She met his level gaze. “You know a massive corps of new caseworkers are coming on in a few weeks at DAS.” She meant the city’s Department of AIDS Services, which, the past three years, had done an anemic job at best of coordinating services in the city. “I’ll tell you this confidentially right now. In a few days, Steve’s announcing me as DAS point person for Health. And I am going to ride that agency like you’ve never seen.”
Hector smiled and laughed. “I’d like to see that!”
She laughed in turn. “Ride them into the ground! And if, in three months, I’m not getting what I want — what we want”—and she gestured back at the great room—“I am cutting loose and going maverick like you. So, in other words, I have nothing to lose at this point. I stopped wanting to be the first female chief at Health about two years ago, so — so fuck it.”
Hector studied her. “You know that all the information you just gave me, I now hold over your head.”
She shrugged slightly, as though to say, So?
“And you know that, as much as I like you, if I need to, I won’t fail to put it out there.”
“Why the fuck do you think I told you?” she rasped. “You’re going to hold me to account. You and I are going to be in close, close touch in the coming months, my friend.”
If I give you my trust and you let me down, I’ll kill you, he wanted to tell her. But he thought better of that. It’s good to be working with you again, Ava, he was going to say. But the corner of his eye caught a woman — a short Latina with her hair pulled back in a scrunchie had wandered into the foyer in acid-washed shorts and a baggy T-shirt, looking terrified. Ava, noting Hector’s attention break, caught the woman, too.
“You need something?” Hector called.
The woman turned, seeming scared to have been spotted. She said something and choked on it.
“What did you say?” Hector asked. He felt his face and his voice softening, trying to calm the woman. That seemed to work. The woman walked straight over to him and Ava. “Is this the AIDS meeting?” she asked in a half whisper, as though invisible passersby might hear her.
“It is. Las activistas,” he said with a laugh and a little bit of a gay flourish, something he had modestly refined in the past few years, though not very convincingly. He just never would be one of those flourish-y gays, like Ricky. “You wanna join? We need Latinas.”
The woman bowed her head. It seemed like her face was twisting into some kind of embarrassed smile. But — no! She started crying. “I’m gonna die,” she sobbed. “I’m think I’m gonna die soon.”
Hector and Ava looked at each other, parted on the bench to make room for the woman, who didn’t look much older than thirty. The woman put her head in her hands and continued crying and saying, uncontrollably, “I’m gonna die.”
“Shh, it’s okay,” said Ava, putting her arm around the woman. “Why are you saying that? Because you’re HIV-positive?”
The woman nodded. Still crying, she said, “I have a hundred and thirty T cells. I don’t ever feel good any more. I have problems with my periods. They’re not normal anymore.”
Hector and Ava exchanged another look. “Chica,” Hector told the girl, “a hundred and thirty T cells is a lot. Why do you think you’re gonna die any time soon? There’s meds and treatment for you.”
“They didn’t help my friend,” she said, coming up from her tears for air, with what seemed like a bit of fighting spirit breaking through. “He took AZT and it just made him sick and he died anyway, in February.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” Ava said.
But Hector was connecting dots in his head. Of course. Tavi Peña. That crazy, cackling queen he’d worked with at GMHC. But Tavi, once he found out he was positive, as he got sick, didn’t want to come here, didn’t want to fight. He retreated back to Queens, to his family, which, thank God, loved him and took him in and nursed him. Hector had been to the funeral, to the memorial service in Jackson Heights, with its Spanish drag performances. But he hadn’t seen this sweet chica there. And then he remembered, now, that night at Paradise Garage so long ago, when this woman — a girl then! — and Tavi were so messed up. It was the night he met Ricky!
“You mean Tavi, right?” Hector said to the girl.
She snorted back tears. “Oh my God,” she said. “You knew Tavi?”
“Yeah. And don’t you remember that night I met you with Tavi at the Paradise Garage? Like, five, six years ago?”
The girl looked blank for a minute. Then, locking on to a new depth in his eyes, her face colored. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. That night.”
“Yes.” He laughed. “That night!” He put his hand in hers. She just hid her face behind her hand and laughed quietly, mortified.
“I guess I had to be there,” Ava said.
“Oh, no, you didn’t!” the girl said. “No, no, no.”
“Well, okay, whatever,” Ava murmured. “No, no, no. Well, anyway, stick with this one”—she nodded at Hector—“and you’ll be okay.”
“I’ve known for a year now,” the girl said, “and I can’t tell my family. My father and brother will kill me.”
“Why don’t you just come back into the meeting with me?” Hector said. “You don’t have to figure everything out at once. What’s your name again? I’m Hector.”
“It’s Issy. From Ysabel. But just Issy is fine. I need advice. This doctor wants me to take AZT but I’m scared to take it after what happened to Tavi. He was so sick from it and it barely even helped him.”
Hector stood up, lifted Issy up gently under her arm. “Come into the meeting.”
Ava rose. “I’m gonna get home.” She kissed Hector on the cheek. “Let’s talk tomorrow. I’ll have more intel for you on the caseworkers.”
“Thank you for coming,” Hector told her.
“Don’t thank me, that’s insulting.” Ava turned to Issy. “Stick with him,” she said again, nodding to Hector. Ava put her hand on the girl’s arm. You’ll be okay, she was about to say. But how could she really say that?
She walked out of the building into the sweet June night. Absently, her thoughts still at the meeting, she wandered into a bodega and bought a pack of gum. Gum had become a kind of soothing cud for her through all these years of medication-related misery. She stepped back outside, pulled out a stick of gum, and walked. After a few blocks, she came upon a black woman wearing flip-flops, jean shorts, and a filthy-looking old Rick James concert T-shirt, sitting on a cardboard box. The woman’s face was emaciated — she looked like Munch’s The Scream.
“You got a cigarette?” the woman asked her in a hoarse voice.
Ava’s jaw dropped. You’re sick, you shouldn’t be smoking, she was about to say. “I don’t smoke” was all she said, though.
“Well, can I have a piece of gum then?”
Ava handed a stick to the woman who, rather than unwrapping it and putting it in her mouth, tucked it away jealously in her pocket.
“Do you have any place to live?” Ava finally asked the woman, swallowing a fear she was being rude. She was always torn between her everyday New Yorker’s instinct to ignore street people and her health worker’s instinct to get real information about how city systems were working.