Can You Believe My Luck?

The last time I saw Jodi was in downtown Manhattan, off Houston Street, during Ronald Reagan's second term.

Through the SoHo crowd, I heard my foster sister call my name. Full-hipped, thick-waisted, Jodi stood about five feet tall, with porcelain-white teeth, a delicate nose, slim hands, and small tapered feet. Despite her voluptuousness, her fragile features made her seem young and graceful, like a chubby ballerina half her age. Jodi was thirty-seven, unmarried, and had lived most of her life with her parents, April and Lou. After they moved to Florida, she had remained in Queens, worked temporary receptionist jobs and watched lots of television; her favorite shows were All My Children and Soul Train.

Jodi rushed toward me, her smile wide, clutching a Macy's bag with one hand, her other arm at a slight crook, finger and thumb touching, pinky suspended, as if holding a cup of tea. Moving closer, she glanced at the ground, chewing her gum, and chuckled.

"You little shit," she said. "How come I never hear from you?" Her gum snapped and popped.

I told her how busy I was. School. Work. "It's good to see you," I said.

Dressed in blue jeans, she was on her way to a job interview. "Unemployed again," she said. "But I'm tired of working for jerks. You know?"

I knew. She rarely held her gal-Friday gigs long, a source of frequent friction between her and my foster parents. But Jodi had her reasons: the receptionist or filing position was boring, the work demeaning, the boss abusive. Work isn't supposed to be fun, Lou would yell. And what are you going to do for money now? April would add before Jodi slammed her bedroom door and turned on her stereo.

Jodi was happy to see me that afternoon. She told me about some guy from Europe she was dating and pointed to one of several thin gold bracelets, the sort of dainty jewelry that she had bought or stolen for as long as I had known her. "He gave me this." She blushed.

I nodded.

"So what about you?" she asked. "Seeing anybody?"

"Me? Oh no."

Shifting uneasily, I said I had to go and then gave her a kiss. She frowned.

"Call me, you little brat," she shouted, as I darted across the street. "I'm listed."

"I will. I will."

I didn't.

It was April who called me a year later.

My foster mother rarely phoned, even on holidays; I knew something was up.

"What's wrong," I said.

Jodi had AIDS.

I sat down.

"She's been sick for a while," April said. Fevers. Strange bruises. No one knew what was wrong.

I took a deep breath.

It had been months since I had spoken with April, years since I'd seen her.

"And we always worried it would be you," she said.

Jodi became my sister when I was two, fresh from the foundling hospital, where my troubled single mother had left me six months earlier. It was the year of Jodi's Sweet Sixteen. The party was held in my foster parents' furnished wood-paneled basement. Jodi had her hair teased high, she wore false lashes, her lids were powder blue. Her friends, girls in miniskirts with kohl-lined eyes, passed me from lap to lap, posing for the camera. In one snapshot, my foster sister's straw sombrero rests on my head, nearly covering my eyes, and I suck on a corncob pipe, grinning, my early childhood captured in a moment of photogenic bliss.

When I was five, Jodi took me with her to Main Street in Flushing to visit her dirty, bearded boyfriend. He worked at a head shop, and I remember how she disappeared with him into the back, behind some beaded curtains, while I stared at the black-lit velvet portraits of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and two thin salesgirls with long straight hair who made fat faces and laughed, their teeth glowing like radioactive snow.

I own no photographs of Jodi, only a...