The Forever Marriage (41 page)

“But see? It is alright. You do not.” Althea stood and opened her arm wide, pointing toward the table like a girl on a game show. “The solution, it is here.”

“So what do we do with it now?” Carmen reached for the half-full glass Althea had taken from her but before she could grasp it, the girl picked it up and handed it to her.

“There is a …” Althea stood, thinking, an exasperated expression on her face. “Prize!” she finally said triumphantly. “The Clay In … Insti—”

“Institute?”

Althea nodded. “It is in Boston.”

“What kind of prize?” Carmen asked.

“It is one million dollar.” The girl’s pale eyes shone. “Would Jobe’s name go on the solution? And yours, of course. Could you write it? You can certainly have the prize money.”

“Oh, no!” Althea looked horrified, hair coming loose from her scrunchie and electric around her head. “I am tiny part, should have only a few dollar.”

“Mom?” Something had just ended on TV and Luca was calling from the other room, no doubt starving.

“We’ll deal with that later,” Carmen said, rising. She grabbed the table for support but didn’t need it. Her legs felt skinny but strong. “You need to eat and get some rest. But can you start on this in the morning?”

Althea nodded. And on the way to the kitchen where she would place an enormous order with Wok and Roll, Carmen reached out to take the girl’s arm. “Don’t worry. My mother-in-law will be here soon. Jobe’s mother. You’ll like her. She’ll take very good care of you while you work.”

They flew out on a Wednesday, skimming through the rose-colored sunset, retrieving their suitcases, and emerging from Logan Airport into a windy moonlit night.

Carmen shivered and commented to Jobe that she could feel it, the difference. What was it about location—movement just four hundred miles along the shore of a shared ocean—that made everything seem completely foreign? She closed her eyes and breathed in the diesel fumes from trucks growling along distant highways. This was the smell of her youth, of Detroit, only in Boston it was mixed with magnolia and salt air.

You should be here
, she thought fleetingly.
But you are here
, she answered herself.

They were all a bit ragged and weary. The flight had been delayed nearly three hours, during which they had eaten a meal too late to be lunch and far too early for dinner in a crowded restaurant on the main concourse, and Siena pointed out they could have driven half the distance in the time they sat. The food was heavily salted but otherwise tasteless. Yet Carmen ate diligently as she did these days, still trying to
pad her body the way a sculptor adds wet clay, one layer at a time, to make a rounder, more voluptuous shape. The room buzzed with an uneven noise. When they finally boarded the plane, Carmen felt the sort of relief one did leaving the dentist’s office and entering a quiet car.

Then Siena slept—or pretended to—while Luca stared out the window, riveted by the rushing, darkening sky. Olive ordered a martini that she somehow made last for the entire flight. And Michael, using the laptop Carmen had given him for Christmas, watched half a movie that involved both martial arts and cross-dressing, actually complaining when the plane touched down because he had to turn it off.

Now, standing at the curb, Carmen was suddenly bleary. Her shoulder stung where the strap of her purse cut into it. And getting a taxi to Cambridge large enough for five people and nine bags was turning out to be more difficult than she had anticipated. One after another, the drivers turned them down, pointing to their signs that said, M
AXIMUM CAPACITY
: 4. And they stood in a clump on the curb, perplexed, until Luca finally said, “Can’t we just take two?”

“I am so not the traveler I used to be,” Carmen said, hugging her older son. “Thank God you’re here.”

By the time they reached the hotel it was nearly midnight. Carmen paid for three rooms, handed the key cards all around, trying to keep track of who was rooming with whom and failing (there would be an exchange later), accepted with a weak smile the strapping, elderly bellhop’s offer of assistance, and followed him toward the room she’d taken for herself. She was aware, at moments like these, of the now blade-thin division between simply tired and beaten. Once she’d crossed the line, there was only a short time before she was gone.

