Best Friends (58 page)

“It's a very caring facility,” Sally assured her. “As nice as his place in L.A.”

The aide beamed.

 

 

 

ANOTHER EVENING AT HOME with Sally, the big kids in bed—something about the mountain air, they slept gloriously—the baby nestled on Sally's lap and Linnea, who couldn't fall asleep without Sally, sleeping on the floor beside the rust-colored sofa. Sally was going on and on about the thing I least wanted her to mention. Me. Ted. Adultery. Pain. She'd lit the candle again, and for some reason, I was remembering Sid's house in the Malibu hills, the house that clutched the hillside with its view of the ocean. Ben's tooth had sat in the little box on the Biedermeyer chest. I had the tooth with me now, in its little plastic bag in the enameled pillbox in the jewelry sack in the pocket of my suitcase.

“Look, Sally, what about me?” I finally objected. “Ted makes me feel alive! We have great sex! We're a unit together! And we were married before he ever met Mary.”

“Oh.” Sally waved her hand dismissively. “Sex is overrated. The best thing about sex is it makes babies.”

Hadn't she said something like that before? The best thing was the joy, the connection. The best thing was wanting it. The best thing was feeling totally alive, in the moment, your genitals swelling so big they blotted out the rest of your life.

I suddenly recognized the reason I'd thought of Sid's house. The smell from Sally's candle was the smell on Sid's old deck. “What is this?” I said, pointing at the candle. “What scent?”

“Rosemary,” Sally said. “For clarity and spiritual renewal.”

“Your father had rosemary growing on his deck in Malibu, remember?”

Sally smiled dreamily, stroking little Shoshana's fuzzy head, and I knew she was thinking of the old daddy, not the shell we'd seen today.

“He hurt you a lot, your father,” I said. To say sex was overrated. Never.

“Oh, no,” Sally said, “Daddy never hurt me. Never. Not me.” She paused a moment, considering. “He did hurt Ben.”

Should she know? Could she? “What do you mean?” I said, unable to mask the urgency in my voice, and my mind was already taking the trip upstairs to the guest bedroom, opening the suitcase, and slipping that tiny pillbox from its soft fabric pocket.

“Daddy thought Ben was weak,” Sally said. “He thought Ben's problem with his sexual identity was weakness, and that using drugs was weakness. And Daddy wasn't”—she paused, made a fist—“Daddy didn't like weakness. He was definite.” She was speaking in the past tense.

“That's true.”

“He knew what he wanted.”

“Definitely.”

“He was unafraid.”

“I think he would do anything,” I said. “I think in the right circumstances he was capable of anything.”

Sally looked up from Shoshana, and in her gaze was both a sharp puzzlement and some of the old snap that had driven her to buy Ben his Happy Families, that had won her every trial. “What are you saying?” she said. “Daddy had scruples. I know you never liked his business, but you have to admit he had scruples.”

Her husband was out walking again tonight. She had six children.

“His whole insistence on condoms,” Sally said. “Don't you think that was a scruple?”

She was my best friend. Who was I to destroy her innocence, even for her own good?

“You're right,” I agreed. “The condoms were a scruple.”

I GLANCED OVER HER shoulder at the monitor. Endless words. A far cry from the monitors in Sally's old locked room.

“What is this?”

“He calls himself the Web Reb. It's a rabbi in New York who answers questions. He's interesting.”

“Do you write him?”

“Uh-huh. He's traditional, he's Lubavitcher. The Lubavitchers believe the Messiah's coming any day now. Some of them thought their leader could be the Messiah, but he died back in June.”

“They thought their leader was the
Messiah
? ”

“They believed in him. They had faith in him.”

“Crazy,” I murmured. Then: “You don't believe the Messiah's coming, do you?”

Sally shrugged. “Oh, I doubt it. This rabbi's one of several I write to. He's not the only rabbi on the Web.”

 

 

 

WE DROVE THE LONG gravel driveway down the mountain, through groves of pine trees and past outcroppings of rock to the main road, where we turned north toward town. We passed an elaborate gate on the right, stone columns supporting a metal arch over a paved road that took off across a field and disappeared in the bare trees beyond. SNAKE-BYTE RANCH, read the letters on the arch. On the distant hillside shone the glittering windows and brown roofs of some enormous complex. “Is that a resort?” I asked, gesturing at the roofs; I'd heard there were resorts in Idaho.

“Laurie's house,” Sally answered with a tight smile. “Peter's little friend,” and before I had a chance to express my astonishment, she directed my attention to a hovering line of gray on the far end of the field. “Look. The landing strip. The mogul flies in on weekends.” Her left hand gripped the steering wheel tighter. “When I'm lucky.”

 

 

 

I COULD HEAR BRITTANY'S VOICE, more excited than I'd ever heard it, as I walked up the stairs to Aury's room. “Her daddy killed her mommy. My mommy said she never thought she'd ever know a murderer, but Mr. Crossburn was a murderer.”

“Mr. Crossburn killed somebody?” Aury's voice was incredulous.

“He killed Lindsey's mommy. It was on the news.”

