Danny drove much too fast, as always, and the highways were so empty that we arrived pretty early. Visitors weren’t allowed in until after lunch, so we spent a while strolling through the forest surrounding the beautiful half-timbered house.

“I’m scared to go in,” I admitted.

“So am I,” he said. “Trust me, so am I. I just have to know, though.”

Danny had registered us in advance, and the head of the institute welcomed us warmly. “Just go ahead and look around,” she told us. “You can go anywhere you like—everything’s open today. Make yourselves at home.”

No, I was not going to do that.

My heart was racing, but I tried not to let it show. I didn’t want Danny to feel that all of this was weighing on me.

We started with a cautious stroll through the outside grounds. Danny looked curious and interested as he tramped around the property; I clenched his hand tightly, sometimes even closing my eyes as I prayed desperately that we wouldn’t run into any of the residents.

I let him lead the way, and soon he started dragging me inside. Toward the residence wing. It was always easy for Danny to start up conversations with new people. This was no different. He entered their rooms, sat down on their beds, and started chatting with them as though he’d known them forever. I don’t remember any of what they talked about, because I was practically willing my ears shut the whole time, and focusing all my energy on not running away screaming.

Death was a constant presence here, sitting in the rooms, clinging to the walls, floating in the air, written on the faces. We saw a girl of about nine with full-blown AIDS. She was covered with Kaposi sarcoma, a type of skin cancer common in late-stage AIDS patients. Her emaciated face reminded me of a skull, and I knew the sight of her would haunt my dreams for a long time to come.

A guy not much older than Danny passed us in the hallway, pulling his IV and limping like an old man. His face was covered with a red rash. Probably shingles. His hair was snow-white, his skin fragile as parchment paper. As he went by, he stared at me with eyes full of hatred. His expression told me in no uncertain terms that he found it completely unfair that he was sick and I was healthy. His nearly black eyes followed me accusingly, and a chill ran down my spine.

“Why are you healthy, and I’m not? Why?”

Danny kept stopping in his tracks and giving me worried looks. “You can do this, Ducky. Everything’s okay. You just can’t let it get to you this much. Pretend it’s just a movie.” He was the one trying to give me courage, when it should have been the other way around. I wanted to say something cheery to him in return, but I couldn’t get a word out. We were as far away from “Everything’s okay!” as it got.

We stepped into the nursing ward, where a woman was getting a blood transfusion. Her ear was full of telltale blisters. It took a lot of willpower to keep myself from scratching—the sight of them suddenly made me itch all over.

An older man was lying beside her, coughing continuously. There was a tube in his nose, and he was wheezing so badly, it sounded like he was going to choke to death any minute. Automatically, I began breathing more shallowly, not wanting to breathe in the air that had been inside his body.

All at once, I felt like I was choking, too. Desperately, I tugged on Danny’s hand. “I have to get out of here, Danny!”

Without a word of protest, he turned around and led me to the exit. I was angry at myself, because I hadn’t wanted to say anything, but it was all awful, too awful, and suddenly I didn’t feel like I could handle any more of it. I was a teenager! I belonged at parties, not at my partner’s deathbed!

I snuck a glance at the man beside me. He was young, athletic, and unbelievably attractive. The painful loss he had suffered had probably marked his soul, but it hadn’t hurt his face any—nothing about him looked ill or injured in the slightest. I just couldn’t get my head around the idea that he might someday end up like these people here, with white hair and hate-filled eyes, slowly wasting away. His optimism and his lust for life were just now returning. When I imagined him permanently becoming the bitter, frustrated wreck he’d been after Christina died, I felt sick to my stomach.

Suddenly, I felt like I was going to throw up. As soon as Danny got me outside, I fled to his car, gasping for air. Tears sprang to my eyes without warning, and Danny took me into his arms, regarding me empathetically. He was obviously well aware that I was hopelessly overwhelmed, nowhere near as self-assured as I’d made myself out to be.

“I shouldn’t have brought you with me,” he said.

“It’s okay. I had to see it eventually. I need to learn to deal with it.” But it wasn’t okay, and I didn’t want to learn to deal with it. I wanted a normal life and a healthy boyfriend. I wanted it so desperately it hurt. Why didn’t we have ordinary problems like everyone else? Why didn’t we ever fight about who left their shoes lying around, or who forgot to put the cap back on the toothpaste? Why didn’t we have jealousy issues or normal doubts about our relationship? Why was everything about us so different from other couples our age? Why did I have to deal with so much sickness and death, when I was still so young?

Danny kept looking at me, seemingly reading my thoughts. I could see the wheels turning in his head, and I really believe that that was the moment when he decided:

“Maybe it would be best for everyone involved if I threw myself in front of a train.”

