Bleeder Read online

  “A cane?”

  “Yes. A cane.”

  “But I’m only eighteen. Nobody has a cane at eighteen.”

  “I understand the stigma, but you’re different. You know that. And you’re now walking with a noticeable limp. We don’t want your gait to worsen too quickly.” He gathers my X-rays and returns them to his folder. “As for the cane, you don’t have to use one, of course. I only think it could help. You’ve had an increase of bleeding episodes this fall, and I think you need to consider ways to reduce those. Each one does more and more damage to your joints, and if too much damage occurs . . . well . . . we’ll have to consider other methods for treatment.”

  I understand his meaning here, and I’m certainly not wishing for another operation. Not now. Not ever again.

  “Think on it,” he says, shaking my hand on his way to another patient.

  Outside, a storm begins. The wind chafes my cheeks as I walk to the parking lot, so I tighten my scarf around my neck, it binding round me like a noose. The sky—heavy and pregnant with winter—begins to sift freezing rain upon me.

  On the highway to my parents’, as the cars edge forward with caution, the sleet pings on my windshield and gathers in the corners as grains of translucent white. It salts the grass and tar-black roadside while the trees—having become hazy and borderless—are washed flat against a gray sky. I grip the steering column and climb the Piedmont hills with care.

  Going home for Christmas, I drive slowly. The snow-ice dusts the roadways, and the salt trucks I pass are too few to keep the highways clear. On the bridge that spans the Yadkin River, my lightweight truck loses purchase. I tense and place a firm grip on the steering column as I slip up the bridge—an arabesque of ice and snow stretched over a river, blue and stiff with cold.

  Turning onto my parents’ street, the snow thickens. Patches like thrown flour splotch my windshield, and when I finally pull into the driveway, the yard is speckled in white, and a long, green-white lawn follows the right side of the house and dips into the backyard before finally being halted from unrolling any further by the rusted barbed-wire fence. It looks like a rolling gumdrop dusted with powdered sugar. I am relieved to be here safe.

  Mom rushes out, coatless. Without a way to call her and let her know I was safe, she has worried.

  “Oh, we’re so glad to see you,” she says, hurrying to me. “Dad and I have been worried sick about you driving in this awful weather. They’re saying that the roads are icing over and it’s already sleeting. Is it as bad as they say?”

  “It’s pretty bad. I wouldn’t suggest going anywhere tonight.”

  “Well, we’re not. Everybody’s here. We’re just waiting on you.” She pulls me to her and hugs me. “We’re just glad you’re here safe. How did it go today in Chapel Hill?” I pass her my duffel bag full of dirty laundry. “What did the doctor say?” The snow whirls around us, peppers our hair.

  “They said I’d live forever.” I smile to her as I hoist my backpack across my shoulders and gather CDs in my hands.

  “Oh, that’s not funny, Son. You shouldn’t joke like that.”

  “They said you and Dad should get me a cane for Christmas.”

  “A cane?” Mom scrunches her face with worry. “Well, your father and I had concerns when we saw the size of that campus, but a cane? Does the doctor really think it’s that necessary? Would you have to always use it?”

  “I don’t know. Guess so.”

  We both grow quiet, the snow continuing around us.

  “Well, come in. We’re so glad you’re finally home for a few days. We’ve hardly gotten to see you this fall.”

  Inside, Mom has the table set for supper and the house decorated for the holidays. Nutcrackers stand in all the corners, garland twirls along the banister, and Christmas candles adorn the piano and the furniture, and when I take my bags downstairs to my room, the den smells sweetly of pine and the tree shimmers with silver and gold ornaments.

  “Your dad and I just got that up last weekend,” Mom says when I stop to look. “It was different not having you to help this year.” She walks to the tree, reaches for a fallen ornament resting on the skirt. “Look here.” She cups it in her hand. “Do you remember when you made this?”

  I look to the ceramic star painted by an inexpert hand, and admit that I don’t remember making it.

  “First grade. We had that house in Indiana and you had just started at the elementary school there, and that year Louise lost her shoe in the snow and it wasn’t until spring that your dad found it laying over by the bird bath.” She stretches to replace the ornament on a green branch of spruce. “This is what you gave us that year.”

  “Well, I didn’t make any of those in college, so it’s good you kept it.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  In my room, I unpack my things and then reach for a book to read. I prop my feet on my bed, turn to the first page. But it is not long before Louise comes down to tell me it’s time to eat, so I mark my place and go to join my family at the holiday table.

  We all look out the window beside the dining room table and watch the snow still being drawn down in a slow drift of white.

  “Maybe this year we’ll have a white Christmas,” Mom says.

  “Maybe,” Dad says, pulling his napkin up to wipe his mustache. “Stranger things have happened.”

  “I’d love a white Christmas. That would be perfect,” Anne says as she, too, gazes out to the snow piling in our yard.

