Two hundred sixty signed permission slips are sent back, and Linda Gleason feels some consolation when she finds out that only thirty-two teachers and parents have signed the petition against her, not enough to put her job in jeopardy, just enough to make her uncomfortable each time she walks down the halls. The Community Action Coalition people have stopped leafleting, but Linda has heard they’re still holding small, solemn meetings in rec rooms and basements. A few of the members of the Coalition stand outside the school on the morning of the assembly; they mill around near the bicycle racks, and those with school-age sons and daughters hold their children by the hand, making it clear they won’t allow them inside the school today.
Charlie’s class is one of the first to file into the assembly hall. He has sneaked a science book under his sweater and the binding feels hard against his chest. As far as Charlie is concerned, this is just another boring assembly, only this time it’s Amanda’s fault that they all have to sit here and listen to a bunch of doctors. Charlie sits down on a metal chair and pulls his book out of his sweater. He starts reading right away, but it’s so noisy when the older grades arrive that it’s hard for him to concentrate. He dogears a page of his book—he’s up to the section on butterflies and he thinks he’s sighted a rare species at the pond—and when he looks up he suddenly realizes that he’s flanked by empty chairs. For a moment, Charlie is confused, he wonders if he’s supposed to move down a seat. He looks over at Barry Wagoner, who’s one seat away. Barry quickly turns to Judd Erickson, who’s sitting next to him, and they both crack up, but they seem kind of nervous and weird as they’re laughing and Charlie understands, all at once, that no one wants to sit next to him.
The art teacher, Miss Levy, walks past, then stops at the end of the row and motions for the boys to move down.
“Come on, guys,” she says when she’s ignored. “Make some space.”
No one moves. Charlie feels himself getting hot; kids in his class are staring at him. Miss Levy comes up behind them and puts one hand on Barry Wagoner’s shoulder.
“Let’s all move down,” she says.
Barry shakes his head. “I don’t have to sit next to him,” he says to Miss Levy. “You can’t make me.”
“You really are a fat, stupid slob,” Charlie says to Barry.
“Charlie,” Miss Levy says.
Charlie gives her the meanest look he can, even though he’s always liked her, and Miss Levy kind of shrinks away from him. That’s when Charlie knows she won’t do anything to stop him. He gets up, pulls his chair out so he can slip into the row behind him, and heads toward the door. Miss Levy calls to him, but he just ignores her and walks out of the auditorium, past a class of fifth-graders. He goes down the hall, past classrooms, past the cafeteria, toward the front door. Something inside him is exploding with little pops of fury. He’d like to strangle Amanda. He knows this is all her fault. She’s the reason why everyone was staring at him, and he didn’t even do anything; she’s the sick one.
No one stops him. He just walks out the door. He holds his book so tightly that his fingers hurt. He realizes he’s forgotten his jacket, but he doesn’t care. When he passes the playground he sees someone is out on the swings. It’s Amanda and she’s not really swinging, just moving back and forth slowly with her sneakers scraping against the earth. Charlie stands there watching her; even from this distance he can hear the creak of the chain as the swing moves. And then, for no reason at all, Charlie is afraid that his sister will look up and see him. He takes off, as fast as he can, and even though he feels certain he’s heading in the wrong direction, he doesn’t once stop until he’s all the way home.
CHAPTER 9
Nearly every night after dinner, when the children are in bed, Ivan goes back to the institute. None of his colleagues asks him any questions, they’re used to what anyone else would consider odd working hours; last year there was one graduate student from California everyone called the Vampire—he worked only from nine at night until dawn, no one had ever seen him during the day. Once, Ivan walked right past him outside the hardware store, not recognizing him in the daylight.
