Chapter Nineteen
Gracie stood at her apartment door, yet to open it. Even with the key in the keyhole. After her strenuous day at the gym, her main focus was to get in her apartment and rest. She heard the phone ring on the other side of the door, and dropped her grocery bags to the ground. She ran into the house to answer the call. It was the automated message.
“Hello?” she answered.
Gracie listened to the beginning of the message, but then froze with fear. Gracie sat still on the edge of her sofa as to not make any unnecessary noises. Before, she hadn’t noticed that message was directly meant for her. However, listening to its entirety, she knew it was indeed.
Hello, this is the Department of Health Services in your area. This message is for Gracie Gregory. It is very imperative that you contact us immediately. Our number is 1-888-555-5555. Again ...
Why would the Health Department keep calling me? ... “The health department!” Now, she was nervous but not enough to stop her from searching for an ink pen.
Gracie jotted the number down and decided to give the department a call.
“Hi, yes this is Gracie Gregory and I’m returning a phone call.” Her thoughts got deeper, and she wondered if the phone call had actually been meant for her. Gracie waited to be transferred to the person that could help her.
“Thank you for holding, what time would you like to make an appointment?”
“Oh, I’m not making an appointment. Well actually, I would like to know the reason behind the call. Can you let me know, please?”
With all her effort, she was still unable to get the reason for the repeated phone call. She had no resolution and was down at the point of horror. She stood, pacing back and forth, hoping that the representative would give in and relieve her tension. It wasn’t happening.
“Well can you at least brief me on what it is I’d be looking forward to if I make the appointment? What if you have the wrong Gracie Gregory?”
“Ms. Gregory that will be something we’ll have to deal with then. Can you please allow me to make an appointment with you at one of our local clinics?”
“A clinic?” Gracie stopped in her tracks and demanded to know what was going on. “If you can’t tell me what’s going on, let me speak to your supervisor. I’m a busy woman and I’m not just coming down there just to be coming, ma’am.”
Gracie would have never guessed that a phone call of such importance was actually meant for her. The supervisor explained why it was important for her to cooperate.
“Ms. Gregory, this is procedure that cannot be broken, but what I can let you know is that your name is in a database of people who need to be contacted for testing.”
When she found out what kind of testing he was talking about, she had to sit right where she was, which was on the floor. She needed to clear her name for disease testing. He went on to say, “Because it could have been any disease possibly contracted in a sexual way, you need not waste anymore time. Make an appointment right away.”
Gracie made the appointment for the very next morning and disconnected the call. She dragged the groceries a few feet into the house. Then she resumed her Indian-style sitting position on the floor.
Confused about the whole conversation, Gracie was terrified by the mere thought of having a disease. Tears started to fall.
“A disease?”
Gracie prided herself in her caution to protect herself—from the first to the last time she’d had sex. There was no link on how, when, why, or where she’d contracted the disease. Then it hit her.
It was after a friend’s July fourth party the previous summer that she and Dillian had one of their most romantic nights together. Once they got back to their side of town, they opened the patio doors and sat out lounging, watching the fireworks light up the sky at Fair Park in south Dallas. They shared one bottle of wine, opened another, and worked on the remainder. Before they knew it, they had forgone the fireworks and found themselves in the bed, making love without protection. Until the phone conversation with the health care worker, Gracie had placed the incident in the back of her mind.
The next morning, Gracie sat in the cold waiting area of the clinic. Minutes felt like hours. Her eyes flitted around the room, refusing to rest on any one person for too long. Instead of the patients, she took in the white walls and the plethora of posters that were taped along them; posters on high blood pressure, cancer, the flu, abortion, STDs. Just as she began to read a WHAT TO DO IF YOU THINK YOU HAVE AN STD poster, the receptionist told her that the doctor would see her.
Gracie clasped her hands together and wrung them. She saw stirrups and shiny metal instruments, but what really waited for her at the end of the hall was a counselor and an office. A petite white woman in a fitted brown blazer guided her to the office, and her nervousness turned to fear. She began to think that this “disease” was more than a case of chlamydia.
With all of her strength, Gracie paced herself with her too many thoughts. She walked toward an open seat and sat impatiently, waiting to get to the reason for the visit.
Gracie sat face to face with Sandy, the clinics counselor and immediately started her questioning.
“Can you please tell me why I’m here?” Gracie asked.
“Yes. We’ll get to that. Did anyone accompany you today, Ms. Gregory?”
Gracie let the woman know that she was indeed alone. The look on the counselor’s face took Gracie’s helpless fear up a notch.
“Can you please just let me know what the problem is? I’ve waited all night long.”
For the next twenty minutes, Gracie sat and listened to this stranger tell her that another stranger turned her name into the health department because of the possibility that a disease had been transferred from his body to hers. Nothing could have taken the look of helplessness off of Gracie’s face when she found out the infection was the infection of them all: HIV.
“Gracie ... Gracie ...”
Gracie was blocked in her own world, in her own nightmare. It wasn’t until Sandy got up from behind her desk, came around to Gracie, and shook her that Gracie responded.
Gracie answered Sandy’s questions with head nods and sat crying with her head in her lap. She thought of her whole life in her first visit to the clinic. Every time she would try not to think about the worst, she felt she couldn’t neglect reality.
No, she moved her head slowly to answer if she had had any transfusions, drug use. No, she moved her head when asked if she had or had had unprotected sex, was she promiscuous. Gracie was stumped.
Gracie agreed to take the test to determine if her lifestyle would indeed change. Crying with every emotion present, Gracie thought she would fall dead right on the clinic’s floor when Sandy asked if she wanted to call anyone to pick her up.
“No! I’m sorry. That’s not possible. I live alone and I don’t have any immediate family around this way.” Gracie knew that she could call her godparents for anything. That realization stopped her breathing. This could change the lives of everyone I love, Gracie thought. With that thought, her tears started all over again.
“Momma,” she muttered.
“I’m sorry?” Sandy asked.
Looking up for the first time, Gracie thought about her parents out loud. “Tell me what to do, what do I say ... where do I go. I mean, there has to be something done, right? When can I get my results? I need to know, ma’am!”
The counselor wrapped her arms around her client. Another young woman lost, fighting, not knowing where her fate lay. Not knowing if her cries would cease or increase for years to come.