Sonny screamed.
He knew it would wake Alec and bring Brenda running from the next room, but he couldn't stop himself. Though Brenda would scold him for scaring her, Sonny would shrug it off irritably. He had a right to make some noise, dammit! It wasn't every day you opened the newspaper to find that the disease that had stolen your best friend finally had a cure.
"The Man Who Had HIV and Now Does Not," blared the headline. A photo of a worn-looking man sat beside it, a man who had not only had the virus but leukemia on top of it, a man whose doctor had the intuition to find a bone marrow transplant that would rid him of both. Sonny squinted his eyes at the photo and imagined for a moment that instead of the middle-aged German translator, a teenaged boy sat in a windowsill with his eyes closed. The illusion faded quickly, though, and Sonny crumpled the paper with another snarl of frustration. "How come you lived?" he snapped at the now-wrinkled photo. "How come you lived and Stone didn't?"
Five, ten, fifteen years had passed and Sonny still wasn't over it. He thought he was, would spend days without remembering Stone losing Lucky's dog or Stone getting locked out in the cold or Stone dying upstairs with Robin by his side—and then Sonny would go to the hospital to pick up his meds or, too often, to check up on one of his kids, and there would be Robin, struggling with the same virus that killed her boyfriend. There would be the AIDS wing that Sonny had paid for and named for Stone, hoping that maybe, maybe he could save Robin the way he hadn't saved Stone.
This wasn't a cure for everyone, the news article cautioned, and the man had only been HIV-free for four years—but to Sonny, it didn't matter. He knew this was it. Once the scientists had one breakthrough, they'd figure everything out, and sure enough people everywhere would get their AIDS reversed. Robin was so healthy so far, maybe they'd get to her in time so that she could see her daughter grow up and then watch grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. The hospital wouldn't need the Stone Cates wing anymore then because no one would be dying of AIDS anymore.
Too little, too late. Robin might live, great, Sonny loved her, but until the damn doctors could bring Stone back, he would never be satisfied.
"The Man Who Had HIV and Now Does Not," Sonny read again. "Stone, who had HIV…"
Sonny couldn't stop himself. He screamed.
It's a, um, THING! I came up with this after reading the real article "The Man Who Had HIV and Now Does Not" in New York magazine. The article is here, h t t p : / / n y m a g . c o m / h e a l t h / f e a t u r e s / a i d s - c u r e – 2 0 1 1 – 6 / (without spaces), but to sum it up: This man had HIV and then got leukemia. Since he needed a bone marrow transplant for the leukemia, his doctor decided to get the marrow from a donor who had an inborn immunity to HIV (some people do). It worked. Obviously, it's not for everyone, since marrow transplants are costly and dangerous, but it's a start.