Читать книгу Damn Love - Jasmine Beach-Ferrara - Страница 5

STAYIN’ ALIVE

I get it. Broken hearts mend and in six months I’ll see that we were never right for each other anyway. But this middle distance blows. Like the way Emily asked me to meet her for coffee tonight to talk about god knows what. Or the fact that yesterday morning, I saw her and the new girlfriend—a Silicon Valley software tycoon—in the UCSF lobby. It was just after 8:00 and I’d been on call all night, which means I looked like hell and was drinking coffee on a slatted bench, trying to hide from the particularly anxious pack of internal medicine interns I’m supervising this month. One kid, not yet twenty-one because he skipped all of high school, almost killed a patient last week. We call him Danger Mouse now.

Emily and the tycoon emerged from the elevator laughing. I ducked, slid behind the nearest ficus tree and began a close inspection of its leaves. But one of my interns spotted me and began her approach like a heat-seeking missile. This is the one who last week asked for a letter of recommendation and began listing her extra-curriculars as we peed in adjacent stalls. I scowled at her through the ficus leaves until she retreated.

Even I, who have yet to erase her from the #1 position in my speed dial, could see that Emily was happy as she strolled across the lobby, her arm around the tycoon’s tubby waist. We were together for seven years—my final year of med school, my residency and the first two years of my infectious disease fellowship. That final year, I probably shouldn’t count because it overlapped with the affair. A month ago, she moved out of our apartment on Guerrero and into the tycoon’s Castro condo. Now they are everywhere and growing, like a mold. This was the second time I’d seen them in as many weeks. San Francisco is like this: small in precisely the ways you wish it wasn’t. Shit-fuck, I call them.

But I can also say this. Last night, I got out of clinic early and picked up a steak burrito on the way home. I crashed on the couch and watched the second half of the Redskins-Cowboys game without having to say a word to anyone. Small triumphs, I know. But they’ve got to count for something.

Most of my patients are heroin addicts trying, at least some days, to get clean, and gay boys with HIV who do well on cocktails until they don’t. One of my patients calls himself Weasel and just cycled out of our inpatient rehab unit for the second time. I discharged him this morning, along with bus vouchers and a quick hug. At the end of appointments, I always hug my patients. Even in San Francisco, this has earned me a bit of a reputation. But in the last year, it also means I’ve said a proper, final good-bye to six people.

We have Weasel on a new cocktail and on Testosterone, and he’s gaining muscle mass like a sixteen-year-old. He calls his biceps guns and flirts with our entire staff, regardless of age and gender. Three months ago, he arrived at the ER with PCP and a T cell count of 15. There is a 90% chanced he will relapse in the next six months. You stay matter of fact about these things until you can’t any longer. Which is another way to say that even steady exposure to suffering is no inoculation against it. You see the whole world in a hospital. Emily. Weasel. My interns. The thirty patients I’m following this week. A banquet of souls, my attending likes to say. He means the ghosts too, the ones who die here.

My uncle Roger died on the street a year ago, but he was called at our ER, a fact I discovered only after I identified his body at the city morgue. With Roger, it was always about near misses. That’s how it was in 1982, the year that he lived with us. At the time, I thought that he was seventeen, but he was actually twenty-five. I was seven then and all that I cared about was football and convincing people that I was a boy. The Redskins were my team, the closest NFL franchise to our apartment in Durham, North Carolina. For Halloween, I dressed as Joe Theismann and my two best friends, Peter and Keisha, dressed as Hogs, the nickname for the offensive linemen that protected the small quarterback.

Roger looked enough like John Travolta to occasionally persuade drunk women that he was him, in town for a shoot. He usually wore a pair of tight Levi’s, a white undershirt, scuffed brown cowboy boots and a denim jacket that smelled of cigarettes and motor oil. His standard expression, in response to praise, scolding, flirtation, and accusations, was a suppressed grin. My infatuation with Roger was mistaken as a crush by my parents, who seemed encouraged that I was showing signs of a burgeoning heterosexuality. But it was something other than that: I wanted to be him. I wanted his efficient, rakish handsomeness to be my own.

I had spotted two tattoos on his body—a blue cross on his forearm that had been inked by an ex-girlfriend and an Apache symbol on his chest, at the spot where you would perform chest compressions. He caught me staring at this one as he passed me in the hall en route to the shower. Towel around his waist, hairbrush as microphone, he was singing “Stayin’ Alive.” “Music loud and women warm. I’ve been kicked around since I was born. And now it’s alright, it’s ok . . .” My mom was laughing and I was dancing down the hall behind him. Later, he showed me the book he’d found the Apache design in. It means potency, he told me seriously. I decided that I would get a tattoo exactly like his, just as I would buy a pocket knife like the one he carried on his belt. The tattoo I eventually got on my hip matches one on Emily’s.