Polly never asks Ivan where he’s going. She’s pulled out the pieces of a quilt she started years ago, although Ivan suspects she doesn’t really work on it. Tonight Ivan makes a pot of strong coffee in the outer office, pours himself a cup, then goes into his office and locks the door. He dials the hotline and, while the phone is ringing, adds Cremora to his coffee. A man answers the phone on the second ring, but Ivan doesn’t recognize the voice. He’s had to wait for Brian to get off other calls before, so he’s prepared to hold on. Tonight he wants to ask Brian more about interferon, a drug Brian used to go to Mexico for when he was in California last year, but tonight Brian isn’t there to answer his questions. It’s only when Ivan refuses to get off the phone that he’s told how sick Brian’s been all along. For the past few weeks he brought a canister of oxygen with him when he answered phones, and over the weekend, while Ivan was fixing the broken radiator in the living room, Brian had a recurrence of pneumocystis. He is not coming back.
Later, Polly notices that Ivan’s face is puffy, he seems folded in on himself, as though he’s shrunk. They’ve been taking turns getting up with Amanda; she’s so hot at night that her sheets have to be stripped and her nightgown changed at least once before morning. Tonight it’s Polly’s turn, but Ivan tells her to stay in bed. He follows Amanda’s voice down the hallway; she’s half asleep, she always is, and in the morning she won’t remember being lifted out of bed. When he changes her, pulling the flannel nightgown over her head, Ivan thinks about changing her diaper when she was a baby. He thinks about the smell of powder, the silky feel of her bare skin. Now, when he picks her up so he can strip the bed, Amanda smells bad, there’s a sulfury scent on her skin. She has pink nail polish on her fingernails, but her hands don’t seem much bigger than they did when she was a baby.
“All right?” Polly says when Ivan comes back.
Ivan pulls off his sweater and his slacks. He twists the buttons on his shirt heartlessly and two pop off and fall to the floor.
“I’m going into Boston tomorrow,” Ivan says. “A friend of mine is dying.”
Polly sits up in bed and watches him as he finishes undressing. He looks breakable to her; he’s all bones. “Is it someone I know?” Polly asks.
“No,” Ivan says. “But he has AIDS. Do you want to come with me?”
Polly stops looking at Ivan; she reaches for the clock on the night table and sets the alarm. Ivan takes off his shoes and socks last. He sits heavily on the bed; he can feel Polly turning away from him.
“I’m too tired to go anywhere,” Polly says. “If you want to take flowers, you should buy them here before you leave. They’ll be much more expensive in Boston.”
Her voice breaks as she speaks, but other than that Polly doesn’t give herself away.
“All right,” Ivan says as he turns out the light. “I’ll do that.”
He chooses daylilies, yellow ones, even though they’re three dollars a stem. The flowers are wrapped in thin green tissue paper, and when Ivan parks on Marlborough Street, they slide onto the floor of the Karmann-Ghia. This morning he talked with the supervisor of the hotline, who phoned Brian and got permission to release his address. The college students are back from summer vacation and there are U-Haul vans double-parked up and down the street. The brownstone where Brian lives is broken up into three condos. Once it was a single-family mansion; there are crimson and blue stained-glass windows just above the door, the floor of the hallway is a circular pattern of white and black marble. The building is a formidable one; lawyers live on the first and third floors. Brian spends a great deal of time looking out his window, which has black iron bars. When he watches Marlborough Street he’s glad he never let the guys in his band talk him into moving to Los Angeles permanently when their first album took off. He was born in New Hampshire and he always wanted to live in Boston. He has sworn that he’ll never
let himself just lie in bed and watch TV, but he’s started to watch game shows. He cannot bring himself to listen to records or CDs, although he dreams of music. He has a collection of songs he’s written in the past few months, music far different from anything he ever wrote for the band; he’s been composing for instruments none of them could play. Bassoon, oboe, violin. Black-and-blue music with a line of pure white fury through the middle, a line of stars, a line of desolation as cold as the moon. He’s just begun to realize he’s been writing dirges. He keeps them in a folder; no one will ever hear them, except for Brian, who hears the music in his mind. At night it helps him fall asleep. It helps him separate himself from his anger. No one could stay as angry as he was and survive; he would implode, ignite his clothes with a butane lighter, jump out a twelfth-story window.
