But who was this old man getting out from behind the wheel? His shoulders were little more than a clothes hanger for his T-shirt. His pants were cinched around his waist. His cheeks were so hollow, there were pockets of shadow in his face. As he walked across the front porch, a hand dusting the wall, she saw that his curly hair, once jet black, had become embroidered with gray, and the narrow bridge of his nose was crazed with red veins. It was as if he’d stepped out of a time machine that had tossed him years into his future.

“Frankie!” she said, “My God!” When she hugged him, she felt the trenches and protruding spine of his back through his shirt. “What’s wrong with you?!”

“Oh,” he said lethargically, almost casually, “I’m AIDS-y.”

He’d been tested but had never gone back to the doctor after he’d gotten his results. He had no interest in taking medication because he was waiting for somebody (the Visitors, it turned out) to show up and fix all of his problems. When he was too weak to argue anymore, she drove him to her GP, who took one look at him and recommended a specialist in Orlando. A nurse took six or seven vials of Frankie’s blood (Teresa was amazed he had them to spare). Two weeks later, they went back for another appointment.

“Things could be better,” the specialist told Frankie, who was drowsy from the car ride and was blinking slowly at a plastic brain sitting on the desk.

“Tell me,” Teresa said. “He’s too sleepy to pay attention.”

The specialist cleared his throat. He explained in simple terms how the virus went about its business, what the viral load count meant, what a T cell was. He told her Frankie’s viral load topped two million, and that his T cells were very low.

“Well, how many should he have?”

“I’ll try to put things into perspective. The average, healthy person has about a thousand T cells. Your son has seven.”

“Seven!”

“Seven,” Frankie repeated in a sleepy voice.

“Can he have some of mine?” Teresa asked.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way,” the specialist said, frowning.

They drove to the pharmacy and—at Frankie’s request—the arts and crafts store, and came home with a small stack of art books and a bag of pill bottles. Next to the books on Modigliani, da Vinci, and Watteau, she laid out one of each pill across the coffee table and read off their names for him.

“They’re ugly,” Frankie said, eyeing the pills suspiciously.

“This one’s not ugly. It looks like a little pearl.”

“It looks like fertilizer.”

“Well, look at this one. That’s kind of a sky blue, isn’t it?”

“There’s no such thing as ‘sky blue.’ It’s one of those made-up colors, like ‘fire red.’ ”

“Periwinkle, then.”