“I made a mistake.”
“Well, that’s for sure.” He lets out a long whistle.
“I think she’s too young. She’s with this boy who worked in the kitchen at the center. I should have tried to learn more about him. I never thought Gita would actually walk away. But then she did. I can’t tell you how natural it felt. I was tired. Wasn’t thinking. Was worried about you.”
“Me? Don’t pull me into this.”
“Macon’s moved out. Sophie, the woman who runs the center, never wants to see me again.”
Luke bangs the back of his head lightly on the headrest over and over. I say, “They were going to send her back to a man in India who’s already raped her. Do you know how many forced, arranged marriages there are in India between girls and men old enough to be their grandfathers?”
“But that’s not your job, Willie. We can’t have volunteer teachers escorting refugee students to the metro. The whole country will collapse.”
“Oh, please.” I pull into the hospital parking lot. “Not that. A bunch of detainees from the asylum center on Rue de Metz isn’t going to disrupt the French political system.” We climb out of the car and move through the revolving doors into the lobby. I don’t know the nurse’s name today. I think she’s African. She speaks English with a slow lilt through her face mask. It’s another one of the baby blue masks with the thin white elastic band over her ears and around the back of her head. I’m trying not to see the masks as some personal affront to Luke. I know very little about HIV, but everything I’ve read says you don’t get the virus from breathing near someone who’s got it. You don’t get it from the air. Which means it isn’t airborne. It seems vascular. Of the blood, is what Sara has tried to explain to me. So why on earth the face masks? The gloves I understand much more, and this nurse wears those too. Bright purple ones again.
She walks us back to the old wing.
The AIDS wing
is what I’m calling it in my mind now. “AZT today, yes? You might start feeling very sick a few hours after injection or you might not. You may be in bed for a day or a week. Some people throw up. Others just feel like throwing up and can’t. Some people feel fine.”
This time the room is a bad mustard color, and there’s a spider plant hanging in the window inside a macramé planter. “I hope I’m one of the fine ones.” Luke takes his shirt off and lies down on the table. There are more sores on his chest. They look so painful and
remind me that the disease is working away on him—cracking the code of his immune system.
The nurse gives him a big shot of something she calls Bactrim, to stave off any more lung infections, and a smaller needle for anti-fungals, and a medium needle for the AZT. The French newspapers referred to it as a miracle drug this week. I don’t want to get too excited. But AZT is the first thing I’ve read about that has a chance to help him. They’re working hard on the vaccine in France and in the States. What Luke needs to do is stay healthy until they find it. That’s all he needs to focus on: waiting for the vaccine.
Dr. Picard walks in and studies Luke’s face. “You look pretty good, Luke. How are you feeling?” he asks in English.
Good? I think he looks like a shadow of himself. I think he looks horribly thin and that his face has become skeletal. I allow myself to think these terrible thoughts only in the safety of the hospital.
“I feel okay,” Luke says.
“The breathing?” Picard asks.
“The breathing is steady.”
“You’re not too tired?”
“I need to lie down more. But I’m still cooking. I’m still getting around.”
“Let’s watch for the bad side effects of the AZT. We just have to wait and see.”
“I’m prepared for that.”
“This drug reduces the replication of the virus and can lead to immunologic improvements. I call it a DNA chain terminator. It gets immediately absorbed into the cells and runs interference with cell replication. Are you continuing to feel okay since we last met?”
“I feel the same. I’m tired and thirsty and I always have diarrhea and my throat hurts now. But otherwise good.”
“Your throat hurts?” Dr. Picard takes the flashlight out of his pocket and shines it into Luke’s mouth. “Probably candidiasis. Yeast. You call it thrush. It’s nothing unless it’s in the esophagus. Then it’s defining for HIV. I want to stop it before it infects your bronchi, or
your trachea or lungs. We’ll take a swab today. Then I want you to go home and rest. I’ll see you in a week.” He taps his hand twice on the examining table.
Go home and rest?
I want to beseech him. I want to say,
Help us, please. Look at us a little more closely
.
“Au revoir,”
Picard says to us by the door.
“Au revoir, mes amis.”
Good-bye, my friends.
