When we knew the end was really coming, Mother began closing off the rooms of our house. She told me it was because it was easier this way, to keep things clean, and with AIDS, clean meant safe. Daddy was allowed to be sick in the dining room and bathroom. I was allowed to be well in the kitchen and upstairs in my parents’ bedroom. The other rooms, the places we used to pass through every day of our lives — his study, Mother’s music studio, my old bedroom, the living room, the guest bedrooms — these were all off-limits because it was too hard to know where the germs were hiding.
That’s when Mother first brought me into her bed at night, to make sure I was sleeping in a clean place. Eventually, she moved me in full-time and began calling it “our room,” meaning that it belonged to her and me, rather than her and Daddy.
Nobody knew very much about the disease. We didn’t know if it could be left on doorknobs or toilet seats. We didn’t know if you could get it if an infected person coughed or breathed on you. We didn’t know if it traveled through tears, or if you could catch it through a kiss. So when Daddy started dying, the dining room and the downstairs bathroom were also off-limits to me. I would sit in the hallway or at the kitchen table and call out to him, Daddy, Daddy, and if he was awake, he would call back to me, June Bug, June Bug, which is how I knew he was still okay.
Even in his last weeks, Daddy’s music filled our house, played with shaking hands amidst jags of coughing, but music nonetheless. Sometimes Mother would bring her cello into the dining room and play with him, making her instrument wail like the velvet voice of Ella Fitzgerald, scatting around his melody, the sweet, mournful riffs of a soul getting ready to say goodbye.
Even though she kept me from touching him, and even though she always made sure to scrub her hands with bleach and hot water after tending to him, Mother never left Daddy alone for too long. She would move between him and me, reading me poetry in the kitchen with a glass of milk and a grilled cheese sandwich, but then, when he called out, pulling on a pair of disposable latex gloves to hold his hand while he wept. Our trash bins filled with latex gloves, translucent and dry as snake skins.
She had all kinds of ways to keep me occupied. Sketchbooks. Modeling clay. Watercolors. When she went to him for too long, I would call for her, making sure my voice was loud enough for both of them to hear me. There was always something I needed. A book I couldn’t reach. A meal I couldn’t make.
“Mother!” I called out on the last day of his life, my voice so shrill, I knew it would make her jump to attention. “Mother! Aren’t you going to make me something for lunch?”
Her tired voice came from the dining room. “Just a minute, June. Daddy needs me.”
“I need you!” I called back. “I’m hungry!”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, June. You are ten years old. Just make something yourself for once.”
I punished her when she returned, shrinking away when she reached toward me.
She went to the counter, and I could hear her making my lunch. She brought back a glass of milk and a bologna and Wonder Bread sandwich.
When she offered me the plate, I pushed it out of her hands, and it crashed to the floor. There was a puddle of milk and sandwich fixings everywhere, but the plate didn’t break; it just clattered and spun. I remember how disappointed I was, because a broken plate would have been much more dramatic. I started to cry.
“Honey,” said Mother, “please try to understand. I’m doing the best I can. I really am.”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “I told you I was hungry and you didn’t care.”
“I did care.” Mother sighed. She started to clean up the mess. “I do care, sweetheart. But Daddy needed me just then. You can make your own lunch. Daddy can’t clean himself up. Can you try to understand that? He needs me more than you do right now.”
“Daddy always needs you!” I screamed in her face.
“God help me, June. Your father is dying. Pretty soon we won’t have him anymore. You’ve got your whole life to spend with me.”
“Why doesn’t he hurry up and die then!” I screeched. “Why don’t you hurry up and die, Daddy! Hurry up and die right this second for all I care!”
Mother slapped me.
I held myself, stunned by the force of our anger.
Mother knelt on the floor beside me.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” I whispered, reaching out to her.
She leaned her head against the wall and sobbed.
“I didn’t mean what I said. I don’t want Daddy to die.”
She lifted her head to look at me. Her eyes were filled with shadows.
“I know that, honey,” she said, softly. “We’re both tired — we don’t know what we’re saying or doing anymore. You didn’t mean to hurt me.”
“I did mean to hurt you,” I said. “But I’m sorry.”
Mother kissed me on the forehead. Her lips were warm. “I forgive you,” she said.
“I want to tell Daddy I’m sorry too. He might have heard what I said.”
“You can’t go in his room, sweetheart. You know that.”
“I’ll stand in the hall. I’ll tell him from there.”
“Okay,” Mother said. “I’ll come with you.”
She took me by the hand, and we walked from the kitchen into the hallway.
Daddy was lying in his hospital bed in the dining room, facing us.
His eyes were open and he was smiling like he had been waiting for us to come.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I said. “I didn’t mean what I said.”
But it was too late. He was gone.
On Saturdays, Uncle Toby arrived early because he knew I’d be hungry.
During this past school year, he came all the way to Newton even though he had to drive in from his basement apartment in Somerville every morning to give me breakfast and bring me to school before heading back out to the lumberyard. He always had a ham and egg sandwich or a couple of cold pancakes or, if I was really lucky, maybe a packet of Hostess Twinkies. After school, he always had something for me from the pizza place: a slice of pepperoni, a wedge of baklava, half an Italian sub. I never asked him how it felt having to drive back and forth every day. But I was grateful.
Now that school was out for the summer, Mother said we only needed him once a week with groceries. Uncle Toby said he’d rather keep coming twice a day just like he’d been doing, but Mother said, “No thank you, we’ll be just fine. You don’t need to be driving so much, day after day. Doesn’t the lumberyard pay by the hour? You need to work, Toby. And besides, it’s time for me and June Bug to try and make it on our own now.”
As soon as we heard Uncle Toby’s truck rattle into our driveway, my own mother, Angela Jordan, who once played Bach suites to a packed audience of sneezing strangers without even batting an eyelash, now pulled the blanket over her head and stewed in her own sweat.
According to Mother, body odor was okay because it came from the inside. It was the germs from the outside that could kill us: surfaces that were touched or sneezed on by strangers. It was the toilet seats and doorknobs and hands and mouths of strangers that could devour us and spit out our bones.
I knew that to Mother, Uncle Toby was still a stranger even though he was Daddy’s younger brother, and even though he was born right here in this very house, and even though he said he loved us so much, it made him want to get down on his knees and pray, which was really something because Uncle Toby did not believe in God.