In One Person

I was holding one of Tom’s cold hands, and Elaine was holding the other one—I could see Elaine trying not to stare at the Hickman catheter in Atkins’s bare chest—when we heard the dry cough. For a moment, I imagined that poor Tom had died and his cough had somehow escaped his body. But I saw the son’s eyes; Peter knew that cough, and where it came from. The boy turned to the open doorway of the room—where his mother now stood, coughing. It didn’t sound like all that serious a cough, but Sue Atkins was having trouble stopping it. Elaine and I had heard that cough before; the earliest stages of Pneumocystis pneumonia don’t sound too bad. The shortness of breath and the fever were often worse than the cough.

“Yes, I have it,” Sue Atkins said; she was controlling the cough, but she couldn’t stop it. “In my case, it’s just starting,” Mrs. Atkins said; she was definitely short of breath.

“I infected her, Bill—that’s the story,” Tom Atkins said.

Peter, who’d been so poised, was trying to slip sideways past his mother into the hall.

“No—you stay here, Peter. You need to hear what your father has to say to Bill,” Sue Atkins told her son; the boy was crying now, but he backed into the room, still looking at the doorway, which his mom was blocking.

“I don’t want to stay, I don’t want to hear . . .” the boy began; he was shaking his head, as if this were a proven method to make himself stop crying.

“Peter—you have to stay, you have to listen,” Tom Atkins said. “Peter is why I wanted to see you, Bill,” Tom said to me. “Bill has some discernible traces of moral responsibility—doesn’t he, Elaine?” Tom suddenly asked her. “I mean Bill’s writing—at least his writing has discernible traces of moral responsibility, doesn’t it? I don’t really know Bill anymore,” Atkins admitted. (Tom couldn’t say more than three or four words without needing to take a breath.)

“Moral responsibility,” I repeated.

“Yes, he does—Billy takes moral responsibility. I think so,” Elaine said. “I don’t mean only in your writing, Billy,” Elaine added.

“I don’t have to stay—I’ve heard this before,” Sue Atkins suddenly said. “You don’t have to stay, either, Elaine. We can go try to talk to Emily. She’s a challenge to talk to, but she’s better with women than she is with men—as a rule. Emily really hates men,” Mrs. Atkins said.

“Emily screams almost every time she sees a man,” Peter explained; he had stopped crying.

“Okay, I’ll come with you,” Elaine said to Sue Atkins. “I’m not all that crazy about most men, either—I just don’t like women at all, usually.”

“That’s interesting,” Mrs. Atkins said.

“I’ll come back when it’s time to say good-bye,” Elaine called to Tom, as she was leaving, but Atkins seemed to ignore the good-bye reference.

“It’s amazing how easy time becomes—when there’s no more of it, Bill,” Tom began.

“Where is Charles—he should be here, shouldn’t he?” Peter Atkins asked his dad. “Just look at this room! Why is that old oxygen tank still here? The oxygen doesn’t help him anymore,” the boy explained to me. “Your lungs need to work in order to have any benefit from oxygen. If you can’t breathe in, how are you going to get the oxygen? That’s what Charles says.”

“Peter, please stop,” Tom Atkins said to his son. “I asked Charles for a little privacy—Charles will be back soon.”

“You’re talking too much, Daddy,” the boy said. “You know what happens when you try to talk too much.”

“I want to talk to Bill about you, Peter,” his father said.

“This part is crazy—this part makes no sense,” Peter said.

Tom Atkins seemed to be hoarding his remaining breath before he spoke to me: “I want you to keep an eye on my boy when I’m gone, Bill—especially if Peter is ‘like us,’ but even if he isn’t.”

“Why me, Tom?” I asked him.

“You don’t have any children, do you?” Atkins asked me. “All I’m asking you is to keep one eye on one kid. I don’t know what to do about Emily—you might not be the best choice for someone to look after Emily.”

“No, no, no,” the boy suddenly said. “Emily stays with me—she goes where I go.”

“You’ll have to talk her into it, Peter, and you know how stubborn she is,” Atkins said; it was harder and harder for poor Tom to get enough breath. “When I die—when your mom is dead, too—it’s this man here I want you talking to, Peter. Not your grandfather.”

I’d met Tom’s parents at our graduation from Favorite River. His father had taken a despairing look at me; he’d refused to shake my hand. That was Peter’s grandfather; he hadn’t called me a fag, but I’d felt him thinking it.

“My father is very . . . unsophisticated,” Atkins had told me at the time.

“He should meet my mom,” was all I’d said.

Now Tom was asking me to be his son’s advice-giver. (Tom Atkins had never been much of a realist.) “Not your grandfather,” Atkins said a second time to Peter.

“No, no, no,” the boy repeated; he’d started to cry again.

“Tom, I don’t know how to be a father—I’ve had no experience,” I said. “And I might get sick, too.”

“Yes!” Peter Atkins cried. “What if Bill or Billy, or whatever his name is, gets sick?”

“I think I better have a little oxygen, Bill—Peter knows how to do it, don’t you, Peter?” Tom asked his son.

“Yes—of course I know how to do it,” the boy said; he immediately stopped crying. “Charles is the one who should be giving you oxygen, Daddy—and it won’t work, anyway!” the fifteen-year-old cried. “You just think the oxygen is getting to your lungs; it really isn’t.” I saw the oxygen mask then—Peter knew where it was—and while the boy attended to the oxygen tank, Tom Atkins smiled proudly at me.

“Peter is a wonderful boy,” Atkins said; I saw that Tom couldn’t look at his son when he said this, or he would have lost his composure. Atkins was managing to hold himself together by looking at me.

Similarly, when Atkins spoke, I could manage to hold myself together only by looking at his fifteen-year-old son. Besides, as I would say later to Elaine, Peter looked more like Tom Atkins to me than Atkins even remotely looked like himself.

“You weren’t this assertive when I knew you, Tom,” I said, but I kept my eyes on Peter; the boy was very gently fitting the oxygen mask to his father’s unrecognizable face.

“What does ‘assertive’ mean?” Peter asked me; his father laughed. The laugh made Atkins gasp and cough, but he’d definitely laughed.

“What I mean by ‘assertive’ is that your dad is someone who takes charge of a situation—he’s someone who has confidence in a situation that many people lack confidence in,” I said to the boy. (I couldn’t believe I was saying this about the Tom Atkins I’d known, but at this moment it was true.)

“Is that any better?” Peter asked his father, who was struggling to breathe the oxygen; Tom was working awfully hard for very little relief, or so it seemed to me, but Atkins managed to nod at his son’s question—all the while never taking his eyes off me.

“I don’t think the oxygen makes a difference,” Peter Atkins said; the boy was examining me more closely than before. I saw Atkins inch his forearm across the bed; he nudged his son with that arm. “So . . .” the boy began, as if this were his idea, as if his dad hadn’t already said to him, When my old friend Bill is here, you be sure to ask him about the summer we spent in Europe together, or words to that effect. “So . . .” the boy started again. “I understand that you and my dad traveled all over Europe together. So—what was that like?”

I knew I would burst into tears if I so much as glanced at Tom Atkins—who laughed again, and coughed, and gasped—so I just kept looking at Tom’s carrot-haired likeness, his darling fifteen-year-old son, and I said, as if I were also following a script, “First of all, I was trying to read this book, but your dad wouldn’t let me—not unless I read the whole book out loud to him.”

“You read a whole book out loud to him!” Peter exclaimed in disbelief.

“We were both nineteen, but he made me read the entire novel—out loud. And your father hated the book—he was actually jealous of one of the characters; he simply didn’t want me to spend a single minute alone with her,” I explained to Peter. The boy was