Free After Nothing by Rachel Mackie

room. Her body was healthy then. It was another year until her gums started bleeding. She didn’t tell anyone. It was the nose bleeds that started soon after that drew attention to the fact something was going on.
    It’s hard to know for sure whether she would have got leukemia without being HIV-positive. It’s possible the two were unrelated. I guess it doesn’t matter. First she got HIV, then she got cancer, and that’s what happened.
    She didn’t fight to live.
    I watched her die from a distance. There was her and Mom on the inside, and me and Dad on the outside. The only time she ever let me in on what she was thinking about it all happened one day out of the blue. I was in her room wrapping her birthday present to Dad. Black socks with stripes around the top and three handkerchiefs with grey edging. I’d been with Mom when she’d bought them. I’d wanted her to get the ones with blue edging, because that was Dad’s favorite color, but Mom had ignored me and bought the grey ones.
    I was halfway through wrapping them, scissors and sticky tape and a spool of green ribbon on the carpet beside me.
    Lisa was lying still on her bed, on top of the comforter.
    ‘I only did it once. Just one time.’
    I looked over at her and tears were sliding down her face and onto her pillow.
    I didn’t say anything. I was ten. I knew about sex. I knew that she’d been infected by a virus you never want to get. And the virus itself: I knew plenty about that because Dad talked about it all the time. He had so many books on it, and folder after folder of internet printouts full of research and treatment options. Dad and me had even gone to some support meetings for families of people with HIV. Mom wouldn’t go, and Lisa never attended any support groups for people living with HIV. The fact was, Lisa wasn’t living with HIV; she was dying with it. The only times she ever left the house were for medical appointments. Even then Mom had to prepare her for the idea of them weeks in advance, and then on the day cajole her, and manipulate her, just to get her out the front door.
    I know Lisa’s stays in hospital were torture for Mom. Lisa just shut down if she wasn’t at home. Wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t read. Mom would have to feed her, and lead her by her hand if they went for a walk. The doctors and nurses used the word ‘traumatized’ a lot. I think ‘hiding’ is a better one.
    Lisa would get home from those hospital stays and rather than be all shut down and incapable she’d just be a bit quiet. Then, within half a day, words would come. I’ll tell you something else too, hospital or home, unless she was completely incapacitated with chemo, or just with plain dying, like at the end, Lisa never let anyone take her to the bathroom. Even when she supposedly couldn’t feed herself, she could still take herself to the bathroom.
    ‘You can live with this,’ my father once said to her. ‘People live with HIV, Lisa. You just decide to.’
    But Lisa refused. She hid from life and she hid from the certainty of death. When it was finally time, she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t at peace. The last words she spoke as she drifted in and out of consciousness were, ‘Momma, no.’
     
    When Lisa died, my mom shut everyone out. She stopped going to church, and the few friends she had were cut out of her life. She turned on Dad, and helped push him into his first stroke. Then she neglected him so badly he had another one.
    Also, her rejection of me became complete.
    After Lisa’s death, she never asked what I was up to, or where I’d been that day. Never even told me off. Once I asked her for help with my homework.
    ‘Go see your father,’ she said.
    That was after his second stroke. My father could no sooner help me with my homework than do a child’s jigsaw puzzle, and my mom knew it.
    Even when I started coming home late because I’d been with Kane, she still didn’t ask a single question. Just left my dinner out on the bench,