by Wall, Carol
Now it was my turn to feel emotional. One of her truest friends? I had always wanted that to be true, but I felt so inadequate to the task.
We settled into silence again, and despite my better intentions I rushed to fill the void. “How do you think Giles is doing?”
“Why do you ask?”
But as open as she was before, Bienta had now shut down on me again, her face a closed mask. “I ask because I care.” My voice betrayed more impatience than I meant to show, and I sensed Bienta receding even more. What had started as a pleasant ladies’ lunch unraveled before my eyes.
When our waitress delivered the check, Bienta and I reached for it at the same time.
“I invited you,” Bienta said.
Not wanting to insult Bienta further, I drew back my hand and managed to topple over her water glass. The puddle spread across the table and then rushed off into Bienta’s lap, drenching her light blue skirt.
Bienta studied the situation in horror for an instant, and then jumped up with a tiny cry of anguish, shoving her chair backward. The scraping of its legs on the floor created a high-pitched echo. Other diners turned to gawk. I grabbed an extra napkin from the table next to us and flailed madly at the mess I’d caused.
When the restaurant manager came over to offer Bienta a clean towel, instead of accepting it she wove her way through the tables toward the exit, as if fleeing the scene of a crime. I paid our bill and then rushed out to find her.
Outside, Bienta leaned against a lamppost, sobbing, a lacy handkerchief covering her face.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I said. “I’d so hoped to have a nice lunch with you and then I went and threw cold water all over it.”
She nodded. “It’s not your fault. And it’s not the water that upset me.”
“What aren’t you telling me, Bienta? I truly just want to be your friend. I hope you don’t mind that I visit Giles so often. He’s your husband, and I have my own, if that’s the problem. Look, I don’t have to stop by every week. We’ll put a space between us, if you’d like.”
Almost instantly, her crying ceased. She looked surprised, and then regretful. “Oh, no,” she answered in alarm, her earnest eyes on me. “In fact, we do appreciate, and need . . .” Her voice trailed off. “You are already a better friend to me than you know. When you are helping my husband, you are helping our household. Someday we will explore the topic more.”
Bienta reached out and put her hand on my forearm. I looked at her and said, “Well, wabironenore. Giles taught me that.”
She squeezed my arm. “Yes, we will see each other later.”
I watched as she walked uphill to where she was parked. Once again I felt shortchanged, and I wondered if Bienta would ever confide in me. I so wanted to be deserving of her trust.
My steps were slow as I found my own van. “One of these days,” I said to myself, “I will know more.”
22.
An Awkward Path
Days later I arrived home from school to a stunning voice mail.
Listening to the message, I briefly doubted my ears. In an irrational moment of optimism I thought, There must have been some sort of mix-up. That awful news wasn’t intended for me.
Yet I knew that it was. The female caller, an assistant in my Handsome Oncologist’s office, started with words I have already, in my journey as a cancer patient, come to dread:
“This message is for Carol Wall . . .”
I listened again. Disbelief was all I felt.
No. Impossible. Not me.
Not me, again.
I put the phone down gingerly, as if my every action posed hidden dangers and bombs lay all around me. It had been three years since chemo ended, and my most recent routine checkup had been good. My Handsome Oncologist and I discussed a host of unrelated topics, in our usual, friendly way. He assured me that everything looked fine. The only thing left to check were my tumor markers, and I chatted with the nurse the way I always did while she drew the blood. I wasn’t worried. My tumor markers had never varied in the slightest.
Until now. The new results were in, and the numbers were creeping up.
The room seemed to tilt. I called Dick at the office. He didn’t answer, and I told myself that this wasn’t the kind of news I should leave him in a message.
I was seized with an urge to run away, as if I could outpace my own cancer markers. There was only one person I could imagine talking to right now, and I yearned for his calming presence. Giles. I needed to see Giles.
