The Forever Marriage

by Ann Bauer

  “Oh,” she heard herself cry, just before Danny moved in and closed his arms around her.

  “It could be nothing,” he said into her ear. “In most cases, that’s what happens. You go in, they take a biopsy, and it’s perfectly benign.” He had the loamy smell of unshowered sex and Carmen knew she should warn him: He must not go home to his wife this way. Instead, she let him hold her until a few minutes before four o’clock when they both scrambled for the rest of their clothes.

  “You’ll make an appointment tomorrow?” Danny asked as he pulled his pants on and started fastening his belt with its complicated silver buckle in the shape of a wolf, his Cherokee clan. She was silent, and he stopped what he was doing. “Carmen?”

  She looked up at him from where she was sitting on the unmade bed, holding her long dress socks in one hand, not moving. Danny sighed and sat next to her, lacing his hands together. She shifted her gaze to them, the very fingers that had detected her (she refused even to think the word lump) comet made of stone.

  What if she’d never come here with him? Carmen played the game. What if she’d loved her husband better and grieved him right, staying home to rearrange his clothes in the closet and weep? What if, back when she’d sat in a room with Jobe and heard the doctor say non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she had never felt even the slightest twinge of reprieve? Any one of those things might have changed what was happening right now. Perhaps thoughts have weight—enough to push the balance of events from one outcome to another—and every action alters molecules in tiny but profound ways. This cancer—because she was certain that no matter what Danny said, that that’s what it was—had been shaped by everything she’d done and wished for over the past many years. It was the product of her life: an evolving enemy living in the pocket under her left arm.

  “Look, if you want me to, I’ll call in sick and take you. Maybe there’s a clinic in Frederick where we could go.”

  “No.” Her voice came out calm, almost ghostly. “That would be stupid.” What she meant was that Baltimore had one of the best medical facilities in the civilized world—it hadn’t helped Jobe, but still, one did not leave the Johns Hopkins system to be examined by country doctors with flickering, outdated X-ray machines. Danny, however, took it another way.

  “Okay,” he said. “I suppose you’re right. There’s no need to take the risk, because you’re probably just fine. They’ll do a little minor surgery and take out this … cyst.” He made a hand gesture she took to mean the swipe of a knife. “I’ll be careful of the stitches next time and spend a lot of time helping you relax and recover.” He’d been caressing her thigh but Carmen saw Danny turn his hand so he could look at his watch, as he bit the inside of his cheek.

  “Listen, I hate to do this, but I have a dinner thing …” he said finally.

  “Go.” Carmen was still holding her socks in one hand. It was possible she might go barefoot, she decided. The weather was warm. May. Things were growing; if you were very still, you could feel it in the air. “I have a couple phone calls I want to make and the room is paid for.”

  Danny shot her a look, but she hadn’t meant anything by the comment—or if she had, it wasn’t worth going into. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Call me at work tomorrow, will you? Tell me what you find out?”

  “Of course.” She lifted her face, prompting him to rise from the bed and kiss her. Then he took ahold of her shoulders and tipped her chin up farther, so she was looking into his eyes, where the Irish blood shone through Indian skin with two gleams of ocean green. “Carmen, I love you. Maybe not in the traditional way, but I do. And if you need something, you can call. I’ll find a way to explain it to Mega.”

  She nodded and blinked, wishing there were tears there. Why, if she could cry for the man she’d disdained couldn’t she cry for this man, whom she’d dreamed of since she saw him sitting behind his desk decorated with leather and turquoise two years before? But rather than returning his feelings, she felt only a vague, unfair anger toward Danny, who had changed everything in a single afternoon: first by diagnosing her with his busy hands and then by proclaiming his love.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Carmen lied. “But I’ll let you know.”

  The attendant brought her tea, in a cup with a saucer and a linen napkin and a tiny spoon. This was like being at Olive’s house, Carmen thought, only in an ugly pink fleece robe and jeans, waiting for her turn to have her breasts smashed between the plates of a huge machine.

