Emancipated (19 page)

Paolo held open the car door so Grace could slide in. “I think what you're doing is seriously, seriously cool, Grace.”

“It's . . . it's not all that special,” she said with a sad smile.

“Yeah. It really is.”

John-Michael nodded in fervent agreement.

“I'd kind of like to try it myself,” Paolo said. As he said the words, he realized that he sincerely meant them. He wasn't just saying it to impress his friends. Maybe good deeds were missing from his life. And it couldn't hurt to start learning the terrain he might one day choose as his professional field.

“You want to write letters to guys on death row?” Grace asked. She seemed more than a little surprised.

“Maybe I'll start with just one. How do I do it?”

Grace took her seat in the rear of the car. She was still acting a little dazed. “I can get you the details.”

“Okay. Let's do it.” Paolo nodded firmly. “I'll reach out to some guy in San Quentin. Then we can do
the visits together.”

Grace hesitated. “You might . . . it might be nicer if you wrote to a woman. Most guys prefer to have women write to them.”

“I'll bet.”

“It's not necessarily sexual. Just that there's less sense of competitiveness than with another guy. At some point, they might compare their life to yours and get envious.”

“Okay, a woman then.”

“There aren't many women on death row. But there are plenty of lonely lifers who need people to write to them.”

Paolo felt the situation slipping from him somewhat. If Grace could handle the emotional roller coaster of a death row pen pal, then he wanted the same challenge.

“We'll see,” he said. “Maybe I'll hang in there for one of those tough ladies on death row.”

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VENICE BEACH, FRIDAY, APRIL 17

I need a favor. Can u call me?

Lucy pressed the button to return John-Michael's text with a call. The bus was pulling up to her stop in Venice. She gripped the rail as she waited for him to pick up.

“Where are you?” John-Michael's voice sounded urgent, almost aggressive.

“I had detention.”

“Oh. Bummer.”

“What's up? I'm on the bus . . . be home in a few minutes.”

“Stay at the bus stop. I'll come pick you up in the Benz.”

“Dude, I'm in my uniform. Let me come home and change first.”

“I have an appointment, Lucy. I need to go right now.”

“Right now?”

“Yes. I want you to come with. I
need
you to.” He paused, then added in an anguished tone, “Please, Luce.”

“What kind of appointment?”

“At the health clinic.” Another pause. This time she could sense the anxiety in his voice. “I'm getting some blood tests done. Routine stuff, but . . .”

Lucy dropped her resistance. “Got it. I'm here for you, JM.”

John-Michael drove by a little later and Lucy hopped into the Benz. They just looked at each other for a second.

Impulsively, she leaned over and hugged him. “Try not to worry. It'll be okay.”

He managed to nod. John-Michael looked paler than she'd ever seen him. His eyes had a haunted look.

Lucy leaned back into the thick leather upholstery. She guessed he was going to some kind of STD clinic. Lucy didn't like to ask people if they did drugs or had a risky lifestyle, but someone like JM who'd lived on the streets might be at risk from hepatitis or even HIV. In which case, he'd have to get tested every three months. That had to suck. Even though there was a treatment nowadays, HIV was still a dangerous, troubling condition.

She felt honored that John-Michael had asked her to come with him. They'd had a brief period of intense friendship two years ago at rock camp, but since then, their friendship hadn't gone much beyond the superficial. It was good to know that he still felt some kind of bond.

Lucy missed the thoughtful, intelligent, and surprisingly well-read boy she'd met when they were both fifteen. He was just coming to terms with his sexuality back then and wasn't openly “out.” He'd come out to her one night as they wrote a song together. It had been an intense love song, what she'd taken to be a girl's lyric. But when John-Michael had sung it back to her, he hadn't changed the line, had sung of aching love for a boy. Suddenly, all the pieces of a puzzle had fallen into place. And very gently, she'd asked him if he was gay.