I was terrified and angry as I drove along the back roads to his house. I thought how it would not be too much of a tragedy if, at the intersection, I forgot to brake and let a truck make simple work of me. It was a sin, I was pretty certain, to think this way. Yet trying to be virtuous had gotten me nowhere, so I gave in to bitterness.
It was a gray and blustery spring day, close to the dinner hour. The light was just fading when I arrived, and I saw Giles taking halting steps toward his garden shed, cane in hand.
The one thing I had prayed for in the past few minutes was now close at hand. And then I heard it, the melodic voice of Giles addressing me, the sound of it a blessing on the breeze.
“Eh! Mrs. Wall!” he called to me.
We walked toward each other, meeting at his fence. His living workshop stretched out behind him, all the little plastic pots beneath the tarp. I hadn’t noticed how high the magnolia had grown. I remembered how sad and frail it looked to me when I first saw it.
I struggled to keep my voice calm. “I’m glad you’re here, because I thought you ought to know . . .”
He turned his head and narrowed his eyes. As always, he looked toward me but not at me. “What is wrong?”
“I don’t know how to say it. I . . . well, that is, judging from some tests I had the other day, and unexpectedly, to say the least, considering results supposedly obtained . . .”
“You’ve learned . . . ?”
“My breast cancer markers are rising, Giles. It might mean nothing . . . or it might mean . . . anything and everything.” My voice broke. “The worst. You know?”
With his cane, it took him three tries to flip the latch on the gate. “Come in,” he said, “and tell me more.”
“I’m going to have to have some scans. Repeated scans, the doctor said when I returned the call.” I looked up at the wispy clouds that alternately raced and idled as they shifted their gears across the sky. This is exactly what I had feared all of the years since Mama and Daddy told me about the radiation treatments I’d received as a baby—this feeling that I could never, ever get free, and that it would just keep coming back. I had never told Giles about the radiation. Dick was the only other person who knew. I wasn’t sure who I was protecting more by keeping this from everyone else—my own privacy or my parents’ feelings. But both of my parents were dead now. “For years, Giles, my parents kept a terrible secret from me. And I’ve learned that secrets can be damaging to the soul.”
I told Giles everything then—how I’d cried all the time as a baby, and how desperate Mama and Daddy were.
Giles looked alarmed. He turned his head as if listening for incoming artillery.
“I was only five months old. We lived in Radford then. They took me to the big city of Roanoke for three full treatments of radiation to my thymus gland.”
Giles shook his head. “Radiation exposure. That is very, very bad. Especially for a baby.”
“I know. Mama and Daddy meant well. We all know that now. They already had one baby with serious health problems, so I guess this doctor wanted to help them or something. In any case, it was a gross overreaction. I feel sorry for them now, and I’ve tried so hard to understand what they were going through, but I’m also angry. I had a small benign tumor removed from my neck when I was twelve, and another when I was seventeen. But my parents never told me why, not until Dick and I were a
lready married. And ever since then, I’ve felt like my own body was booby-trapped, and it was my job to examine every inch of its terrain, like it was enemy territory. Now my worst fears are coming true.”
Giles nodded, taking in everything I said, rolling my words around in his head the way he always did.
“You know, I’d like for everyone to just go away,” I said. “I really would. The prodders and the pokers. The experts trained to peer and stick and cut. The ones who read charts and type up notes. The ones who train their X-rays on the innocent and hold their glowing film up to the light before surprising you with secrets you’ve been keeping from yourself. I feel so alone, Giles. Like I’ve been marked—singled out.”
“I understand,” Giles said. “Whenever we must carry a health legacy from the past, it can be too much to bear.”
A cold wind swept across the yard just then. Instinctively, we turned to face the mountains, but in pivoting, Giles became unsteady on his feet.
“Oh, Lord,” he said. His cane slipped from his grip. I tried to grasp it as it fell, but missed. The grass received it, shuddering. His cotton shirt blew up against his chest. I saw how thin he had become.
“I’ve upset you. That was selfish. I’m so sorry, Giles.”
