The Forever Marriage (15 page)

Probably because he fit into the world so well, it was tempting for people to overlook Michael and assume that whatever happened he’d be fine. But what she had observed in the days after Jobe’s funeral was a boy with no outlet for grief. Her younger son’s job was to be happy and funny. Most of the time, this is what he did. But lately he’d begun, for the first time in his twelve years, to have trouble sleeping. He had terrible nightmares. Occasionally, despite the dust of mustache on his upper lip, he even came to her room at night.

She and the two older children—along with Troy, the fourth child she appeared to have inherited—had agreed not to tell Michael about her cancer until they knew more. So Carmen hid in her bedroom with the door closed, as secretive about these medical phone calls as she had once been about Danny. Finally, after calling the seventh name on her list of referrals, she found an oncologist willing to perform what everyone insisted on calling “the procedure.” This was because, Carmen realized slowly as she sat on hold, they could not accurately name it prior to the doctor’s cutting a hole in her. She would be trusting this man she’d never met to decide—while she herself was unconscious—whether to preserve her left breast or lop it off.

Sitting on her bed, clutching her cell phone with one shoulder, Carmen breathed in shallow sips. By the time the nurse returned from
scheduling this event, Carmen was light-headed. Obediently, she wrote the woman’s instructions on a half-used notebook abandoned by one of the kids on the last day of school.

“You’ll need to make an appointment with your doctor for the day before the procedure,” the nurse said. “Get a clean bill of health, other than the tumor, of course. And some Xanax. You’ll need it.”

This woman was completely insane. Last time Carmen had called to get an appointment for an annual physical it had taken a month and a half to get in. What were the odds she’d be able to pinpoint a day and demand a slot? But she scheduled the surgery anyway, because she had to start with something. “Your surgeon is Dr. Woo,” the nurse informed Carmen crisply. “You’re lucky. He’s very good.”

“That’s great, thank you,” Carmen said sweetly, though she wasn’t feeling lucky. She might need this woman to do something for her in the future: slip her some Vicodin or put her out of her misery with a cleaver to her head. But this business about excellent surgeons was a lie; she’d found that out with Jobe. He’d had the best at Johns Hopkins; the university had insisted upon it, even pulling on medical school resources to dig up a specialist who had worked with precisely Jobe’s type of non-Hodgkin’s his entire career. This was the guy who set out the course of treatment that ultimately killed her husband. Eerily, that doctor had accomplished the terrible thing that she was secretly afraid she’d wanted bad enough to have caused. Since meeting Jana’s Wiccan friends, Carmen wondered sometimes if she was some kind of inept witch, conjuring up evil unwittingly yet unable to fix Luca or make herself magically content with a perfectly nice yet tentative and periodically impotent man.

Carmen looked down at what she’d written on the page: T
UESDAY
, J
UNE
12, 2
P.M.
The symbols materialized like carvings in a headstone and her breath came sharply. This had been happening more and more; panic rose in mundane moments like a wild, bitter wind. But there was nowhere to go with it, no one to scream at or seek comfort with. Even Jana did not know the extent of her betrayal, the fact that she had—when Jobe’s doctor’s face had turned grave and
he’d used the words
mortality rate
and
terminal
—rejoiced faintly in the privacy of her own head. It had been an unspeakable secret: Her own life sentence was being commuted by this freakish twist of fate. Abruptly, now, she recalled the day that Jobe, at twenty-five, had predicted it. He’d said he would die young. He’d informed her. It was the reason he could gather his nerve back then to take her dancing and coax her into his childhood bed. Did this, in some small way, let her off the hook?

She could not answer this. So, breathing slowly, she tried to work through the next conundrum. There were only two real possibilities, so far as Carmen was concerned: Either she was being punished for her sins against Jobe and had been sentenced to cancer by some judgmental deity, or there was something poisonous about this house, something lurking and ready to attach itself to the children, now that both the parents had been done in.

Clearly, she would prefer the first. At least then her children would be safe. But she would need to resign herself to the fact that her own life had been entirely misspent. It would not matter that she had stayed with the man and raised his children, showing the world a devoted wife and mother; what would come to roost, spreading its cancer throughout her chest, was her rancid, unloving heart.