He’s twenty-eight years old and he wets the bed every night. He knows he will have to have a catheter soon, but he couldn’t stand it if it were now. The nurse who sleeps in every night doesn’t even know about this; rather than be humiliated, he stays in bed, on the urine-soaked sheets until Adelle comes in the morning to relieve the nurse. Adelle was once his biggest fan, she was the band’s secretary, a gofer really, but now she works for him alone. In his will he’s left her everything, including this apartment, but it isn’t enough. In the beginning he made charts and lists, he was obsessed with figuring out how he got AIDS, he has been in love only with men, but he has slept with both men and women, and years ago he shot cocaine all through a tour of the South without ever thinking twice when he shared someone’s needle. He’s so used to thinking I’ve gotta quit every time he reaches for a cigarette he still thinks it even though there’s no reason to quit anymore. He always makes certain to smoke far away from his oxygen tank; he sits by the window so the smoke spirals outward, between the bars.
Last week, before Brian had this relapse, Reggie came to visit. Reggie was so uncomfortable that Brian was doubly glad he hasn’t told his family in New Hampshire. They have never approved of anything about him other than the money he’s made. Reggie didn’t touch anything in the apartment; he had a blank, startled look on his face, and Brian realized Reggie had never seen the welts of Kaposi’s sarcoma on his face before. The band’s latest record has been an enormous flop, and they have to do whatever they can to salvage their careers. Without thinking, Brian began to cry when Reggie told him they had found a new lead singer. That made Reggie back even farther away.
“Look, forget I told you,” he said.
“No, really,” Brian said. “I’m happy for you guys.”
“Yeah?” Reggie had said. He turned away and Brian could see his body shake with a slow sob. “Man,” Reggie said without ever facing Brian again. “Why did you do this to us?”
Today Adelle has brought a box of little cakes she picked up at Bildner’s, and she’s making a pot of tea they can have when his guest arrives. Brian will not have any of it; he has problems swallowing. Adelle makes him a mixture of spring water and honey and some kind of liquid protein. From the window, Brian can see a man enter the brownstone, and when the buzzer goes off Brian yells to Adelle, “He’s here.”
God, he’s actually excited to have company. This guy he doesn’t even know, but of course when Ivan comes in Brian realizes he does know him. He’s talked to him for hours; he knows things about Ivan no one else will ever or can ever know. Before she brought him into the living room, Adelle took Ivan’s jacket and said, “Let me warn you. He doesn’t exactly look like his photographs right now.”
“All right,” Ivan said. He has never seen a photograph of Brian and what he sees now is a very thin man who has lost most of his hair. Brian wears a gold hoop in one of his earlobes, and loose blue jeans. A few months ago these jeans probably fit him just right; now Brian has to hold onto them when he stands up to greet Ivan. They shake hands and then Ivan gives Brian the flowers. Brian studies the lilies for a moment, then gives them to Adelle to put in a vase.
“I came to see you,” Ivan says. He can’t believe how desperate he sounds.
“Great,” Brian says. “Have a seat.”
Adelle goes into the kitchen for the tea; the apartment is cavernous and her footsteps echo. An entire wall in the living room is taken up by tape equipment; next to the window is a piano that Brian doesn’t use anymore. The ivory is too cold; when he tries to play he feels that if he pushed a little harder his fingers would snap off at the bone.
“I guess I came to thank you,” Ivan says.
Brian begins to cough, and he turns his head away. The cough shakes his whole body. Ivan grabs a box of Kleenex off the coffee table and holds it out, but Brian shakes his head. He can’t cough anything up; it’s all trapped inside him. Ivan feels panicky; he reaches into his pocket and finds a roll of Life Savers he bought for Charlie but forgot to give him.
“Take one of these,” Ivan says. “This will do the trick.”
Brian takes one of the Life Savers, but instead of eating it he holds it up to the light. “I used to love these,” he says. He puts the Life Saver on the table, reaches for a cigarette, lights it, and coughs.
“I plan to quit when I’m thirty,” Brian says. Ivan stares at him. “That’s a joke,” Brian tells him.
“Ah,” Ivan says. “I’m not very good at those lately.”
“No,” Brian says. “Tell me about Amanda. Tell me how she is.”
