Fade to Black

  No one sits there,

  just me.

  I have baloney.

  Mama uses brown bread.

  Brown bread, not white,

  orange cheese, not yellow.

  The baloney smells good.

  I put potato chips

  between the slices.

  The girls come,

  one, two, three.

  Don’t sit.

  They’re not friends.

  The yellow-hair girl’s hair

  shines like hair

  in a commercial.

  “Hear what happened?” she says.

  “That guy

  got his windows smashed.”

  Her voice sings up and down,

  like Gramma’s piano.

  The others look.

  “What guy?” they say.

  I say, “Alex… Alex… Alex Crusan.”

  No one hears.

  “That guy,” she says.

  “Hel-lo? You know.

  The one from Miami, the one with AIDS.”

  “Alex,” I say. “Alex.”

  No one hears.

  “Who did it?”

  “Don’t know yet.

  I saw his car

  on the way to school.

  The windshield was, like, totally smashed out.”

  “On purpose?”

  “No doubt.

  Bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “But who did it?”

  I want to say

  blue jacket.

  I saw

  the blue jacket.

  I don’t say it.

  They don’t hear.

  “Who knows?”

  The yellow-hair girl

  sniffs the air.

  My baloney.

  She doesn’t say it.

  “Was he hurt?”

  I want to know too.

  She doesn’t say.

  She walks away.

  The others go too.

  Her hair is shiny.

  Monday, 11:30 a.m., Memorial Hospital

  ALEX

  Jennifer left when the nurse showed up to change my bandages. I still haven’t looked in the mirror. I feel less spacey, so whatever they gave me must be wearing off. I’m awake enough to notice I don’t have a roommate. I wonder if that’s because no one would want to room with me.

  “He got it from a transfusion, you know,” my mother says to the nurse as she follows her in.

  “Mom…” I say.

  My mother saw me talking to Jennifer when she came in, so now I can’t pretend I’m asleep. She looks at me but speaks only to the nurse. Fine. She’s mad. If I’d listened to her about not going out alone this morning, this wouldn’t have happened. I give up on saying anything and submit to the whole ER routine. My mother hovers, getting in the nurse’s way.

  “Transfusion.” The nurse looks at my face for the first time before dropping my bandages into a step-on garbage pail marked “Medical Waste.” “That’s very unusual nowadays. They run lots of tests on blood products now.”

  Darn near impossible, really.

  “Poor child,” the nurse says.

  “Yes.” My mother puts her hand on mine. “It has been a terrible misfortune.”

  The nurse takes out a needle and starts heading for the IV on my arm. I point to it. “What’s that for?” I move my mother’s hand over with the gesture.

  “Just something for the pain,” the nurse says.

  “Is that why I’m so spacey?”

  She nods. “Mmm-hmm … on this stuff, you should be feeling no pain.”

  “Don’t give me any more.”

  My mother starts in. “Alex, I think you should let her.”

  “Please. I don’t have to, do I?” I ask the nurse.

  The nurse shrugs. “You want pain?”

  “I’d rather have pain than be a waste case.”

  She nods. “I can ask your doctor.”

  “Yeah, do that,” I say. “Thanks.”

  The second the nurse leaves, my mother starts in, first about how I’m feeling—fine. Fine.

  Then she says, “Oh, Alex, I told you do not go this morning.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” There’s no use arguing with her at this point. I just have to be sorry. So, so sorry. Sorry for wanting two minutes to myself without your whining. Sorry for being sick. Sorry for living. Sorry for not being sorry enough. My mother has protected me all my life—if she could have encased me in Styrofoam, she would’ve. She even held me back from starting kindergarten until I was six so she could baby me longer. So, needless to say, she’s barely holding it together with my having HIV. “Sorry,” I repeat.

  She touches my forehead. “The people in this place—animals. I told your father we cannot stay here, no matter what.”

  A week ago I’d have been dancing at this. But now I know it’s my fault, that I’ll be screwing things up for everyone like I’m always screwing things up for everyone. Even so, it was scary what happened this morning.

