Bleeder (27 page)

“They said it went fine,” Mom says when she notices me rousing. She walks over to my bed and brushes hair from my face. “How do you feel?”

“Like shit, really. And I’m scared as hell to use the bathroom.”

Soon, a nurse comes in and changes out my factor bag, and I watch as it begins to drips down my IV. She takes my temp, checks my blood pressure, empties my bloody urinal, and is gone. I sleep. I wake and glance over to Mom and Dad, who still sit in their chairs beside me.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ve had enough. I’m moving home.”

For another week, I lie in that hospital bed and every time I pee, I brace myself for the pain and I cross my fingers for clear, unbloodied urine. At first, my urine is dark like a thick merlot, but then, as the days go on, it begins to lighten and then is pink and, eventually, is clear, leading to my discharge.

Having resigned from Barnes & Noble and made arrangements to break the lease on my blue, blue apartment, I return home. Mom and Dad drive their cars up and load my things, and then we leave, carrying my body home to rest. Outside, the roadside pastures bloom around me and it seems that spring will inter me as we glide over the Uwharries’ rolling hills. The dogwood trees are just beginning to flower and they group about the fronts of fading farmhouses, their brilliant white bracts open for pollination. The
pines and the rich-green cedars lord over the clover and crabgrass which presses through the thaw. Overhead, a troop of starlings flies in the dull blue sky, and when we park in our drive, they seem to come near, alighting in the yard before lifting off in an ocean of caws.

At the house, I help as best I can to unload the cars and U-Haul, but, still recovering, still worried I might piss blood again, I hang back and watch the furniture, boxes, and household accoutrements pass by as Mom and Dad transport them from U-Haul to bedroom and then return for another armload. At every third or fourth trip, Dad pauses for a smoke and then begins again. And when the sun begins to sag under the flat ceiling of sky and the U-Haul is empty and returned, we gather at the table for a meal, and then, all of us heavy with fatigue, we disperse to our rooms.

I lie on my bed and feel a great weight upon me. I am worn out. I have failed again, and, at twenty-five, am returned home. I breathe out; my heart flaps in a chest of bone.

Through my window, daylight constricts and soon a ribbon of moonlight casts its onion color on the stacks of boxes clustered about the room. I rise, root through one, and, finding a book, begin reading and let its fiction eclipse my reality.

RECOVERY

M
AY 1997
. I
BEGIN ANOTHER COCKTAIL THERAPY WHERE
V
IRACEPT
replaces Crixivan, and time is again measured in the eight-hour intervals my medicine requires, this only punctuated by the meals my mom prepares: breakfast becomes lunch becomes dinner. I sleep. I read. It is a soft living, an inviting picture. Yet my leg and ankle joints remain swollen, and mornings I am an ungreased machine. Arthritis having settled in, I am feeling what hemophilia does to a body as it ages. But it is not as bad as it has been, for now I am able to rest.

My hometown is just as I have remembered it: quiet with nothing happening. The three o’clock factory shift changes are as punctual as the noontime fire whistle that I can hear drifting to me over the vacant pasture and the few brick homes between the siren and me. I will pause from my reading only long enough for my mind to connect that low moan with something that exists in the real world. And then it fades away. I read more.

Spring passes into summer.

The daytimes are searing hot, but the evenings are a pleasant treasure. Louise, who earns a few coins in the local workshop program, also helps punctuate my day by her arrival home by bus at five. She lumbers down the stairs to my room, peeks her head through my door—her Down eyes big
and brown behind thick glasses—and says, “Hey,” in a short thick language that is her own.

“Hey, Louise,” I will answer. “Did you have a good day at the workshop?”

“Good day,” she says.

And then I will bookmark my read and follow her upstairs, for I know by her arrival that the sun has just lowered itself behind the tall longleaf pines and that the whole of our back deck is now shaded. The deck is a new addition. A wall was knocked out, the deck was raised. And now, being above the low Chinese elms in our backyard, I can look past the fence line that hedges our property and into the pasture due west. Here, the sun descends.

I take my coffee with cream and sugar and watch the sunset view from this deck. By the time I begin my second cup, the final sunbursts flare into the horizon and then soften into a strata of purple that cloaks the yard and its unseen crickets in plum darkness. The sparks of fireflies flash here, then there, then here again—their formless floating glows filling up the darkness. And with the stars out, the moon up, Mom has supper prepared. I eat, have another coffee, and read more until my tired eyes tell me they need rest.

Soon I begin swimming at the YMCA. I undress and slip my legs into the suit. I dip into the indoor pool’s cool water. Beside me, a man adjusts his cap, his goggles. He is hairy like a bear, and he pushes off from the side, makes a heavy kick and swims. I swim. He swims faster. My arms grow heavy. My lungs ache. And it is much too far to the other side. When I reach it, I hold onto the ledge gasping, wheezing heavily. The bear beside me tucks and shoves off from his second lap. I go another length, and, dizzy with exhaustion, I feel as if I have swum an ocean. My head spins. I gasp. My heart pounds itself against my thin ribs, and I hold my chest to keep it from bursting out.

I get out, dry myself off, and watch as the bear keeps at it.
Soon, I’ll swim like him
, I think.
Soon.