Yet the John-Michael she lived with now seemed, in some ways, completely different. He was still occasionally as sweet as he'd once been, especially when he decided to bake for the housemates. But he could be brusque, even belligerent, when he didn't get what he wanted. Grace and Maya, who shared a room with him, often commented that he wasn't as neat and organized as Lucy had led them to expect from her memories of him at camp. His corner of the triple room was as slovenly as Maya's. Most of all, he wasn't nearly as chatty as she remembered. He resisted being drawn into long conversations, especially about their childhoods. Now that Lucy thought about it, John-Michael often made an excuse when the conversation got even remotely personal.

He hadn't been that way at all when she'd first met him. She could remember hearing all about his mother, who'd died when he was nine. About his father, whose girlfriend drove John-Michael crazy. About his school, his friends.

In all the time they'd been living together in Venice, Lucy couldn't remember John-Michael saying any more than the bare facts about his dad. How they had hated each other, how the old guy had killed himself. How John-Michael didn't really know why and didn't really care.

Lucy suspected that despite what John-Michael said, he did care. Something had changed him—she guessed it was his father's death, together with the experience of spending most of last year living on the streets. There had to be all kinds of stories he could tell about that life. Any of that would have been instant fascination for Lucy and the other housemates. Like a kind of dread fantasy. But he never talked about it. Hardly told them anything, in fact.

Maybe it had all been so awful that he simply preferred to move on?

Lucy was glad to see that at least he took his health seriously enough to get a checkup. She was sure he must have put himself at risk at least once while living on the streets. She never asked, but she'd often peered at his arms looking for track marks. Mikey used heroin. She'd been startled by the evidence it left on his body. Mikey had lived in a squat for three months. He'd told her about some pretty messed-up stuff. It seemed likely that John-Michael had lived that life, too, at least for a while.

She decided to test the waters.

“You ever live in a squat, JM?”

He glanced at her quickly, a little suspicious. “Yeah. Why?”

“I was just thinking about my friend Mikey.”

“The junkie?” John-Michael said, a tad warily.

“Yeah. Mikey gets checked for HIV every three months. Says it doesn't even scare him now.”

“HIV?” John-Michael was pensive for a few seconds.

“This your first time?”

He shook his head.

“So what, you only get tested after you've been exposed, or annually, or what?”

“Something like that,” he answered cagily.

“But you're still nervous?”

John-Michael seemed to take his time before answering. “I think medical tests are always heavy. I mean . . .” For some reason he seemed reluctant to continue.

“Isn't it better just to talk about it, JM?”

He continued hesitantly. “It's just that some of it is, like, irrevocable. You get the diagnosis and that's it. That's your label. For the rest of your life. A horrible destiny. Just as well that I don't plan on having any kids.” He spoke with an air of finality, turning the car into the underground parking garage of the clinic.

Lucy was still pondering that statement as they walked into the clinic and rubbed their hands with squirts of sanitizer gel from a dispenser by the front door. Surely only pregnant women could pass HIV on to their baby? She wondered if John-Michael had his facts straight on the subject.

As John-Michael was led into the consulting room, she decided to pick up a leaflet:
HIV and AIDS—The Facts
. After a few minutes, Lucy was no clearer about why John-Michael had said that thing about not having kids. Because it was pretty clear from the leaflet—men rarely passed on the virus “vertically” to their babies. Why was he so worried?

He emerged about ten minutes later, expressionless.

Lucy stood up. “So . . . ?”

“So what?” John-Michael handed his credit card to the secretary.

“So—do you have HIV?”

“Oh. No. I don't.”

Lucy began to smile. “Aren't you happy?”

John-Michael gave an impatient sigh. “Sure. I guess.” He took the receipt that the secretary offered to him and turned to leave. Lucy followed him. She was beginning to feel pretty baffled.

“It's just that . . . on the way here, it seemed like a big deal. And now you don't seem all that happy is all.”

John-Michael beeped open the doors of the Benz. “I'm happy, okay?”

