Threads of Hope: Quilts of Love Series (22 page)

They prepared themselves for having an HIV-positive child by talking to other families and reading whatever they could find that would help. They knew the virus could impair her immune system’s ability to control viral infections, bacterial lung and ear infections. But they also knew she would have a normal life expectancy because modern drug therapies made the virus almost undetectable. A week after starting her antiretroviral therapy, her virological suppression was at 90 percent. Within a month, it was 99 percent.

“Ironic. Lily spent so much time and energy doing all she could to make sure Jazarah would live, and she was the one who died.”

On her way to the office on Monday, Nina received two texts from Greg. One asked her to call him to discuss Manny going home. The other, saying how much he enjoyed their time together, asked if she had plans for Saturday. She smiled, remembering him walking her to her car after dinner. How no matter how old you are, there’s that geeky awkwardness of saying good night to someone you’re attracted to, which resulted in a clumsy kiss somewhere between her lips and her ear. For Nina, it was enough to let her know, she’d try again.

Dinner with Greg had trumped the anxiety of Daisy returning, so that walking to her desk, Nina was surprised by the familiar scent of rain, which meant she was back. Her earth-friendly accessories surrounding her as before, Daisy settled in as if she’d never left.

“Nina, I’m so excited to see you,” said Daisy, springing from her chair, her shock of sprouting hair now gathered into a neat bun at the nape of her neck.

Setting her briefcase on the floor, Nina hugged Daisy, who seemed smaller and frailer than she remembered. “I’m glad you’re here, but I don’t know why you left in the first place,” Nina said. “Now, let me look at you. Did you even eat while you were in New York?

“I so owe you an apology. Maybe several. You deserve an explanation. Do you have time to talk now?”

“Let me find Shannon. She’s been helping me, and doing a bang-up job at it, too. I’ll be back.”

After getting notes from her intern, who proved her savvy by delegating some of the work to another intern, Nina returned to her desk. “Did you want to talk here?”

“Here is fine.” Daisy scooted her chair around the partition. “I’m going for the condensed version because, well, I’m exhausted. My flight was late yesterday, and I didn’t get to bed until after midnight, so I might not be too coherent.”

“We don’t have to do this now—”

“No, I want to. I’ve wanted to since I left.” She kicked off her sandals and sat, cross-legged on the chair, her cotton skirt pulled over her knees. “Here’s what happened . . .”

Daisy’s mother had moved to New York months before with a man who promised he’d marry her as soon as he started his job there. The job started, but the marriage didn’t. “My mother called, hysterical, that she wants to move out, but she doesn’t want to be homeless again. And then she pummels me with guilt about her being all alone, no one to help her . . . I talked to Elise because I thought there might be a way for me to get on staff in New York. I could get my mother situated, stay for a while, come back here . . . I told her I didn’t want to step on your toes because I knew how much you wanted to be there.”

Elise had called Daisy the day after Janie made her grand announcement to tell her there was a possible opening. But it was Elise’s suggestion that Daisy not make a permanent decision until she arrived there, checked on her mother’s situation, and spent time in the New York office.

“She told me she’d keep my job open here, so I didn’t want to create high drama. Janie already had her production going on, but there just wasn’t enough time for me to explain it all. And, if I ended up back here anyway—ta da!—then I would have put us both through that for no reason.”

Daisy said that her mother lived in an apartment almost worse than the car they lived in for weeks. Janie offered to let them stay with her. “And that was the beginning of the end. My mother was making me crazy. Janie kept pressuring me to stay, mostly because I think she saw Brady slipping away. And, Nina, the New York office, is this place,” she moved one outstretched arm in a circle, “on steroids.”

Nina sat straighter in her chair like someone about to be rewarded. She’d thrive in that energy.

But it debilitated Daisy. “I told my mother that if she wanted to live with family, then she needed a Houston zip code. She balked at first. I’m not even sure why, because she wasn’t all that devastated leaving,” she gazed at the ceiling, “I think his name was Eric. Finally, I convinced her to come back with me. She’s been here less than twenty-four hours, and she’s already complaining. She’s been homeless so much throughout her life that I think having what could be a real home feels strange to her.”

After she and Daisy finished talking, Nina called Greg to make arrangements for picking up Manny. As she waited for
him to answer, she surveyed the office. Nests of submarine gray partition walls separated the staff writers from the ad writers from the classifieds. Days closer to deadline, the nest swarmed with the energy of people moving from hive to hive, the impatient rings of telephones, the electrical current of voices that punctuated the stillness between.

Would she exchange this for the frenetic pace of the New York office? Without a doubt.

“This is Dr. Hernandez.”

When he knew that she was on the other end of the line, his professional tone gave way to the one with which she had become familiar.

“Hey, Nina. How’s your day going?”

“So far, so good,” she answered. “Thanks for your text. I had fun, too. I’d love to get together Saturday.”

