“All right,” Ivan says. “I’m leaving now.”
He tells Monica he’ll be back after lunch, then stops into Max Lyman’s office and tells him he can’t play squash this week. It takes him less than fifteen minutes to get over to Reardon’s office. He tells the nurse, the blond one, that he’s here, and she quickly goes into the doctor’s office. Does he imagine that she looks uncomfortable? Does he imagine the edge of panic?
The waiting room is crowded. Ivan finds a space on the couch, but he feels too big for the room. He hasn’t been here with either of the kids for over a year, and he can’t quite remember whether that’s because the kids have been healthy or because Polly’s taken over that job. The first few years they’d been here constantly, with both Charlie and Amanda. Ear infections, mainly. For a while it seemed there wasn’t a month when one of the kids didn’t have one.
Ed Reardon comes out, walks right to him, and shakes his hand firmly.
“Let’s go into my office,” Ed says. He doesn’t let go of Ivan’s hand.
A toddler lets out a yelp as soon as he sees the doctor, and her mother holds her so she can’t run out of the office.
“I can see you’re a popular guy,” Ivan jokes.
Ed opens the door to his office and motions for Ivan to go in first. Ivan can feel himself being watched as he sits down in a chair facing the desk. And that’s when he knows something is wrong.
Later, as he drives home, Ivan will pull over to the side of the road, not far from where there are wild raspberries Polly and the children like to pick every summer. He has been crying since he left Ed Reardon’s office, but now he begins to howl. It is a terrifying sound. It comes from deep inside him, but it doesn’t seem to belong to him, he can hear it from the outside, as if it were somebody else’s pain. All the mornings when he could not wait to leave the house and get to the institute come back to him, the times when he was too tired to see who was crying in the middle of the night and sent Polly to check, the spilled milk, the annoying sound of cartoons on Saturdays, the vacations he and Polly have planned, just the two of them, so they could get away.
When the howling stops, Ivan sits motionless behind the steering wheel and he holds onto it. It crosses his mind that he should kill Ed Reardon. Ed is the one who diagnosed Amanda’s appendicitis. There was unexpected bleeding during her surgery; Ivan remembers being told she needed a transfusion. That was when she was given the contaminated blood. For five years Ivan has been losing her without knowing it. Every time he has sent her to her room for being fresh, every time he missed a gymnastics meet, every hour he has spent looking at dead stars, he has been losing her.
And now, on a Thursday morning, as blackbirds light on the brambles that grow alongside the road, he has lost her.
CHAPTER 4
They can hear traffic out on the street. Amanda is wearing white jeans and a T-shirt patterned with clouds; her hair is pulled back with two barrettes shaped like Scotties. On this doctor’s desk there is a container of jelly beans, the expensive kind with flavors like blueberry and chocolate and mint. The doctor is pretty and Amanda likes the earrings she wears, slices of silver moons that swing back and forth each time the doctor moves her head.
“Do you understand what a virus is?” the doctor asks. She is a specialist in pediatric AIDS named Ellen Shapiro.
Amanda nods her head yes. She looks so serious, the way she does in class when she has to learn a lesson on which she’ll later be tested. Polly forces herself to look away from her daughter. In a hard-backed chair, on the other side of Amanda, Ivan is motionless; he’s like a man made out of stone. The window is open and the city sounds of Boston are jarring to someone used to the quiet of Morrow. In Morrow, the wind makes more noise than anything else; it rattles the leaves from the trees in November, it whooshes down the chimneys on wild January nights and breaks the thin, blue icicles off the rain gutters. A long time ago, ages ago, when Polly was a little girl in New York, she never noticed the sounds of traffic. Now, she hears not only the traffic but also something underneath the whir of engines and the horns honking. She could swear it was the sound of someone screaming.
Polly and Ivan have made a vow not to cry in front of Amanda, and they’ve kept to it, but when they’re alone they break down suddenly, they find themselves weeping when they brush their teeth, when they reach for socks in a dresser drawer. They do not think about why it is that they haven’t touched once since Ivan locked the bedroom door and told Polly, or why they both have this horrible feeling of culpability, as if there must have been something they could have done to prevent this, if only they had been better parents.