Roger slept on the fold-out couch in our apartment. Each morning he folded the couch up and stored his suitcase in the hall closet, leaving no evidence that he lived there. Whenever I was alone in the apartment, I always went straight for his stuff. I’d put on his boots and his aviator sunglasses and pose in front of the mirror nailed to the back of the bathroom door. Standing there, I didn’t see a girl with patches on the knees of her jeans and a missing front tooth. I simply saw a body that might grow to be like my uncle’s, a body that could get you through the world. It was essential, I knew, that everything be back in place by the time my mom returned with my baby brother strapped to her chest and grocery bags in both arms.

My uncle had already been kicked out of my grandparents’ house twice by the time he landed with us. They lived in a southern Ohio town so debilitated by the shutdown of a GoodYear plant that it made downtown Durham, with its abandoned tobacco warehouses and snaking train tracks, feel like a vibrant urban center. Roger was trying to get clean and it was this that he and my mother talked about when they stayed up late chain smoking at the kitchen table.

On those nights, I would crawl across the carpeted floor of my room and nudge the door open as if I was a clever dog. The apartment would be thick with the smells of cigarette smoke and instant coffee. I would poke my head just far enough into the hall to hear her laughter and their conversation. From down the hall, my father’s snores rumbled like a diesel engine.

Roger brought out a side of my mom that my father and I couldn’t. We were both jealous. With him, she laughed harder than she ever did with us and it was usually impossible to tell what exactly was so funny. A used car ad on TV, my uncle’s dead on impression of their mother, the smell of bleach—any of these things could set them off. It sometimes felt as if they were gloating in how much humor there was to be found in the world, if only you knew where to look for it. Even her speaking voice changed with him, a little higher, a little more alive. My father and I tried to console each other with rolled eyes and shrugs, but we both wanted to laugh that hard, and, more than that, longed to make her laugh like that.

Last month, I got home from the hospital and found Emily emptying her desk into a cardboard box. Two packed suitcases were lined up by the front door.

“What’s going on?” I poured myself a shot of Jameson. Through the living room window, I glimpsed a car idling outside our building, its headlights like startled, jaundiced eyes.

“I’m moving out,” she said. I sunk into the couch.

We’d been fighting and we hadn’t seen each other for more than thirty consecutive minutes that week. It’s no way to live, and I know that. But we were only months away from a different kind of life, one in which I’d be working fifty instead of eighty hours a week.

She took a deep breath “I’ve fallen in love with someone else,” she said as if announcing that she’d gotten a new job. Emily’s currently a bartender, but she’s also cut hair, taught first grade, cleaned houses, and done retail. Paid work is largely a distraction from writing confessional, mostly bad poetry. I can say that now although for years I sat gamely in the front row of her packed readings and tried to ignore how closely her poems resembled those of her friends.

“You can’t be serious.” I stood up and stepped to the door, blocking her way out.

She bent to pick up a suitcase. She’d left before, for a night or two, but never with more than her purse. “C’mon, babe. This is absurd.” I tried laughing but she reached for the doorknob. I grabbed her forearm. When she tried to pull away I gripped her wrist more tightly and pulled her towards me.

“Let go of me,” she said, her breath warm against my face.

I squeezed until I could feel the speeding beats of her pulse.

“You’re hurting me,” she said and when I let go, she jerked away as if I was radioactive and in that moment the floor and bookshelves began to shake. Car alarms went off up and down the street. Dishes rattled in the kitchen. When it passed, a radiant look spread across Emily’s face. She always hated these minor quakes, which happen every few months out here. But this one she interpreted as a booming geological exclamation point to the utter rightness of her departure. I took it as further evidence that if God exists at all, he is either a twisted bastard or a space cadet.

She walked out and I followed her down the hall and out to the sidewalk, the tycoon joined the scene, ballsy enough to extend her hand for an introduction before she loaded Emily’s bags into the trunk. Emily went blank and mute as she got in the passenger’s seat, tears rolling down her cheeks as I begged her to stay and the tycoon, behind the wheel by then, put a pale, venous hand on her thigh. For two blocks, I chased them, keeping their tail lights in sight. And then the tycoon gunned it and they were gone. I called Peter sobbing. We’ve been best friends since we were six and now he and his fiancée, Felix, live a block away. He found me on the sidewalk and I spent the next week with them, calling in sick and vacating my apartment as if it had been condemned.

The year Roger lived with us, my parents were broke and sleep deprived. At their worst, they seemed barely able to tolerate each other. For years, those fights presented like the symptoms of a looming divorce. Now they seem to have been nothing more than the awkward, bucking alignments of one life to another, full of chafe and struggle and moments of ecstatic recognition.