Her room was small and square. The light coming in through the window was just enough to illuminate its outlines: a low, dark dresser, the angled open door to a tiny bathroom, and a bed that was taller than any she’d ever seen. The bellhop placed her suitcase on the floor and reached for the cord of a lamp, but Carmen put out her
hand to stop him and then handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “Ma’am, this is too …” he began, but she shook her head and nudged him bodily toward the door. It was like they were dancing and, too tired to speak, she caught his eye. The man chuckled. “Alright, ma’am. My name’s Joe. You just let me know if you need anything else.”

Once he was gone Carmen shrugged off her purse and sighed with relief. There was a footstool at the side of the bed and she climbed it then sat, dangling her feet off the edge of the bed, leaning over to unzip her black leather boots and letting them fall, each with a soft, carpety
clunk
, to the rug below.

She lowered herself back onto the mattress and groaned. This was like entering another country: something from a fairy tale, a magical, tufted sanctuary enveloping her in pillows and a feather-stuffed duvet. Scrabbling among the softness, Carmen tugged her dress over her head and peeled off her tights and bra. She threw these things over the side, imagining they would waft down and down and down for miles, then slipped naked under the covers and lay curled to the left, stroking her right hip with a feathery touch.

The room was all shifting shadows, its objects hazy as she let her gaze go loose. Only her top arm moved; the rest of her was perfectly still. And the hand she used seemed to draw its energy from some other source, traveling the length of her thigh, crossing the knee, returning up the inner side and finding that place that was, once again, damply warm after months of feeling barren and numb. The fingers moving there, gently circling, felt not like her own.

Sometimes exhaustion helped. It took only minutes to coax waves from her body and they rippled into the first velvety layer of a dream. She could have sworn she heard Jobe—for the first time in so long.
Thank you, Carmen
. Her body lay anchored to the bed, but she strained toward him elsewhere: a place hidden between her heart, her eyes, and her brain. He pushed her back with one golden hand then slipped it under to cradle her sleeping head.
Rest now
, he said.
Tomorrow, you will be fine
.

* * *

The next morning was sharp and deliciously cool.

Carmen awoke all at once and tested her limbs under the comforter, like a creature swimming. Everything, as the voice predicted, had been healed by sleep. She lay considering, remembering. It was a dream. That was the only explanation, really. But she couldn’t deny the existence of something left inside her—an iota of light or sound—that hadn’t been there before. Mulishly, she spent a few moments insisting to herself that she must stop this nonsense … or at least go to an expert (a psychiatrist? a psychic? she could never quite decide) to figure it out.

But after a time, Carmen gave in and lay calm.
You will never quit telling me what to do, will you?
she asked the space above her.
Even if you’re only in my head
.

She rose then to put on her robe and made coffee in the little pot that the hotel provided, pouring a cup and taking it to the balcony, a small platform with a waist-high fence around it jutting out over the street. Her coffee balanced on the wide rail, Carmen watched the college town’s rush hour traffic—the cars generally smaller and more worn than those in downtown Boston, but just as fervid—dart and angle busily below.

A breeze came up and she shivered, retreating back into her room. This was the longest she’d gone without speaking to another human being since that four-day stretch when she was unconscious. Since that time, the children and Jana and Olive had been hovering close. But now, bathed in silence, Carmen dropped her robe and stood in front of the mirror gazing at herself.

She had gained back more than half of the weight she’d lost last fall but retained a fragile, sparrow-boned look. Her eyes were huge and looked darker than before because her hair had come back in not only curly but a thick, snowy white. It was just long enough now that she wore it in the same style she had when she married: the 1920s bob cut short in the back and angled down toward her chin. Whether she should dye it had been a topic of some discussion; Jana had offered to do rainbow colors. But turning
her head from one side to the other in the hotel mirror, Carmen decided that for now she would leave it. She was different and it was right that this would be reflected. Perhaps her body knew what it was doing, even if she did not.

Other things had changed, too. Danny, for instance, had vanished for a time in the fall then appeared at the clinic during the third hour of her final chemotherapy treatment. Olive had accompanied her but must have stepped out while Carmen was dozing, because she had opened her eyes and there he was, materialized at her feet with six miniature roses on a ridiculously large cloud of baby’s breath and a tired, worried face.