Yesterday, before they told Amanda, they sent Charlie on the bus down to New York to visit Polly’s parents. It was more than just wanting to protect him; the presence of any healthy child, even Charlie, makes what is happening to Amanda realer. They constantly consider the possibility of a misdiagnosis, but when they lie in bed at night, without touching, each feels completely without hope.
When they told her, she stared at them as though they’d gone crazy.
“No, I’m not,” Amanda had said, puzzled. “I’m not sick.”
While Ivan explained about the blood transfusion and the virus, Amanda chewed bubble gum and stared at the ceiling. When he was done, she sighed and said, “All right. How much school do I have to miss?”
“We don’t know about school,” Ivan had said.
The look Amanda gave him raised goosebumps along Polly’s skin.
“What!” Amanda had shouted. “You have to know.”
Polly tried to put her arms around her, but Amanda bolted from the table. She stood between the sink and the refrigerator, cornered, a wild look in her eye.
“I can’t be sick!” Amanda screamed at them. “Don’t you understand anything! I can’t miss school!”
She ran up to her room and locked herself in, and they let her. They let her sit in the dark and cry, they let her listen to one cassette tape after another, and when she came back downstairs at a little after nine that night, they nodded when she said her eyes might look funny because she was tired. They sat around the kitchen table, eating chocolate ice cream. But they didn’t look at each other; they didn’t dare speak above a whisper. They’ve become sleepwalkers, wandering through their own nightmares, each avoiding the others for fear that a word, a conversation, a kiss will make them realize they aren’t dreaming.
This morning, before they set off for Boston, Polly made a pot of strong coffee. She poured herself a cup, but she couldn’t drink it. The house was much too quiet; it was like the house in a dream that even the dreamer knows is not quite right simply because the edges of things blur. Polly is afraid that if she reaches for a coffee cup her hand will go through a wall, if she turns on the tap instead of water out will come spiders and stones. This is the kind of dream where everything too terrible to imagine suddenly happens, it happens when your back is turned, just when you think everything is fine.
When the phone rang, Polly answered before she thought better of it. It was Betsy Stafford, calling to give her hell.
“If you’re playing at being a photographer, just tell me,” Betsy had said, without giving Polly a chance to say anything. “I’ll get someone else to work with me.”
Polly was so numb she hadn’t recognized Betsy’s voice and she had recoiled from the phone in shock, wondering if someone was making an obscene phone call.
“We had a meeting yesterday and you weren’t there. No phone call. No appearance. No nothing.”
Polly realized then who it was, but she still could not speak. When she opened her mouth her tongue felt cottony. At the time when Polly should have been at Laurel Smith’s cottage she and Ivan were meeting with Ed Reardon to discuss the series of diagnostic tests scheduled at Children’s Hospital. Twice, Polly had to hold Ivan back, or he would have attacked Ed. And even then, when Ivan promised to hear Ed out, he was shaking, ready to erupt. He had a crazy look on his face, like a madman behin
d the wheel who’s just waiting for someone to cut him off on the road so he can pull his gun. It was terrifying to see Ivan look this way; he is the least violent person Polly has ever known, he won’t kill an ant, he’ll calmly back down from most arguments. It’s not a question of Ivan’s not knowing his own size and strength, he’s simply not built to fight. He’d worry too much about the other guy. But there, in the doctor’s office, Ivan kept cracking his knuckles; he wasn’t looking anyone in the eye. He has already told Polly that, as far as he’s concerned, Amanda’s been murdered. He is looking for suspects; if he could ever find out who donated the blood Amanda got, he would break that person’s neck, he would listen to the bones snap. He’ll never find that person, but from the way he was acting, it appeared that Ed Reardon was the next best thing. He seemed not to be listening as Ed and Polly discussed how important it was to Amanda that she stay in school, but he was still making that awful sound with his knuckles, and then, for no reason at all, he stood up suddenly and, facing Ed, shouted, “God damn you!”