  “We don’t have to leave,” I say. “It’s just some nut job.”

  “Some nut job who attacks a seventeen-year-old boy with a baseball bat. No. I say to your father this is a bad place. He has to tell them transfer him back. Or else we go somewhere else. Another job.”

  “What about the health insurance?”

  She sighs. “There’s always Medicaid.”

  Medicaid. For poor people. She means if we lose our health insurance, and my illness makes us so poor we lose everything. Then Medicaid would pay for me. No way.

  I change the subject. Again.

  “Where’s Carolina?”

  “Home. I tell her stay in the family room. It has the least windows.”

  Windows.

  Last night, when we were at mass, someone threw a rock through Carolina’s window. Then we had dinner and watched TV, so we didn’t even notice until it was time to go to bed and Carolina stepped on glass in her bare feet. Who’d throw a rock through a little kid’s window?

  We called the police, but they weren’t real helpful. Que sorpresa—what a surprise.

  That was the first time anyone had done something like that. Other people have thrown stuff—bottles and junk—in our yard, but not the house. This felt different. It felt … personal. And now this, this morning. That felt about as personal as it gets.

  Afterward we had a family meeting. Mom led it, of course. Dad sat and offered solidarity and fatherly wisdom. I know I shouldn’t complain about my parents, that I’m lucky, really. Most people I’ve met with AIDS, their parents don’t speak to them, much less hover and worry like mine. But sometimes, it’s hard to feel lucky.

  The upshot of our family caucus: The Crusan kids aren’t supposed to leave the house unnecessarily, and never alone. I nodded along with the whole thing. It’s not like I have any friends here anyway, and like I said, it was scary. That was until I realized I wouldn’t get to spend time with my baby.

  My baby is a three-year-old red Honda CR-V with a sunroof. Mom and Dad bought her for my seventeenth birthday. I know it was a stretch for them financially. Dad’s always griping about what it costs to insure a seventeen-year-old driver, and I can’t get an after-school job (“Would you like some fries with that, Mr. Cole?”). But my parents do that sometimes, indulge me because I’m sick. They don’t say that’s why, but it is. And hey, I’m seventeen. I want a car.

  When I’m driving is the only time I feel halfway normal. One of my favorite things to do is, Mondays, I get up before everyone else and drive to Dunkin’ Donuts, which is pretty much the only sign of civilization in Pinedale. I eat healthy the rest of the week—it’s important to eat good foods and take about a million vitamins to help fight disease—but Mondays, I buy coffee for Mom and Dad and a dozen donuts. Mom and Dad love the vanilla bean coffee. The owner, Mr. Kahn, knows me. He always makes sure he has chocolate honey dip Monday mornings.

  “I’m afraid that means no more Dunkin’ Donuts,” Mom said, like she knew exactly what I
was thinking. She sighed. “Though I’ll miss the vanilla bean.”

  I nodded. Carolina was screaming into someplace where only dogs could hear. She wasn’t too happy about the new rules either. When I nodded, she glared at me like I was sucking up to my parents. I didn’t bother saying anything because I knew I was going no matter what they said. One thing about having a limited life expectancy: it makes you more willing to take risks. I wasn’t about to spend the time I had cooped up in this house in Pinedale, though I thought it was okay if Carolina did.

  I figured once Mom smelled that vanilla bean, she’d get over it.

  “I’m sorry,” I say now. Sorry. Sor-ry.

  “It isn’t your fault, Alejandro. It is these … these people. They aren’t human. They don’t bleed as we do. They don’t feel. As soon as you are out of the hospital, I will send you and Lina to live with Aunt Maria in Miami.”

  My mom’s good at drama. She’s still touching my arm. Sometimes I wonder if she touches me so much to prove she’s not afraid to. Or that she doesn’t hate me because of what’s happened.

  I move my arm an inch, trying to lose her, then feel bad and move it halfway back. “Why don’t you go home and stay with Carolina?” I say.

