by Ann Bauer
“I mean,” Carmen corrected, “it’s 99 percent certain. They did the mammogram and an MRI and a biopsy. I got a call telling me to come in for a consultation. Fast. But I’m also … I just know. It’s cancer. I’ve been sure of it since the day Danny and I …” She put her head back. The beer was starting to kick in and her eyes felt heavy.
“Danny found it?” Jana asked. “Did he run for the hills? No more good time girl, you’re just a regular old mortal with an imperfect body.” Her words were harsh, but her voice was low and soothing, her face creased with concern. “God knows the man never signed on for that.”
“I don’t know what he’ll do yet, honestly.” Carmen was too tired to argue. Besides, she’d been wondering the same things herself. Danny had never been tested—at least not by their relationship. That was the beauty of it: nothing serious. Cancer ruined everything. “I haven’t talked to him about this. I just got the call and I haven’t told anyone but you.”
“So I’m the go-to woman for loveless marriages and cancer. I suppose I can deal with that.” Jana gazed at the bottle in her hand and crossed her eyes. “You suppose I could have one more and still work the night shift? It’s not like I have a big crowd. Sometimes I think I got that liquor license just for me.”
Carmen slumped back in her chair. “Perfect. Get another beer. And bring me a glass of ice water. I’m supposed to be drinking a lot and I don’t think this”—she lifted her own half-full bottle—“is what the doctor meant.”
When Jana came back she had a tray with her own bottle, two glasses of ice water, and a basket of chips and homemade guacamole. “Here, try this,” she said gruffly, placing everything on the table. “It’s got about a tablespoon of this new hot sauce in it. I think it’ll do you good.”
“Thanks.” Carmen wasn’t hungry but she knew Jana needed to feed her, so she dipped a few chips into the bowl and ate them. She took a long drink of water, then a sip of beer. Her stomach shifted pleasantly; she’d been wrong. She needed food after all. “Okay, thanks, I feel slightly less like total crap. And I’m tired of talking about my incredibly fucked-up life. So tell me what’s going on with you.”
“My incredibly fucked-up life? Well, there’s the café. And a date with this pretty little blonde lawyer who’s ‘experimenting.’” Jana made quote marks in the air with her fingers, work-worn and red with ragged nails. “Jesus, I hate that. Nothing worse that a straight woman who goes down on you once then says she’s going back to her husband.”
“She did that?” It felt wonderful to eat and talk about something other than the comet that was trying to eat her alive. Carmen dug another chip into the guac, smearing it on her fingers and licking it off.
“No.” Jana shook her head, and her colored locks leaped and danced. “But she will.”
Carmen sat for a moment then started to rise. The children were waiting for their dinner.
“There is one more thing,” Jana said. “I took your daughter to get birth control pills.”
Carmen was piqued—this was an interesting twist, normal in a way that nothing else had been today—and a little hurt. Siena had confided in Jana. But of course, this was exactly what she’d always told her children to do: Find a trustworthy adult when they needed help.
“I assume this means she’s having sex, or planning to.”
Jana shrugged. “Her dad died. If you believe her, and I’m inclined to, she and Troy never did it until that first night Jobe was gone. She couldn’t stop crying and you were busy making funeral arrangements and talking to the boys. Not that anyone’s blaming you. But Siena went to her boyfriend and he was comforting her and … well, he comforted her. Then it happened again the next couple of nights. I think they decided they’d found some amazing new cure for grief.”
“Yeah, I know how that feels,” Carmen said softly.
During the months after Luca’s birth, when Carmen felt sore and frightened and guilty, she and Jobe had made love at least twice a week. It was the only time she could remember wanting him, leeching warmth from his body. The only time he’d acted recklessly, as if he genuinely longed for her. The only time he’d responded automatically, his body rising to meet hers.
Jana looked at Carmen sharply. “Do you know? Because I certainly don’t. I mean, what good am I in a situation like this? I haven’t had sex with a man in fifteen years.”
Carmen shrugged. “You made sure she was alright, not doing anything stupid.” Suddenly the resentment was gone and she was only grateful.
