The Forever Marriage (16 page)

Carmen turned off her cell phone and gazed at it lying in the palm of her hand. After so many furtive conversations it was almost as if this instrument contained her relationship with Danny. By folding it up and slipping it into her pocket, she could keep his words there.

She turned slowly as the door opened and the boys entered. In the background there was the rhythmic sound of Luca shooting baskets, a ball
thunk
ing against the garage, punctuated by the sound of his shouting—“Yes!” “That was a good one”—echoes of Jobe. Michael came toward her, extending his arm like a dance partner; but instead of taking her hand when she offered it, he deposited an enormous wad of chewed gum in her palm. Both he and Jeffrey laughed wildly and Carmen laughed, too, as she shook the gob into the waste-basket and scrubbed dramatically at her hand with a Kleenex.

“
Ratatouille
is here!” Jeffrey shouted in his underdeveloped voice. “Can we go?”

“It’s a cartoon, a kids’ movie,” Michael sneered. “I don’t want to see some stupid cartoon about a mouse.”

“It’s a rat.” Luca stood in the doorway, sweat dripping from his square jaw, holding the basketball under one arm. “I want to see it.”

“Me too,” said Carmen. “You’re outnumbered, three to one.”

Michael flopped on the couch and stuck a long red licorice into his mouth. “Okay, fine,” he said, grinning as he chewed. He had secretly wanted to see the cartoon movie all along, and for a moment Carmen’s world felt right.

* * *

“Well, it’s a brilliant strategy,” Jana said as she switched her blinker on. “I’d have expected Danny to turn tail, but instead he’s goobering all over you with this different-kind-of-love crap. It’s like something out of a made-for-TV movie:
Our Special Love
. Maybe he’s trying to turn you off with it, get
you
to leave
him
.”

It was dawn and the sun, newly risen, glinted viciously in Carmen’s eyes. She closed them, rather than squint. “It’s really amazing that I asked you to come with me for comfort, don’t you think?” She slouched in the bucket seat of Jana’s little roadster, pleasantly buzzy from the Xanax she’d dry swallowed just before leaving home. “A real sign of faith on my part. No matter how big a bully you are, I just keep believing you want only the best for me.”

“That,” Jana said, turning into the hospital parking lot, “is because it happens to be true.”

There were herds of them now, wherever Carmen went: women waiting for images of their breasts to be read and things extracted from them to be dissected and reported on. It was like becoming pregnant, when suddenly it had seemed as if everywhere she turned there was some other woman’s huge, bulbous stomach; they’d all somehow swollen up simultaneously, according to some master plan. And now, she sat in the waiting room with seven others who were within—she was pretty certain—about ten years of her age. Other than this, however, there was no common theme. They were black and white and one was a regal Indian, with a red dot on her forehead under the paisley headscarf she wore with her candy-pink gown. Several came with men, assumedly husbands. One woman who dozed in a corner chair seemed to be alone.

“I hate pink.” Carmen gazed down at the robe, the smooth, plastic hospital bracelet, the socklets, all variations on the same shade. “I’m not even two weeks into this and I already can’t stand it. I can see the headline:
Cancer victim goes on rampage, strangles candy striper with pink rope
. Will you visit me in jail?”

“Only if you’ll give me some of those drugs,” Jana said. “You’re toast.” The Indian woman pursed her lips and angled her head
away from them, burrowing more deeply into her husband’s side.

Carmen felt a flicker of defiance followed by regret. The Xanax was making her experience every emotion more fully, as if it were a bath. Now, she was tearful that she’d offended this woman on such a difficult day. She wanted to apologize but her head was heavy and each word took real concentration, as if she had to locate it in a thick fog. So she settled for smiling and nodding, a carefully orchestrated gesture that she hoped didn’t look like a leer.

They sat for more than an hour: The room was hot, the drug started wearing off. Both fatigue and fear had set in. Carmen dug through her purse to find the pill bottle and swallowed another, just seconds before her name was called. “You’ll need to take those off,” said the nurse—oddly male, in his pink shift—as he pointed to the rings on her left hand. “No jewelry allowed in the surgical suite. I can hold them for you.”

“That’s okay.” Jana had come out of her own early morning stupor and risen to stand beside Carmen. “Give them to me. I’ll hold on to them until you come out.”