  ANA

  JANUARY 1991. ANA WAS MY FIRST, MY ONLY. IT HAPPENED IN A musky garage where beetles scuttled across concrete walls to tango with the cobwebs, where musical instruments lay strewn and disregarded, where dust motes floated in the phantom evening light from outside. My high school friends and the band we jammed in long since retired for the night, Ana and I reclined on a mattress, on a sultry night in June—my birthday.

  “Are you ready?” she whispered, coiling her shaven leg around mine, knowing this was my first time.

  I unrolled the condom just as my more experienced friend had shown me.

  “I’m ready.”

  I kissed her. We pressed our bodies together. I was in. I was out. I was done.

  Afterwards, Ana and I sprawled in the lavender twilight, whispered endearing words of foreverness, and snugged our naked bodies against each other. I knew nothing of love, and yet I said I did as I held her tightly. We kissed more. We played our hands together, and we began again. And I had no idea then of our danger.

  These thoughts return to me as I again read the Christmas card Ana has mailed. It says she thinks about me often, and naturally, I think of her, feeling an inordinate responsibility to her. Dr. Trum had asked about my sexual relations, but I assured him that I had retained my virginity all my high school years. I was the minority statistic, I had quipped. And he did not press me, but asked that I be forthcoming when I began having sex. Often, I have thought of Ana and have retraced our actions, scrutinizing them for any slip—a split condom perhaps, or a time we pressed forward without protection, but I can recall none. It seems our fear of pregnancy kept us safe from so much other than that.

  Yet still, I must confide in Ana and warn her that our le sport was not as carefree as we thought. But how can a man as young as me be expected to have a conversation such as this? How can any man?

  When I return to campus after winter break, I call her. I will be as an old boyfriend calling his once-girlfriend, I say to myself as the phone rings.

  Ana sounds excited and says she is glad to hear from me, and soon we fall into a lengthy conversation about our lives since we parted. I am swept away by her easy laughter and her voice’s soft cadence. I can’t remember why we broke up. One year, we were high school juniors dating, having sex; then we were seniors parting for separate colleges, and ending the relationship seemed the thing to do.

  “Why don’t you visit sometime?” Ana asks during a pause.

  “Okay. When’s a good time?”

  “How about
next weekend? My roommate’s out of town.”

  “Okay. Next weekend.”

  And when we hang up, I feel happier than I’ve felt in months. My body is warm. My breath easy. Yet HIV is there to remind me of sadness. I bury it. For now.

  When Friday comes, I speed along Interstate 40, closing the distance between Wilmington and Greensboro, Ana and me. I’m so excited to see her that I arrive almost an hour early and kill the extra time by napping in my cab as twilight becomes night, but yet my stomach roils when I think of HIV.

  Later, from the dorm’s front desk, the R.A. pages Ana, who soon skips down the hallway and rushes me with a hug. Her hair tickles my chin and smells like fresh spring flowers. She presses her pink and full cheeks again my slender neck, and she holds me with arms that are warm and nourishing like freshly baked bread. Ana says she can’t believe I came, squeezes me, says again how she can’t believe I came and tells me how good it is to see me.

  She rushes off to her room to gather her things and then we eat out at a Mexican restaurant, talking and laughing like old times. And after dinner, we stroll the campus, hold hands beneath the southern stars, and kiss beside a Jeffersonian column as the blush of winter rubs deep roses into our cheeks. We easily fall into our old roles—she my girlfriend, I her boyfriend. It is as it was before. We kiss and hold one another as if this is the only thing to do in the world.

  When we return to her dorm, she distracts the night-watch while I tiptoe past to her room, my bag in hand, slipping in undetected. Ana follows and shuts the door behind us.

  “I missed you,” she says clasping my hands, touching my lips with hers.

  “I missed you, too.”

  She removes her shirt. I mine. And we move to her bed.

  “I don’t want to go too far tonight,” she says.

  “Me, either.”

  So, we tease one another’s desire with our hands, our mouths, our burning breath. Ana leans over me and covers me under her sheet. She runs her hands across my bare chest, my skinny legs, my strong spirit. We indulge in the petting of young lovers.

  “Oh, we have to stop,” Ana says, retracting. “This is going too far.”

  She pushes away from me, letting out a rush of air as she falls into the mattress. Our breathing calms and my drumming heart quiets.

  “I’m so glad you came to see me,” Ana says, playing her hands along my thin bone. “I was hoping you’d call if I sent that card. I wasn’t sure how else to get your attention.” She wets her lips and gingerly kisses me before pulling away with a strange look on her face. “Shelby,” she says, changing her tone. “I think you’re bleeding.”

  Startled and embarrassed, I check myself in Ana’s mirror and see that I have a bleeding razor cut.

  “Dammit,” I say. “You did this . . . All that wrestling underneath the covers has done this.” I press a Kleenex to the cut.

  “Looks like a shaving accident to me. But I’ll take part of the blame. Do you want a Band-Aid?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to bleed on your pillow.”