In the winter of 1982, my father’s father had a heart attack in Philadelphia. My parents bundled my brother into our battered Corolla and raced to his hospital bed, leaving Roger and me alone for the weekend. I wanted them to stay away for an entire year, during which I would cook dinner for Roger every night and we would somehow get tickets to the SuperBowl, and he, rather than my exhausted parents and wailing brother, would cheer from the sidelines during my Pop Warner football games.

After my game that Saturday, we headed to Duke Forest on his bike. Roger rode helmetless and I wore a beat up football helmet that he’d bought at a yard sale and painted maroon with a gold stripe in honor of the Redskins. I wrapped my arms around his waist and felt tough and terrified as we sped down two-lane back roads. He pushed the bike into the woods and after half a mile on the main trail, we forked off onto a minor dirt path that ran along the Eno River.

Other than the tall, swaying pines, the trees were bare. Dry, fallen branches cracked under our feet and ice pocked the trail. Behind him, I tried to imitate his swagger. When he accidentally stepped in a puddle, I followed suit. The frigid water soaked through my sneakers and socks. By the time we stopped to rest at a bend in the river, my toes were numb.

“It’s easy,” he said, continuing his primer on cussing. “Just pretend you’re saying a normal word. Like this. Money. Toast. Dog. Fuck.” We were squatting on the bank next to the river, the soles of our shoes gripping the sticky red mud. He rolled a joint and I scanned the shallows of the river’s clear water for skipping stones. I had never cussed before. He licked the rolling paper with his tongue, a quick flash of pink, and then lit up.

“Let’s start with shit. That’s an easier one,” he said. “You’ve heard your parents saying that, right?”

I nodded.

“It’s ok,” he said. “I’m the only one who can hear you.”

I dipped my hand into the water and selected a chipped, misshapen stone. I hurled it into the dark water in the middle of the river where it immediately sunk. “Shit,” I ventured. My hand was now as cold as my feet and it occurred to me that perhaps there were ways to impress him that didn’t involve being so uncomfortable.

“Excellent,” he smiled, palming the crown of my head with his hand and squeezing it. Blood surged to my heart. Year later, I would take Peter to this spot during the six months that we dated during our senior year of high school. We would sit by the river and make out, both of us eager for the distraction of conversation. A few times, I tried to explain what it had been like to be there with Roger, but then, as now, it was hard to get it right.

That day in 1982, it took another hour for Roger and me to circle back to the trail head. As we walked, I watched the brown and whites of the river rushing by, the barn-red flare of a cardinal swooping through the trees, Roger’s shoulder bent and his palm cupped around the joint to shield it from the breeze. I stayed close enough to make sure that he could hear me whispering fuck to the sparrows hopping from branch to branch and asshole to the low-hanging pine boughs that brushed my cheeks.

The next night, we watched the Redskins play the Eagles. Roger had heated up two TV dinners and I tried to coax myself into an appetite for Salisbury steak. “Do you think they’ll make the Super Bowl,” I asked, soaking a chunk of gristly meat in steaming brown gravy.

“Highly likely,” he replied, tearing the plastic sheath off his cherry pie.

“We could have a party,” I suggested.

“That’s a long time from now,” he said.

“It’s the same day as my birthday.”

“I know,” he said and for several minutes we watched the game in silence, as Darryl Green picked off a pass and, three plays later, Theismann connected with the lanky Art Monk on a twenty-five yard slant into the end zone. After the extra point, the Redskins were down by two with five minutes to play. During the commercial break, Roger pulled his jackknife out of the leather pouch on his belt. The knife had a single gleaming blade and a wooden handle with brass tips. “Give me your thumb,” he said as he drew the blade quickly across his own thumb and then squeezed until a drop of blood appeared.

“You’ll barely feel this,” he said, looking directly at me and smiling. I was scared but calm, the same feeling I would have years later when I kissed Keisha for the first time. He angled the tip of the knife into the pad of my thumb. The cut was no bigger than a pin prick. He pushed his thumb against mine and explained that we were now blood brothers, which meant that no matter what happened, we were bound to one another.

For the rest of game we held hands and when, in the final minute, John Riggins chugged his way across the goal line to put the Redskins up by four, we both jumped up and screamed, arms raised and whooping. As the clock ran down, my uncle stood in front of the TV doing the Hog dance, and I thought, as I had the day before at the river, that we would go on and on like this.

