The Forever Marriage (25 page)

They were silent for a time. Out in the hall, doors creaked open and thudded closed. People ran and laughed and got ice. The darkness deepened. Carmen waited for Danny to walk out, for their door to slam shut.

Instead he walked forward and put his hand on her head,
atop the long, curly mass of hair that would soon be gone. “I’m not leaving,” he said.

Carmen raised her head, exerting pressure against his palm. She felt about six years old. “Why do you even like me?” she asked.

There was a faint memory, something she couldn’t place. A cool night, a sugary smell, the movement of a swing. Then it disappeared.

Danny sighed. “I don’t know, Car. Sometimes I really don’t.” He paused, and she thought that was all there was. “But I think it has something to do with your fierceness. You take care of everyone—even Jobe, the guy you say you never loved. At the end when you were cleaning the shit from his sheets. I kind of liked that. Jesus, you’re kind of a bully but …” His hand dropped away and he sat on the bed next to her. “For some reason, I just sort of. Love you for it.”

Carmen nodded. There were glimmers of that long-ago ice cream shop appearing in her memory like a house behind a thick stand of pines. She rested her head on Danny’s shoulder and they stayed that way, silent, until he had to leave and go home.

Olive arrived at dawn dressed in a smart yellow suit—the kind one might wear to an afternoon luncheon—and pushed her way through the screen door onto the sun porch where her son had died. Carmen stood watching from her spot in the kitchen. It was approximately where she’d been when Jobe stopped breathing, and this time, too, she was holding a cup in her hand. But—because she was leaving to be stuck with needles, poisoned and instantly nauseated—rather than coffee, she was drinking weak tea.

“Hello, dear.” Olive crossed the porch and set her purse down on the kitchen counter. “Are you ready?”

Never!
Carmen shivered. “Just about,” she said. “Can I get you something?”

“I’m fine.” Olive fingered the brooch at her throat. It looked like rhinestones but Carmen knew it was not. “I stopped for a little breakfast on the way here.”

“Okay.” Carmen gulped the last inch of her tea and put the cup in the sink, feeling irrationally irritable and rushed. “I’ll just grab my stuff and we can go.”

They had been like this—formal and stilted—since that disastrous talk in Olive’s car, the day of the meeting with Dr. Woo. Olive had phoned the following evening to ask when Carmen’s first chemotherapy session was scheduled and inform her that she, Olive, would be accompanying her. There was an unnaturally hard edge to her voice. Carmen wondered for one frantic moment if her mother-inlaw simply wanted a front seat to her suffering—to watch the shrew, who hadn’t loved her son well, writhe and retch and die.

But when she climbed into the front seat of Olive’s Mercedes, Carmen had to hoist herself over a pile of supplies on the floor: bottles of sparkling water, brand-new magazines, a bag of hard ginger candies. “I was remembering Jobe’s treatments,” Olive said curtly. “I thought those things might help.”

“Thanks.” Carmen slumped, which was due to the early hour but also, probably, to the way she was dressed. She’d been warned to make herself “comfortable” over and over, as if you
could
be comfortable while someone was pumping toxins into your blood. Grudgingly, she’d put on her sweat suit, fuzzy white socks, and tennis shoes. Her hair was unbrushed and wild, which she liked. The more present it could be, the better.

“I have a favor to ask,” she said. As if this weren’t favor enough. But Olive didn’t seem perturbed.

“What can I do?”

“I need to tell Michael, today. I just haven’t had the … I know I should have. But he’s so young, and he’s still really upset about Jobe. I thought it might be easier on him if you were there.”

“Of course.” Two words, perfectly even. Suddenly, Carmen was irritated with Olive. With this whole
uncomfortable
situation. It was a puzzle whether she had a right to be, but she was too anxious to figure it out.

“I still don’t know what to do about my job,” she volunteered
after a few miles. Here was a nice, neutral topic. “I got the paperwork yesterday and reinstated Jobe’s insurance, just in case. But I don’t know if I want to let go of mine … stop working.” Carmen looked out the window. It was early enough, there were only a few cars on the road—mostly people drinking coffee out of enormous white paper cups.

“Do you
like
your job?” Olive asked. “It’s always been hard to tell.”