  She rises from her bed, goes to a small box above her sink and then comes toward me with the Band-Aid. “Here. Let me put that on for you.”

  I freeze. Think of my blood, of HIV.

  “No. I can do it. I need to take care of my own problems. I’m a big college boy, now. I need to do this myself.”

  “Fine. But I’m buying you an electric razor.”

  Ana relinquishes the Band-Aid, which I secure over the cut; then I slip back into bed where Ana nuzzles against me.

  “It’s nice to not be lonely anymore,” she whispers into the night as we fall asleep.

  Another weekend as I drive to see Ana, my truck’s odometer measures the real distance of our love. I crack my window and the breeze chills me while the wind drones out the Stone Roses album straining from my tiny dashboard speakers. The asphalt clips underneath my tires, and the city lights dance neon rainbows as I streak through winter twilight.

  When I arrive, Ana’s dorm is quiet. The thrall and hum of young scholars has been replaced by the hollow echo of a few pattering steps and the distant sound of faceless voices.

  I call Ana’s name down the hallway toward her room. She soon answers back.

  “It’s so quiet here,” I tell her when she greets me.

  “They’ve all left for some party. My roommate, also, has left for the night. We’ll be all alone.”

  I smile. Ana smiles back.

  We go to a movie; then we return to her silent dorm, slinking down the vacant hallway in the giddy embrace of young lovers. Ana playfully kicks open her door and flips on a lamp in the corner that casts her room in a romantic glow. She stands by her bedside, rubs her hand across its coverlet.

  “What should we do now?” she asks. My skin prickles. My heart flutters.

  “What should we do?” I repeat, playing the game Ana has begun. And yet, my mind is nettled by HIV. But I suppress it.

  She pulls me to her, pushes her warm hands underneath my shirt and sweater, and strokes my chest. She lures me to her bed, where I begin fumbling with her blouse. And when she climbs on top of me, her long hair catches in my mouth, and I lift my hand to hook her dangling strands behind her ear; then I breathe into her ear and kiss her neck. She sighs with pleasure, her hands struggle with my jeans’ zipper.

  “Wait,” I say.

  “We have waited.”

  She moves lower. Then, she is breathing on me. I can’t look at her, so I stare at the ceiling, studying leak stains that spread out like continental maps. I swell. Ana stops and pulls herself to my lips where we heave and grope and grind our hips together, the thin fabric between us our only restraint.

  “I have condoms underneath my bed,” Ana whispers into my ear.

  My mind tugs at me, but when Ana unrolls a condom along me, I let her. We become two bodies, one movement, and we press our desire as far as it will go.

  When the moment ends, Ana fills a glass of water at her sink, drinks deeply, and then offers it to me. I swallow, pause for a breath of air, and finish it off. It is cool and tastes like nothing, but is everything. Ana rests the glass on her floor and returns to bed where I slip an arm around her.

  In the corner, the lamp burns, dimly, moodily. Ana rises up to kiss me, and she then shifts to fit in the slip of space between my arm and my heart. Her eyes close, open, close, and then close.

  I’m thinking of how to tell her about my HIV . . . but I am asleep.

  Later, I awaken and get up to turn out the lamp and refill the water glass. I sip while standing over Ana and watching her sleep in the gray moonlight. Curled onto her side, the sheet tucked to her neck, and with strands of her blonde hair splayed out onto the pillow, she breathes in such gentle and easy peace. I take a few more sips before slipping back into her arms.

  When morning comes, we drive into the country. Despite it being cold, it is a lovely day: the sun is out, the sky is clear, and a car ride seems fun. We don’t speak of last night, but I can’t loosen it from my mind. I’m restless and need to confess. Yet I don’t know what to say, for HIV does not enter our conversation.

  She leans against me and tells me she is happy.

  “Are you happy to be with me again?” she asks.

  “I am.”

  We drive into winter. The trees are bare and the meadows we pass are humped with the heaviness of rolled hay, and the geese file over us as we pass the withered barnlots of a past life. Ana stretches out her tender hand, and I grip it as I steer to nowhere in particular.

  Ana visits me in Wilmington. She has told me to be waiting, so I wait, realizing that I have to tell her. It has gone too far.

  Ana knocks at my door. I inhale deeply and then I let her in.

  “Oh, it’s been too long,” she says, placing her bag at the foot of my bed. She then draws me on top of her and my bed. “I’ve missed you.” And we’re at each others’ clothes, manipulating clasps, navigating fabric.

  “Wait. We have to talk.”
/>   Ana freezes. “Talk?” Her face looks troubled.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “How do you know what I think?”

  “I can see it in your eyes. This isn’t a breakup talk. This is harder to say.”

  I lie down beside her, stare at my ceiling—a wilderness of white.

  “Well, what is it?” Ana trifles her fingers along a dangling sweater string, coils it tightly around her index joint. “You have to tell me now.”

  “You know I have hemophilia?” She nods yes. “Well, when I was a little boy, something happened to me.”