“Yeah. We went to Planned Parenthood.” Jana blushed. “I hope you don’t mind; I said I was her mother. They really don’t care, but it seemed to make it easier for them to prescribe. Oh, and they did a pregnancy test. She’s fine. They also made her promise to use condoms in the meantime. You know, ’til the pills take effect.”
“Thanks for doing that. Really.” Carmen sat for a moment absorbing, drinking her beer and wondering how things might have been different if she’d known this woman earlier in her marriage to Jobe. Surely Jana—three years older, Brooklyn-born, an ethical drifter—would have helped her find a way out, advising her the way she had Siena. You’re going to live like this, lying, every day for the rest of your life? Carmen imagined the young Jana saying. But it hadn’t been her whole life, and if she hadn’t stayed, they wouldn’t be sitting here right now, discussing Siena. Carmen and Jana would be, what: lovers themselves? Partners in a French bistro? Estranged after knowing each other only a short time? Who could say?
Just then the bell over the door jangled and a couple came in. The Corona-and-tamale crowd. In a few minutes, Harvey, the blue-grass guy, would set up in a corner of the café and the mood would be festive and a little bit New Orleans. Carmen rose quickly, dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the counter despite Jana’s protests, and kissed the other woman on the lips.
“You’ll be okay,” Jana mouthed before dashing unsteadily behind the counter. Carmen picked up the bag holding her children’s dinner and left.
At home, things were still too quiet. The main floor was dark and Carmen wandered from room to room, switching on lights, which made various items—Jobe’s stereo, the cedar chest where they kept old photographs, a coat tree—leap out at her all sharp corners and cave colors and spikes.
“Hello? I have dinner,” she called up the back stairs. There was a rustling, then the slow footsteps of Luca, plodding toward her voice. He appeared at the top of the stairs looking newly wakened; it was as if the house had been under a spell. “Where are your sister and brother?” she asked. But he only shrugged.
There was more movement upstairs. A few minutes later, Siena and Troy appeared, entangled in a way that Carmen couldn’t even figure out. Their hands and arms were wrapped together in some sort of strange way—as in a yoga pose. She opened her mouth to say something about their having been upstairs, probably in Siena’s bedroom, alone. Then she realized there was no point.
“Hey, where’s Michael?” she asked, turning to the cabinet to get a pot for Jana’s soup.
“He’s staying at Jeffrey’s tonight.” Carmen had to turn to determine who had spoken; she’d never realized Siena and Troy actually sounded alike. And they looked more—she shivered—like brother and sister than they did like Romeo and Juliet.
“Okay, perfect!” Oh, two beers were too many, she thought. One would have given her courage, but the second was making her overly cheerful and dumb. She poured herself a glass of water and drank half of it, standing over the sink, while the three young people watched. “Jana sent dinner.” She took the bowls and a fistful of soup-spoons to the table and began doling them out to each of four places.
“You saw Jana today?” Siena asked.
Carmen turned. She might as well get this over with. Meeting her daughter’s gaze, she locked on and said, “Yes, we talked for quite a while this afternoon.”
“Oh.” Siena bowed her head and reddened, and Carmen thought again of the night after the funeral when her daughter had been so wil
d with grief, she’d looked on the brink of throwing up. If Carmen hadn’t been so busy with her own unexpected longing for Jobe, with bedding Danny, and now with doctor appointments and worry, she might have noticed how effectively Siena had calmed. Carmen stared at her daughter and wished ardently for the twelve-year-old she’d glimpsed the other day, or the imperious three-year-old with sheets of golden-red hair.
Siena was opening the bag from Jana’s café, Troy’s hand resting on her hip—as if he owned her!—while she leaned forward to look inside. “Mmmm.” Siena inhaled in a way a little too sensual for Carmen’s taste. “Smells really good.”
What kind of hypocrite was she? Carmen wondered. Not long ago, she’d been distracting herself in bed with Danny, practically begging him to get out of town with her so she could stop thinking about Jobe. Siena and Troy were just as entitled to their rites of comfort even if they were still teenagers, probably even more. She sighed as she poured soup into the pot and lit the burner underneath. It was hell sometimes being a mother who’d misbehaved. Carmen wished for the clarity Olive must have felt, her past so pure she could make rules without wavering at all.