Polly finds herself thinking about that crazy look on Ivan’s face more often than she should. She was thinking about it all the while Betsy was yelling at her; she couldn’t stop herself, it was like something stuck in her brain and she had to replay that one image of Ivan, again and again.
“This morning you were supposed to be at my place at eight-thirty to go over the latest proofs,” Betsy told her. “What the hell have you been doing? Making breakfast for your kids?”
“Amanda’s sick,” Polly had said then.
“Well, then call me!” Betsy said. “Let me know when we can reschedule. Show some shred of professionalism. Meanwhile, Laurel had an amazing reading. This new client of hers is so uptight that she was floored by the experience and I had to lend her a Valium.”
“She’s really sick,” Polly said.
“What do you mean?” Betsy said.
“She has AIDS,” Polly said. It was the first time she had said the word aloud. It seemed an impossible word, one she shouldn’t even know.
“She had a transfusion five years ago. They say she has AIDS.”
There was complete silence on the other end of the phone. Finally Betsy said, “Oh, my God. It’s not possible.”
“No,” Polly had said. “It’s not possible.”
“Forget about the book,” Betsy had told her. “Forget about it until this whole thing is over.”
Polly did not like the sound of that. When she looked down at her own hands they looked old. She could have been looking at her mother’s hands.
“All right,” Polly agreed.
“Oh, Christ,” Betsy said then. “I forgot that Charlie was supposed to come over today. I have to take Sevrin for new shoes. School,” she explained. “He has to have Reeboks.”
“Charlie’s in New York. We sent him to my parents’. We can’t tell him yet.”
“Of course not,” Betsy had said. “Especially when it may all blow over. That happens all the time. My mother was diagnosed as having breast cancer. They wanted to operate immediately, but my mother, in her usual difficult manner, said absolutely not. They gave her a year at most to live, and that was eight years ago. Shows you how much doctors know.”
But this doctor at Children’s Hospital seems to know quite a lot. She explains the AIDS virus to Amanda matter-of-factly.
“An immune system is what keeps you healthy,” Ellen Shapiro says. “It’s like an army that helps fight off viruses.”
“I don’t understand,” Amanda says.
“Well, without that army, that immune system, the body is more likely to pick up diseases. It can’t fight off infections. AIDS shuts down the immune system and leaves you open to diseases you wouldn’t get if you hadn’t been infected with AIDS.”
“I understand that,” Amanda says. She leans forward in her chair. “I don’t understand why kids get it.”
Polly can’t stop herself before something escapes from inside her. She coughs to disguise the sob. Ivan looks over at her; he has that same strange look so that his eyes are blank. He told Polly once about seeing a dog run over on Route 16; when he got out of his car and saw the blood he felt as though he himself were drained, as though there were nothing inside him.
Ellen Shapiro gets up and comes around to their side of the desk. She sits on the edge of the desk and puts her hand on Amanda’s shoulder.
“I don’t either,” she says.
Amanda jerks away from Ellen Shapiro, her face flushed with anger. “You should,” Amanda says. “Doctors are supposed to know.”
“It’s a new disease,” Ellen Shapiro says gently. “We’re learning more about it all the time.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Amanda says. She turns to her mother. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“All right,” Polly says.
And why should Amanda have to stay here? A team headed by Dr. Shapiro has already examined her. They have found two small lesions in her mouth, at the base of her tongue, and they’ve agreed with Ed Reardon’s observation that her glands and lymph nodes are swollen, her muscles inflamed. No one had to tell Polly that Amanda has lost close to ten pounds; she can tell that by the way Amanda’s clothes hang loosely. The white jeans Amanda wears used to be so tight Polly had to help her with the zipper. Now the jeans are cinched with a woven blue belt.
“I’ll be working with your doctor at home,” Ellen Shapiro says.
“That’s comforting,” Ivan says. “That makes my day.”
Ellen Shapiro writes down her phone number on a yellow pad, tears off the paper, and hands it to Polly. “You can call me anytime you have questions. I hope you will.”
