“Then why am I supposed to go out?”
“It’s nice out. You could walk.”
“You working? I mean, thinking?”
“No. I’m not working. I’m not thinking.”
Johnny shoved the chair back and stood up. “I’m going to turn on the light.”
“No. Don’t. Please don’t.”
Johnny started around the table. “Your eyes. Are your eyes bothering you? Is something happening to your eyes?”
“No. They’re fine. They’re all right.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nothing is wrong with my eyes. Please. I’d like to just sit here for a little while. By myself. Is that all right, Johnny?” She sounded incredibly sad, resigned almost.
“I don’t know. Is it?”
“Yes. It is. Honest it is.” She turned her head toward him and said softly, “You go out. Walk. Anything. Come back when you see the lights on. It means—it will mean—it will mean the lights are on. And you can come back. All right?”
“I’m going to turn them on now. I’ve got to see what’s happening.”
“No, please don’t!”
Dempsey was up from her chair. She rushed toward him and grabbed the back of his shirt. She immediately let go. The touch seemed to have frightened her. Johnny turned around. Dempsey stood, unmoving, her hands held up in front of her, palms outward.
“Okay,” Johnny said quietly. “Maybe you’re feeling sick. Maybe you’d rather be by yourself. But I’d like to help if I can.” When she said nothing, he added, “Why won’t you take some of the medicine? Please. I’ve begged you and begged you. And now I’m begging you again.”
“Don’t beg. There’s no reason to beg.”
“No? It’s crazy not to take it. You know that? Crazy!”
“I’m not crazy.” Her voice was even quieter than before. She went back to her chair and sat down, assuming the same pose she’d had when Johnny had come into the room. It was as if she wanted not to have gotten up; she wanted not to have grabbed his shirt. Johnny waited for her to repeat her dismissal, her request that he leave her alone. She said nothing. Johnny decided he wouldn’t move until she told him to.
She lifted her head. “Do you pray for me?” she asked.
“Yes. Sometimes.”
“What do you pray for?”
“For you. I pray for you.”
“For what for me?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You ask for something. What do you ask for?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it changes. When you’re in pain, when you cough and it keeps getting worse. Or when you have to lie down all of a sudden and I’m afraid you’re going to die, I pray.”
“What?”
“That it stop. That you’ll be all right.”
Johnny could hear her breathing. And his own breathing. Then Dempsey said, “Did you ever pray that I would be cured?”
Johnny waited a moment, then said, “No. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sure?”
When he answered, his voice was low. “Maybe I did. Once.”
“When was that?”
“Shouldn’t you lie down?”
“No. And please tell me. When did you pray I would be cured?”
“The time I went to the cathedral to tell the cardinal about the condoms. Except I didn’t get to the cardinal. I got to this other priest, for communion, and after I’d said it, about the condoms, he just repeated what he’d already said. ‘The Body of Christ.’ So I took communion anyway. And then I had to pray something. So I prayed, ‘Cure her.’ But that’s the only time I can remember. Why?”
Dempsey nodded her head twice. Johnny could barely see her, the lighter gray of the window darkening itself to the deeper gray of Dempsey and the chair and the wall. “I will, though,” Johnny said.
“No. That’s all right. You can forget about it now.”
“But I will—”
“No. There’s no need. Not anymore.”
“But it’s not too late. It can’t be!”
Dempsey raised her head. “I went to Doctor Norstar this afternoon. She called. She wanted to see me.”
“More tests?”
“No. ‘No more tests,’ she said.”
“What’d she want then?”
“She was moving her office. Upstairs.”
“And that’s what she wanted to see you for?”
“Everything’s out of the old office. We even had to get up especially so the men could haul away the couch in the waiting room. We didn’t mind. Not at all. They were very polite, the movers.”
“Dempsey, Doctor Norstar did not ask you to come see her just so you’d be there for the move. Now why—?”
Before he could continue, Dempsey said, “I’d brought some colored pencils and a drawing book so if her little boy was there—”
“Dempsey, please, what did she want to see you for?”
“She told me I’m cured.”
Johnny waited for her to say more, but she said nothing. “Cured?” he asked. “What do you mean cured?”
“All those tests, that’s what they were for. I’m cured.”
“Those tests were not treatments. They were tests. They wouldn’t cure anything.”
“I know they were tests. And they mean I don’t have AIDS anymore. The virus is gone. That’s what Doctor Norstar told me.”
Johnny took one step closer, then stopped. Dempsey went on talking. “The tests—they were to make sure. She suspected it, but didn’t want to say anything—you know—get my hopes up. But now she knows. I mean—I’m negative. There’s no evidence of the virus—anywhere in my body. And they looked for it everywhere. All those tests. I’m cured, she said.”
Johnny waited for the streak of terror shooting through him to complete its course. To settle quietly in the ends of his hair, in the bristle of his chin. The dementia had come. Dempsey was losing her reason and nothing could stop it. The tests, the endless tests, the endless repeated tests had searched it out and had found it at last. Doctor Norstar must have seen the symptoms earlier, symptoms Johnny had no way of suspecting, symptoms in behavior, symptoms in the blood, in the spine, in the brain. And this was the chosen way for Dempsey to make it known to him. This was the chosen moment to let him know that the final horror had arrived and was dwelling in her brain. Whatever Doctor Norstar may have said, this is what Dempsey had chosen to hear and tell him. That she was cured, that she was not sick, that she would not die.
And to support her claim, she had asked him about the prayer. The connections available to the disconnecting mind, the summoned logic, the dazzling, darting thoughts, sparking from one point to another, a pattern of sanity, a web of reason in which to entangle those too stunned, too caring to make a quick escape. He must keep himself free of the web. He must not address the warped logic; he must not be deceived by the cunning patterns that disguised the madness within.
“That’s wonderful,” he said. “You’re cured.”
“You don’t believe me. That’s all right. I don’t believe it either. But it’s true.”
“Why wouldn’t I believe you?”
“Why should you? Why me? It can’t be you and your prayer. You don’t believe that, do you?”
“No, of course not.” He started toward her. Dempsey drew herself up in the chair.
“Stay there. Please. Don’t come near me.”
“I’m not near you.”
“You are. You’re too close.”
Johnny stayed where he was. Dempsey, he now knew, would be taken from him. She had gone mad. She would be put into the care of those trained to handle patients in dementia. He would lose her; she was lost already. His one wish would be denied. He would not be able to care for her to the very end. He might not be the last man she would see, would touch, in this life. All that he had wanted, all that had been promised from the day she let him come back to her, would never be his again. She had escaped. She had found a way to leave him again. She had retreated into herself. What he had hoped for, his great reward, would never be given to him now.