One of Giles’s neighbors checking mail across the street called out to ask if we needed any help. She lingered at her mailbox, pretending to inspect the hinge, when all the while I sensed that she was just one of those people who had radar for gossip of any kind. I told her, no. We were fine. Giles and I dropped our voices to a whisper.
“This morning, we received some news as well,” Giles said, while I retrieved his cane. “Lok’s visa is going to come through. We’ve known this was a possibility for quite some time, but now it is confirmed. It is a matter of days.”
“Oh, Giles! That’s wonderful. We’ll have a celebration when she gets here.” I stepped closer to him, hoping to convey how excited I felt about Lok’s arrival.
If only I had known about the good news, I would have waited to share my burden with him. But his troubled expression persisted. I expected him to be overjoyed, but instead he looked sadder than I’d ever seen him.
“There is something which I have not told you,” he said. “It is regarding my condition.” He paused. “It is something that makes Lok’s arrival a matter of the greatest urgency. I have wanted, many times, to tell you . . . of the underlying reason for this stroke and my decline . . . but we were always working in the garden and the moment never came.”
His eyes shone in their earnest way, and I waited patiently for him to continue. A plane was descending toward the airport, a view that always reminded me of Lok. I watched its birdlike profile sweep along, decelerating, stretching out its belly for the landing. Giles waited until the neighbor disappeared into her house before he spoke again.
“I will not get better,” he said.
“Of course you will. My mother was much older and her stroke was worse.”
“No. It is not the stroke. Please listen for a moment.”
He turned his face away from me. The clothesline bobbed up and down, reminding me of the jump ropes we used as children. I noticed that Giles had finally made a key for the garden shed, but he’d left it hanging on a nail right next to the lock.
“I am HIV-positive,” he said at last. “It has been this way for many years. I have lived a long time since my diagnosis, but the doctors do not believe I have much more time left.”
I couldn’t help myself. I gasped. Then just as quickly I thought that I must have misunderstood him. Speechless, I handed him his cane and then led him to the fence so he could grasp it for support.
“I was diagnosed in Blacksburg, fourteen years ago. My shame was profound, and the counselors made no attempt to alleviate our pain. At the time, they told me I had three more years to live. The boys were small, and they urged us to make a will, as if it was a given that Bienta would be taken, too.”
“Oh, Giles, I’m so sorry.” Words failed me. I thought of this awful secret that Giles and Bienta had kept tucked inside them for so long. I remembered all the times that Bienta had been on the verge of telling me something, how vulnerable she must have felt, how sick with worry and fear.
“It doesn’t matter how they treated me, back then,” Giles said. “You recall the hysteria in those years. Such a diagnosis was perceived as a death sentence. There was no effective treatment available. There was one person in our apartment complex whom we suspected may have intercepted a message from the doctor’s office. We watched this person every day. Did he know? If so, what might he do? Call the health department? Spread the word on campus? We lived in constant dread of discovery.”
I raised my hands to my face. “Oh, God, I can’t believe what you have been through.”
“The stigma has been almost as bad as the disease itself. Bienta has had to live with that, and worried that word would spread and the children would be treated as lepers. We told no one at Virginia Tech. And no one here in Roanoke knows, except for you, Mrs. Wall. One cannot trust many people in this life of ours.”
My heart broke for Bienta. How often I’d misunderstood her diffidence. I’d thought her reserved and distant, difficult to know.
“Bienta has proved strong,” Giles said, “and has been spared. Her tests are negative for the disease. The children, too.”
“I’m glad for that, but I am so sorry, Giles, that you have had to keep this awful secret.”
“Had Bienta sent me back to Kenya,” he said, “away from the treatment available here, I would quickly have died. This is why I could never go to Lok. Who knows what obstacles might be encountered when traveling outside the country? I have not felt free to tell Lok. It would only have added to her pain. But recent blood counts have introduced a sense of urgency. She must come to me, to say goodbye. The end could quickly come.”