Carmen calculated what she’d had to eat the night before: Szechuan, brimming with MSG.
What the hell
, she’d thought when she ordered.
It’s time to live like every day is my last
. Now, even without trying to remove the rings, her fingers felt like tight, inflated sausages. There was no way she would get them off.

“I’m not sure,” she said, twisting the sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring she’d worn for twenty-two years and yanking it up to the knot her knuckle made. “They’re kind of stuck on, I think.”

“Here.” The nurse produced a plastic bottle of hand lotion out of the pocket of his scrubs. Carmen found this so unlikely, she wanted to check inside to see what else he had (an Allen wrench? a plastic Papa Smurf?). Instead of handing her the bottle, he cradled her left hand in his and squirted some lotion on, using his right to slick the wetness up and down her finger until he could work the rings off. Carmen stared dumbly; this was weirdly intimate. And this man reminded her in some vague way of her older son. He didn’t have
Down’s, clearly, but he did have the solid stance, stubby limbs, and darting, green eyes. With a grunt, he finally worked the set up and over her knuckle, then free of her hand. He gave the rings to Jana, though he scrutinized her as he did. “Okay if your friend holds on to these?” he asked. “I could lock ’em up in the safe if you’d rather. They look pretty expensive.”

You have no idea
, Carmen almost said.
That’s a million two you were slathering with Jergen’s
. But she didn’t. “Jana should keep them,” she said then realized how that had sounded. Carmen hadn’t meant keep them forever. There was, she found, a loss when they came off her finger that had nothing to do with their worth. She felt off-balance and unprotected somehow. She wanted to correct what she’d said, just in case there was some misunderstanding, but her head swam. That second pill was kicking in.

Thankfully, Jana understood. “They’ll be here when you’re done,” she said, slipping the rings onto her own finger and holding it up for Carmen to see. “Look, a perfect fit. We’re married now, it’s my dream come true. Now get out of here and come back healed.”

Carmen smiled and nodded, though she didn’t feel like it. She was, in fact, terrified in a way she never had been before. She’d been stripped of everything: her clothes, her rings, her friend. Now she was being led by the portly nurse the way prisoners were walked to death. She wondered if this is how her mother felt, or Jobe—or if his mistaken belief that she was in the waiting room crazy with worry and praying for a miracle helped him in this moment. Carmen sniffled. She hoped it had.

“Hey, don’t worry, this is going to be just fine.” The nurse slipped his arm around Carmen’s waist as if they were a couple, out strolling. And this is when she realized that she’d been crying. “You took a Xanax, didn’t you?”

Two
, Carmen almost blurted out, then—as her thoughts ground slowly through the mechanisms of caution—simply nodded.

“It has this effect, a lot of times. You get a little weepy. But we’re going to take really good care of you. My name’s Pete and I’m going
to stay with you the entire way. We’ll have you back to your lady friend in no time.”

Carmen brightened at this. Had she been a little less stoned, she might have laughed. But the image of she and Jana—a happy couple the way she and Jobe had never been—brought her great pleasure. Perhaps, she thought woozily, she should suggest it afterward. Jana could move in and help her raise the children. Carmen tried to imagine taking off her friend’s tie-dyed cap, striped cape, and cotton clothes and she stumbled. “Whoa, there. I think you better take my arm.” Pete tucked her hand inside his elbow, as if they were walking together down the aisle of a church. “You don’t look it but you’re kind of a lightweight, aren’t you?”

Carmen leaned gratefully. “Will they cut it off?” she asked. “What do you think? Does this doctor like to do that?”

Pete was unperturbed, clearly used to this question. “You signed, giving permission if the cells have spread?” he asked, and Carmen nodded. “Then the answer is yes, if there’s any sign at all he’ll perform a mastectomy. Dr. Woo is kind of a zero-tolerance guy where cancer is concerned. He thinks you just get rid of it. And he’s right; his success rate is very high.”

Pete led her through a doorway, into a room that looked not like a surgery but like a birthing suite, without the fancy linens. In the center was a normal hospital bed surrounded by equipment: monitors and masks and two IV stands. “Time to get in,” Pete said, pulling back the white top sheet. “Doc’s on a schedule. He should be here any minute.”