It’s hard, when thinking of Roger, to isolate one image from another. The problem is that these images do not add up to a whole. They are partial. Like him, it is tempting to say. But that wouldn’t be quite right. He was as whole any of us, but he worshipped his own gods. More times than I can count, I’ve been asked why I went into medicine. By admissions committees, professors, now students. Each time, it’s Roger’s face—a young grinning heartbreaker a moment away from trouble—that comes to mind. But that’s never the answer I give.

God forbid you bleed a little, Emily would say. She thinks I live in a bubble because I go to cocktail parties at which someone is invariably talking about his wine collection and someone else is casually relating how she met the Obamas. Emily hated these parties as much as she hated the fact that I sometimes like them. More and more often, we would arrive late and depart early to hang out at the bar where she works.

When she left, Peter suggested that I get a pet. A companion animal, he means. With her gone, my apartment is as blank as a hotel suite. Emily somehow took the charm with her. Now the salvaged chair in the living room exudes a whiff of wreckage rather than warmth. The bookcase she painted pink has lost its whimsy and looks like it belongs at a Head Start. The thriving plants and the sunlight streaming through open windows and her photos clustered on the walls—that was all her.

She left home and Alabama at sixteen. The great escape, she calls it. From there, she worked her way west. The word hope is tattooed on the inside of her forearm. She got it in rehab. Several of her friends have the same tattoo. Just talk to me, she would say, coming up behind me while I worked at my desk, her arms around my chest, her hand on my heart. I wouldn’t look up. We’re all gonna die, Alex, no matter how many journal articles you read tonight. Come to bed, she’d say, naked and tangled in our sheets. Or, later, come out with me, her jeans tight, her lipstick fresh. That I kept studying was a problem.

The one photo she left behind is of Peter. In it, he’s standing outside his parents’ brick rancher in Durham. He’s wearing a gray t-shirt and his eyes are staring straight at the camera. She took it at three in the morning when the moon was nearly full. Somehow she got the lighting on his face right. Looking at it feels like being with him. Behind him, the lawn was meticulously cut, his father’s handiwork. The house was dark and shuttered except for the porch light, its glow competing with the moon’s in the photo.

It was the night of my med school graduation from Carolina. She and Peter had flown in together from San Francisco; late that night, after dinner with my family and then drinks at a bar, Peter had asked if we could drive by his parents’ house. He hadn’t been home since his dad kicked him out back when we were in college. Emily was the one who suggested he actually get out of the car. She snapped thirty, forty shots, her voice soft as she coaxed him from the edge of the lawn to the front stoop. That was six years ago now.

The week she moved out, I lived with Peter and Felix. From their guest room, I could see my building’s front door. I spent more hours than I care to confess watching for signs of Emily’s return. I also logged into her email and read the horribly love-drenched messages she and the tycoon were exchanging. I got as far as writing a message to the tycoon from Emily’s account cancelling a weekend trip to Sonoma. When I called Peter asking him to edit it for believability he ordered me to turn the computer off. I ’ll be home in an hour, he said.

I was high that week. Which meant that when I wasn’t stalking Emily, I was eating Fritos and chocolate icing by the spoonful. I don’t have an addictive personality, so I can get high twice a year or every morning and it makes no real difference. People like to put addicts in a separate category, on the other side of a bridge so long you cannot see its end. But, more than anything, the patients I see feel familiar to me. I don’t need to know why Weasel has relapsed six times, or why another patient, an oncologist who has been positive for ten years and has an undetectable viral load, spent last weekend on a meth-fueled binge on a gay cruise. I differ with the twelve-step orthodoxy on this point. I don’t believe these things require exhaustive explanation. They are simply the risks we each choose, not so different really than boarding a plane or deciding to live on the West Coast.

More and more, I hear people talking about the big one as if they can somehow stop it. Even Peter and Felix have a survival kit. Assembling it was on their wedding planning to–do list, a state of preparedness somehow linked to matrimony. From deep in the bowels of FEMA’s website, they downloaded an Earthquake Survival Guide, which promises to keep you safe for the first thirty-six hours. That’s how long they think it will take to get aid into the city. This coming from the geniuses who didn’t even know there were people in the Superdome.

So now a plastic garbage can on wheels sits in their backyard, filled with glow sticks, canned food, blankets, cash, a first aid kit, and gallons of water. I can’t imagine pushing that thing through the busted streets of an apocalyptic San Francisco and trying to outrace death. If the earth splits open at these coordinates, I will either fall through or stand on the rim and administer first aid.

Emily. Weasel. Roger. Peter. Felix. Love. Death. Risk. All these pieces fit. My seeing Emily yesterday morning means nothing more than that we are still in each other’s orbits. But it also distracted me enough that I missed a patient’s allergy to an antibiotic and prescribed it to her. Danger Mouse caught my mistake. Near misses are what I’m talking about here.

