At Risk (8 page)

“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, machinery, 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 bath-robes, 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.

Late that night, sometime after midnight, after Amanda has fallen asleep, and Ivan has turned one last time and finally fallen asleep as well, Polly gets out of bed and pulls on a pair of jeans and an old gray T-shirt. She’s very quiet when she walks down the hall; she doesn’t make a sound. The only problem is that she doesn’t know where she’s going. The dishes have all been rinsed off and put in the dishwasher. There’s no point in pretending to have a cup of tea. Standing in the kitchen, in the dark, Polly hears the squeak of an exercise wheel from the basement and remembers that Charlie asked her to feed his specimens. She switches on the dim stairway light and goes downstairs. It smells like animals and earth; Polly wonders what the mice that run through their house think when they come upon this section of the basement and find Charlie’s hamsters and field mice in their warm cages, so lazy and well nourished.

The field mice stare at Polly as she gets out their bag of food. They’re not white, like pet store mice, but small and brown with black eyes; if one ran across the floor you’d think it was a shadow, nothing more.

Tonight, Charlie is sleeping at her parents’ house in Polly’s old room, which was turned into a den years ago, with a pull-out couch for overnight visitors. Polly used to have an oak spindle bed that her father, Al, found at a flea market out on Long Island. Polly watched him refinish the bed on weekends, down in the basement of the building where he was, and still is, the superintendent. It was warm down there in all seasons, because of the hot-water pipes that ran overhead. Al usually gave two or three half-wild cats free run of the basement, to chase away “mouse cousins,” and his cats, which were often large and mean, certainly seemed ready, willing, and able should a rat ever be stupid enough to cross them. Al swiped things from the kitchen for them, cans of tunafish, Swiss cheese, chicken wings. He called the cats his “boys,” regardless of their sex, and he always said to Polly, “Let’s not mention the boys’ dinner to your mother,” when they took a stolen treat down to the basement.

Polly still wonders if she should have realized that something was wrong between her parents, but what happened to them seemed as much a surprise to Al as to anyone else. On weekends in the summer he went out to Long Island, to Blue Point, to go fishing, and one Sunday he didn’t come back. Polly remembers what she and her mother had for dinner that night: meat loaf, roasted potatoes, and lima beans. There was Jell-O for dessert, the kind only Al liked, with chunks of pineapple in it.

“We’ll just save your father’s dinner,” Polly’s mother, Claire, had said.

Claire wrapped the plate in aluminum foil and put it in the refrigerator, where it stayed for four days before she finally threw it out. When tenants called up, Claire lied and said Al was sick with the flu and wouldn’t be able to fix the pipes or paint the hallway until the following week. She wrote down every complaint on a piece of yellow paper, which she kept by the phone.

“What if he doesn’t come back?” Polly asked her mother.

“We’ll just tell them he’s still down with the flu,” Claire told her.

When Polly was in bed she could hear her mother crying. but in the mornings Claire never said a word against Al, never acted as if the morning were anything unusual now that it was just the two of them at the table eating eggs. One night, Polly woke up suddenly, in a sweat. She got out of bed, she had a lump in her throat, and when she went into the living room all the lights were on, but the apartment was empty. There was no one in her parents’ bedroom, in the kitchen, or the bathroom. She was alone, they had both left her.

Polly knew she couldn’t stay in that empty apartment. She could feel her heart pounding. She put her shoes on and pulled a sweater over her nightgown; she took five dollars from a secret place she knew about under the sink. She was breathing hard and she may have been crying, but she wasn’t about to wait around for them, not when they’d left her. She could starve all alone, she could die of thirst.

Their apartment was on the first floor, so once she was out in the hallway, all Polly had to do was walk through the heavy double doors onto the street, walk two blocks east, and she’d be at the police station. She would turn herself in as an orphan, and they’d know what to do with her. But out in the hallway she saw that the metal door to the basement was ajar and that the lights were on. Polly slipped through the door and listened for robbers, but all she heard was a tapping sound. She didn’t think about cockroaches or rats. She followed the sound down the stairs.

Claire was kneeling down, spooning cat food onto the old chipped plates Al kept down there. The cats were crouched in a corner, watching suspiciously. When she realized someone was watching her, Claire looked up and blinked. “The boys,” she explained.

“You should have let them starve,” Polly told her mother.