The Forever Marriage (30 page)

He rose to leave again, but more slowly this time. “Have I answered your question?”

“Yes, thank you,” Carmen said quietly.

After he was gone, she gathered her things and let herself out. There were people in the halls of the clinic but they floated past Carmen, like faces in a dream. “One point in a set of millions.” Through the dark concrete parking ramp and as she drove out into the glinting sun, the phrase echoed like a far-off but persistent series of bells in her head.

Carmen was pawing through a box of papers when Danny showed up early, looking as nervous as if he were there to take her daughter out on a date.

“Prompt today, aren’t we?” she said, as she let him in. “Where’s the guy who used to keep me waiting twenty minutes in a hotel room?”

He blinked rapidly, looking as if he didn’t know whether to storm out or laugh. “I thought it was important. Kid just lost his father, his world keeps getting turned around. Showing up on time seemed like the least I could do.”

“That’s sweet.” She moved in and put her cheek briefly against his neck. It was warm. “I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to say. This just feels a little strange, you know, you being here.”

“It feels strange to me too.” She backed away, in case Michael heard them and came out. Danny looked around him. “This isn’t what I imagined.”

“But, wait …” Carmen pictured the cockier version of Danny, standing across this very room, chatting with Jobe’s brother Will. “You’ve been here before. After the funeral.”

“I suppose.” Danny stared soberly, as if he were just now mourning Jobe. “But it seems different now. Or, I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention back then.”

There was a pause. “So,” Carmen broke in, “what did you imagine?”

“Something haughtier, I guess. More …”

“Expensive looking?” He nodded and she laughed. “That would be my mother-in-law’s house, plenty of ancient Chinese vases and Persian rugs. I’ll have to wangle a dinner invitation for you.” She stopped to consider Danny and Olive together at a table. She couldn’t picture them in the dining room but could see them together in the kitchen—at the table where she and Olive had eaten grilled cheese sandwiches on Carmen’s first night in Baltimore—using their fingers to pluck bites from the same roasted chicken.

“Hello?” Danny’s voice and questioning tone interrupted her fantasy.

Carmen turned and there was Luca, planted in the doorway, watching Danny. “Hey, sweetheart.” She cleared her throat. This was ridiculously awkward. “You remember Danny, from the funeral?”

Luca didn’t respond one way or another but continued to stare, slit-eyed, exactly the way she’d taught him not to when he was a child. It didn’t seem right to correct him now that he was an adult; that would be humiliating. But why did Luca have to backslide in front of Danny, whom she’d tried to keep separate from every messy, imperfect detail in her life?

“Luca. Hi. It’s good to see you.” Danny stepped forward, crossing between Carmen and her son, to extend his hand.

Please shake his hand
, Carmen willed Luca silently. Whether in response to this or not, he did.

“Are you here for dinner?” Luca raised his nose as if to sniff the air. No, there was nothing cooking.

“I’m here to take your brother to a ballgame, actually,” Danny said.

“Grandma and I are …” Carmen jumped in to reassure Luca that she and Olive were taking him out, as well. Forever trying to make up for his disability with movies and treats.

“Michael’s afraid,” Luca told Danny, interrupting Carmen. “He
cries all night.” Luca made two fists and twisted them in front of his eyes in a comic book demonstration.

Danny was silent for a moment, looking Luca over. Once again, as she had in the chapel, Carmen saw how similar they were in size. These two men looked each other straight in the eyes.

“What do you think he needs?” She’d never heard Danny’s voice so gentle, certainly not with her. “What should I do for your brother?”

“Did you know our dad?” Luca asked.

Danny shook his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t. I think I would have liked him.”

“He was very
smart
.”
Thmaart
. Luca said this word reverently, which pained Carmen to the point that she almost missed what came next. “It’s like God died.”

It was a simile. This was the first thing Carmen noted. Once, a rather dim, young speech therapist had listed for her the things Luca could and could not learn to do. She would be able to help Luca eliminate the thickness from his pronunciation, the woman said, but he was incapable of grasping higher-level language skills, such as metaphor and simile. Carmen grinned. The woman had been wrong on both points.

Then, she heard the actual words her son had used.
It’s like God died
. For a moment, the world around her felt turned inside-out in the way of a reversed glove that looks right except for the seam. Then it flipped back.