Ivan looks at him, uncomfortable, then he sees that Brian is sincere. He really wants to hear, and so Ivan tells him, tells him how she has taken to wearing her hair in a French braid, how she feels in his arms, so damp and thin, when he goes to her in the middle of the night. He tells him that he has tried everything for her diarrhea, but that on some days she has to miss school because of it. And then, for some reason, Ivan begins to talk about the stars. He tells Brian the stories he used to tell the children, stories of mythical heroes plucked from death and set into the sky. In every story there is a reward for bravery, for courage; in each, flesh and blood is transformed into blinding white light.
Brian has closed his eyes, and when Ivan stops talking he opens his eyes, slowly; even this takes great effort.
“Beautiful,” Brian says. His voice is thick, no longer the voice of a singer. He lights another cigarette and asks, “How’s Amanda’s vitamin therapy going?”
“She hasn’t gotten any better,” Ivan says, “but then she hasn’t gotten any worse.”
“That’s something,” Brian says. “Isn’t it?”
Adelle comes in with the tea and cakes.
“Put out that cigarette,” she says.
“Don’t give me orders,” Brian says, but he stubs out the cigarette. Blue smoke hangs in the air like a spider’s web. “Pour the fucking tea.”
“I stay only because of his charm,” Adelle tells Ivan. “Keep it up, I tell him. Good for you, you’re too mean and too stubborn to die fast.”
Ivan takes a sip of his tea because his throat feels so tight. What the hell is he supposed to do without Brian? Who will there be for him to talk to?
“That’s right,” Brian says. “And when I do I’m coming back. I’m not taking this lying down.”
Adelle grins at him, but as soon as he turns away, she looks as if she might burst into tears. She’s brought Brian a glass of spring water, which he drinks now. He’s so pale it’s almost possible to see the water through the delicate skin of his throat. Brian is tired. Ivan can see now that he has overstayed. Brian leans forward. He has extremely blue eyes; girls who fell in love with his picture could never decide if they were aqua or sapphire.
“Kids are funny,” Brian says. “They can be stronger than we are. Don’t give up on her.”
“No,” Ivan says. “I won’t.”
“Don’t listen to doctors. They told me I’d be dead months ago.”
“And here you are,” Ivan says.
It’s late now, and the sunlight is fading. Adelle coughs and goes to the windows to lift the shades higher. When the light fills the room, I
van swears he can see all the bones in Brian’s body rising to the surface like fish. He can see Brian dissolving, and in this instant Ivan realizes that Brian is barely here, he is already looking at something far away, something in another dimension no one else can see.
CHAPTER 10
Laurel Smith sits in the bleachers with her knees pulled up, her feet balanced on the empty seat in front of her, her toes curled so her rubber flipflops won’t fall off. She chose this side of the gym because it’s much less crowded than the rows of bleachers she faces, where students and families are scrambling for good seats. This is the first meet of the season, and it’s against Medfield, a school farther west, which is Cheshire’s archrival. It’s an important meet, and Laurel knows it’s an honor for her to have been invited by Amanda. During the time they’ve spent together Laurel has been the instructor, teaching Amanda how to braid her hair, how to simmer chocolate for mousse, how to scoop sand in the marsh and find peculiar blue crabs. Now Amanda wants to show her something, and that’s why Laurel’s here, even though she should be at work.
Laurel was lucky to get a job in Morrow, and she knows it. With no real skills, other than the ones she’s taught Amanda, now that she’s given up her readings she has only the little income she gets from her parents’ estate. She’s lucky, too, that Marie Pointer, who runs the gift shop, is quite deaf, so that if anyone had told her not to hire Laurel, she probably wouldn’t have heard. Mrs. Pointer is extremely patient. She spent an entire afternoon teaching Laurel how to work the cash register, and another showing her how to make out invoices. Mrs. Pointer’s store is not one of the better shops in town; there are no displays of local crafts, no pottery and weavings. But there are plenty of Hallmark cards, and there are ceramic figures of poodles and collies and ducks bought by children on Mother’s Day, as well as rows of candy and gum, magazines, office supplies, and, up by the register, trays of cheap jewelry, mostly birthstone rings made of colored glass.
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