“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