She blinked and glanced at Danny who wore a questioning expression, as if asking her,
What do I say now?
Carmen shrugged. But she stepped forward and put her arm around Luca, drawing in his warmth. “Why don’t you go find your brother, then get ready for dinner?” she said. “Grandma will be here soon.”

“Okay.” Luca turned to go, then seemed to remember something. He turned and stuck his hand out again. “It was nice to meet you.” Words that long-ago speech therapist had taught him. She had—despite her prejudices—done a few things right.

“You, too,” Danny answered. “And I’m really sorry about your dad.”

After Luca left, everything was different. Her world had intruded completely and Carmen knew that she and Danny could never go back to the thrilling, secretive relationship they’d had before. So she might as well go for broke. “Got a couple minutes before you have to go?” she asked. “I’d like to show you something, get your opinion.”

Danny checked his watch. “Sure. I did leave the house way too early. Mega was …” He caught himself, still trying to adhere to the old rules. “Anyway, I’ve got time. What is it?”

“Come.” Carmen led him down the hall and into the dining room, where she’d already spread two boxes’ worth of papers across the surface of the table. “I’m trying to organize these. Figure out what’s important. But it’s like trying to glue together a bowl after it’s been shattered. Every piece looks similar. At least to me.”

Danny raised his reading glasses and picked up the sheet nearest his hand, squinting at the tiny penciled numbers. He put it down and picked up another, circling the table. After repeating this a half dozen times, he looked up at Carmen and pulled off his spectacles, letting them drop to his chest. “Maybe he really was God.”

Michael must have heard their voices. He edged into the room, shy, dressed in jeans and a Baltimore Orioles shirt and hat.

“Hey, sweetheart.” Carmen worked to sound casual. “This is Danny, your escort for the evening.”
That was a stupid old mom thing to say
, she thought immediately. Danny probably was looking at her now as a doddering, inane housewife. But there was no way she could think of to sex up her image now, in front of her son.

Thank God they’d given up on their plan to stage an accidental getting-to-know-you breakfast. Originally, they’d been going to meet at Sunrise Deli, pretending to bump into each other while she was out on a Sunday morning with Michael. But Mega had seemed to catch on and suddenly she needed Danny to help her plant some rosebushes that weekend; she’d never, in their eight years of marriage, cultivated a single other thing, Danny swore.

It was fine, Carmen told him. She’d guessed wrong about Michael at every turn, assuming he’d crumble when she disclosed her cancer
only to sit down with him and Olive and have him take the news with prosaic calm.
Yes, parents do this; they get cancer
. It was just another outlandish thing about them, like the way they insisted you clean your room every week even though no one was going to see it but you.

“I’d made such a big deal of it, asking Olive to be there with me.” Carmen laughed, re-creating the conversation for Danny so it was absurdly light. “But Michael was just like, ‘That’s a bummer. Can I get back to MySpace now?’”

“Maybe this baseball game was a stupid idea.” Danny had already bought the tickets from a coworker and Carmen thought she could hear disappointment in his voice. “He seems to be coping just fine.”

Why did she do this?
In order to preserve her stupid pride, she’d made Michael sound heartless.

“No,” she said, serious now and telling the absolute truth. “He’s coping just fine with my being sick but he’s still heartbroken over Jobe. Michael is
like
me, but he was much closer to his father.” She paused for a beat. “All the kids were.”

“Michael,” Danny said now and walked around the dining room table. “I’m Danny. Good to meet you.”

For the second time that afternoon, Carmen watched her lover reach out to press his fingers and palm against the hand of one of Jobe’s sons. Dust hung in the air, light shifting—raising shadows—between her and the two dark-haired forms. She remembered the night at the restaurant more than a year ago, Jobe’s hand stretching out across the table, touching Danny’s.

And again there was that image. The golden circles appearing, sinking, and dissolving, like ripples in a pond. Carmen felt buoyant, the room around her an aquarium in which her body bobbed.

“Paired prime ideals occur more often in commutative rings,” Michael said, pronouncing each syllable with exaggerated care,

Carmen was jolted. “Excuse me?”