But if the latter explanation were true, they were all in danger. She should be picking up the phone again, talking to someone who could come out and test the soil, the walls, the air quality … whatever it was that made human cells turn mutant. Only she had no idea whom to call.

Danny! She came to this as one finds the answer to a game show question: The moment she quit concentrating, it popped into her head. Danny did this for a living. He helped people figure out these answers. Now the next question was, did she call his cell phone number—which was programmed into hers—or go downstairs to look up the one for the information desk at the library? Fuck it, she didn’t have time to worry about etiquette; besides, what if one of his colleagues answered? How, exactly, would she explain her situation to a stranger?

She pushed speed dial 3 and listened with growing irritation as the line rang and Danny’s voice mail clicked on. “Listen, I know I’ve been out of touch. Sorry.” She looked around the quiet room and realized that she was on her marriage bed, in the very spot where she’d been unwilling to talk to Danny before. “But I really need to talk to you. I have a few questions—professional. I need your help researching something. So, um, call me.”

Carmen was calmer now, but ridiculously worn out from fear. She walked downstairs, her bare feet sticky against the wooden steps. Luca was in the living room. His bus must have pulled up while she was on the phone. He sat slumped on the sofa, eyes crossing slightly as he gazed down at a cushion; no one else was in sight.

“Hey, what’s up?” she asked.

“Nothing.” The word was not only thick but languid, and Carmen realized it was very literally true. In years past, she’d never worried about Luca’s summers. Once he was released from school, Jobe, whose schedule freed him up around the same time, would take over. What they did together was a mystery, but movies reeled through her head of the two of them heading out the door—Jobe arcing over his older son like an oak—and metal doors creaking open then slamming, the soft revving of the car engine. Often, they would be gone all day.

She sat next to Luca, desperate to fill in for his father but feeling woefully inadequate. “Do you have anything planned for this afternoon?” she asked then instantly regretted it. What would he have planned? A date? A movie? A game of ultimate Frisbee? He could neither handle money nor drive.

Luca turned to her with lazy eyes, blinking. “No,” he said.

The cell in Carmen’s pocket rang and she reached for it. “Why don’t you go shoot some baskets?” she said, stuck between wanting to care for her son and trying not to treat him like a child. It was a delicate balance under any circumstances, especially right now as she burned from shame. To have failed to calculate Jobe’s loss in terms of Luca—and figure out how to mitigate it—this, even more than her other sins, was unforgivable. She’d been not only selfish but blind.
“We’ll go out later, to a movie and dinner. We can take Michael and Jeffrey. Where are they, anyway?”

“CVS.” Luca nodded. “Twizzlers,” he said gravely, elongating the two z’s, then rose. She answered her phone at the last possible second as Luca pushed the screen door aside, making a space just large enough for his body to slip through, and disappeared outside.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Car, you alright?” Danny asked. He sounded guilty, his tone a little strangled. It occurred to Carmen for the first time that he had never called to ask about her doctor visit.

“No, actually, I have cancer.”

“Oh, Christ.” Danny took a long breath and choked at the end. “Hold on. I gotta get out of here.” She heard him mumbling in the distance—the phone no doubt held down by his hip, covered with one hand—and then there was the leaf-crunching sound of movement.

“Okay, I’m outside now,” he said after this, his voice nearer now than it had been without the stone library walls to make it echo. “What’s going on?”

Carmen glanced around. Still, the boys weren’t back. But she’d have to be fast. “I went in for a mammogram on Wednesday. They saw something on the films and took me immediately for an MRI. Then a biopsy. And I got the official results on Monday.” She counted on her fingers. This was Friday. Had it really been only four days since her future contracted and her entire post-Jobe life began wavering in front of her like a mirage?

“I’m going in for surgery next week. Tuesday.” Less than two weeks from the mammogram to possibly losing a part of her body. Fourteen days if she counted back to Danny’s actually detecting the cancer. She ran one finger along the rough wood grain of the table. She might have had an extra month or two of ignorance without him. Or maybe, if it hadn’t been touched and examined and named, her comet might have dissolved, those deranged cells turning into brown powder she could simply cough out.

