Homesick Creek (13 page)

“How are you?” She asked him as though she meant it.

Bob slumped. “Okay. You know.”

“Good,” she said, letting the lie pass, and opened a manila folder in front of her on the desk. “Okay then, let’s see.” She extracted a slip of paper and smoothed it on top of his folder.

Bob wondered if he might vomit.

He watched her take a breath and fold her hands on top of the paper. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “Your HIV test came back positive. The lab ran it twice just to be sure.”

Bob dropped his head. His ears began to roar, but inside his mind it was suddenly quiet, deadly quiet; deeper than deafness, absolute as a vacuum.

“Would you like a glass of water?” the nurse said.

“No.”

“Would you like a minute to yourself?”

Bob shook his head.

“Then let’s talk about what this means.”

“My wife.”

“Your wife?”

“Yeah.” Bob jackknifed over his knees. “Does she have it?”

“Do you mean, is she HIV positive?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you had unprotected vaginal or anal sex with her?”

Bob nodded.
Murderer.

“Unfortunately, there’s no way to know that without a test,” the nurse said. “But just because you’re infected, it doesn’t mean that she is. For every time you had unprotected intercourse, she had a one-in-a-hundred chance of being infected. It’s possible to beat the odds. But she needs to come in so we can find out. In the meantime I can’t stress enough how important it is that you practice safe sex. Are you familiar with the term?”

“Rubbers.” He could feel gummy spit building up in the corners of his mouth: fear spit, coward’s spit.

“Condoms, yes, but there are also other sexual practices and alternatives that are safe. Mutual masturbation, fondling, protected oral sex. I’ll give you some literature about it.”

Bob licked his lips. “How long have I had it?”

“There isn’t a test that can tell us that,” the nurse said. “I wish there were. We’ll need to find out how many T-cells you still—”

“I heard you can have it for years before you get sick. If I’ve had it for a long time, my wife has it too.”

“Let’s not jump that fence yet. Bring her in and let’s get her tested. Then we aren’t guessing.”

“How?”

“How can you get her here?” the nurse said. “I’m sure we can arrange for transportation, if that’s a problem for you.”

“No, I mean how can I get her tested without telling her why?”

She looked at him compassionately, her voice low and even. “Honesty is usually best, though it’s never easy. Is there any possibility that you might have gotten the virus from her and not the other way around? Has she had other sexual partners? Is she an intravenous drug user?”

Bob shook his head dumbly.

“Then you’ll have to tell your other partners about your HIV status too,” the nurse said. “That means anyone you’ve had unprotected sex with.”

“He knows,” Bob whispered. “He’s sick. He’s already sick.”

“I see.” The nurse leaned across the desk. “Listen. There are things we can do, that we can get started on right away, to prolong your quality of life, and your wife’s too, if she’s also HIV positive. We can’t prevent this nightmare, but we can sure turn up the lights a little. There’s a drug called AZT that’s just been approved. It keeps your T-cell count from dropping as quickly—”

“Do you believe in God?”

The nurse sat back in her chair. “Yes, I do,” she said evenly. “I didn’t always.”

“Why?”

“Why did I start believing in Him?”

Bob wiped his face on his sleeve. “Yeah.”

“Three years ago my son was in a head-on collision. He was in a coma for two months. We were told he’d never walk again, never speak clearly. If you saw him now, if you talked to him, you’d never know anything had ever happened.”

“And God did that?”

The nurse said softly, “I think He did, yes.”

“My wife is going to die.”

“You don’t know that yet.”

“I’m going to die.”

The nurse looked away.

“What kind of a God would do a thing like that?”

“That’s a question only you and He can answer. I’m afraid what I have to offer is more practical.” She began pulling pamphlets and photocopied pages out of her desk drawers. “Let’s go on. We have a lot to talk about.”

“We got nothing to talk about.”

“What?”

“Can you make my test negative?”

“No.”

“Then nothing you’ve got to talk about is what I need to hear.” Bob stood and circled the room, stopping in front of a poster about prenatal health care. He studied it for several minutes and then said, “Nobody knew about this shit when Nita was pregnant, you know? Hell, she ate pizza, drank beer, smoked a pack a day. She wouldn’t have done that stuff if we’d have known.”

