Best Friends (42 page)

“Look,” the lawyer said, touching the air with his index finger, “it's not sounding like a criminal matter. There may have been negligence, true, and I don't know Mexican law, but—”

“They're American citizens.”

The lawyer nodded. “In the death of a person's own son by misadventure, I doubt anyone, anywhere, is going to prosecute. I'm sure the father's already suffered enough.”

I stared. “Maybe.”

“Oh, I'm sure he has.” The lawyer frowned. He was searching my face now. “Are you a friend of the mother's?”

“The mother is deceased. I'm a friend of the sister's.”

“I see. Does she blame her father?”

“No. I do. I'm the one who blames the father.”

The lawyer bit his lip, stepped back a bit. “When Timmy got sick”—Tim, his sick brother—“I can't tell you what I went through. This was my little brother. We used to play walnut wars together. He used to get inside the dryer and I'd turn it on. We had such a happy family, I never dreamed . . .” The lawyer stopped, took a deep breath. “When he told us how he got it, how he'd gotten that letter—Dr. Mann, I bought a gun. But Timmy said, don't go crazy. You've got to accept what's real. That's what my little brother said.”

I nodded.

“It's a family matter, Dr. Mann. Families go through these things, and if you're not part of the family, you can't judge.”

“I can't judge,” I repeated dully.

“It's not my business, of course, but extrapolating from what I've been through.” He muttered as he walked away, “A boating accident. You never know, do you? You never know how the blow is going to come.”

 

 

 

“ I HEARD FROM SOMEONE in our residency program that Ted got married and has a daughter,” I told Sally over the phone.

“Really? A daughter with his wife?”

“Of course.”

“Are you ever going to contact him?”

“Sally! Why should I?”

 

 

 

ONE OF MY PATIENTS had died about a year before—I'd gotten him into hospice, which was a huge deal, because back then hospice wanted only people with cancer—and one day his sister called and said that his family wanted to make a panel in his honor for the AIDS quilt. “That's great,” I said. “So we want you to tell us what to put on the quilt,” the sister said. “Well,” I said, you make something that honors his life. If he liked music, you do an instrument or musical notes: if he liked flowers, you put on flowers; that sort of thing.” “We didn't really know him,” the sister said. “You saw him all the time. What should we put on the quilt?”

For some people, I realized, being their doctor wasn't enough. Maybe I really had to love them. Because there was nobody else to do it.

 

 

 

EZRA'S INITIALS WERE were E.I.N., which meant—as I discovered when I next went out to California—that Sally could hold him in the air above her and sing “E-I-E-I-O!” with an accent on the “O” and a little toss. Ezra would collapse in delight. Sally also had several personalized songs she sang to him, and when she worked in the kitchen or the garden, she popped him into a canvas-covered frame that sat on her back. She was a natural at motherhood, really. She never used a stroller. I thought back to my early days with Aury and how I felt as if I were playing a part. I still felt that way.

Ezra was leaning forward now, tilting his head so he could peer around Sally's neck and catch her eye, and Sally, sensing his motion, twisted her face to meet him, and there they were smiling at each other. Together they made a sort of circle. Ezra giggled and reached for his mother's nose. The moment was astonishingly intimate; I had to look away.

“You see people carrying them around, and they look adorable. They're lots cuter than puppies. You'd probably meet more guys like that than walking an Akita.”

“I've got to get out of L.A.,” Sally said, staring into the display case of food. “This is no place for children.”

Peter wasn't useful. His video didn't sell well, despite his rounds of self-improvement bookstores. I'd seen it, and I thought the problem was too much earnestness. His client base was eroding. A producer friend of his had suffered a real tragedy—his daughter had drowned in the family pool—and I suspected that Peter lost credibility there. “I kept telling him, what is death, you know? What is it? You've got to keep on living, because what is death?”

Now Peter spent much of his time playing golf with two aging rock stars, who pricked my interest only until I met them. They both had coarse laughs and talked about nothing but money and stocks. “Oh, a doctor,” one of them said, sidling up to me, tilting his head in a calculated way, “what do you think of Genentech?”