“Goddamn, I was afraid of that.” Danny’s voice brought her
back to reality. “Carmen, I’m …” He stopped and she heard the flare of a match. Looking outside, she saw that it was windless, everything preternaturally still: the best weather to be a smoker outside. “Listen,” he said, and the change was complete: Here was her husky lover, certain and soothing. “I want to go with you. To the surgery, I mean. Have you called anyone else?”

She stopped moving her finger. “No. But how do we explain this?”

“If there’s no one else there, we don’t have to. The doctors aren’t going to care. What do you think, the nurses are going to check my marital status? I’ve got about twenty personal days racked up so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

Carmen considered this. She imagined Danny sitting in a chair while she lay on a metal slab dressed in a backless shift and had a needle inserted into her arm. Then there would be that fog after, as she was coming out of the anesthesia acting not drunk but dumb. She would be sick and weak. Jobe had been stalwart about minor surgeries but twice she’d had to stop on the way home so he could lurch out and vomit by the side of the road. She had gotten out and run around the car, only to stand helplessly while he retched and the traffic whipped by. Then she’d hunched beside him to put one hand on his knee and ask, “Better now?” before helping him fold back into the passenger seat where he sprawled with a gray, dead-looking face.

She didn’t want Danny to see her this way. That wasn’t part of their deal.

“Where would you take me after?” she asked now. “It’s not like you can show up here and blend in with the kids. They’d wonder who this guy was and why he was around all of a sudden. They’d ask questions.”

“Tell them I’m a friend,” Danny said. “They don’t know all the people you do. They’d probably just go along.”

“Not in this situation. Siena would know.” Carmen saw her daughter’s flashing, appraising eyes. Heard her words from that first night:
You seem glad that he’s dead
.

“I suppose you’re right.” Was there a hitch of relief in these words? Disappointment? She couldn’t tell. “So who are you going to get?”

“I’m thinking Jana. Though she’ll have to get someone to fill in at the café. It’s going to screw up her whole week.”

“Yeah, I think she’ll understand.”

There was a pause. Time, she knew, for Danny to crush out his cigarette and head back inside. “The reason I called,” Carmen said quickly. “I’m worried about the house: first Jobe’s lymphoma, now this. I think maybe this place is contaminated somehow and I was hoping you could …” She waited, but Danny did not fill in the words. Clearly, he had no idea what she was hoping he could do. “Would you look this up, do some research, you know, help me figure out who to talk to, what kind of contractor can find out if we’re living in Amityville?”

“Car?” Danny’s voice was gentle. “Didn’t you tell me once that your mother had breast cancer? That she”—he hesitated slightly before finishing—“died of it?”

Carmen stopped, shame filling and confusing her. Having the house checked out had seemed like such a reasonable, scientific path to follow—the sort of thing Jobe might have thought of—but it was only more voodoo, her trying to avoid the facts. “Yes,” she said, her tone as grudging as the teenager’s she’d been back when her mother was ill.

“Well, you know this disease runs in families, right?” Danny asked. “Any woman with a first-degree relative is twice as likely—”

“Jesus! Do you
memorize
all these statistics?”

“I can’t help it. They stick in my head.”

Carmen wandered in circles, scuffing her bare feet against floor and carpet in turn, feeling crazy. She’d always thought of Danny as the anti-Jobe. Now, here they were, having a conversation she could easily imagine having with her husband before he died.

“Forget about it,” she said. Outside, she could hear the younger boys calling to Luca; then they were climbing up the porch steps,
plastic bags full of candy rustling against their knees. “It was a stupid idea.”

“No, no, I’ll call someone today. It can’t hurt. What are you thinking about, like chemicals, formaldehyde, asbestos, that kind of thing?”

“Sure.” She hated being soothed. “Listen, I really have to …”

She was about to say
go
, but then Danny broke in, speaking in a continuous rush: “I’m worried about you …. I can’t sleep …. Ever since that day, I’ve been wishing I could be there …. I think … I love you.” Then there was a click.