“Cecily was there too.” Fiona’s voice croaked out as if she hadn’t talked in a week. “It was me and Cecily in the hospital. We did shifts.”
Cecily said, “It was mostly you.”
“But he died alone.” It was the cruelest thing Fiona could have said, not just to Julian but to Richard and Cecily too. And to herself. “He died completely alone.”
Julian set his sandwich down and looked at her until she looked back. “Richard told me,” he said. “I know, and I know it wasn’t your fault. Anyone could have died alone. You know, the middle of the night, if—”
“It wasn’t the middle of the night.”
Cecily put a cool hand to the back of Fiona’s neck.
Serge mouthed something to Richard, and Richard mouthed back “New York.” Serge must have been asking where Richard was when Yale died. Richard’s career had been blowing up.
Fiona, to change the subject, managed to ask Julian to recount his last three decades.
“If you’re asking how I’m still alive,” Julian said, “I have no idea.” But he did, really. He’d gone to Puerto Rico in ’86, and he’d stayed a year, mooching off an old friend, selling T-shirts on the beach and getting stoned. “I was so sure I was ready to die,” he said. “And then when I heard about AZT, it was like—like if you were trying to drown, but someone threw you a rope, and you couldn’t stop yourself from grabbing it.” The problem was that Julian had no insurance, and the drug cost more than half of what he’d made a year back in Chicago. So he went home to Valdosta, Georgia, where his mother, who’d thought she’d never see him again, was happy to let him live in his childhood bedroom, happy to spend his father’s life insurance and remortgage her house for her youngest child. “She was a saint,” he said. “A southern gentlewoman. She was built for church and afternoon tea, but it turns out she was also built for crisis.” For a while she made him keep working—he got a job with a local film production company—because she was so certain he’d survive, and that when he was cured, he wouldn’t want a gap on his résumé. (Fiona remembered Julian’s sweet optimism before his diagnosis, the way he was always sure the disease would be cured, sure he was just about to become famous. He must have gotten it from his mother all along.) He grew sicker and sicker despite her care, developed resistance to the AZT. “I had about half a T cell left,” he said. “I weighed a hundred and eight pounds.”
Richard said, “And that’s when I saw you.” Fiona knew Richard had run into Julian in New York sometime in the early nineties, that Julian had come up there with a friend to see one or two good shows before he died. He was in a wheelchair. This was when Richard had taken that last photo of him, the third photo of the triptych. Richard had called her afterward, and then she’d called Teddy to marvel over the fact that Julian had lasted that long.
“Right. And after that I was in the hospital for a solid year. That New York trip was a bad idea, in retrospect.”
Serge said, “And then what?” He was the only one who’d finished his sandwich.
“Then it was ’96! Suddenly the good drugs came out! There’s a few months I don’t even remember, I was so out of it, and when the fog lifted, I was home again. I could lift my arms and I could eat food. Next thing you know, I’m jogging. I mean, really it took a while, but that’s what it felt like.
“For a long time—you’ll appreciate this, Fiona. For a long time, I wondered if I was a ghost. A literal ghost. I thought I must’ve died and this was some kind of purgatory or heaven. Because how was it even possible, you know? But then I thought: If this is heaven, where are all my friends? It couldn’t be heaven if Yale and Nico and everyone weren’t there. So I guess this is just plain old earth. And I’m still on it.”
Serge excused himself to answer the phone. He’d been texting all day, and although all his acquaintances seemed accounted for, not all of their acquaintances were, and there were still urgent and worrisome things to be discussed.
Julian said, “My husband had basically the same experience. He