The food was ready and Carmen wished again that she hadn’t drunk so much beer. It would be nice to have a glass of wine to hold right now. But every headline she’d ever seen linking alcohol and breast cancer was dancing through her head. She could picture herself drinking Merlot, the wine drizzling directly into the comet and plumping it out, encouraging it to grow.
“Can you call Luca, please?” she asked Troy through a tight, fake smile. And take your hands off my daughter’s ass. He did so but not without patting Siena lovingly, the gesture of someone who was parting from her for days.
As on the night they’d eaten goulash, Carmen saw an image of the two of them at an altar and knew that their relationship would become, in time, what her own marriage had been. Siena was brilliant, the child whose mind was most like Jobe’s; Troy was an average student and gifted baseball player. She’d grow tired of him in about five years—around the time she’d be ready for graduate school, the luster of Troy’s athletic sex would begin to wear off—which was probably just long enough to get a marriage and a baby started. Was there no way to stop history from repeating itself?
Carmen shook her head and laughed to herself. She was just tipsy enough to be paranoid but too sober to shrug it off. What the hell? The cancer was already there. She poured herself a glass of red wine.
She sat with this while the children filled bowls and plates at the counter.
“Why aren’t you eating with us?” It didn’t matter how much Luca aged. His voice sounded childlike and plaintive to her. Carmen’s first impulse was to jump up and get some food. But the alcohol had dulled her impulsiveness as well as her inhibitions.
“I ate earlier, with Jana,” Carmen said in a dreamy voice. “We had a lot to talk about.”
Siena scowled. Why did teenage girls assume everything was about them? Sweetheart, you’re not the only one with secrets, Carmen thought wistfully. But the moment passed quickly and the practical, motherly self reclaimed her body. “I needed to talk to her about your dad—Jana is the only person who understands how I really felt about him.” This was true, however misleading. So far, Carmen was negotiating the minefield well. Now the question was how to tell her children about Glenda’s phone call without implying they’d soon be orphans.
“You’re sick.” Luca formed his words carefully this time, the way the speech therapist had taught him. And instead of sounding like a little boy he suddenly struck her as ageless and wise. She’d always loathed when other parents talked about their disabled children’s “special” connection to the spiritual. Sentimental bullshit. But she couldn’t deny what she’d taken from holding on to Luca during the funeral. Or from the intensity she felt facing him now.
“Yes, I am,” Carmen said. “But maybe not in the way you mean.”
“How then?” Strangely, it was Troy who’d asked—Troy who looked the most frightened and stricken.
Carmen cleared her throat. “I have cancer.”
“Are you serious?” Siena sounded not concerned but indignant, as if her mother had stolen the diagnosis from her father.
“Breast cancer,” Carmen said, which caused Troy to look at her chest and blush bright red. “I don’t know how advanced yet. It could be very early, nothing to worry about. But I’ll be going in for appointments next week instead of going back to work. I might need some help around the house. With Michael.”
“I’ll drive him places.” Again, Troy appeared to be the only one who was responding appropriately. Siena was sparkling with fury. Luca appeared lost in thought.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” Carmen said. She tipped the wine bottle and poured an inch and a half into Troy’s empty water glass. He was nearly eighteen; he was sleeping with her daughter. He was, after all, acting like a man. Maybe this would bring some color back into his face.
“Thanks.” Troy took a quick swallow—refined, even under these conditions. He was a young man of breeding; Olive would tell her to take solace in that. “When will you, uh, know?”
“I’m going back to the clinic on Monday. I should find out more then.” Once she said it, Carmen realized what this meant. There was an entire, empty weekend to be lived before she found out how decayed her body had become. All those years, all those terrible thoughts about Jobe. They’d been cancerous. Stop, said a voice in her head. Life is not a linear equation. Most events are random. This is not yours alone. It was loud enough to startle her, and she wondered, briefly, if the children had heard.