  “So you’ve had … one mammogram? Is that right?” The woman sitting next to her had a clipboard and a springy bracelet around her wrist with a key that she used to open the dressing room doors.

  “Yes. I had a baseline at thirty-nine. My mother died of breast cancer, so I wanted to be careful.”

  The interviewer grimaced. “But nothing since?” Carmen turned to the woman, who had drawn on eyebrows with what must have been a felt-tip marker. They were weird and furry-looking but perfectly flat. “We recommend mammograms every year after forty, especially for first-degree relatives. For you it’s been”—she flipped back to a previous page—“more than two.”

  There was a pause. No point in reviewing the fact that she’d been told something completely different when she was in last time; back then, the technician had said if the scan was clean, Carmen could wait safely until forty-five.

  “Well, my husband was very ill and I seem to have forgotten,” Carmen said. This was like a tactical checkmate, a move you couldn’t use until the opportunity was presented directly to you, but then it worked every time. Not that Carmen was much interested in chess. But Jobe had been determined to teach Luca—even buying a set with the characters from Alice in Wonderland to help capture him—and sometimes after dinner she would watch them play.

  “He passed away last month,” Carmen said, though she was still picturing the two of them hunched over the board. “I guess I haven’t been thinking clearly since.”

  “Oh, Lordy.” The woman’s face went through a montage of sad expressions; then she put her hand on Carmen’s arm and squeezed. “You’ve been through everything, haven’t you, dear? I don’t know how people like you stay so strong.”

  “Are there any other options?” Carmen asked, then immediately felt bad. If she was going to use Jobe’s death to elicit sympathy, she should at least be grateful when that’s what came her way.

  “Now, dear, I want you to show me where you found the lump.” The woman sat, pen poised.

  Carmen looked around the room, where half a dozen women sat. There were also two husbands—if they were here, the X-ray probably was not routine for their wives either. She pointed with her right finger to her left breast. “Here.”

  “I need an exact spot, if you can,” said the woman, pulling out a sheet with a crude outline of a female form. “Can you still feel it? Has the lump gone away since that first time?”

  Carmen shook her head, amazed that her fantasy was such an ordinary possibility. She’d been prodding herself obsessively, hoping the comet would simply disappear. But each time she’d checked, it was in the exact place where Danny discovered it nine days earlier.

  Now, she slipped her hand inside the robe and palpated her breast until she homed in on the location, touching herself directly above. “It’s right here,” she said, and the woman with the key made a neat cross on the top left side of the drawing. Like a treasure map.

  The procedure itself was as Carmen remembered. She was ordered to turn, lift her arm, slant her body at a weird angle so her breasts could be smashed between two plates. And as she had the first time, Carmen wondered how much damage was being done. A few of these lifesaving tests and a woman could end up with two stretched-out teats dangling to her knees.

  The technician did her right breast first, pictures from the front and the side, then released that one and gingerly lifted the left onto the Plexiglas platform of her machine. “Will it hurt, because of the …”—Carmen forced herself to speak the way others did, using the wor
d they preferred—“lump?”

  “It shouldn’t. But if it does, you tell me the minute you feel anything and we’ll stop and readjust.” She was young, probably not yet thirty. What did she know about these things? But the girl patted Carmen’s back in a friendly way and scratched it a bit with her long fingernails, which felt good even through the fleece. Carmen relaxed and was surprised when her left breast lay squashed below her that the comet neither hurt nor popped from the surface of her skin. She’d been expecting to see an outline, the way you did with a baby’s foot when it kicked from inside.

  “Everything okay?” the technician asked.

  “Fine,” Carmen said, though it was at least in part a lie.

  They had her sit in the waiting room, still in her robe, in case they needed more “films,” as the technician referred to them. Carmen did nothing as she sat, neither reading a magazine nor drinking tea, but simply waiting for what she knew would come. And then it did.