“Great. We’ll talk soon about that. In the meantime, can you meet me at the ER clinic around four this afternoon? We can release Manny then, and I can go over what he’ll need. He’s making great progress, and I’m sure he’s ready to be home.”

“Aretha and I have missed the little yapper. Tell him we’ll see him in a few hours.”

Nina then contacted Kelley and her daughter Crystal, and they arranged to meet the next morning over breakfast.

Daisy and Nina had lunch with Elise in her office to work out story assignments. Nina arrived before Daisy and was relieved Elise made no mention of her having been with her brother. While policies existed for office romances, she had no idea how to handle a relationship with a boss’s sibling.
Getting ahead of yourself, Nina. One dinner isn’t a relationship, but I wouldn’t mind if more did make it so
.

Elise had arranged for a local deli to provide salads and a tray of fruit, with a side of chocolate gelato. “Figured we’d be tossing ideas around, might as well toss salads, right?” She
looked at Daisy and Nina. “Guess that wasn’t as funny as I’d hoped.”

Nina expected to play polite tug-of-war over some of the assignments. But Daisy offered to take over the political corruption story without any protest, so Nina could focus on the feature.

“But I thought you didn’t like writing those stories,” Nina said.

“I’m learning to stretch. Besides, you might want to get back to politics after you dabble in the wild side of feature writing,” Daisy said and handed Nina her salad bowl for a refill.

Elise closed her laptop. “Sometimes life works out so much better than we anticipated,” she said and smiled in Nina’s direction.

Kelley and Crystal waved Nina to their table where they already had coffee waiting.

“After all those years of using, Carlys surprised us by not dying of a drug overdose. Never would have thought it though. That girl checked in and out of rehab hospitals like they were resort hotels.”

Crystal, her twin, handed her mother a biscuit. “Except that the resorts might have cost less.”

Kelley squeezed her daughter’s hand. “Might be right on that one. Anyway,” she breathed in as if Nina had pressed a stethoscope to her chest, “last time out, she stayed clean for months. Then, we started to notice she was sleeping longer. ’Course we were suspicious, how could we not be? But when Crystal told us about her night sweats and her complaints of fever, we figured one monster of a cold was headed her way.”

The monster wreaking havoc upon Carlys wasn’t a cold. It was AIDS.

“The doctor told us she probably shared a dirty needle with someone who was infected. Of course, Carlys had no idea who that someone might be.” Crystal rubbed her arms like the temperature
dropped. “It’s so weird to think a stranger killed my sister, and doesn’t even know.”

“Almost a year later, Carlys died. And she stayed clean. She was proud of herself for that. But . . .” Against a backdrop of dishes clattering, the thick smell of bacon, and the wait staff carrying trays like large brown halos, Kelley shared the pain that ripped through her every night. The wound that would never heal.

“. . . people who knew Carlys, just figured it was drugs that killed her. I never told them otherwise. Couldn’t make myself say my daughter died from AIDS.” She looked at Nina. “What kind of mother lies about why her child died?”

When Nina returned to her office, she didn’t remember eating breakfast at all.

“Do you realize that Kelley’s daughter might have been saved by something that costs less than a dollar?” Nina handed Aretha the article she’d been reading on syringe exchange and needle share programs and their importance in reducing and preventing HIV. “These programs provided a way for drug users to be given free sterile syringes. That one difference could have saved her from being infected.”

Aretha leaned against the pine tree and propped the tablet against her knees. “I’d like to read this. Make sure Mr. Manny doesn’t try to escape.”

“As if,” said Nina. “He’s basking in the outdoors, content to be home.” She carried him outside, as per Greg’s instructions, for what Aretha referred to as his daily “constitutional.” After their first adventure into the front yard yesterday, Aretha told Manny he needed a few less amendments to his constitution.

The sun hadn’t yet disappeared into a pocket of clouds when the three of them settled on a patch a grass, the two women sitting cross-legged in front of the dog, blocking the street. Even if he had a yearning to dash in that direction, there was no way he’d outrun them. So, Manny alternately lifted his head to catch a breeze, then rested it on top of his bandaged leg.

Nina scratched behind his ears, remembering Greg’s litany of instructions when they checked Manny out of the clinic. He helped Aretha settle the dog in the car while Nina wrote a check for his treatment. Once outside, she’d thanked him for his help with Manny and with the charges. “I appreciate all you did for Manny, and I meant it when I said I didn’t want this costing you more than it cost me,” she told him

“Not at all. And even if it did, you . . . I mean Manny, was worth it.”

Aretha was packing a dinner to take to Luke who worked late shift, and Nina had started writing her feature about Carlys when Greg called about dinner and a movie Saturday night. “Or it could be a movie and dinner, either way.”

They were still talking when Aretha came back almost an hour later.