A story of a man who must escape from self-destruction so he can recover what he lost: Love.
Edward Baxter has fourteen days to wait. In fourteen days, he’ll learn whether he’s HIV positive, and possibly his wife and unborn child. During that time, driven by madness, Edward embarks on an odyssey of mistaken retribution and self-discovery that will nearly destroy him.
The story begins with seventeen-year-old Anthony Baxter attending his father’s funeral, a day very reminiscent of his mother’s funeral five years before. He recalls how his father approached him at his mother’s funeral and revealed the truth of his mother’s death. His father also spoke about his death that could come in a year or two or five years. When that day comes, Anthony is commanded to find a secret journal that his father wrote only for him. He needs his son to discover whether he was forgiven.
Written months before Anthony’s birth, during his parents’ happiest moments, the journal recounts every moment of the odyssey his father undertook while he waited for the results of his test. It begins when Edward learns through a letter that he may share the doom of a former lover living her last days with AIDS. The two weeks that follow his reading this letter reveal one man’s slow but inevitable fall from grace, and his even slower journey toward redemption and salvation. But will salvation come too late? Will the sins of his Fourteen Days be unforgivable?
Before Helena: My Fourteen Days Of Madness is a gritty story told through two viewpoints, with alternating chapters that follow Anthony Baxter as he endeavors to read the account of his father’s tumultuous Fourteen Days. It forces readers to question whether great suffering is worth the elusive reward, rather than avoiding suffering and ending up with nothing.