Carmen narrowed her eyes. Olive’s voice was pleasant. But this could be code, a clever way of circling back to the subject of Carmen’s fickle nature. Finally, she shrugged. “I don’t love it, I don’t hate it. It was …” What? A way to bide time, to get out of the house, to provide an easy excuse for her afternoons with Danny? “No, I guess I don’t really like the work much. I just always thought I should.”

“Should what, dear?”

“Should have a career, something that made me of use, beyond being just a wife and mother.”

“You’ve been of use,” Olive said starchily, turning into the parking lot. They’d arrived. The torture was about to start. Carmen got out of the car as slowly as she could, then reached down to get the gifts Olive had brought her. “No matter what you might think,” Olive said, as they walked up the concrete path. “You were necessary.”

It was such a strange comment, Carmen remained distracted during the battery of invasive questions and tests that followed. A lab tech dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt had Carmen leave a urine sample, drew her blood, and inserted a needle with a short, floppy tube into the back of her hand. Then he led her into a barnlike room whose walls were lined with chairs that looked like they’d come from a dental office—with padded headrests and feet that could be raised. Each one had an IV stand next to it, a small metal table, an emesis basin. Two patients were lying back already with bright amber fluid flowing into them.

“You’re early,” he said. “Pick your spot.”

“You mean?” She stopped. This was worse than anything that had happened so far. Jobe’s treatments had taken place in a small, private
cubicle at Johns Hopkins; now she understood that it had been a favor to someone in his department. “We’re all in this room together? Isn’t there anywhere else?”

At precisely that moment, one of the two patients already receiving treatment lurched forward and vomited with a noisy slosh into his basin; he paused then repeated with a deep, rumbling throat-clearing sound. Then he lay back in his chair and closed his eyes, as if nothing had happened.

The tech seemed not to have noticed. “Nope, this is it. Better for the nurses, you know. They can keep an eye on all of you at the same time.”

Carmen walked forward into this new nightmare. She chose a chair as far from the other two people as she could get, and the tech gamely went to retrieve a folding chair for Olive. But just as Carmen was getting settled in, her feet up and head back, a bald woman with a pinched face, penciled-on eyebrows, and a bag of knitting in her hand came and took the chair immediately to their right.

“I just want to get this over with,” Carmen said to Olive. But they sat for nearly fifteen minutes in tense silence, waiting. A nurse came out with a bag she was holding by the ends and tipping from side to side, but she went directly to the stand behind the bald patient and hung it there, fussing as she attached the tubing to the woman’s IV. “But we were here first!” Carmen cried, loud enough for the woman in the adjoining chair to hear and turn.

It’s no honor
, her small eyes seemed to say.
Just you wait
.

Then another nurse appeared—the twin of the first—with her bag, an even brighter, more luridly orange concoction, and hung it above Carmen’s head. Reaching for the end of the tube that snaked down, she uncapped it without a word and clipped it neatly into the needle in Carmen’s hand. Both she and Olive looked down as the first of the poison entered her body.
I can’t believe I’m doing this
. Carmen put her head back.
This is insane
. But she didn’t object. Rather, as in the MRI machine, she lay perfectly still.

“Does it hurt you, dear?”

Carmen looked up and Olive’s face was twisted. Clearly she was in pain, and love for her mother-in-law swelled in Carmen. “No,” she said, reaching out with her free hand to brush the sunny yellow sleeve of Olive’s suit. It was the one bright spot in this barren room, Carmen realized. Like a daisy in the desert. “It’s just, I think about Jobe.” She watched Olive flinch inside her clothes, but it was a small movement and she covered it well. “After watching him go through this, the treatments. You know they killed him—maybe slower than the cancer would have. I don’t know. But doing this …” She glanced at the glowing bag above her head. “It feels like an invitation. Like I’m just inviting death in.”

Olive shook her head. “You’re wrong. This will help you. I saw it in a dream.” She blinked, as if she was appalled at what she’d just said. “Or at least, I think it was a dream. Jobe was there.”

Carmen stared at the ceiling—beige acoustic tiles with tiny holes—and wondered if perhaps
she
was the one who was sleeping. Or crazy. Or dead already. None of this seemed real, not the chemicals coursing into her arm or the old woman sitting beside her, talking about clairvoyant dreams. She closed her eyes and then recalled something.