On January 30, 1983, I turned eight, and the Redskins kicked off against Miami in the SuperBowl. Although it was a school night, my parents let me throw a party. I invited Peter and Keisha and requested that they each dress as a Redskin. We made an unlikely trio—me, a female Joe Theismann, Peter a faggy, reluctant Art Monk, and, in Keisha, a Darrell Green with braids.

We spent the pre-game show assembling a SuperBowl shrine out of my Legos and Redskins curios. Its centerpiece was a battery-operated talking Redskins helmet. Peter was bored out of his skull but perked up slightly when he saw the cheerleaders’ routine. We watched the game in near silence on our thirteen-inch black and white Zenith, its rabbit ears wrapped in foil. My father sat in his recliner, working on a beer and trying to stay awake. Every few minutes my mother, who hated football, cheerily inquired if anyone had scored. My brother was asleep in the room we shared.

When Theismann scrambled on a third and ten and slid for a first down during the second quarter, I thought of Roger, and how, had he been there, we would have high-fived. Minutes later, when the Dolphins cruised into the lead with a seventy-six yard touchdown pass, I muttered “Shit.” On either side of me, Peter and Keisha giggled but my parents failed to react. “Fuck,” I said, this time more loudly.

“Watch it, young lady,” my father said, raising his eyebrows. I scowled at him.

He’d kicked Roger out of our apartment. Twice that week, I had found my mother crying at the kitchen table and the night before the SuperBowl, she and my father had fought again as they’d baked my birthday cake. My mother wanted to give my uncle one more chance; absolutely not, my father had said. But it still seemed possible that Roger would show up at half-time, just as it seemed possible that the Redskins would score twice and hold the Dolphins scoreless for the rest of the game.

Going into the fourth quarter, the Redskins were down 17-13, and for the first time, it occurred to me that they might lose. Keisha and I were gripping each other’s hands and Peter, still a star Sunday school pupil at that point, was praying. With just over ten minutes left, the Redskins went for it on a fourth and one. Riggins broke free of a tackle and ran for a forty-three yard touchdown. The clock ticked mercilessly. With 1:55 on the clock, Theismann connected with Charlie Brown in the end zone and my friends and I jumped up and did the Hog dance. Even my father, jolted out of his nap by our screams, joined in. My mother stood behind the couch and took pictures of us with the Polaroid they’d given me at dinner.

The phone rang. I knew that it was Roger even before my mother’s voice jumped. The game clock ran down. I watched my mother make eye contact with my father across the room and saw him nod slightly. She signaled for me to come to the phone. I did but I didn’t want to talk to Roger.

He was calling from a bar in Reno, he explained, saying that he’d thought about me the whole game. In the background, I could hear music and a woman calling his name and laughing loudly. We talked for a few minutes, but mostly it was him rehashing the highlights with forced enthusiasm. Across the room, I could see Theismann being interviewed, sweat pouring down his face, a sparkling white SuperBowl Champions cap sitting jauntily on his head. I passed the phone back to my mother and ran back into the living room, sliding into position on the couch.

The next time I saw Roger was Christmas Eve of 1990, when he arrived in a taxi and rang our doorbell like a stranger. It took a second to recognize him. His black hair had turned gray, like my mother’s, and it was well cut. For the first time, I noticed that his left ear stuck out. There were other changes: twenty pounds and a two-inch scar under his right eye. He wore a gray wool overcoat and lined black leather gloves. He carried a caramel-colored leather duffel and a slim silver briefcase.

I was seventeen then and had just been accepted into Yale. My parents couldn’t afford the tuition and fought about it frequently, my mother arguing for them to re-mortgage the house, my father insisting I stay in state. I was preoccupied by this and by the pressing, and somehow not contradictory, questions of whether to have sex with Peter and whether to tell Keisha that I was in love with her.

Roger and I stood in the living room, crowded by piles of presents and a tree weighed down by handmade ornaments. We fell into an easy conversation. That night, he and my mother stayed up late at the kitchen table. She and I got up early the next morning and took a bottle of aftershave from my father’s stack of gifts and a pack of wool socks from my brother’s, readdressing the cards to Roger. My mother raced around the kitchen pulling together a gift basket from the contents of our pantry—an old, unopened bottle of maple syrup, a can of smoked almonds, a box of Darjeeling tea. What the hell is he going to do with maple syrup? she muttered. But she couldn’t help herself and so arranged and then rearranged these items in a wicker basket she’d found in the basement.