“Sure, John-Michael, if you say so.”

He didn't respond. Lucy fastened her seat belt. John-Michael seemed even tenser now. There was absolutely no sense of relief. If anything, he looked as though he'd received bad news, not good.

It was odd, and gave Lucy an unsettling vibe she just couldn't shake.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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SECOND FLOOR, MONDAY, APRIL 20

It had been three days since John-Michael's blood test and still the good news didn't appear to have sunk in.

Lucy had been on the verge of talking to him about it a couple of times since then, but he'd been even more reclusive than usual. He hadn't even been in the mood to bake. Lucy knew that at least a couple of the housemates were quietly pleased by the recent lack of temptation.

It was beginning to dawn on Lucy that something else had to be wrong with John-Michael. He'd been behaving oddly ever since the police detective had visited. No one knew exactly what the cop had said to him. Candace had been hovering upstairs, but she hadn't been able to hear properly. All she could confirm was that the cop had told him something about the way his father had died. Whatever it was had come as news to John-Michael.

The following weekend, he'd hightailed it out of there in his car. He'd been gone all day Sunday. Since she'd returned from the clinic with John-Michael, Lucy had asked Maya and Grace separately what time he'd come back that day. Grace didn't remember that he'd even been away all day. Maya, on the other hand, had known precisely what time he'd left and what time he'd gotten home—around two in the morning, she reckoned, because he'd woken her. “I'm a light sleeper,” she'd confessed.

Weirdly though, when Lucy had commented that Maya seemed pretty clued in to her housemates' movements, Maya had become evasive to the point of retracting what she'd originally said. “Maybe it was two? Maybe it wasn't. I looked at my phone and saw a two, is all I know. It could have been midnight. Eh. I don't really remember, I guess.”

Something about that cop's news had jolted John-Michael into action. He rarely left the house apart from going to school and the grocery store. Sometimes he walked along the beach, alone, but there hadn't been one day in which he'd been out of the house all day—until after the cop's visit. Then the mysterious day out. And the following weekend, too, when he'd taken off to San Francisco with Paolo and Grace. Just like that. A recluse one minute and the next, on some kind of road trip kick.

And then, after San Francisco, he'd decided to take the blood test.

It was as though there was a connection between his father's death and his fears about HIV.

Could his father have died of AIDS? He'd hated his father and had been thrown out of his home, forced to live on the streets. Somehow, John-Michael seemed to worry that he'd been infected, too. But how? Lucy's mind began to go somewhere very dark before she pushed the thought away. God, no. It couldn't be anything that horrible, could it? The thought was simultaneously sickening and pitiful. Was it possible that John-Michael could be hiding such an agonizing truth?

Lucy paused on the threshold of John-Michael's room. She needed to choose her words carefully. You didn't just blurt out a question like that. One of the guys she'd befriended on the beach, Luisito, had been sexually abused by an uncle. He'd run away from home rather than admit the truth to his parents. Lucy remembered very clearly how Luisito had resisted talking about it at all. He rarely spoke about it unless he was wasted; even then, he was cautious, wary. But most of all, sad.

Inside the triple room, John-Michael was sitting on his bed, back against the pillows, his knees folded up. Propped up and laying across his lap was a surf-green Fender Stratocaster. He was just staring at it. The sight of John-Michael with his guitar was such a nostalgic hit—it took Lucy's mind clean off the issue with his father.

“Hey, JM. You gonna actually play that thing?”

“I was wondering if I even remembered how.”

Lucy leaned against the doorjamb and folded her arms. “If you brought it over when you moved in, I'm guessing you wanna play. And of course you remember how.”

John-Michael's fingers tightened around the fret board. He flexed them a couple of times. Lucy could see his throat tense.

He was open and vulnerable—a rare thing for John-Michael. This could be her cue. Lucy moved over to his bed and perched at the other end. John-Michael seemed suddenly uncomfortable. He couldn't look her in the eye.