The nurse watched him.

“That’s the thing: We wouldn’t have done it if we’d have known. But we didn’t know,” he said. “How the
fuck were we supposedto know
?”

“No one knew,” the nurse said gently. “No one could possibly have known.”

Bob stalled where he stood, looking out the window at the meaningless street, the pointless traffic, tears running down the panes of his face like rain.

The nurse said, “There’s a support group through Sawyer Memorial for HIV-positive people and their families. They get together every week, on Tuesdays, I believe. I think you should consider going.”

He kept his back turned. “And sit around with a bunch of dying faggots? No way.”

“Homosexual men aren’t the only people who get AIDS,” the nurse said evenly.

“Yeah?”

“There are hemophiliacs, people who’ve had tainted blood transfusions or shared IV needles, family members like your own. And someone is usually there from the Sawyer Hospice.”

“What does that mean, hospice?”

“A place where terminally ill people and the people who love them can find dignity and support,” the nurse said.

“You mean a place where people go to die.”

“Not only that.”

“No way,” Bob said. “No fucking way.”

The nurse stood, seeing that Bob was leaving, but he paused at the door. “What’s your name?”

“Gabriella,” the nurse said. “Gabriella Lewis. I hope you’ll come back in and talk to me when you feel ready. Or to your family doctor.”

Bob smiled a thin smile. Bets used to read the Bible to him, so he knew that the archangel Gabriel delivered divine messages.

God Himself was fucking with him.

He walked out without another word.

From a pay phone outside the True Value, Bob called the dealership and told Francine he was sick and wouldn’t be back for the rest of the afternoon. When she pressed, he said it was nothing, just a bad headache, sinus infection maybe, and hung up. He had no idea what he was going to do next, except that he couldn’t go home, at least not yet. So he got back in the Caprice and drove. There were two orange triangles hoisted at the coast guard station: another gale coming in. For now, though, it was so still that the air itself seemed to be weeping.

As he crested Cape Mano, Bob found himself thinking about jumpers. When he was in high school, a kid had jumped off one of the cliffs, killing himself on the rocks nearly a thousand feet below. They said he died instantly, but how could someone know that? Maybe he’d been alive for a few minutes, too broken to move and feeling the advancing tide already licking his shoes. Drowning had always scared the shit out of him; that was one reason he’d never made much of an effort to fish commercially, though you could make a fortune at it. Boats went down, disappeared, were found with no one on board, drifting empty for weeks, sometimes months. He and Warren used to talk about it sometimes, Bob’s morbid fear of the water. Warren said Bob had probably been in his mother’s womb too long, and that’s where it had all started, the business of breathing amniotic fluid when he was ready to be breathing air. Bob agreed the unconscious memory of sucking that thick fluid into his lungs could make a man nervous. Maybe that was it, and maybe it wasn’t, but either way the ocean scared the hell out of him, and so did falling. Walt Disney movie characters always died by falling, as though it were painless, but Bob knew that was bullshit. You might die instantly at the bottom, but you were thinking all the way down.

Two miles south of Hubbard, he turned off Highway 101 onto a rough logging road leading inland. He’d never followed it before, though it had been put in a couple of years before by the Weyerhaeuser Catskinners, elite heavy equipment operators who could navigate a Caterpillar on a thirty-degree slope. Now he steered the old Caprice like an ark, wallowing in holes and rising up again on firm track, clinging to steep hillsides. The entire area had been clear-cut right after the road was put in, and there were snags and stumps everywhere. It used to take Bob and Warren two hours to hike in, but now, in just ten minutes, he was in their little homestead valley, the first time in nearly twenty years. He had assumed that when the area was logged, the homestead had been destroyed, but instead he found the alders still standing on the banks of Homesick Creek, providing a fringe of grace around the cabin. He shut off the Caprice and sat for a minute, listening to the gentle tap of raindrops on the car roof. It was so peaceful here, so quiet. The cabin still stood, patient as Methuselah: I have seen some things, O Lord, and I have
given shelter.

