Series: Four Lives, One Last Chance - A Year In Drug Court: Part 28 Of 41

ACT IV. LINDA: PAST MISTAKES

There are a few things that Linda would like to do before she dies --
achingly simple acts that other people do all the time.

She'd like to take her family to Disney World. She'd like to send her mom
on that Hawaiian vacation she always dreamed about. And while they still
have time, she'd like to take her mom to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day
Parade in New York.

Linda talks about these goals with a wistful air, not with the confidence
that she'll ever accomplish them. But she has one objective she seems
determined to accomplish: to save enough money to pay for her own funeral.

When Linda gets sick - and she knows it will happen - she doesn't want to
be a burden to her family. She's asked enough of them already.

"It's not their fault. I don't want to put them through that," Linda says.
"The only thing I can do is make sure they don't have to pay for my mistakes."

She knows she'll be lying on her deathbed one day, looking back on a life
of self-inflicted struggle and pain, and wishing she had made other choices.

"They always say your past comes back to haunt you," she says. "Mine's
going to come back big-time."

When Linda talks about these issues, she often sets her arms across her
chest. The edges of her mouth dive down, her bottom lip juts forward and
her nostrils flare in a scowling expression of fear and suffering.

That contemplative, pained side emerges often, overwhelming Linda's
naturally effervescent personality.

It comes out when she is stressed or concentrating. It comes out when she
is sad or when she thinks of what remains of her life. It comes out when
she hurts.

And Linda's body aches constantly, despite the painkillers in her medicine.
When she sleeps, whole sections of her body go numb. So she sleeps on one
side until it goes dead, then rolls over to the other side. She also
catches colds easily, and once she developed bronchitis.

Although she normally looks robust and healthy, Linda starts losing weight
around the Christmas holidays. By January, she's dropped 12 pounds, dipping
below 140. Her clothes hang noticeably, her jeans dangling around her legs.
She tries to chalk it up to stress from work, her family and Drug Court.

"I just haven't been eating enough," she says.

The holidays are particularly difficult. Her home life is chaotic - her
mother threatens to kick her out "every other week." Linda wants to move
out, but she can't scrape together enough cash for a security deposit on an
apartment.

On Christmas morning, her two grown children stop to collect their
presents, but they don't stay for long. Linda knows they still harbor deep
resentment from all the absent years when she chased her high around the
country.

They didn't even stop to say, "Thank you, Mom," she says.

"They probably just forgot in all the excitement," she adds with a weak
smile. "I'll try to rationalize it."

Her home life only adds to her deepening sense of loneliness. She has
always been a star party girl, and she has nearly always had a man in her
life - even if he was abusive.

Now that she's battling drug addiction, the parties have ended.

And now that she's living with HIV, she wonders whether love and sex will
be lost to her troubles.

For a while, Linda has an older man who calls her and takes her out to
dinner. But she stops hearing from him after she refuses to sleep with him.
Even though she had told him about her HIV, she wasn't comfortable with the
idea. It would take an extraordinary man, she knows, to endure all the
discussions, safety precautions and risks.

"Just to go have casual sex, I'm not ready for that," she says. "What if
the condom breaks? You gonna get mad and blame me?"

With all this on her mind, Linda's pained side has become dominant.

At the end of January, she attends her bimonthly doctor's appointment. The
appointment had been moved up several days, and Linda fears this can only
be bad news.

When she arrives, Linda quickly learns that her doctor rescheduled her
visit because he has to go out of town. He runs just a few of the regular
tests, and Linda is done in less than half an hour.

One test shows that Linda's red-blood-cell count is up. Anything below 220
constitutes full-blown AIDS. Linda's count has risen more than 300 points
to 1,150.

"That's probably better than mine," the doctor tells her.

As Linda walks out into the sun-drenched parking lot, she's happier than
she's been in months.

The good news about her health is one reason, but Linda smiles from ear to
ear because of something else.

She walks from the doctor's office on the arm of a man she met just days
earlier. As they leave for a lunch date, Linda's feet barely seem to touch
the ground.