That night, Roger and I smoked up in my backyard. I pretended I’d done it before, but when I started to hack, he handed me his beer and said, easy there. He leaned back on his heels and closed his eyes, his head bowed as if he was praying. Behind us, my parents’ house glowed and to the north Durham’s smokestacks and sedate skyline were visible. Standing next to him in the quiet yard, I felt like an adult. He told me about meeting a CIA spook in Panama, about flying first class and sitting next to Joe Thiesmann on a flight to LA. He was wearing his SuperBowl ring and a gold bracelet, he said, shaking his head. Whatever else you do, promise me you’ll stay away from dudes who wear jewelry, he said. That was the last conversation we ever had.

When my mom leaned out the kitchen door to call us in for dinner, she smelled the pot. I was exiled to my room and then grounded for two weeks. Roger called a cab before my parents could tell him to leave. A month later he was arrested in a federal bust and sentenced to prison in Morganton, a few hours west of Durham. My mother visited him on the third Saturday of each month as if they had a custody agreement. She brought him books from the ten page reading list he’d typed out for her. He liked Hemingway, Cheever, Denis Johnson, John Grisham. It was in prison that he converted, the preferred term now for testing positive, as if someone has become a believer rather than a carrier.

Not until my graduation from medical school did my mother tell me that the contents of that silver briefcase—and not a second mortgage—had paid for my first two years of college. They’d paid taxes on it, she insisted. The details were fuzzy.

We are like most families I know, which means that we’re scattered now. My parents, just a year away from retiring, have already purchased the RV that they plan to tour the country in. My brother is married and has a two-year old son. They live in a condo in the Atlanta suburbs, close to his wife’s family. He works for a landscaping company and, once a month, djs at a downtown bar. We talk every few weeks and they’re coming to visit next month. This is not the life I would have imagined for him, which is different than saying it is not the life that I wanted for him. For years, I confused the two, as if these conditions were indistinguishable.

Roger has been dead for a year now. He overdosed near the Panhandle in Golden Gate Park. He easily could have been one of my patients, but I didn’t know he was in the city until my mother called with the news of his death. Emily was out of town and I took a cab from the hospital to the city morgue. An intern escorted me to the viewing room.

He was wrapped in a white sheet and laid out on a steel table. I pulled the sheet down, trying to see his body not as a patient’s but as my own flesh and blood. My mother’s jaw line. My grandfather’s nose. The track marks. Dirt under his nails. The tattoos—the two I’d seen as a child, and another one low on his hip, of a heart, the name Angela in loopy cursive running across it. I nodded and was escorted back out.

By then, he’d been out jail for a few years. Between the time of his release and his death, he was an erratic, fleeting ghost. A year would go by without a call and then he’d be at my parents’ doorstep, either flush or broke, sober or high, healthy or off his meds. You never know which Roger is going to show up, my mother would say in lieu of actually describing her broken heart.

I flew with his body back to North Carolina two days later. Emily wanted to go with me, but I told her she didn’t need to. I meant it and I didn’t. Later, she told me this was the first weekend she spent with the tycoon. My parents got security passes so they could meet me at the gate at Raleigh/Durham. The three of us stood at the window and watched the baggage handlers unload his coffin from the rear of the plane as if it was any other kind of freight. We buried him at a cemetery in Durham. My parents bought their own plots there years ago and insisted on showing them to my brother and me that day, weirdly proud of themselves for such clear-sighted acceptance of their own mortality.

Keisha came to the funeral and afterward, she and I had drinks at new bar in downtown Durham. We talked about her husband and about Emily and she told me that she’d recently enlisted in the National Guard. When she said she was ready to go to Iraq if she got called up, I recognized the look in her eyes as the same one I’d seen on her wedding day. She drove me back to my parent’s house like we were eighteen again, and we sat in her darkened car for a few minutes with the radio on. When she reached for me, I kissed her and for twenty seconds it was as if we were catapulted into a parallel universe in which all the things that keep us apart didn’t matter. Then I pulled back and got out of the car.

This afternoon, I hauled ass to leave the hospital early so I could get home to change and shower before meeting Emily. It meant unloading a few patients on the interns and rushing through their evaluations. Danger Mouse, who yesterday called me a prick when he thought I was out of earshot, got a deserved poor.

She’d asked me to meet her at a new café on Valencia, a place where we had no history. It was nearly empty when I arrived. Emily showed up ten minutes late, wearing skinny jeans with a white tank and a white leather belt. Her hair was pulled back and she had on fire engine red lipstick. She ordered a decaf coffee, sat across from me and tapped her index finger on the wooden table. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

“You look skinny,” she said. “Are you eating?”

I figured I had exactly one chance. “Look, Emily—”

“Have you noticed how Obama always says look when he’s about to get all, like, didactic. Don’t you love Michelle’s arms? She’s so jacked.” She laughed nervously and then looked at her phone to check the time. One minute had elapsed and already her massive chatter shield was up.