“Right there, it says that.” Michael pointed to a random paper lying cockeyed on the table, where it was written complete with a question mark. “I think Dad did it.”

She remembered Jobe’s voice now, a reedy tenor. She’d always longed for him to be low and husky, more muscular sounding. Yet now, she found the memory of his oboe-hued words as soothing as a lullaby.

“Order is everywhere in mathematics,” Jobe had told her. It was nighttime and they were sitting somewhere in moonlight—on a porch or under a blank black sky waiting for fireworks to begin. “It’s the rule, the basic structure. But even within that ordered universe, there are random occurrences. Sparks.” His hands had flickered in space when he said this, dancing. “Just like in life.”

She was back at the dining room table, hunched over the piles of papers again, when Olive walked in.

Carmen craned her head to peer at the clock on the kitchen wall. “You’re late! That’s so unlike you. And just this afternoon, someone who’s always running behind …” Carmen trailed off then, unable even to talk about Danny—the man for whom she’d once waited for an hour in a Super 8 Motel, checking her watch every few minutes, only to discover later he’d been waylaid by a surprise visit from his wife’s parents—despite the fact that he was rapidly turning into a benign family friend.

“I know. I was, well, sleeping.” Olive sat. Her hair, for the first time in Carmen’s experience, was ruffled. And there was a pillow crease, thick and red among the wrinkles on Olive’s cheek. “I’m sorry, dear. I don’t know what came over me this afternoon. I was so tired I couldn’t take another step, so I thought I’d lie down for a few moments. But when I woke up, hours had passed.” She gazed at Carmen wonderingly, glassy-eyed. “And such dreams! It took me some time to get free of them.”

“Are you alright?” Carmen asked, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. This of all things had never occurred to her, that Olive might become frail or sick. It was ridiculous that it hadn’t; the woman was seventy-three. She’d been through the deaths of her husband and
her son. “Here, you sit. Let me get you a glass of water. Or some wine?”

“Actually, dear, if you wouldn’t mind. A little scotch over ice wouldn’t hurt.”

Carmen grinned. “No problem. I think I’ll join you. Unemployment has its perks. Though we may have to call a cab to get to the restaurant.”

Olive waved her hand—that gesture she seemed to have been born making. “What the hell?” she said, and Carmen gaped. Had her mother-in-law opened her mouth and begun barking it couldn’t have come as more of a surprise. Then she laughed.

“You
are
in a strange mood.”

“Yes.” Olive pulled a compact and a hairbrush out of her purse and began straightening her silver curls. “You may as well bring the bottle.”

It took Carmen several minutes to get everything together. Someone—Siena and Troy, no doubt—had emptied all the ice trays and stuck them back in the freezer without refilling them. So Carmen was left to chip shards out of the automatic icemaker they’d given up using because it created a discolored glaciery block. Finally, Carmen returned to the dining room carrying two glasses filled with yellowish ice and the Glenlivet from Jobe’s study. It was as if she and Olive had simply switched places; now the older woman was bent over the papers that Carmen had been studying, shaking her head and muttering to herself as she leafed through.

“Oh, thank God,” Olive said when she saw Carmen. “I’m going to need to drink if I want to understand any of this.”

“Believe me, there isn’t enough scotch in all of Edinburgh.” Carmen set the glasses down and poured a couple inches into each. “I’ve been going through these all day. I had this friend of mine …” She grew warm, but handed Olive her drink and went on. “He’s a librarian and used to deciphering things, but he couldn’t understand any of this. He said from what he’s read, Jobe was working in an area no one else understands.”

“No offense intended to your friend, dear, but I think it might be better to have a mathematician go through them.”

Carmen’s cheeks burned in earnest. She turned to the sideboard to refill her drink. “I thought of that,” she said, facing the mirror on the wall. Her eyes were huge in her face, her hair lustrous and longer than it had been in years. She looked—for this brief moment—the way she had during that trip to New York with Olive more than twenty years before. “But what’s to stop that person from saying there’s nothing here, then taking all the work Jobe did and stealing it?” Swiveling, she tipped the bottle over Olive’s glass. “Maybe I’ve just watched too much
Law & Order
, but it seems like a risk. Besides, I was looking for something math geeks wouldn’t necessarily pick up on.”