“I insist.”
“All right then.” She tapped Dempsey’s arm, then said, “Well, your friend, John Francis Donegan, when he was fourteen—”
“Thirteen,” Johnny said.
“All right then. Thirteen. And after being almost the shortest kid in his class, all of a sudden began to shoot up like a beanstalk. One day he goes to collect some of the catalpa seedpods—we call them Indian cigars—and wham, he bonks his head on a lower branch. And what does he do? Instead of just ducking the next time, he saws off the branch. And does he stop with that? Oh no. Not John Francis. He builds a bonfire to burn the branch and almost sets fire to the back fence.”
Dempsey, to her relief, had finally entered into the spirit of the gathering, which prompted her to say, “Is that why he became a fireman?”
Patricia clapped her hands. “Dempsey! Dempsey! You got it! You got it!”
Theresa laughed and said, “Johnny, where did you find her?”
Mrs. Donegan shook her head with pleased amazement and kept repeating, “Dempsey! Dempsey! Demp-sey!”
The raucous response to her triumphant comment began to calm itself. Dempsey, as if rewarding herself for the successful one-liner, allowed herself to check on Terry. There he was at the food table, stuffing a deviled egg into his mouth and, while he was chewing, he began to play with the olives in the bowl next to the pickles. As he was swallowing the egg, he tipped the olive bowl toward himself, picked one out, and popped it into his mouth.
Dempsey then saw him reach for another olive, then pull back his hand. She looked sadly at his pudgy legs, the tan shorts and the shirt with teddy bears crawling all over it. His back was to her and she noticed he was bringing his slender shoulders up, then up farther as if trying to make himself taller. His head was sinking slowly between his shoulders, the shoulders themselves, jerking upward.
Dempsey let her plate fall to her feet, dumping her food onto Johnny’s shoe. She sprang toward the boy, spun him around and saw the terrified look on his face, the bugged eyes, the dampening skin. She grabbed him by the ankles with one hand and put the other under his head so it wouldn’t hit the ground. She yanked him upward and turned him upside down. One ankle broke free from her grip. There was no time to retrieve it. She whacked the boy on the back between his shoulders, then whacked him again, and then again, lifting him higher each time so her hand wouldn’t have to go too far away before she could whack him once more. Desperate to hear the cry, the wail that would tell her he was still alive, she started to bring her hand toward the child’s back one more time, but there was a curling of his body, then a stretch straight down toward the ground. The loud cry came, a wailing that seemed to have started in a far place and had only now arrived. Dempsey held him by the one ankle and breathed deeply.
And now they were upon her. “What’s she doing? Stop! She’s gone crazy. Quick, grab her. Does she always get like this? Get him away from her. Johnny, how could you bring—” Johnny had taken Dempsey by the shoulder and yanked her away from the others. The boy was now in his grandmother’s arms. His father, roasting fork in hand, was coming toward them.
Johnny stared up into Dempsey’s face. He was trying to say something, but couldn’t. His hand began to rise. Was he going to hit her? But the hand was lowered. His mouth began to open. He was going to say something. Again the hand started to rise.
“An olive,” Dempsey said, the words more rasped than spoken. She had no breath left. She was sure that she would, at that moment, soil herself. She would throw up, she would lose her mind. She dropped to her knees, kneeling on the grass. “The olive was choking him.”
“What the—?” Johnny bent over her and took her by the arm. She pulled herself free. As if she had gone blind, Dempsey frantically patted the grass in front of her, then out away from her, then back again. She found nothing. She started again, this time patting harder, reaching farther, whimpering, begging to find what she was looking for.
“Dempsey—” Johnny was determined to help her up. Again she pulled away. When she felt the olive beneath her hand, she let her head fall farther forward, her hair touching the grass. Johnny had squatted in front of her and was trying to lift her by both shoulders. She let herself be helped to stand.
With the side of her hand, she brushed the hair from her face. Johnny hadn’t let go of her shoulders, but Dempsey could see Mrs. Donegan, the others, arrayed a few feet in front of her. They were saying nothing. Terry was in his father’s arms. His father was staring at Dempsey. They all were.
So small the object seemed, so pitiful a justification. But she held it up anyway for them to see. Terry turned his face toward his father’s chest. “Olive,” Dempsey whispered. “Choking. He was choking.” She turned to Johnny. “Maybe I should have let you, you’d know better what to do, but there wasn’t time.” She held her hand out to Mrs. Donegan. “Here.” She put the olive into the woman’s hand, gently, so they wouldn’t crunch the frail bones or break through the taut skin. It took everyone a moment to identify it as an olive. Dempsey wet her shield.
When the ferry had moved out no more than fifty feet from the slip, Dempsey saw that a mist was rising from the water. It had gotten colder and, as if to hide rather than to end the summer day, a fog was obscuring the island and all the people on it. Johnny, who had duty at eleven and hadn’t slept all afternoon, was stretched out on a bench, Dempsey’s tote pillowing his head. He’d promised to close his eyes. She’d promised to wake him when they passed the Statue of Liberty.
Revealed to the Donegans as a savior, placing herself in the tradition of rescuer, Dempsey was accepted as an equal and given hints, by gesture and intonation, that she was considered a promising initiate destined, perhaps, to become one of them. At parting, Patricia and Maureen had kissed her; Theresa insisted Terry shake her hand; Andrew touched her shoulder. “Thank you for saving my boy,” he said. And Mrs. Donegan had given her a hatpin crowned with a rose.
Dempsey had not gotten sick.
So dense had the fog become that foghorns were calling plaintively to each other from distant waters as if trying to set the pitch for the song the whales would sing. A buoy marking the channel was rocking in the advancing waves, its bell tolling an hour beyond anyone’s counting.
Dempsey gazed into the unmoving mist. With each blink she caught the image indelibly slapped onto the surface of her eyes and smacked into the back of her brain: the moment before she had shown the olive in proof of her innocence. Still on her knees, she had raised her head and had seen, arrayed against her, not only Johnny’s family but Johnny himself, all the fierce, horrified condemnation locked into the set of their bones, frozen into the stare of their widened eyes. For that one sharp moment she had accepted, even approved, of the way they were seeing her.
A devastating truth was revealed: she saved the boy, but she had not saved her own son. She had given him AIDS and nothing could save him. She was deserving of any scorn that was heaped upon her. Also, in that moment, she accepted and approved of what awaited her, not just her death but a death brought on by any number of the horrors included in the AIDS repertory. And to her as well came a truth she had managed to suppress: her refusal to take her medicines, her insistence to herself that she was playing a game with her illness. It was all a fraud. She’d been inviting the sickness to do its worst. She would welcome it. She deserved it. She had given her son not life, but death—and now her own death should be a horror beyond imagining.
The buoy sounded its knell, but farther away. Dempsey had brought her arms up and was about to fold them across her chest, but she lowered them instead, surrendering to the fog whispering around her.