The carpet in the lobby of the old wing of the hospital is green and hard like turf, and Luke trips on the way out and falls. Then he cries. “I just like it here,” he says when I kneel and try to pick him up. “I just want to stay alive a little longer.”
“Of course. Of course you do.” I pull him to standing. “Of course you want to stay.” And I don’t cry even though I want to stand there and sob with him. Or scream. I’d like to scream in this old, forgotten part of the hospital where they’ve stashed us and see what would happen. It’s so quiet. I want to scream and see if someone would notice us.
On the drive home there’s the slow letdown. Like I’ve been up too late on a boozy night and now there’s the incipient hangover. Fighting this disease is starting to feel like an accumulation of trips to the doctor where nothing much happens. There’s so much buildup. Yes, we got the AZT started, but what does that mean really? Everything is so much starker outside the hospital safe zone.
I space out and ram into a green Citroën at the intersection of Boulevard Haussmann and a street called Boulevard Malesherbes. I think I crack the other car’s back fender and I scream. Luke puts his hands over his face, while an angry French woman in a tight black skirt suit raps on our car window. “Do I have to talk to her? Don’t make me. You do it,” I say.
“You have to open your door.” Luke talks with his eyes closed. “Please make her go away.”
I climb out and follow the woman to her car, which is double-parked in front of ours, hazards blinking, and I pretend to examine her fender. I nod and say in French, “Yes. I am so sorry. I’ll pay for everything.” I just want this over with. I’m tired. I’ve been driving impaired. The woman and I stand on the side of busy Boulevard
Haussmann while cars fly by, and wait for the police. After twenty minutes I climb back into the car. Luke’s fallen asleep. When will the immigration officers find Gita? When will they come looking for me again? I want to get my brother home. The police finally come, and after they’ve taken my information and driven away, I climb back in and put my head on the steering wheel. Luke places his hand on the back of my leather jacket and tries to pat my back. His seat’s almost fully reclined to take the pressure off his sitting bones.
“Is it impossible for you to drive?” I can’t believe I ask him this.
“I have to pee is the thing,” he says, his voice rising. He’s wrapped the black scarf twice around his neck, even though it’s mid-June, and this heightens his gauntness. “So drive on,
mon amie
! To the nearest leafy patch by the side of the road! Drive on!”
“You always have to pee!” I scream. I’m so grateful that he hasn’t fallen apart. “What’s wrong with you, anyway?”
“I know. I know. I may have a condition.”
I pull out into the traffic, and we crawl home. I get Luke into the apartment and give him some orange juice from the supply I keep in his fridge. Then I call Gaird at the movie studio. “He fell,” I say when Gaird answers. “Luke fell down.”
“I will come home. I’m leaving now.”
I run water in the tub in Luke’s bathroom and climb in and wait for a headache that’s coming. This feels new—like we’ve entered a different phase. Luke fell in the hospital. He never falls. I want to call Macon and tell him about the AZT. I want to say how sorry I am, and could he please come home now. I blew it and Gita’s gone and everything’s not what I thought it would be. Macon will say he isn’t sure which is worse: that I knew what I was doing or that I was foolish enough not to think about what I was doing.
I can’t call him. He wouldn’t talk to me, anyway. And Delphine wouldn’t let me through. I lie in the tub and look down at my breasts and my stomach and the V of lighter hair between my legs. My disconnect to my own body seems immense. My boyishness has given way to rounded hips. I think of Sara’s pregnant belly. Tumescent. The word sounds like the roundness it describes. I can’t imagine a pregnancy.
Can’t get my mind to hold the idea of it. And yet I want it too. The thickening. The life growing inside. I can hear jangling keys. Then the apartment door opens. Gaird yells, “Hallo?”
I sit up in the tub and pry at the rubber plug with my big toe. Thank God he’s come home. And that there’s someone else here with us. Thank God for Gaird and his world order.
T
HE POLICE ARE
outside my apartment when I get back—same two from the center but not in uniform. They wear brown sports coats and flash badges at me. “We will need to search your rooms,” the bald one says in French. Somehow this destabilizes my knees and I can’t walk naturally. I’m not afraid of jail. I’ll get out eventually. But I don’t want to implicate Sophie or the asylum center. We climb up the stairs and into the apartment and my legs feel gelatinous. They pull open the silverware drawer and reach around in the cupboards. They take down the dried cherries. The salted almonds. The flour. Olive oil. Dark baking chocolate. Vanilla.
