Dominick takes an HIV test and learns he is negative

Dominick Birdsey’s HIV test becomes a trial of waiting in which uncertainty magnifies his guilt and fear. After days of imagining the result as punishment for his failures toward his family, he learns that the test is non-reactive. The relief settles one immediate question, but the episode shows how readily Dominick turns danger into a verdict on whether he deserves to suffer.

The Test and the Wait

On Friday, Dominick drives to Farmington, pays twenty dollars, receives a confidential number, and has his blood drawn. At the testing center, a woman explains the procedure: he must wait three business days, then call the laboratory on the third day. In his case, that means Wednesday; results usually arrive around three in the afternoon, so he should call between four and five-thirty. The schedule gives the wait a precise shape, but not a way to make it easier.

Dominick keeps the test secret. He fears that telling Leo would mean Leo telling Angie, who would then tell Dessa. His uncertainty also makes him doubt what Dr. Patel could say that would change anything. The silence is not simply a matter of privacy: it leaves him alone with the possible result, unable to share or test his fears against another person’s response.

Anxiety in the Days Before the Call

As the wait continues, Dominick cannot eat or sleep normally. Nights bring broken sleep, abrupt awakenings at noises he thinks he hears, and dreams. When the phone rings at two in the morning, he cannot answer it because he is sure it will be Joy. He resents the possibility of being asked to take responsibility for her problems and tells himself he is nobody’s father. That response makes the test feel entangled with a larger question of obligation, even though the result itself can establish only whether the test is reactive.

On Tuesday night, the eve of the expected call, his distress reaches a crisis. Dominick goes driving to calm himself and runs a red light at Broad and Benson. No car is coming the other way, but he recognizes that one could have been; he connects his impaired judgment to the sleep deprivation. The near miss turns his inward panic into a danger beyond himself, while offering no answer about the test.

His thoughts give that uncertainty a punitive explanation. He imagines that God has waited years to punish him for being a bad brother, and interprets the possibility of HIV as a punishment reserved for him after Thomas’s schizophrenia. He recalls that an earlier fear that Thomas had HIV proved false, then reads his own present fear as a new blow in a divine plan. This is Dominick’s anxious interpretation, not evidence that he has contracted HIV. The imagined logic makes chance feel like judgment and the wait feel like a sentence already pronounced.

The Result

Before the call, Dominick speaks with a priest, who assures him that suffering can have meaning and that God is merciful even when people cannot understand his ways. Dominick initially dismisses the reassurance as platitudinous, yet hangs up feeling calmer. The conversation does not tell him what the result will be; instead, it helps him recognize that the answer is outside his control. He can only endure the wait and hope for mercy rather than irony.

On Wednesday afternoon, he calls the testing center. Busy signals delay him until 4:45, within the time window he had been given. The woman asks him to repeat his confidential number. While she checks, Dominick closes his eyes and grips the receiver, convinced that the result will confirm his fear and exact payment for what he has done to his brother, mother, and wife. The short pause before the answer concentrates the episode’s tension: the laboratory is checking a test, while Dominick has already turned its result into a judgment on his life.

The woman tells him that the result is non-reactive and explains that this is the result he wanted. Dominick asks what non-reactive means; her explanation confirms that the test has not indicated HIV. The answer brings relief from the fear that has governed the previous days, but it does not establish that his family conflicts or responsibilities are resolved. The episode ends with a clear medical result set against the unresolved emotional meaning Dominick had placed upon it.