know? And I wasn’t in Julian’s tightest circle. And anyway, in the end, he shut everyone out.”
Jake looked like he didn’t follow. “Okay,” he said.
“There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing. That sounds terrible, but it’s true. Not that they had bad intentions, just . . . you always want to believe you’re important in someone’s life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren’t.”
Jake ran his tongue down her ear and then along her clavicle. “One more time,” he said.
She didn’t like the way he looked at her, staring deep like he was trying to get their pupil dilation synced up. The point had never been for him to get more attached, especially not with everything else going on.
There were sounds out in the apartment.
“Shit,” she said. “If it’s just Richard he’ll go to bed soon. You can sneak out then, okay?”
“Alright,” he said, and closed his eyes. “I’m not an alcoholic. That was a joke.”
“How is that funny?”
“I don’t know. I was drunk.”
Fiona must have fallen asleep, because she was on a bus in Chicago with Richard, looking for Corinne’s house. Her hand was on fire.
When she rolled over in the middle of the night, Jake, thank God, was gone.
1986
Bill had decreed that everyone had the afternoon off. Yale lugged his bag on the El, and then to Briar and up the two flights. He’d been away long enough to induce that wonderful coming-home-after-a-long-trip feeling, the way you’re hit with the smells of your own building, the dimensions of your own hallway, which have somehow readjusted themselves so the place feels dreamlike, off by a few vertiginous inches in every direction. He was hungry, late for lunch. He thought he might make a grilled cheese, and he wondered if there was tomato soup in the pantry.
When he opened the door, Charlie’s mother stood there in a gray dress, her feet bare. He’d thought she was coming next week. Yale dropped his bag and said “Teresa!” and went to hug her. As he did, he heard the bedroom door shut. He assumed Charlie was coming out to see him, closing the door to hide the unmade bed from his mother. But Charlie didn’t appear. He’d gone in, not out.
And when he pulled back from Teresa, she had the strangest face. She smiled, but only with her mouth, and she said, “Yale, we need— Shall we go for a walk?”
He felt as if the room might tip sideways, or already had.
“What happened?” Charlie was having a breakdown. Julian had died. The paper had folded. Reagan had—
Teresa put her hands on his arms. He still had his coat on, his dressy coat. “Yale, we ought to take a walk.”
“Why would I want to do that? Teresa, what the hell?”
Her eyes were filling, and he saw now that she’d already been crying, that her face was a mess. Her hair was a mess.
He put his hands into his coat pockets. Fiona’s necklace was there, transferred from his pants, and the wings stabbed his palm. It was a cameo with birds on each side, birds holding up the frame of the cameo. Sharp metal wings. Something was very wrong.
Teresa drew a breath and very quietly said, “Yale, I’m going to walk you to the clinic and we’re going to get you tested.”
Yale started to say, I can’t believe he’s doing this again, I can’t believe you’re listening to him, I can’t believe he thinks I’d do that to him, and we just got tested this spring.
But he sat on the floor and put his head between his knees.
She was trying to tell him something different, something about Charlie, and Yale couldn’t work out the pieces. But yes, oh God, he understood. Needles shot through his arms and legs and abdomen, pinned him to the moment. A dead bug on a foam square.
He could hear Charlie in the bedroom, walking. Moving things. Yale squeezed his ears with his knees. Teresa had crouched in front of him. She put her hand on his shoe. Nico’s shoe.
She said, “Yale, can you hear me?”
Yale was shocked to find that he wasn’t crying, even though Teresa was. Why was he not crying? He whispered: “Teresa, what did he do?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “He won’t tell me. Listen, Yale, even if he has this—these—antibodies, that just means he’s been exposed. It doesn’t mean he has the virus.”