Running Down a Dirt Road

Joyce Maynard felt as hard as it was sometimes caring for her children when they were little, back in those days she at least stood a reasonable chance of protecting her sons and daughter from pain and loss. The hard part hits later, when — fiercely as you love this person and desperately as you may worry — you can’t come to your child’s rescue. Worse, what you imagined you were doing to protect her may actually end up inflicting another form of injury, as her actions easily could have, in what happened between her daughter and she in the story she tell here.

It was the fall of 2001, and the world felt like a particularly dangerous place. Her children were grown and out on their own — one son at college, the other bumming around West Africa. Her daughter, Audrey, 22, had left to spend six months volunteering with a women’s organization in a poor town in the Dominican Republic.

Not long after Audrey started living in Barahona she e-mailed that she had met a young man, Johnny, who ran a kind of taxi service, offering rides on the back of his motorcycle. He had given her a lift.

She didn’t tell me much, but she knew Johnny had come to the Dominican Republic from Haiti in search of a better life. Audrey said he was handsome, smart, funny, a great dancer and wonderful to her. Within a month she wrote to say she was in love.

Then nothing. Unable to reach Audrey at her rented room, she sent breezy news reports, casual questions. “How’s Johnny?” Then, “I’m worried.”

Finally, she tracked her down by calling the neighbors’ house. Even on that line filled with static she could tell something was wrong. Her voice, usually so lively, sounded wary and defensive: “I just can’t talk now. There’s a lot going on.”

Weeks passed. More silence. Or — almost worse — flat-sounding, one-line e-mail messages: “Will write later. Don’t worry.”

But she worried all the time now, more even than when she got the message from her son in Africa: “I’m over the worst of the malaria now.” He was writing to her, at least. From Audrey, nothing.

In early spring — six months since she had seen her last — she dreamed her daughter was running down a dirt road, with her long braid flying behind her and her face a mask of grief. The dream felt real.

That morning she knew what she would do, though she feared her daughter might never forgive her.

For years she had known the password to her e-mail account but never used it. Now — hands trembling on the keyboard — she typed it in.

Slowly, then, in messages she had written to friends, the story unfolded.

Audrey and Johnny had gone for their H.I.V. test that December. Two weeks later: A clean bill of health for Audrey. But the man her daughter believed to be the love of her life was H.I.V. positive. Back then, for an undocumented Haitian living in the Dominican Republic, the medical services necessary to keep him alive would be available only at a cost beyond his means.

It got worse. They had mostly been careful, but not 100 percent. And the test results Audrey got could not be viewed as accurate until three months had passed.

Feeling as though the room was on fire, Joyce scrolled through the messages her daughter had written over the weeks since then (with her own hopeful, plaintive notes scattered throughout: “Tell me what’s going on! I miss you, honey!”). There were letters to the American embassy inquiring about Johnny emigrating to the United States if he were married to an American citizen. Letters inquiring about the options for treatment for both of them back home. If she came home.

But for the moment, Audrey was still living with Johnny. Loving a man with whom she could not make love. Uncertain of her own health.

All she wanted, reading this news, was to jump on the first plane to the Dominican Republic, throw her arms around her daughter. Only to do so, Joyce would have to admit to having done this terrible thing.

cag ah