Bob walked to the cabin and pushed open the front door that he and Warren had planed so it would shut behind them. From inside he could see that their childish repairs to the roof hadn’t held; a lot of the shingles were missing, and the walls had new gaps and cracks where the boards had split and fallen away. It had taken nearly all summer when they were thirteen to patch the cabin together with old boards from the barn and nails they’d stolen one at a time from the True Value. But the bedstead was still there, and on top of it was the hay-filled ticking they’d made to replace the old one, a wild patchwork of scraps taken from Bets’s fabric bag. Now it was worn too, but it held when Bob unfurled it and sat down, feeling the familiar crackle of hay. It was cold in here, but he didn’t build a fire for fear the chimney was clogged with birds’ nests and the accumulated booty of packrats.

He and Warren had brought Anita and Sheryl here just once, when they were eighteen. It must have been just before the Miss Harrison County pageant, because he could remember Anita fussing about not wanting to mess up her manicure. Miss Harrison County—my God, but that had been a night. Bob had been speechless with pride to see Anita dressed up so fine like that, with her gown and her matching pumps and satin sash. He had sat in the audience at the Elks Lodge, where the pageant was held every year, the grand elder’s chair turned into a throne for just that evening, and stared and stared at this girl who had agreed to be with him when she could have chosen anyone. She had done her swimsuit promenade and runway turns like a movie star, and when it was over, he had held her coat and her champagne glass while she posed for picture after picture. They had stayed at the reception until the very end, both of them drunk, he on beer and her beauty, she on champagne and attention. Afterward they’d parked in a pullout on Cape Mano and traded in their virginity. He had held her in his arms in the tight backseat of his Buick and marveled at her softness after the hard planes of Warren. They coupled in the backseat twice, their blood rich and warm, their prospects bright and whole, because up until then nothing in their lives had gone wrong yet, not really wrong anyway. At eighteen they still held to the touching delusion that failure happens in catastrophic ways instead of by inches, from the inside out.

Less than a year later Anita had Patrick, his nursing mouth like a sucker pulling Anita’s life toward him and away from Bob. Then, unable to make a living, Warren had moved to Portland. Bob stayed behind, failing at both jobs and sobriety, talking more, doing less, making his furtive pilgrimages to Warren four or five times a year, running up big phone bills in between, and then they got evicted from the house on Adams Street. Anita didn’t think Bob had seen her crying as they picked up their things from the yard where they’d been thrown, but she was wrong; he’d seen her clutching the bag with her pageant gown; he’d seen it all, the terrible humiliation and the sadness.

He shivered, sitting on the creaky old bedstead in the gathering dark. For something to do, he picked up a loose board lying on the floor. Which one of their ghosts, his or Warren’s, had put it down in that exact spot twenty years before, meaning to get back to it in a second that never came? He stroked the grain, remembering how much he’d loved the feel of wood in his hands, the dying gift of grand old trees. He and Warren argued once about whether trees have souls. Warren maintained that they did: the stronger the soul, the more resilient the tree. In Warren’s mind, trees broke during windstorms not because of physics but fear. Bob had said that was bunk, but now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe, after all, it took more than luck to withstand a high wind.

He picked a nail loose with his pocketknife, a square-headed nail that had been handmade by some settler dazzled with the good fortune of being here in this protected place, this sheltered valley. And to Bob and Warren too, it had been a sanctuary— away from the molding, rotting trailers behind the First Church of God; away from Bets’s temper, hardening over the years into bitterness; away from Warren’s mother’s suicide by hanging the year they were sixteen.

Do you think they got lonely here?
Anita had asked Bob after looking the homestead over.
It’s so far away
.

Away from what?

Everything.

Life can happen anywhere
, he’d said. But evidently he’d been wrong.

A sudden gust chilled him through a broad crack in the wall beside him. Shivering, Bob picked up the board on his lap, and the square-headed nail, and found the old claw hammer he and Warren used to keep under the bedstead. He seated the nail and pounded it in. For a little while, at least, the patch would hold.

The last of the light had gone. Bob closed the door behind him tenderly and saddled up the damned Caprice. It was time to go home.