“You think you can answer our questions?” Ivan says.
“You have to understand that this is nobody’s fault,” Ellen Shapiro says. When Ivan looks away, the doctor turns to Polly. “You know that.”
“I know it,” Polly says.
She doesn’t blame Ed Reardon for diagnosing Amanda’s appendicitis. In fact, she feels comforted by Ed; she’s taken to calling him several times a day.
Why is it that she still feels that someone, something, must be to blame?
Out in the hallway, Polly puts one arm over Amanda’s shoulders as they walk toward the elevator. They follow behind Ivan, and Polly thinks about how annoying it was when she and Ivan would go out on a date and he’d walk so quickly she’d have to struggle to keep up with him. She used to tease him and say he got into the habit of walking so fast because as a boy he wanted to get away from his family so badly; he was looking for giant steps to get him out of New Jersey. Over the years, Ivan has slowed his pace, but sometimes when he’s with the children Polly has noticed that they have to run or be left behind.
“Let’s just get out of here,” Ivan says when they reach the elevator. “Let’s go out for pizza.”
Polly stares at him.
“I’m serious,” Ivan says. “We’ll go to the North End.”
Amanda looks at the floor and starts to cry.
“Honey,” Polly says, but Amanda turns away from her. “Great idea,” Polly says to Ivan. “Just fabulous.”
Ivan ignores Polly. He goes over to Amanda and leans down so he can whisper. “What do you say we just go home?” he says.
“Yeah,” Amanda says, her voice thick.
Polly hits the down button for the elevator. They won’t be able to keep Charlie out of this any longer; it’s going to take over their lives. Polly knows she’s a coward, but she’s going to ask her father to tell Charlie. She just can’t do it, and she’s afraid to ask Ivan, afraid of what he’ll say to a little boy.
“I shouldn’t have been so mean to that doctor,” Amanda says. Her voice is small, the way it always is after she’s cried.
“She didn’t seem to mind,” Polly says.
Polly thinks she may dissolve if the elevator doesn’t come soon. They keep this hospital much too hot; there is always the sound of metal, wheels creaking, machiner
y, bedpans and food trays hitting against each other on shiny silver carts. She will do whatever she can to keep Amanda out of here.
“I just shouldn’t have talked to her that way,” Amanda says. “I have to be nice to her.”
They are standing in front of the elevator. Polly turns Amanda so that they’re facing each other.
“You don’t have to be nice to anyone you don’t want to be nice to,” Polly tells her.
“I’d better,” Amanda says. “If I want her to cure me.”
Amanda steps into the elevator when the doors open, and Polly and Ivan follow her in. Ivan pushes the button for the lobby, and as the elevator begins its descent, Polly allows herself one dizzying moment of hope. She leans toward Ivan; she’s missed him. Falling together through space, they reach for each other and hold hands, and they don’t let go until they get to the lobby.
That night Amanda realizes she is afraid of the dark. She switches on the light in her closet and leaves the door open. She turns on her desk lamp and then gets into bed, but she can’t close her eyes. Things look strange. The belts on a hook in her closet look more like black snakes, her old stuffed animals up on the shelf above her dresser look scary, they look as if their eyes are moving around in their heads.
Amanda forces herself to stay in bed and keep her head on her pillow. She tries an old trick her mother once taught her, when she was little and prone to nightmares. She will only think about things she likes; she will make a list of a hundred wonderful things, and, if she’s lucky, she will be asleep before she runs out of wonderful things.
Soon it will be impossible to sleep with the windows open, except for those few miraculous Indian summer nights when the moon is orange and the air is deceitful and warm. But now, it’s still summer, at least on the calendar. It’s good to think about apple pies, and silver gypsy bracelets, and pink silk bathrobes, the kind with lace that are too expensive to buy. It’s good to think about rabbits on the grass and the way her father smiles when they meet someone on the street and he introduces her as his daughter. Someday she’ll drink beer, she’ll have a scarlet dress with a wide silver belt, and earrings so long they’ll brush her shoulders.
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