  “Why do you push us away, Alejandro?”

  “I’m not pushing anything. But I know you’re worried about Lina.”

  “Now, you think that. But this morning—you had to go out even though I tell you not to. You had to go. You complain about being lonely, having no friends. But we would always be with you if you let us.”

  I knew she wouldn’t understand. I shouldn’t say anything else. It’ll start a fight.

  But still I say, “When I’m alone, that’s the only time I don’t feel lonely.”

  She sighs. “Que quieres decir, Alejandro?” She touches my hair. “This is crazy talk.”

  “No, it’s not. Because most of the time, when I’m with people, it’s like I’m not there anyway. People treat me like I’m a science project or have the plague. Or they ignore me. You do it too.”

  She’s looking at me like maybe it’s the drugs. But my mind is clear. I’m just tired.

  “Remember when I was eight, when Austin’s dad took us fishing?”

  “I remember Austin,” she says, like she’s glad I’ve said something that makes sense.

  “He took me and Austin out. It was my first time fishing.”

  I lean back, remembering. The tubes and machines fade away. I’m on the ocean.

  It was this perfect Miami day, the kind where the sky and ocean seem to meet so it’s like you’re inside a blue ball. You hate to turn the motor on and ruin it, so you just sit and let the fish come to you.

  “I caught a fish that day,” I tell Mom. “I remember Austin’s dad helped me take it off. I watched the fish grunting while he removed the hook. ‘What happens to it now?’ I asked him. I didn’t want to eat it.

  “‘We put it in a bucket with ice and water. It’ll last a few minutes, maybe an hour. But, sooner or later, the air runs out, and then … fade to black.’”

  “Alex,” Mom says now. “What does this have to do with anything?”

  “I’m like that fish, Mom. I’m flopping around in a bucket of ice water, no future, nothing to hope for. I feel like I’m fading away.”

  “You have hope. You have a future. We must ask God for a cure.”

  “I’ve asked him. Forty million people with this disease have asked, and he doesn’t listen. Or maybe he says no.”

  “No. God does not say no.”

  “He says no to babies in Africa. Do you know how many have died? He doesn’t care.”

  My mother’s hands go to her ears. “We just have to wait. You have been lucky so far.”

  “Yeah. Lucky. I won the damn Florida lottery.” I remember the nurse, the gloves, the medical waste. “Why do you always have to tell people I got it from a transfusion?”

  “Alex, we have been through this. If we tell people you got it that way, then they—”

  “Don’t think I deserve it.”

  “I did not say that.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  Can you believe that God will help find a cure, but still believe he gives it to people who deserve it? But I don’t say it.

  “It’s no one’s business how I got it,” I say instead. “It shouldn’t matter.”

  “It matters to some people.”

  “To you? Are you ashamed of me?”

  She sighs. “I try to make it easier for you. This is not only hard for you, Alex, but for all of us—especially when people are cruel. I want to make them be kinder, to make them think.”

  For the third time in ten minutes, I say, “I’m sorry.”

  She puts her arms around me. “Oh, my poor boy. At least they caught the person who did this thing.”

  Monday, 2:30 p.m., Cole residence

  CLINTON

  I didn’t do it!

  When they told me they thought I’d smashed Crusan’s car with a baseball bat, I freaked. Polite and respectful went hurtling out the window. I started crying, yelling that I needed my father and I wasn’t going to talk without him. They backed off then. They called Mom. It took her a while to get there, and they didn’t let me eat lunch. I thought she’d be trippin’ ’cause she had to miss work and come down there.

  She was mad, all right. She was mad at the cops. She didn’t take their side like I thought she would. She took mine. Actually, she was pretty cool about it.

  “You have no right to question my son outside of my presence,” she said (she talks like that). She said she was calling our lawyer (didn’t know we had one) and maybe suing the school district (harsh!). She also told them I was home in bed when it happened this morning.

