…………………………………1982

Karen stumbled into the hospital room. Like the rest of Florida this hospital was fiercely air conditioned, chilled processed air to counter the heavy, moisture rich air outside. The cloying smell of flowers. Karen wrinkled her nose, it smelled like a funeral, death.

Sandy lay in the bed, emaciated, pale. Karen was afraid of the way her collar bones jutted out, afraid of how she could see all the bones in her hands. Afraid of the fevered glaze of her mother's eyes.

The I.V. pole stood like a silent sentry next to the bed, dripping useless medication into Sandy's veins.

It would be any day, that's what the doctors said. Her mother could die any day. There was something she had to know first.

Karen had screwed up all her courage and would ask Sandy about her father. Who was he? Where was he? Why hadn't he wanted her?

"Mom? Mom?" Sandy raised her eyes to her daughter's face. Even that took energy she didn't have.

"Mom, who is my father?"

Sandy sighed. She had known the question was coming. She thought of Karen's father, a no good hoodlum from Oklahoma, and she knew he died a few years ago in a bar fight, or a drug overdose, or in prison.

She couldn't tell Karen that he was her father. Sensitive, beautiful Karen who wrote in her journal and painted landscapes and who was having a hard enough time with her mother's death.

So Sandy had an answer all ready.

"His name…is…Sodapop Curtis…" Breathless, pushing the words out. Karen could smell alcohol and some sort of floor cleaner they use, medicine and death.

"Sodapop?"

"Yeah…he lives…he lived in Tulsa…north side…"

There. Now Karen had a father, even if she was losing her mother.

x………..x…………x

The illness, a mysterious thing comprised of vague symptoms, night sweats, fevers, weight loss, thrush. Thrush was a creamy white substance that covered her tongue, the doctors called it Candida Albicans.

Karen was 15 and had watched her mother's health decline since she was about 12. The doctors here were at a loss, many of them unaware that doctors in New York and California were seeing many of the same symptoms, an inexplicable decline in health in people in their 20's, 30's, 40's.

Every day Karen would come to the hospital, into the air conditioning, the cool white walls, whisper of nurses' rubber soled shoes on linoleum.

And she did this again, taking the elevator to the 6th floor, turning left, past the nurses' desk to her mother's room.

The room was empty except for the bed, stripped and raised high, to head level. No I.V.'s, no bedside table, nothing. Karen's breath caught in her throat and she stumbled out of the room, to the nurses' desk.

She couldn't even speak. Her eyes filled with thick tears, her throat was numb. She gripped the edge of the desk and stared.

One of the nurses recognized her, a young nurse with long dark hair and friendly eyes.

"Oh my God, Karen," She came over, "honey, your mom is in ICU, we had to move her last night,"

It was bad, but not as bad as she had feared. Karen's legs felt weak, they wanted to buckle under her, spill her to the floor.

"C'mon, honey, I'll bring you there," The young nurse put her arm around Karen's shoulders and lead her down the hall to ICU.