“Do you believe in chronic fatigue syndrome?” demanded the other.

When Ezra's diaper was dirty, Peter delivered him to Sally. This startled me, because I'd often wished, when Aury was a baby, for a partner to help with diapers. “We made a deal,” Sally said, “I'll look after the kids.”

I shot her an inquiring look.

“He's not really child-oriented,” Sally said, wiping Ezra's bottom. “Oh, he is, in the abstract, but sitting down and playing with them, or changing a diaper, that's another thing. Look, you're a single mother, a true single mother. I figure I can do it as a partial single mother.”

I blushed.

“You're an inspiration to me,” Sally said.

I'd never thought I was a good mother at all. I'd certainly never thought Sally might see me as one. Later, I felt all tingly lying in bed thinking about it. An inspiration. An inspiration!

 

 

 

YOU ADAPT. An impossible idea becomes imaginable, thinkable, logical. Three easy steps. This must be how sin starts. Sid was right, Ben might have died of AIDS. Sally might have been arrested, her cache of drugs found, her life ruined. You couldn't say Sid did the right thing, but what he did had a logic. His motives weren't purely evil. He didn't kill for fun. He didn't kill wantonly. In the old days, a child was a possession, to do with what the parent wanted. In the most extreme way, Sid declared himself Ben's possessor. And really, if there was a God, God could have intervened. It didn't sound like Sid was waiting for much. A breeze, an animal skittering across the path, a cloud over the sun. Sid would have taken any one of those for a sign, a sign to spare Ben's life. You'd think, if there was a God, that God could have done that much.

 

 

 

WE WAITED IN LINE at a chicken place, Ezra in a pack on Sally's back. Two young women were waiting behind us. “Isn't he cute?” one of them said, and then, “Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't think.”

“It's all right,” the other one said forlornly.

“It really is bad for your body,” the first one said. “The breasts, like, go.”

“And your abs.”

“You did the right thing.”

Sally and I eyed each other. Ezra reached up with his hand and patted his mother's hair.

“It could've been so cute. Could've had those eyes.”

“Could've had those hairy hands, too.”

 

 

 

ANOTHER PREGNANCY AND A new baby, Barbara this time, named after Ben. Barbara was an exotic name in California; Brittany or Bethany or Brianna would be more common. “She's beautiful,” Sally said over the phone. “She has tiny ears.” It struck me then that Ezra's ears protruded, a feature I'd never noticed.

“She's not going to be Barbie, you know that,” Sally warned in a friendly tone. “Not even Barb.”

Sally wanted me to come out for the naming, but to do that would be to risk seeing Sid. I had managed to avoid him in the year since our breakfast. He was in his new house in Malibu with a beautiful view of the sea, Sally said, in a house that was clinging (Sally's word) to the side of a hill. All the furniture in Sid's house was new: he'd had some hotshot interior designer fly in from New Jersey.

“Does he like Barbara?” I asked.

“He thinks she's a riot,” Sally said. “When he sees her in her pumpkin seat, he drops things on her.” I glanced at Aury, sitting at the table beside me, coloring neatly in a My Little Pony coloring book.

“I want to talk to Aunt Sally,” Aury whispered.

“At least he's cheerful,” I said into the phone, smiling at Aury. “How's your work?”

“Oh, same old thing. I just got a set of twins who had face-lifts so they'd look distinct, but they ended up looking more alike.”

“Same surgeon?”

“Yup.”

“What
were
they thinking?”

Aury placed a pink crayon in her box and removed an an apple-green one. She looked back up at me, her brown eyes wide, her hair falling back from her forehead. “Are you going to let me talk to Aunt Sally?”

I wondered how Aury would be with a sibling, in what subterranean ways she'd express her jealousy. She was almost too tractable. “Why don't you clean up your room, sweetie?” I'd ask, and five minutes later it was perfect, books in piles, shoes paired on the closet floor, stuffed animals marched across the bed. Of course, the room hadn't been messy to start. She was three and half, but so serious and tall that people guessed she was in kindergarten. I handed her the phone.