I boil water and make a cup of lemon tea and pretend I’m calm and that this is customary. But really, what the hell are they doing here? It seems sort of ridiculous. She’s one girl. Who may or may not have been aided and abetted. They have time to send two men to my apartment? The kitchen feels so much smaller with all of us in it. Cramped. It’s a room Macon and I have made meals in. Kissed in. It’s the room I may have known him best. Where is he? Where is he? I know where he is. He can’t be anywhere else but the house in Chantilly. “Would you like tea?” I ask. “Or coffee? I could make coffee very quickly.”
They both decline with a wave of their hands and move on to my bedroom. I stand in the doorway and watch them pull out my top drawer and dump everything in it onto the bed—slips and bras and lace underwear and T-shirts. It was a one-time thing, I want to tell them. I broke the law by helping a girl. I won’t do it again. Please. Could you just go now. What they don’t know is that I’ve taken all the girls’ writings from the class on Rue de Metz and stashed them at
Luke’s, and Gita’s letters are safe with Sara. There isn’t anything left in my apartment that ties me to the girls.
But is Gita getting food? Does she have a place to sleep? I can’t get her face out of my mind. I can see her sharp jawline and the soft shape of her mouth. I can make out a blurry smile but not her eyes. I can’t see her eyes and they would tell me so much about her if I could. Maybe they’ll put me in the city jail. That would be fair. City jail. I’ve probably compromised the center’s funding. Probably made it so much harder for any girl to ever get out of there. An hour creeps by. The police rake through the bathroom drawers. Scan the piles of books in the living room. Then, without a word, they walk to the door and say,
“Merci”
and leave.
I never thought they would take it this far. I sit down on the floor in my bedroom and close my eyes. I think Gita’s gotten away. Far away. I’m not crying. There’s relief mixing in with my guilt. They’ve got nothing to go on. Gita’s going to be okay. I haven’t tried to pray in maybe twenty years, but I can see the face of Krishna on Gita’s medallion. I sort of invoke him in my bedroom. It’s not a real conversation—not the kind Moona or Gita would have with him. It’s a self-conscious thing that I do in Gita’s honor. But I say his name out loud, and it feels good. I say,
Thank you for letting her walk away
, and I don’t say anything else after that.
It gets dark outside. All the windows are open in the apartment, so I can hear the rain on the street and the pattering on the roofs of cars. I pour a glass of wine in the kitchen and call Luke. “How do you feel? Are you throwing up? Are you nauseous?”
“It’s all good. Gaird’s here and he made chicken soup and I’m really tired but okay.”
“That’s fantastic. You’re tolerating it. Hooray.” I’m smiling at the phone. “I’m not going to French jail, by the way.”
“Were you ever really?”
“The police were here. They actually took the time to come to my apartment.”
“Don’t they have better things to do?”
“They looked through my stuff, and I mean closely through my
bras and my deodorant, and they didn’t find anything. I think Gita’s going to make it now. I think they’re done with her.”
“You have to hope that she’s street-smart. She needs to choose the right people. It’s all about the right people.”
“I know.” I don’t say again how guilty I feel. I’ve set her up to be preyed upon, and why didn’t I see all the dangers before I let her go?
“I have to go to bed now.”
“Good night, Luke. Hanging up now.”
“Hanging up.”
Classes end at the academy. Another week passes. Then it’s July. The delicious month. The heat is on full. I meet Sara at our spot below the Pont Neuf. She likes to walk in the early morning now, before the city gets too hot. The linden trees create a canopy of leaves, so we can walk in and out of their shade by the river. There’s no breeze. The water is still and silky. “Luke’s so much better,” I say. “Your drug is working now. He isn’t in pain. He’s going to work every day, and he’s eating. His numbers are way up.”
“Picard is very pleased,” Sara says. “I talked to him yesterday. There are patients like Luke who get second lives.” She’s like a small truck—front-heavy and moving slowly. So she’s waddling really, and completely beautiful. The baby’s due in two weeks. “Thank God Luke is one of them. Not all of them see their T cell count climb back into normal like his has. I’m calling this his summer reprieve.”