  Which … uh… I wasn’t. But she doesn’t know that. She doesn’t know anything. I’m keeping where I was my little secret. But I was, for sure, not waling on Crusan’s car with a bat.

  But that shut ’em right up. They backed off. One thing I’ll say about my mom—when she thinks she’s right, dammit, she makes sure you hear it.

  They said it was all a big misunderstanding. I wasn’t under arrest or anything. They were just questioning me. They couldn’t do anything definite till they talked to Crusan. And he was in the hospital, too doped up to do any talking about anything for a while.

  They let me go. They told her I shouldn’t leave town for the next week or so. They’d be in touch.

  Mom doesn’t talk while we stop for lunch, or on the way home either. It’s sort of weird, but I start thinking it’s—maybe—’cause she believes me.

  Boy, was I wrong.

  First thing when we get in the house, she starts. “Oh, Clinton, I can’t believe it. As if this family hasn’t had enough problems.”

  I don’t know if she means our family or Crusan’s. So I just repeat, “I didn’t do it.”

  But I can tell from the look on her face she doesn’t believe me.

  “Oh, my… I sent him flowers. I heard on the radio, and I sent flowers to the hospital. I had no idea my own son—”

  “I didn’t do it, Mom. Honest,” I say. “You’ve got to believe me.”

  “This is my fault. I knew how you felt. You threatened to do something like this.”

  “No, I didn’t. I never…”

  I stop. The week before, when she said Melody could spend the night at the Crusans’, I did say something. I said if she didn’t stop letting Mel go over there, I’d have to do something about it, something desperate.

  “Jeez, I didn’t mean anything like that, like bashing a guy with a baseball bat, for Christ sakes. I don’t do things like that. I’m not like that. Jeez, don’t you know me at all? I just meant—”

  I stop again. I don’t know if I ought to tell her about the rock. Or the notes in Crusan’s locker.

  I decide to keep the info on a need-to-know basis.

  “Meant what?” Mom demands.

  “Nothing. I didn’t do it. That’s all. You’ve
got to believe me.”

  She looks like she’s going to say something else, but a key starts turning in the lock. Melody’s home.

  And she’s crying.

  “Carolina wasn’t in school today. Mrs. Admire didn’t want to tell us why, but before we left, she told me. It’s ’cause her brother got hurt.”

  Mom gives me a look like shut up. I do.

  My sister, Melody, is maybe my favorite person in the world. I feel for the kid, really. She’s sort of young for her age, and she’s a fat kid. I was the same way. That was before I started lifting, getting big enough to play football. Now I work out every day and look pretty good, thank you very much. But I still remember what it was like. I remember how people’s idea of being nice was just not to bother you, not to call you names. When I was a kid, I used to go to school every day just hoping to be left alone. That’s why I feel for Mel so much.

  “I want to call Carolina,” Melody says.

  “She probably isn’t home,” I say. “Why don’t I help you with your homework?”

  “I know you hate her, Clinton.” She gives a big sniff, the kind where you just know she hoovered up a ton of snot. Gross. “But she’s my best friend.”

  Only friend, more like. The idea is a thing with teeth. In my mind I can almost see myself, hurling that rock. Not a great throw, but good enough to do what I planned. I picked the window ’cause it was on the side, behind the trees. But I could see that there was a canopy bed inside. So I’m pretty sure it was Carolina’s room. Jeez. But I wasn’t trying to do anything to her. They weren’t home.

  “I don’t hate her,” I say. “I figured if her brother’s hurt, they’re probably at the hospital, so she won’t be home.”

  “Is he in the hospital?” Another sniff. “How do you know?”

  Mom gives me another shut up look, and I shrug.

  “I don’t know. I’m going to do my homework. I can help you, maybe.”

  “Like you’re so smart.” My sister’s in gifted and won’t let anyone forget it.

  “I think I can handle fourth-grade work,” I say.

  “You can call her after dinner,” Mom chimes in.

  Melody wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “A-all right,” she says.

  Mom sends her in to blow her nose. “And wash your hands too,” she yells after her.