“Luca talks about this, too, getting messages from Jobe.” Now Carmen was floating, the hum of other voices in the room comforting rather than intrusive, her legs heavy in the chair. “I didn’t believe him.”
Was this true?

“Believe him,” came Olive’s voice through the haze. “And believe Jobe when he comes to you.”

Carmen shook her head, side to side on the padded cushion of the chair. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do.”

Carmen peeked. The room was full now, lit with fluorescents, but thankfully cool. Some people had covered themselves with quilts. “What in Christ’s name are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about my son, how he loved you. And how you …” She stopped and examined the back of one liver-spotted hand. “Loved him.”

“Olive, I …” Carmen’s stomach twisted. Was it the chemo, already making her sick? She waited, reminding herself to vomit on the side of the chair where Olive wasn’t sitting, to avoid spattering the brilliant yellow suit. But the twinge passed. “I’m sorry about that. I thought …”

“No, no.” Olive held up her hand. “If anyone’s sorry, it should be me. Believe me, Jobe let me know that.”

“You mean from the great beyond?” Carmen struggled to keep the derision out of her voice and failed.

“No.” Olive laughed and sat up even straighter, knees crossed. Damn, the woman had Tina Turner legs. Carmen could easily imagine her mother-in-law on stage. “I mean when he was alive. We talked about it, a couple times, just before he died. He was pretty upset about the way we—I—railroaded you. He said I did it like I was acquiring a small company. Or snaring you in my web.” She flashed a grin. “He started calling me the Black Widow, after George died.”

The smile faded, slowly, until Olive’s expression was smooth and serious again. “I told myself over the years that it was the right thing, that you were too young to understand your own feelings. My son was such a wonderful man, so intelligent and fine, I was sure you’d grow to love him over time.” Tears gathered in Olive’s eyes and she blinked. Her training was ingrained. She would never, under any circumstances, weep in public. “Before your wedding, I told him the same thing.”

“I did love him.” Oddly, when Carmen said this, it actually felt like the truth.

“Yes, you did, but not the way …” Olive looked into the distance, as if watching something unrelated to the twenty sick and dying people in the room. “Not the way you should have.”

Carmen was silent.

“When you had Michael after all those years had passed, I told myself it had happened. You’d fallen for Jobe, just the way I planned. The way couples do in an arranged marriage. Then he got sick and you stayed, you took care of him. When he died I thought—no, I convinced
myself; I was sure—you were mourning the love of your life. You seemed so remote, so inconsolable….”

Next to them, a stick-thin man called for his nurse. He had to go to the bathroom, immediately. There was a scuffle, but they didn’t reach him in time. Urine leaked onto the floor in an acrid, yellow stream.

Remote, inconsolable
. The words echoed through Carmen’s head. It was not an inaccurate description of the way she had felt.

There was an odor. She looked down and saw that the trail of urine had snaked its way over. “Here, your shoes will get ruined.” Carmen nudged Olive. “Pick up your feet. Put them on the end of my chair.”

Olive did so. And they sat watching the clean-up team come in with mops and buckets, their feet clustered together, close enough to touch.

There was no real reason to rush the wedding. Carmen wasn’t pregnant; Jobe wasn’t shipping out to some foreign war. It simply made sense, Olive explained to nearly everyone they encountered that summer. Carmen heard the argument so many times, it echoed through her head every time she thought about the ceremony that would be held during the most oppressive days of summer.

Olive and George were giving the couple a honeymoon trip to Italy as a wedding present—one of several gifts, actually, but this went unmentioned—and it would be better for them to travel then. It would be warm there, too, Olive would concede; but the purpose, mostly, was for their darling new daughter-in-law to tour museums and study great art. Also, Jobe had taken a post at Johns Hopkins that would begin in the fall and they needed time to settle in before he began work.

Carmen sat in the plush dressing room of a bridal shop so exclusive, it did not have a street-facing entrance, listening as Olive went through her spiel for the sales clerk. “Perfectly understandable,” the woman said. Everything in this place was soft and rich, including the clerk’s voice and hair—a cloud of silky blond floss she had pulled back with a wide jeweled scarf.