There wasn’t a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

“I’m so unbelievably sorry,” Danny said, pushing me away a little. “I’m sorry I’m doing all of this to you. But I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re here with me today. It’s so much better than being here alone. Thank you.”

“I just wish I could help you somehow.” I wiped the tears from my eyes and fought back the nausea, which gradually began to subside.

“You help me more than you know.” Danny leaned against his car. We stood there in silence for a while, lost in thought. “This is all my father’s fault,” he growled. “I hate him. I hate him so much!”

Slowly, I closed my eyes. “I hate him too.” It was the understatement of the century. My whole body was flooded with loathing for this person I didn’t even know, this person who had destroyed both of our lives.

“I’d have been able to handle anything else.” Danny’s gaze shifted back out into the distance. “Whatever it was, I’d have found a way to deal with it. There’s nothing in life you can’t get through, or at least work around. But the fact that he’s sentenced me to death as an innocent man… I’m powerless against that.” All at once, his eyes filled with tears as well. “Ducky, I meant what I said about the train.” He lapsed into a thoughtful silence for a few moments. “Although…not a train. I don’t want anyone else involved.”

“Stop it, Danny, please. Let’s go home.” I tugged on his arm with a pleading expression on my face.

“I tried to kill myself once before, as a child,” he began. “It was the summer I was fourteen. I slit my wrists with a razor blade. Both arms. I didn’t actually want to die, though.” He shrugged. “It was a cry for help.”

“Did anyone find out?” Why was I even asking? The world was so unbelievably awful.

“My mom found me. She knew what I’d been trying to do, but she covered it up. A few sports drinks, a couple of bandages, a week or two of long-sleeved shirts, the end.”

“So much pain and suffering could be prevented if the people in this miserable country would open their eyes and see what’s happening around them. But they’re just caught up in their own insignificant little problems, focused on their own pathetic existence. They could care less about the living beings around them.”

Danny had said that to me. Long ago. Nobody had noticed the boy with the haggard expression far beyond his years, running around in sweatshirts for weeks despite the heat. Would I have noticed something like that? Was I as bad as everyone else in the world?

I shook my head. “But why?”

He misinterpreted the question. I could imagine only too well why he’d cried for help like that. What I couldn’t get my head around was that nobody had done anything, not even his own mother.

“It was hell,” he replied quietly. “When I hit puberty at thirteen, my father stopped molesting me. My body was changing in ways he didn’t like. Plus, he couldn’t get me to subjugate myself to him unconditionally anymore, and he hated me for it. At first, I thought things would get better, but instead they got much worse.”

“What happened?”

“How do I explain this without you thinking I’m completely nuts?”

“Just tell me.”

“You mean you already think I’m completely nuts, so one more thing won’t make much of a difference?”

“No,” I said emphatically, taking his hand. “I don’t think that. I think you’re the most admirable person on the planet, and I would never think you were nuts!”

A smile flickered across his face for a moment. “He started beating me regularly. A lot more than he had before—just whenever he felt like it, to make me feel his hatred for me, which I couldn’t do anything about. Sometimes he whipped me up and down the room.”

“And that was worse than sex,” I concluded in resignation.

“Yeah,” Danny said. “As horrible and perverse as all of that other stuff was, at least there was a little tenderness in it. A tiny bit of love, in whatever sick form. When that stopped, all that was left was hatred in its purest form. Not just when he was drunk, either. It was constant. Yeah, that was definitely worse. Much worse.” He gave me a skeptical look. “Does that make any sense at all?”

“Yeah, it does.” I’d seen the scars on his body often enough, knew each one individually. So I could well imagine how much hatred he was talking about. “You longed for love,” I concluded. “I can understand that. There’s nothing sick about that. It’s normal.”

He nodded. “I was really confused about it back then. For a long time, I thought there was something wrong with me.”

Furiously, I kicked at a rock on the ground. “The only person who has something wrong with him is your father. I hope you know that?”

“Yeah, I think I do.” Danny looked up at the sun, trying to blink away his tears. Yet again, I found myself dwelling on the painful question of how he would have turned out if his sadistic pedophile father hadn’t done all of this permanent damage to him.

“Come on,” I said, tugging on his hand. “Let’s take a little walk so you can get yourself together, and when you’re ready, we can drive home.”

 

I’m running again. I’m running away. I know with absolute certainty that I’m running away. Fleeing. It’s an escape!

Cold, hate-filled eyes are following me, black as the night I’m running through. They’re sitting in a bony skull, picked clean of flesh. The eyes aren’t actually eyes, they’re holes that used to contain eyes. Blue eyes. But now the eyes are gone, the life is gone, the blue is gone. All that’s left are emptiness and death.

And I’m running and running, but no matter how fast I run, it will catch up to me eventually…