She lay, stretched out like corpse, while Pete said, “You’ll feel a pinch now,” and slipped a needle under her skin. Of course, even if Danny were here, he would not have witnessed this humiliation. Like Jana, he’d have been in the room with the Indian husband and the lone woman in the corner—who had still, cruelly, been waiting when Carmen was called. Neither would he have been here to see her breathing speed up or the odd, utterly lonely feeling envelop her. Lying on this cot in the midst of shiny metal and white tile, she had become,
suddenly, as small as an insect under glass. She could stop breathing as Jobe had that morning not long ago.

For the first time, Carmen felt not guilty but genuinely grieved. Tears ran down the sides of her face and into her ears. “What is this?” said the man who came into the room, scrubbed and masked, only his narrow eyes peering out over the blue. Oh, thank God, blue, Carmen thought as she wept. The doctor was not wearing pink. This was a very good sign.

Then there was haze and people moving above her: several masked, capped heads, the floating presence of a set of eyes that shone from the brightly lighted room as if it were darkness. Carmen blinked at them, only really it was just half a blink: she closed but neglected to open. There was a rubbery smell, like tires. And then she was gone.

Afterward, in the recovery room, she would remember nothing and have to be told about how she inhaled the anesthetic for three minutes before going easily to sleep. Jana had materialized beside her and the doctor was speaking to them earnestly. Without his mask, he had a shiny, round face and hands that fluttered and gestured. He had gotten the whole tumor, he said, making a scooping motion as if with ice cream. The margins, he told Carmen proudly as if she’d accomplished something, were clean. Here, he used his hands the way men do when they’re outlining a woman, only the shape he made was of her comet and not humanlike. She was a lucky lady, he said, with very little to worry about. She should go home and wait for the path report. Eat well.

It wasn’t until he said this that Carmen realized how nauseated she was. She lay back on the bed, which seemed—if it were possible for one hospital bed to be different from another—not the one that had been wheeled from her surgery into this cubicle. But Jana was bringing her clothes, pulling them out of a plastic bag and piling them at her feet. “Time to leave,” she said. And though Carmen wanted to question this, asking for just a few more minutes the way she had when her mother awakened her for school, she sat up abruptly and the room began to turn.

“Here.” Jana handed her a shirt. And Carmen, without any warning or noise, took it and was immediately sick all over it.

“Jesus!” Jana said, jumping back. “Now what the fuck do we do?”

She was gone for two or three minutes during which time Carmen sat with her eyes closed. “Can we give her a shower?” she heard Jana ask someone when she returned.

“Sorry.” This voice was female, not Pete’s. What happened to his promise to stay with her? This could be just a taste of the infidelity Carmen deserved—her life to come. “She’s not in a room with shower privileges,” the woman’s voice floated in. “You’re just going to have to clean her up with water and get her home.”

“Fine.” But Jana did not sound fine at all.

Carmen felt the washcloth on her arms, Jana’s hesitant touch as she picked up Carmen’s messy hands to clean between the fingers. It was soothing, nonetheless: Even a caregiver who was clearly disgusted could help. Suddenly, Carmen’s eyes flew open. She looked at Jana, who was stone-faced and perspiring. But she was there, after all, lifting Carmen’s hand to wipe under her wrist, Jobe’s jewels glinting from her ring finger.

“They used to be in yellow gold,” Carmen said, tapping the largest sapphire. “He had them reset in white gold because I wanted it. He wanted them to be mine.”

“The man loved you.” It wasn’t a statement or an accusation, but somewhere in between. “Here, I think you’re ready to have these back.” Jana slipped the rings off and handed them to Carmen, then went to the sink and began washing her hands over and over, using big squirts of soap. “You’re going to have to wear a hospital shirt home,” she said over her shoulder. “They’ll probably charge you for it but, whatever ….”

“Yeah, the one thing I have is money. Isn’t that strange?” Carmen pulled on her jeans and leaned over—another woozy moment, but she managed to control herself—to slip on her shoes. “It doesn’t help. Not at all.”

“I’ve heard that about money,” Jana said. “Of course, I’ve never had the opportunity to find out.”

Siena watched from the front door as Carmen and Jana haltingly climbed the steps. They wore the same expressions she had whenever Jobe had come back from another surgery or treatment: part worry, part revulsion, part terror. This had always struck Carmen as precisely the right mix, and it still did now. She tried to smile at her daughter on the way past but succeeded only in straining her eyes. She closed them the moment Jana deposited her on the living room couch.