When the cool breezes begin to blow in the fall, I return to see Dr. Trum. I feel healthier and think that my quiet convalescence at home has improved me, but my counts will tell the truth. They are always a sobering marker of my reality. Dr. Trum walks in, slides my folder open on his table.

“How are those cocktails doing?” he asks.

“I’m tolerating them. I’m not missing any doses.”

“That’s good. That’s good.” He edges closer to me, smiles fully for what I think is the first time. I notice a silver cap on his rear tooth. “Take a look at this,” he says pointing to a sheet with numbers.

“Two hundred and three,” I read.

“Now this.” He points again.

“Undetectable.”

He wheels backwards, crosses his feet, raises his arms and holds them behind his head. “That first is your CD4s going up, and that last is your viral load going down. Now what do you think about that?”

I can’t hide my grin. My Merlin has come through after all with his healing potion.

“That sounds like damn good news to me. That’s the best news you’ve ever given me, Doc.”

“I’m glad I could give it. Doctors never really like giving the bad news, you know. You should take this bit of good news about your recovery and gloat a while. It’s been a long time coming.”

That evening as I stroll up and down the road before my house, my heart is a globe of happiness. I feel unshackled and alive. The lights glow here and there in the windows of neighbors’ homes. Fireflies flicker and hover before the boughs of dark trees, and a woodpecker burrows into cedar and underneath him a cricket sings the sun down. Although the air is lethargic and redolent of late summer, it is full of humming life.

“Call me, too, Ishmael,” I yell out to the slip of moon just visible in the navy night, “for I have survived myself.”

All my family comes and eats with me in our house, and they share in my happiness.

“We really couldn’t be more pleased,” Mom says with wet eyes as we hold our wine glasses up for a toast.

“I will now live a hundred and forty years!”

“Here! Here!”

And later, I flatten a blank sheet of paper across my desk. I fill the vacant night with my words and exhaust myself with the stars. It is in this manner that I begin another kind of recovery. I write:

When Jimmy was ten, HIV came to him through a blood transfusion, but neither the doctor, nor his mother, nor his father knew this until Jimmy was thirteen. And when the doctor uncovered the virus in Jimmy’s blood, he immediately phoned Jimmy’s mother to tell her of this sad news. She stretched the phone cord across their kitchen, and, while she talked, she stared vacantly out the half-sized window over the sink which looked into their acre backyard. Standing on his toes, Jimmy had just grown tall enough to peek out this window, and he arched up to discover what his mother saw there. Winter coming, the leaves had fallen from the shade trees, and he could see far into the pasture to the cows which stood gumming grass idly in the cooling breeze, underneath the pewter sun.

His mother looked down to Jimmy who was pulling on her shirt, trying to gain her attention.

“Now, go away, Son,” she said. “Mommy has some business to attend to. Go play in the yard.” And she waved her hand as if shooing a fly.

Jimmy left and hid himself on the nearby stairs until his mother finished her conversation. “No,” he heard her cry out. “No. It’s not true.” Then she slammed the phone back on its rest and ran down the hallway past Jimmy, hidden on the stairs. He heard the thwack of her bedroom door and the hollow echo it made throughout their tiny hallway. Then Jimmy heard a great sorrow wailing from that room.

His sisters ventured from their rooms, and they peered quizzically at the closed door. In Jimmy’s house, they never kept their doors shut, for they were a family.

“What’s going on?” Lisa asked. Her fifth-grade hair twined in pigtails, she reasoned with the dark wood grain of her mother’s shut door, scrutinized its unusual closing with her kid eyes.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

Being as still as pond water, they congregated on the stairtop and listened to their mother’s tears.

“Mommy cries,” Constance said in her thick Down tongue. “She upset.”

They hovered there for some time, played the short shags of carpet
in their fingers, and peered down the hallway to their mother’s closed door. Time passed.

“I’m going down there,” Lisa said.

And she did. She crawled silently on all fours; only the quiet scruff of her knees across carpet sounded in the house. At the door, she stopped and Jimmy saw as she cupped her ear to it and then raised her hand as if to knock. But she dropped it quickly and scurried back.

“She’s still crying,” Lisa said, panting softly, quietly. “I can hear it through the door.” They all gazed down the hall.

“Mommy still cries,” said Constance, rocking cross-legged on her haunches.

They waited.

An hour later, their father came home from work, and the three siblings rushed him at the door and explained that something was wrong with their mother. He went in, shut the door behind him, and they waited, again.

Much later, he came out and woke the children asleep on the stairs. The house was dark. The outside was dark.

“Are you kids hungry?” he asked.

“Yes,” they said, rubbing their soft eyes of sleep.

“We’re going to eat out, tonight,” he said. “How’s McDonald’s sound?”

He talked not so much to his son and daughters as to the ceiling. He blew into his pristine white handkerchief, wiped his nose, and cleared his eyes, which were wet with tears, and then placed the monogrammed cloth back into his pocket. Then the children knew something was wrong. Their father was upset, which seldom happened, and their mother wasn’t cooking, which only happened when they traveled.

“Mommy going to be all right?” Constance asked, pointing her petite finger toward the room, the door still closed.

“She’ll be just fine,” their father said. “She just found out some really bad news is all. Both of us found out some bad news.”

“What kind of news?” Lisa asked.