There’d been an assault at Hatch a week ago, she said. On the night shift. The administration had kept it so hushed up that most of the staff hadn’t even heard about it. “Which is pretty impressive, given our grapevine,” she said. “But this was top secret.”

  “Who got assaulted?” I said.

  “Duane Taylor. He was attacked from behind in the men’s bathroom in Unit Four—garroted with a wire and left for dead.”

  I waited. Sheffer looked up—met my eyes. “Taylor works days,” she said.

  He’d been rushed to Shanley Memorial and then helicoptered to Hartford Hospital. It had been touch and go for several days, but things were starting to look better for him. They weren’t sure yet about permanent damage: oxygen deprivation to the brain.

  She took another drag. Gave her cigarette a dirty look and stubbed it out, half smoked. “I gave these things up on Jesse’s last birthday,” she said. “She wanted two things: for us to go to Disney World and for me to stop smoking. I couldn’t exactly swing the Magic Kingdom, so I got her a Carvel cake and a Rainbow Brite doll and let her flush my cigarettes down the toilet to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday.’ A whole carton of them. And now, tonight, I’m going to go pick her up smelling like cigarettes.” She started to cry, then stopped herself with a laugh, a shrug. “Oh, well, my credibility’s shot to hell, anyway. Right?”

  “Did my brother assault the cowboy? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  She shook her head. “Oh, god, no, Dominick. Is that what you . . . ? No.”

  The guy who’d strangled Taylor confessed that same night, she said. A patient in one of the other units—she couldn’t tell me his name. It was probably all going to come out in the papers, anyway, though. Unless the hospital could keep it hushed up, there was going to be so much garbage flying around, people would have to duck. The “official version” of Taylor’s assault—the one the administration was now circulating—was that the vendetta had started over a pint of tequila. Taylor and a friend of his—a guard named Edward Morrison—had apparently been running a black market business. Alcohol and cigarettes. Pills. “That much the hospital’s willing to cop to,” Sheffer said. “According to the version the hospital’s floating, Taylor had collected money for the tequila and then reneged. But it wasn’t about booze. It was about sex. . . . Well, power. Rape.”

  The word made me tense up. “What’s this got to do with Thomas?” I said.

  She rested her chin against her propped-up hand. Looked at me with defeated eyes. “Hopefully, nothing,” she said. “From what I heard today, it was mostly the younger kids that Taylor went after—guys in their twenties. But I don’t really know the whole story yet, Dominick. I don’t think I know anything anymore.” For the next several seconds, we sat there, saying nothing, Sheffer’s cigarette smoke swirling around us.

  “Let me ask you something,” she said. “How many times over the past several months would you estimate I’ve reassured you about your brother’s safety? Twenty-five times, maybe? Thirty? Now multiply that number by my caseload. Twenty-five or thirty reassurances times forty prisoners’ families. . . . God, I just can’t believe how naive I’ve been. How stupid.” She thrust her tiny, shaking hand across the table. Grabbed my hand and shook it. “How do you do?” she said. “I’m Lisa of Sunnybrook Farm.”

  She drew cigarette after cigarette out of her pack—snapped each in half, throwing the refuse into her mangled coffee cup. “Guess what else I found out today?” she said. “Through the grapevine, of course—not through our ever-responsible leadership. I found out that as much as a quarter of the population at Hatch may be HIV-positive. That we’ve got an epidemic down there, Dominick, and the administration’s just been looking the other way. Sitting on the statistics. Can’t have any bad PR now, can we?”

  Dr. Yup accompanied me to Hatch on Monday afternoon, examined my brother, and drew blood samples which she transported personally to the testing lab her clinic used. The results of both the hospital’s and Dr. Yup’s tests were the same: Thomas was HIV-negative. But Dr. Yup’s report also cited the presen
ce of anal warts, contusions, and other indicators of rectal penetration.

  As a result, my brother was wanted for questioning in the ongoing state police investigation of Duane Taylor and Edward Morrison. I asked to be in attendance during these interviews and was, at first, denied. But Thomas dug his heels in and insisted to both the police and the hospital administration that he would speak to no one unless his brother was there. The cops met his condition. During the four interviews that followed, I sat by Thomas’s side.

  This was weird: one of his inquisitors—the head of the investigation, actually—was State Police Captain Ronald Avery. I recognized him immediately: one of the two cops who’d caught Leo and me smoking reefer out by the trestle bridge that night and hauled us in for questioning. Avery had been young back then—dark-haired and lean, probably not even thirty. He’d been the most decent of the three cops who’d grilled us that night. Now his hair was gray, his body droopy. Looked like he was maybe four or five years away from retirement. But he’d held onto his decency—his sense of fair play. He was patient with Thomas throughout the interviews—as nonthreatening as possible, given what the cops needed to find out.

  Thomas’s account of his involvement with Morrison and Taylor kept changing. Morrison had assaulted him but Taylor never had, my brother said. Then he claimed both had. Then, neither. During the last interview, Thomas insisted that Taylor had smuggled him out of Hatch one night and flown him in secret to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with the CIA. Vice President and Mrs. Quayle had attended. The Quayles had been involved in Taylor’s cover-up from the beginning and were also behind the lacing of Sudafed with cyanide that had killed those people out in Seattle. Now that he was letting that cat out of the bag, Thomas told Captain Avery, he was probably a walking dead man.

  As I sat there listening to Thomas, exchanging looks with Avery and Dr. Chase, the hospital liaison, I thought about something Dr. Patel had said several months before. Two brothers are lost in the woods. One of them may be lost forever.