It didn’t matter what our relationship was or wasn’t.


It was a time when people were


more careful about such things. I thought I loved Billy and I waited for him to love me too. I look back now and see that we were best friends and that what I was in love with was his family. And that by letting me into their lives, they rescued me. Billy’s mom died a few years later when we were in college. Billy was at the University of Hawaii by then and I was still home at CSUN, the only place I could afford to be with the help of a tiny bursary for being on the girls’ track team. Renate had breast cancer at a time when you didn’t survive from it and you didn’t talk about it. So when I heard about her death, it was unexpected and it shocked me.


I couldn’t reach Billy in Honolulu so I


went to the track and ran for 45 minutes. Running and crying, running and crying.


I heard that Jack kind of went nuts after that. He sold the house, gave Billy a wad of money and went back to Germany and married someone else very quickly. Billy did a lot of drugs, lived alone for a long time and then he died of AIDS when we were 26.


The last time I saw him he told me that his mother loved me the best of all the friends that hung around their house and used the swimming pool. He said those words: she loved you best, and though I probably already knew the truth of it, it was good to be told. Renate wanted him to take me to the


Prom, to rescue me from the sad rage in my own parents’ home. She wanted us to marry and she wanted to know, before she sent him to Hawaii so that he wouldn’t see her die, that he and I would have her grandchildren. would.


He promised her that we


That day he explained to me what it was like to be the child of survivors. How he felt he could never tell them he was gay. He told me that his father told him, only once, the story of how he got the tattoo: other Jews had held him down and branded him with the dirty blunt needle; how the Gestapo watched and laughed when he cried – eight years old and completely alone. He told me that even when Jack told him the story of his daring escape from the camp (the way they hid


in a German forest and later in a


sympathetic attic) Billy knew that he couldn’t live up to that kind of heroism and believed he had no right to confide his own small confusion.


That day I finally understood. He thanked me for being his alibi for all those years when we were high school kids and I thanked him for being my rescuer. We kissed the only kiss we would ever share and held hands for a while and then a nurse asked me if I would please go now and let the patient rest.


Brra ieLl ew yn el


24


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