“I miss you,” I said, my hands flat on the table. I heard somewhere that this is a vulnerable position because it signals that you’re not about to pull a .38 from an ankle holster.

Emily looked away. Her mom walked out on her family when she was four and she’d told me early on that it had made her terribly loyal. I never leave, she’d whispered. We were lying in the grass at Dolores Park. She was on top of me, kissing my neck.

“I need you,” I said and this got her attention. Are you sure you’re not somewhere on the autism spectrum? she would ask sometimes. Asperger’s maybe? In the weeks before boards, I’d spend my days off studying for sixteen hours. I’m doing this for us, I’d tell her as I ate dinner at my desk. What about right now, Alex? she’d say. This is us too.

“I have to tell you something.” She paused. A sip of coffee.

“I’m pregnant,” she continued. “We’re seeing an OB at UCSF and I wanted you to hear it from me first.”

“How far along are you?”

“Almost four months.”

I barked out a laugh. She left a month ago. For a woman.

“We found, like, the perfect donor and everyone says it takes at least a year. This is like a one in a million thing. But I’m 34, and -”

“I know you’re 34.”

“I know you know,” she said. She’d wanted to get pregnant two years ago. I’d worn her down arguing that we should wait.

She looked me in the eye and it was too much. My throat tightened. Sadness pummeled me. I stared at the table and counted to three in German. It’s the trick I use to keep myself from crying when notifying family members of a death. But she knows me.

“Hey,” she said, her voice softening for the first time. She touched my wrist with her index finger and left it there.

“Dr. C!”

I glanced up and saw Weasel, my patient, approaching our table. Since leaving the hospital yesterday, he’d shaved his head and started growing a goatee. He grinned and slapped me on the back.

“You’re looking good, Weasel,” I said. Emily told me that the first seventy-two hours out of rehab were the hardest to get through. But I’ve also had patients tell me exactly the opposite, that the longer you’re on the street, the harder it gets. Either way, right now Weasel is like a man on a razor thin wire, one foot raised, the other wobbling, his arms extended, no net to speak of. Sport for the dead, he once called shooting up as I took his blood pressure and we both stared at his track marks. Then he laughed.

“This one saved my life,” he told Emily. “They were about to put me in a hospice and she says, Weasel, I hear you used to be a boxer. I guess it’s in my chart somewhere. She goes, I need you to be a fighter. She believed in me.”

For a second, he teared up. He shrugged and blinked them away. Grinning, he flexed his biceps, which rose like firm breasts, filling out his t-shirt sleeves. “Now look at me,” he said.

Emily laughed and gave him that NA murmur that’s like an amen and they shared a moment. But then she remembered that Weasel was on my team. She checked her phone again. He looked at me, eyebrows cocked. He knows a little about the humiliations of love and seemed to recognize this for what it was. “Don’t let me interrupt you, ladies,” he said, stepping back, licking his chapped lips.

At the counter, he ordered a cup of coffee and deliberated over the baked goods. Get some protein, buddy, I sent him a mental signal. But he went with the bear claw. He bit into the fat, flakey pastry and took a sip of scalding coffee. He looked happy, as if nothing was more real than the sugar dissolving on his tongue.

Emily finished her coffee. “Your patients adore you,” she said.

“He’s just glad to be alive.”

She sighed, as if I had understood nothing. “I have to go. I just needed to tell you in person. I didn’t want you hearing it from someone else.”

“Jesus, Emily.” I reached for her hand and she didn’t pull back. I pushed my thumb softly into her palm, the way I had for years. I could feel Weasel’s eyes on us but I didn’t look up.

“C’mon, Alex,” she said softly. “Don’t act like this is black and white. I know you’re sad but it’s not exactly like I broke your heart. You’ve been in love with Keisha since you were sixteen. Everyone else has been a subletter.” She kissed my fingers and extracted her hand.

She stood up. “You’ll be fine.” She walked out, phone already to her ear.

I ordered a refill. I’m due at Peter’s for dinner in an hour, but for the first time in weeks, I have nowhere to be. Four months means the baby is covered with lanugo and can blink and suck his thumb. He is learning how to breathe. I imagined a five-inch fetus inside of her, his withered face set with determination as he winds up for his first kick.

I used to imagine it all the time. A baby with a plume of dark hair swaddled against Emily’s chest, my providing for them, us rounding the long bend of our life together. That image of her and the baby is apparently pretty accurate; it’s the rest I got wrong. Near misses.

When my father kicked Roger out of our apartment in 1983, I blamed myself. A week before the SuperBowl, I’d had an hour alone in the apartment and I had gone immediately for Roger’s cowboy boots. I slid one on, and then, standing up, jammed my foot into the other. Something impaled my heel and I screamed in pain, unable to put my foot down or to shake the boot off.

