The Forever Marriage (42 page)

“Not to worry,” he said, starting on the fourth pastry.

Indeed, when they showed up in the lobby dressed for dinner, Carmen was startled to see her children so grown-up: the boys in dark jackets with festive red ties (knotted by Olive, no doubt) and Siena with her hair wound regally around her head. Carmen wore a black sheath and golden shawl with her high-heeled boots. She had long ago removed her many rings and now had only her wedding set on one slender hand. When Michael approached, he put out one arm like a sheltering branch and pulled her to his side. She walked with him through the padded skyway and into the banquet room as if down the aisle of a church.

Althea was already there, sheathed in emerald green, a strapless taffeta dress that seemed to Carmen to belie the young woman’s status
as one of the world’s top mathematical minds. But maybe that was the point. When Althea saw them, she hurried over. It had been months since she left their home and she approached Carmen questioningly, her eyes widening. “You look … so nice,” she said shyly.

Carmen hugged the girl, feeling the strong little back under her fingers. “You, too, honey. Congratulations.”

The ceremony was exactly as dry as Carmen had feared, only much longer. It began with an extended cocktail hour with hors d’oeuvres set out on a long table, next to the plastic-encased nametags they were supposed to wear.

“I am
not
pinning this ugly thing to my chest,” Siena said at first. But after noticing the postscript beneath her name—
DAUGHTER OF
J
OBE
G
ARRETT, WINNER OF THE
M
ILLENNIUM
P
RIZE
—she changed her mind.

When, after a dinner of lukewarm pot roast and overdone vegetables, the director of the Clay Institute finally announced the prize and said Jobe’s name, Carmen heard Olive take a ragged breath and reached down to grab her mother-in-law’s hand under the table. It was impetuous; had she thought about it, Carmen never would have done such a thing. But the old woman’s fingers closed hard over Carmen’s and she held on until the director made his closing comments and sat down.

There were then fully two hours of speeches about Jobe’s and Althea’s solution. It had been examined literally hundreds of times in the preceding months by mathematicians from dozens of different countries, and proven beyond any doubt. But still there were nuances to discuss—myriad branches of analysis. One after another, men and women rose to talk about the finding’s effect on science, on space travel, on the understanding of infinity. And just when Carmen was praying the speeches were finally done, she was asked, without warning, to say a few words.

Rising from her seat, she pulled the golden shawl more closely around her and walked slowly to the stage. Lowering the microphone, she faced the room full of mathematicians, reporters, university officials,
and family members. Siena was sitting, as she had at Jobe’s funeral, in precisely Olive’s straight-backed and refined manner. Michael, Carmen noticed, was gazing at Althea and her cleavage-baring dress with lust in his eyes, and this so surprised her that she nearly laughed. But the impulse faded quickly as she searched her mind for what she would say.

There followed a pause—hundreds of people in front of her shifting like the bits in a kaleidoscope not yet settled—and suddenly Carmen felt herself tumbling into a vast and endless absence. It was as cold as midnight yet bright with sun. She saw Jobe lying on the day bed, no longer breathing. And the pain that struck her was so piercing and new, Carmen thought for one instant that she had cried out. Then, from that podium on the stage of the silent auditorium, she was transported back to that warm January night when she had stood in darkness under a glittering shower of stars.

Carmen blinked and searched the faces until finally her gaze found Luca’s—pure and wide open—and she locked on this, drawing from him something she needed, like water or air.

“Seemingly random events provide the structure in any complex system, mathematical or otherwise,” she began.