I had no idea what to say, and I wanted only to reach out to Giles physically, to show him that I was here with him and that he was right to tell me. But I knew it would have been considered rude in his culture, and would only have embarrassed him. Instead, I grasped the fence and struggled to keep my balance.
I looked up and discovered that Giles was staring at me. He looked directly into my eyes, something he had never done before. The sky didn’t fall, and he didn’t turn away. I had always known that his eyes were the same deep, dark brown as mine. I wondered if he knew it, too, before this moment.
We held our gaze, and I made sure that he was the first to look away. I wanted him to know that I would never reject him. I would never turn away.
He did not tell me how he contracted the disease, and I didn’t ask—nor would I ever. Each of us was too respectful of the other to cross the careful boundaries we’d kept all through the years, a man and a woman happily married to others but finding unique joy in our friendship.
“What can I do to help?” I said.
His answer came without delay. “The minute we are notified that Lok is on her way, you must assist me. You must take me out to meet her. I will be there, even at the airport, because in every moment, there exists a lifetime. Will you do this, Mrs. Wall?”
“I will.”
• • •
I took my place beside Bienta in an empty corner of the bleachers. The Owita boys were playing soccer, and I had offered to keep her company.
After Giles told me his secret, I decided to abandon my random fears about the numbers someone had divined in the oncology lab. Instead, I focused on the joy of anticipating Lok’s arrival. If Bienta and Giles could celebrate at a time like this, then certainly I could as well. Meanwhile, I hoped our friendship would strengthen all of us.
Bienta’s relief that Giles had confided in me was palpable, as if a thick layer of guilt and shame had been chipped away from her, and she could finally breathe and move freely.
She said that for a lo
ng time she had pleaded with Giles to tell me, and that she had so often wanted to tell me herself. But she felt both too respectful of Giles’s privacy, and also too ashamed. “At first, we thought he had malaria. Early symptoms may be similar. But we were wrong. And when this came to light . . .” Her soft voice broke. “His diagnosis came when antiviral drugs were in their infancy and a pronouncement of AIDS amounted to a death sentence. Remember the quilts mothers used to sew in memory of their loved ones who were carried off by AIDS? At that stage in the research, such a loving gesture was all that could be offered. Even family members stood in danger of becoming outcasts should the secret be disclosed. We lived in fear, Mrs. Wall. We felt like criminals. Life was a nightmare.”
“Yes, I do remember how it was back then,” I said. “We were all so stupid, as if being in the same room with someone, or shaking their hand, might expose us. And the judgments people made. The blame. The rest of us are the ones who should be ashamed, not you.”
“The stigma at that time was great,” she said. “As I sent our older son to the bus each day for kindergarten, I would quickly check the door of our apartment to see if anyone had defaced it with AIDS graffiti or splashed blood across its surface.”
“Oh, my God. Did people actually do that? That’s terrible.”
“Exactly. So, Mrs. Wall, this is how we lived.”
I saw the water racing toward her on our tabletop at lunch that day. I was just beginning to understand the horror she had faced all this time—the suffocating grief, fearing for her own health, imagining how a beloved child who left lightheartedly in the morning might return the same day under the weight of accusation, a leper-by-proxy and an exile.
Bienta said, “So many times I felt I should tell you, but I always lost my nerve. Many times, I have tried, knowing it was wrong to keep this from you.”
I shook my head in sympathy. “It wasn’t wrong to keep it from me. I had no right to know. But now that I do know, I can help more.” Bienta’s degree of isolation was difficult to comprehend. If only I had been more attentive. More inclined to look beneath the surface. “I’m so sorry, Bienta. I knew there was something wrong, but I was so caught up in my own problems. I should have asked more questions instead of making assumptions. I even thought at one point that you didn’t like me, and that you resented my help. Meanwhile, you were going through such torture, and all alone. I hope you can forgive me.”