I heard my mom on the stairs. I was terrified that she would find me in his clothes, so I hid, hopping on one foot into my bedroom and crawling under my bed, squeezing between a box of baby clothes my brother had outgrown and a broken record player that my father kept vowing to fix.

My mother found me covered in dust balls and sweat. Down on her knees, one hand cupping my brother’s bald head, she coaxed me out. Her eyes landed on the boots and her eyebrows shot up. It stung, but did not hurt exactly, as she tugged and then twisted until my foot came loose from the boot.

She hissed and sucked in her cheeks, her eyes suddenly frantic. “It’s ok, baby,” she said to me, her voice gentler than it had been in a long time. I could tell she was trying not to cry as she extracted a syringe from my heel and then wiped away the thin stream of blood trickling down my foot.

When I reached for the needle, my mother swatted my hand away. She was electric with panic. The term AIDS had existed for exactly four months at that point. I’d heard her talking to Roger about it late at night, her tone urgent. She wanted him to get tested and he laughed it off.

From the living room, we heard the front door opening and Roger’s singing. The door clicked shut. “Stay here,” my mother instructed. My brother began to cry, and without warning, I did too. I was in over my head, sinking in brackish water. I closed my eyes and held my breath. I’d betrayed his secret and mine. I couldn’t stand the thought of facing him, but I couldn’t resist it either. I crawled to the bedroom door and watched.

He stopped singing as soon as he saw her, charging towards him with the needle like it was a tiny spear. My brother still strapped to her chest, she threw herself at him and pounded his chest until he finally got hold of her wrists. Her cheeks reddened as she screamed. It was about him, about me, about all that she had dared to wish for—an adored little brother who’d stay clean, a little girl who actually wanted to be one—exploding in front of her. He didn’t protest or try to explain. He waited until she was done and then he wrapped his arms around her. After that, the apartment became very, very still until my father got home a few hours later. By then, Roger had already packed. But there was still another colossal fight, one that left my mother, brother and me crying, my uncle escaping into the night and my father sweating with rage.

Before leaving the next morning, my uncle took me on a short walk around the parking lot and explained that he needed to move on, that there was a job waiting for him at a bar in Reno. I nodded seriously and tried to calculate how much money I would need to save in order to visit him.

With him gone, the apartment was desperately quiet. It felt empty rather than crammed. Each time I walked into the living room, I expected to see his boots lined neatly against the wall and his jacket on the folding chair next to the door. Every time that I found them once again not there, it was like missing a step as you walk downstairs, that slight lurch in your stomach, that teetering before you regain your balance.

Last year, Roger knew I was in San Francisco, but he never contacted me. And I never saw him at the mobile clinic. Once a week, I go out with the van and we do the rounds—Church and Market, the Tenderloin, the Panhandle, a few stops in Golden Gate Park. I was in his territory. I saw and treated countless men like him, men like Weasel. By then, he may have been so far gone that he wouldn’t have taken any help. I think about it though. If he’d stepped up into the van, could have we saved him? It would have meant another round of rehab and finding the right cocktail. It would have meant another long road.

Despite myself, there are times when I think I see him in a crowd. Walking down Mission on my way to get a burrito. A flash of his face through the window of a BART train pulling out of the station. I see him as a lost, charming young man. Or as he would be now, heavier, darkened by the world, but still striving for something beyond the measure allotted him.

Sometimes, this happens with patients too. The ones I thought could make it to old age, or at least to their next check up. The ones whose deaths I was least prepared for. That’s why at the end of every appointment I say good-bye and hug them. They get used to it and sometimes it’s a side hug, so quick they barely notice. These are habits, gestures, as much as they are small, urgent blessings.

These are the things we do. The way, out here, we have built an entire city atop the San Andreas Fault, as if it really could sustain all this weight, all this life.

Emily’s gone and pregnant. Peter’s getting married. Keisha still hasn’t been sent to Iraq. Weasel’s back from the dead and grinning. I saw Roger’s body.

I know he’s dead. I get it.

But there are still moments when he’s right here with me, when it’s like we’re back in those woods again and I’m racing to keep up. In a second, he’ll slow down long enough to turn around and flash that damned grin of his. Then he’s off again, running a slant pattern, brushing past trees as if they were linebackers, arms outstretched, eyes locked on the ball.

These aren’t the kind of things we speak of often. But the dead, I have found, are strangely loyal companions. They leave, but they also come back, the way, I know, Emily will not. It’s as if they cannot stay away, as if—even more than us—they cannot bear the grief.