I opened the door to see Aury with her hands over her ears. “Brittany,” I said, “Aury doesn't even watch TV. Please stop talking to her about these terrible things. It's time for you to go home.”

 

 

 

“ANOTHER CONSULTING DOCTOR?” a woman's weary voice said. I brushed past everyone in the hall and walked into the patient's ICU room. She was unconscious. I examined her, looked through her chart, walked out. This patient was a bigshot, a lawyer's widow, ex-Garden Club president. Her adult children, two men and a tight-lipped woman, appeared from three sides to form a wall around me.

“That's our mother. And your name?”

I told them who I was.

“I assume you're a specialist.”

“I'm an internist.”

“Our family doctor is an internist!” one of the sons protested.

The daughter took charge. “We just want to know what's really going on.”

I went into my spiel. A pneumonia, a strange pneumonia, not a bacteria or a virus but a parasite. I could feel their interest reluctantly pick up. “The pneumonia suggests a disorder of the immune system. Her body's simply not fighting this infection the way it should.”

“Is she going to die?” the daughter interrupted sharply. I looked at her. A muscle between her eyebrows was twitching convulsively, a small machine with a life of its own. “Our father died almost two years ago, you know, of a strange infection. Tuberculosis in his bowels, the pathologist told us. In his bowels! Who's ever heard of that? I asked them to send the specimen to the Mayo Clinic.”

“He did volunteer at that drop-in center,” the blond son said earnestly.

“And Ralph, our handyman,” the other son interrupted, “don't forget he'd been treated for TB.”

“I thought my father's infection was very peculiar,” the daughter said firmly, eyeing me with wariness. I fervently hoped she was older than me. “Very peculiar.” She cast a defiant glance at her brothers.

“What did the Mayo Clinic say?”

“They never got the specimen! Always some excuse. You know how hospitals cover for their own.” The daughter gave an angry snort. “Back to Mom: Is she going to die?”

I'd underestimated the daughter. “She may die.”

“The antibiotics aren't working?”

“There're working some. But the effectiveness of antibiotics is limited when someone's immune system isn't doing its job.”

The daughter exhaled sharply. “Thank you for telling us,” she said. “We appreciate your honesty.” She glanced at her brothers as if to confirm this, but they were blinking hard and looking at the floor.

“There's something else you should know,” I said. “I was asked to see your mother because I'm a doctor who treats people with HIV. I'm sure you've heard of HIV. It gets into people's bodies and it—”

The daughter was ahead of me. “She has AIDS.”

“Yes. Your mother has AIDS.”

The daughter took a step back from me, from all of us, and stared, mouth open, past me to the metal edge of her mother's bed. I swear that at that moment I could read her mind. It was saying: I knew it would come to this, I warned her, I knew this would come to pass.

It's not such a strange story. The strange thing for me was to hear it from the daughter who, in 1975, during a trip with her college roommate to San Francisco, saw a patrician older man enter a bathroom behind a young man wearing jeans and a heavy leather belt. As the two of them disappeared behind the cinder-block wall, the daughter had a glimpse of the older man touching, in a shepherding sort of way, the younger one's shoulder, and at that instant she recognized, all at once and so mysteriously it was inarguable, her father's secret life.

“And I went to my mother,” the daughter recounted, nostrils flaring, “and I said, ‘Mother, I just really want to know what's going on.' ”

“I don't see why not.” Cleve frowned. He was now my financial adviser as well as my accountant. “Even if you divested the drug stocks, you'd still be putting equity in the house. What can you get for your town house?”

I told him. “It's not a high-rent district,” I said. “But the place will show well.”

“What's the decor?”

“California modern.”

He punched some numbers into a calculator. “You're planning to maintain your current level of income?”

I nodded.

“I wouldn't put down more than what you get on the town house. You'll need the yearly deduction you get on the interest. Excuse me, but for a doctor you don't make diddly.”

I laughed.

“Every time I put through your co-pay I think, damn, I should pay this good doctor more.”

THE BLOND SON APPROACHED through the ICU doors. “The church people are here,” he whispered.

“The church people, did you hear?” The sister flung the words like a splatter of mud. “The homophobic, homo-hating church people. And you know what, Dr. Mann? I just want to tell them, tell them, tell them!”

“Well,” I said after a moment, trying to sound reasonable, “would that help your mother at all?”

“I want to help me!” the daughter cried. She threw her head back against the cinder-block wall.

 

 

 

“ I TOLD MARY, ” Ted said quietly.

“I did, I told her about us. I had to, Clare. Otherwise the lure of you would be too strong.”

It wasn't enough not to sleep with me. “Why?” I finally managed.

“We've got to stay stopped, and I knew if I told her, we'd have to.” He bit his lip, nodded, looked away. “That's it. That's it exactly.”

We were meeting at a freeway rest area. A nippy winter day, not frigid. “Clare! Clare!” Ted's other daughters were scampering up the incline from the picnic table where they'd shared some cans of pop. “Can Aury go see
The Secret of Roan Inish
with us?”