I wondered what was in store for her. An eating disorder? Migraines? A psychotic obsessive disorder like one that had hit a woman resident I knew, who after a family bout of strep made a pile in the backyard of all her children's clothes and torched them? At one point Aury threw away (I found them in the trash barrel in the garage) a new pair of pink shoes because they weren't the right pink, they didn't match her favorite pink sweater, and I'm afraid I got hysterical. I made her put them on and wear them, wear them—with her pink sweater, with her green top, with her royal blue lace-trimmed pants, with anything and everything, matching or not—thinking that somehow this would cure her, would spare her the years of perfectionist misery I could see she had coming, the disappointing marriages, the bosses who took advantage of her, the housekeeping she could never get done.

On top of that, she had a tremor. Not a bad one, but clearly noticeable when she was drawing. How did she end up so fussy?

 

 

 

A NEW DOCTOR ARRIVED in the division of infectious diseases. I met him at a faculty meeting. His name was Theodore Quiver. “You do the HIV clinic, right?” he said. “I don't understand why we don't run that clinic. Every other major med center in the country has an HIV clinic run by infectious disease. Nothing personal.”

I left the meeting wondering if I should worry. It was hard to imagine anyone else wanting my patients. There's really no redemptive power in illness. A dying young drug addict is still a young addict, and addicts care about nothing—I repeat, nothing—more than their next high. That's what I tell the volunteers who come to the AIDS ward: listen, you don't have to like everyone with AIDS. A lot of them, frankly, are creeps. But they deserved basic human decency and respect, which is really all you need to offer.

Sister Mary Klein (motto: “All things work together for good through the Lord”) didn't like to hear this. “Ooh, listen to her . . .” she said, brushing past the outskirts of my group, fluttering her hands. “I've seen Dr. Mann sit on a dying man's bed holding his hand. I've seen her hold an emesis basin.” She leaned into the group and winked. “Her bark is worse than her bite.” The weird thing was, she thought she'd given me a compliment. She thought I secretly liked her telling people about my softer moments, but I knew much better than to tell people about Sister's occasional hardness. Would she want people to know she'd called Herbert Melrose, leaking parasitic stool on his sheets, a “big lazy poop factory”? Or that she'd snapped to the thrashing prostitute whose nurses were having problems inserting her IV: “You manage to stay still for your johns, don't you?” These cracks might have been what I liked best about Sister Mary Klein, but I doubt they're what she liked best in herself. Ditto the image of me holding the emesis basin, cringing with each poorly aimed squirt of vomit. It's true, it's real, I did it, but it's not something I wanted to be known for. I wanted to be known as tough.

 

 

 

IN OCTOBER OF '90 I could avoid him no longer, and when I went to visit Sally in Los Angeles, I was driven to Sid's new house.

The smell, there was a smell—a green smell, a cooking smell. The breeze came off the water, which we were, truly, high enough to see: it was no exaggeration to say the house was clinging.

It was a small stained-wood one-story house, smaller than my town house in Akron, and although the house was for only one person, this surprised me. A year before, Sid's female interior decorator had come with a legal pad to Sally and Peter's house, peppering them with questions to help her capture “the real Sid Rose.” Now Sally and Peter and I waited for Sid on a patio held up by stilts and cantilevered over the hillside. We were surrounded by pots of vegetation, patio furniture, a hanging sundial with a lascivious-looking sun, its tongue sticking out to cast the shadow. Barbara was perched on Sally's shoulder, and every thirty seconds or so, Sally popped up to run after Ezra, to keep him from the railing or out of the plants or off the chairs. “Could you maybe take him over, please?” she asked Peter in irritation. He uncoiled himself slowly from the chair to pick up Ezra and walk him back out to the drive. I'd left Aury at home in Ohio with my mother because Aury didn't want to miss preschool. “I wish he'd just let us in,” Sally said. “But it's like some stage set, he has to get everything ready. I'm sure he wants to impress you.”