  A man emerged from a back room—the first one on staff that she’d seen since entering the breast center—and introduced himself with a name she immediately forgot. They needed an MRI to follow up, he told her. Then, most likely, a needle aspiration biopsy. It would be relatively painless; just a little local anesthesia. She would be able to go home and cook dinner for her family tonight.

  “Only a guy would say that like it’s a desirable thing,” she cracked and he smiled, but she could tell he was thinking she should, indeed, be grateful. There was a family, she could feed them. These things might not always be true.

  This time Carmen was given a gown that tied in front. It seemed to have been made of wax paper and was, again, pink: the color of the stuff you had to swallow when you were nauseated. The socks they gave her—thankfully, however much they clashed—were a pale blue. Then she was led down a long hallway by a wide-hipped woman who looked like a prison matron. The sweet, young technician had disappeared; Carmen was, apparently, too far gone already for her.

  Inside a steel-gray room, the matron extended her hand like a knight to help Carmen up onto a wide metal table. “Are those what I think they are?” she asked, pointing to a bustier-shaped contraption that lay on the table’s surface.

  “Yep. That’s where your bosoms will go. So let’s just get you ready.” The matron reached out and began untying the gown, oblivious to the intimacy of the act. Carmen leaned back, almost enjoying the play. “Chilly in here,” she said.

  “You’ll be warm soon enough. That’s something a lot of gals complain about: the heat.”

  “What heat?” The woman had eased the gown back from Carmen’s shoulders so that she sat bare-chested in the strange room. It was amazing how good that felt, almost like the wanton feeling of going to a topless beach, which she and Jobe had done once on their honeymoon. Now she recalled his face—her young husband—when she had wriggled out of the top half of her one-piece suit and lay back on a towel. He’d stood over her, supposedly blocking the sun but also obstructing people’s view of her, until she’d had to beg, “Please sit down, Jobe. You’re throwing a shadow and I’m getting really cold.”

  He’d sunk to the sand, cross-legged beside her, and taken her hand. For an hour they’d stayed this way, Carmen touched by Jobe’s protectiveness but also shamefully titillated by the idea of men and women walking by and ogling her perfect, naked breasts.

  “Okay, now, you’re gonna lie this way.” The woman pivoted Carmen on the shiny surface so she was facing the bustier thing. “I need you to lower yourself down into the coil and I’m going to guide you in.”

  It was like doing a reverse push-up: Carmen had her hands on either side of the cast and the matron, standing at the head of the table, had reached out to grab one dangling breast in each hand so she could settle them into the cups. This was not a woman who appealed to Carmen; some did, but they tended to be slim and rugged, women strangely like herself with dark, wavy hair and muscular arms. Still, she couldn’t help but be turned on when anyone touched her breasts. It had happened at every gynecologic exam she’d ever had. Danny could make her come simply by standing behind her while she was fully clothed, rubbing and pinching her nipples through her shirt. Even Jobe had figured out that touching her there was a catalyst, the magic key to orgasm no matter how awkward their sex.

  “Okay, now you’re in. I’m going to put an IV in your arm.”

  Carmen closed her eyes. Her back was starting to hurt already from being propped this way and she was worried now. If surgeons had to cut the comet from her, would they also cut the nerves that made her shudder that way? It had never, in all the years of watching pink-ribbon-wearing women marching on TV, occurred to her that mastectomy was the equivalent of castration above the waist.

  “Relax now,” the matron said. “This won’t hurt much. You’re not a fainter, are you?”

  “Hardly,” Carmen said, her voice muffled against the pillow under her chin. “But what would it matter, anyway? I’m lying down.”

  There was a burning feeling on the top of her right wrist, then the rush of fluid entering her. “There,” said the woman, taping the needle into Carmen’s arm and patting it curtly. “Now, I need to put some ear plugs in, to keep you comfortable.” Again, she was sliding something into Carmen’s body: this time, a squishy little bullet in each ear. Then another pat. “You’re all set. I’m going to run and get the MRI guy and we’ll start.”