He had offered Mega her freedom and the house, Danny told Carmen that day. But she had said no. Mega liked being married, the security of it, and to dissolve what they had would mean impoverishing them both. As long as he could behave himself and avoid getting anyone pregnant or falling in love, he was free to do as he liked. But there would be no divorce; he had made a promise and she was holding him to it.

“We could just go back to the way we were,” Danny had said.

Carmen, then wracked and sinewy, still bald, with veins standing out at her temples and on her arms, had turned away in disgust. “No, we most certainly cannot,” she had answered, and meant it. But when he sat down next to her and took her hand, she let him tuck it into his and together they waited until the poisoning was done.

Later that month Siena had, without preamble, suddenly loosened her clinch on Troy. It took him several weeks to come to terms with this fact, and Carmen spent half a dozen afternoons between Thanksgiving and Christmas counseling Troy after she found him skulking around the outside of the house. He was puppy-sad and bewildered. But once Siena was done with something, apparently, that was that. There was no other boy, Carmen told Troy truthfully. Siena seemed to have turned away from all that completely; she was intent upon finishing her senior year and applying to colleges. She planned to earn a degree in particle physics, hopefully to use her father’s work
in her own research. Siena, Carmen said gently, had moved on and was planning her own life. Troy must do the same.

Then there was the evening in late January—a low, early, and freakishly balmy dusk—when Dr. Woo had called to tell her that her the latest scans were entirely clean. “No evidence of disease,” were the words he used. After thanking the doctor and hanging up, Carmen had turned, dazed, to open the door and walk out into the flat, gray, ever-expanding world. Standing in the yard in front of their house she had faced west, barely registering the forty-degree temperature though her skin was still stretched tight and thin over her bones.

Is it over?
she’d asked.
Do you know?
There was no answer, but as she stared into the smudgy sky, a shower of light began cascading in the distance. Carmen blinked, as if to clear something from her eyes, but the continuous twinkling remained. Fireworks, she thought at first, then realized it could not be. There were no hollow booms. Only a low, whispering sound that swirled around her like mist.

Now, looking intently at the woman she had become, Carmen touched the scar that shone like a comet’s tail across the top of her left breast.

Later, after she had taken a hot shower and dressed, Carmen assembled everyone for a late breakfast and together—like schoolchildren on a field trip—they trooped through Harvard Square. The day had turned sharp and clear, green grass and brilliant sky. Carmen lagged behind the others as they walked through the yard.

There was a pretzel stand and another stand with kosher hot-dogs, the sweet, greasy scent of the meat filling the air. All around her, college students were clustered. Some sat in circles, discussing intently things from their notepads and books.

In the distance, Carmen spotted two long, denim-clad legs: a tall, bearded young man lying in the grass. She stopped and squinted. She’d forgotten to bring sunglasses and the day was dazzling, the yard like a tableau under the gleaming blue sky. Carmen took a step toward
the bearded man and nearly tripped over someone’s backpack. “Watch out,” Luca said thickly and reached up to grab her arm. And she let him stop her. Luca was right, she thought as she took one last glance at the lone reclining boy. She did not want to go toward him. She did not want to find out if he was real.

Besides, she had promised the children a sightseeing tour before the ceremony, so they went to the Old North Church, Boston Garden, and Faneuil Hall. Michael, always hungry, plowed through a paper boat filled with nachos while they watched jugglers in the square outside. Then he went back into the building and returned with four fat pastries stuffed in a waxed, white paper bag.

“I can’t believe you’re going to eat that,” Siena said as he plucked out his third, a raspberry Danish. “That is so gross.”

“Mmm.” Michael rubbed his stomach with a circular motion and opened his mouth to show his sister the masticated dough and jam inside.

Luca laughed, then Olive and Carmen did, too. But suddenly she noticed the sun sliding at an odd angle and looked at her watch. “Okay, enough of this,” Carmen said. “We have to get back. And you”—she reached up and poked Michael in his ribs, as narrow and rock hard as his father’s—“better lay off so you can fit into your suit.”