  Nothing happened for a while but Carmen didn’t really care. They must have stuck some kind of sedative in the IV. She had drifted into a gauzy fog, her back forgotten, when the table she was on began to move. “Carmen?” A man’s tinny, muffled voice came from nowhere and everywhere. “We’re going to need you to lie perfectly quiet, okay? If something happens, if you start to feel sick or dizzy, you just say so. The machine is miked. But otherwise, I want you to hold yourself as still as possible. Ready to start?”

  It was odd, speaking into this tubular cavern, trusting that her voice would be heard. But she did. “Sure, go for it,” Carmen said, and within seconds the most incredible banging racket started around her, sounds like the battering of a thousand deer hooves against a huge tin can. There was nothing to do but lie propped and let this happen and Carmen was doing fine, until the reality of what this could mean flared out at her. She saw her children lined up, Luca and Siena and Michael at another funeral, watching another casket being lowered into the ground. This made her not panicked so much as angry. Not only was it wrong for her children to lose both their parents so young, but she had earned this part of her life. She’d stuck out twenty-one years of marriage, trying as hard as she could under the circumstances to be a good wife; surely she had a little freedom coming to her! Could it be that now—just as she was about to find her way back on to the right road—Carmen, too, was going to die?

  “It will be very hard for a while,” the voice coming through the speaker said. Only this time it didn’t sound so echoey and metallic; also, it was a few shades lower. “But you’ll be fine in the end.”

  She shifted to the right, craning her head to look over her shoulder. “I need you to lie still, Carmen,” said the original voice. “Just a few more minutes and then we’ll do your contrast.”

  “Sorry,” she muttered, but the word was lost in the combination of deer thunder and anxiety. Then she felt the warmth the nurse had talked about, a slow turning-to-orange like the heating of a burner on an electric stove. And—as she had that day with Danny when he’d found her comet—that long, smooth hand on her forehead and another on the back of her neck.

  “It will be fine,” she heard again, only this time it was more like a vapor of words, neither spoken nor written on the air but something she could not pinpoint that was in between.

  After the MRI, she waited again, growing cold and shivering in her wax gown and blue socks. And when the matron came back, Carmen knew immediately from her eyes that the comet had burned through all their tests. A four-year-old could look at the images and know.

  “Do
ctor saw your results and he wants a biopsy,” the nurse said.

  She offered her hand as if Carmen were frail and needed help out of her chair. And to her surprise, Carmen accepted it gratefully, pressing her palm to this large woman’s, feeling the sturdy workings of healthy blood and flesh under her own weak skin. She was light-headed as she rose and wished fleetingly for Jobe to lean against, his arm reeling her in against the long, tall trunk of his chest.

  “This is going to sting,” the nurse admitted as they walked toward a door marked with a number 8. “My advice is to breathe through it.”

  “You could just give me some of that stuff you used for the MRI,” Carmen said. “That worked like a dream.”

  “What stuff?” They pushed through the door and into yet another room of white tile and steel. “All we did was pump a little saline into you, then some contrast. There was no need for any sedative. Some women, they panic inside the tube. But other than that one time, you were perfect.” She helped Carmen up onto another cold metal table and fussed over her like a nanny, untying and retying more tightly the laces on her gown. “We did hear you talking to yourself in there, but sometimes that happens. It’s a little like a sensory deprivation tank. People have their visions.”

  Carmen lowered herself onto the paper-covered pillow though it was the last thing she really wanted to do. Suddenly, she was terrified. More than anything, she wanted to get up and go home—forget this had ever happened—the same way she’d tried when she was giving birth to Luca. Prior to this, she’d assumed there was always the option to change her mind; when, halfway through a thirty-hour labor, she’d realized this was a permanent trap that would go on without her control, she thought she might go insane.

  A doctor came in and spoke to her, but she barely listened. When he unsheathed a long needle and stood aiming it at the tiny X she and the matron had together drawn on her breast with a pen, Carmen was bored. Just let this be over, she thought. There was a prolonged, burning sensation. A few minutes of painful probing. And then it was done.