Carmen shoved her glass away. She should be ashamed of herself, drinking to the point of hearing things. (The nurse had been able to explain it that last time: the isolation chamber effect of the MRI.) “I think, eventually, I’ll be fine” she said, even though she didn’t quite believe it.
She looked around the table. Luca was staring at her, no longer elsewhere, his small eyes glittering with concern. Troy had taken Siena’s hand, which he held on top of the table, and her expression had softened. She was again that stubborn child, bewildered by her own immoderate emotions. Like mother like daughter, Carmen thought. Like father like son. And the room began to recede until she could make out only what existed in their small island of light.
Carmen lay in bed weary, her body faded and grateful not to be holding itself up any longer, but unable to sleep. Something had changed inside her that day, like the small pointer on a radio being turned from On to Off. What was it? Her hope, her determination, her confidence—none of these was quite right. Reaching one hand out in a sweeping, stretching gesture, trying to find her place on the wide mattress, her fingers brushed Jobe’s pillow and she jackknifed up abruptly, aware in a way she hadn’t been before that he was truly gone.
It wasn’t his disappearance so much as anyone’s, the fact that it could occur so quietly and completely, that she herself could vanish that way. The wrong treatment, a few radical cells that broke off and decided to travel, one opportunistic disease, and she, too, might die. But instead of leaving a gaping hole, the world would close around her absence, the way it had already started to close around Jobe’s. The kids had resumed their lives, the department had figured out a replacement for his classes; Riemann might never be solved, but this was no different from the way it was before.
If she were honest, Carmen had to admit her presence would be even easier to erase than Jobe’s. Thousands of people could design banner ads and flyers. Siena and Troy might marry and heroically raise Michael. Danny would find someone else to sleep with and he’d probably tell her, occasionally, the sad, true story of Carmen’s early death. Thinking about this, her fists clenched. He might even woo other women this way, telling them tearfully about the one he’d seen through her husband’s gruesome end only to detect—with his own hands—the comet that would kill her. Carmen envisioned the sweet, pitying expression of a woman barely thirty who put her arm around Danny’s shoulders and
drew him toward her pert, healthy breasts.
This was insane. Carmen checked the clock: a few minutes past midnight. It didn’t matter, really. She had called the HR director at her agency to say she needed yet another week of leave and the man had granted it, sounding forcedly concerned and slightly irritated, as if he suspected Carmen of malingering, playing up her grief because she’d become entranced with shopping and daytime soaps.
“I have cancer now!” Carmen almost shouted but didn’t. She might decide to go back to her job if the biopsy proved this was nothing: a comet-shaped hallucination they’d all palpated and shared—she, Danny, the doctor. Perhaps it was an alien chip, intended to keep track of her, that had been implanted while she was sleeping. Maybe Jobe did it before he died.
Carmen stared into the murk outside the window: a foggy sky with a sharp white scythe of moon. “Did you?” she asked silently. “Did you plant this thing to teach me a lesson? Did you know how I felt about you when you were alive?” But there was nothing out there. No answer. Certainly not Jobe.
She shook her head and got out of bed. This was ridiculous: fear had turned her into an idiot. That’s what it was, she suddenly realized—that was exactly what had been lost. Her fearlessness. And she desperately wanted it back.
At least the weather had grown warm. It was the perfect temperature to be in bare feet and one of Jobe’s old T-shirts, so long that it covered her underwear sufficiently for her to walk around in front of the kids. She padded down the wooden stairs and into the kitchen where the remnants of Jana’s fudge bars sat wrapped on the counter. Carmen picked the plastic apart and stood, breaking off small pieces and eating them, gooey chocolate coating her teeth and the roof of her mouth.
There was a small portable CD player on the counter nearer the wall. It had been Jobe’s: He used it when he worked around the house, carrying it with him from room to room. Carmen loosened the cord that had been wrapped around it, no doubt by her husband in the weeks before he died. She pressed the button to open the round compartment and found a CD of violin concertos played by Itzhak Perlman. The itchy discontented feeling returned for a few seconds: She would have preferred Blondie or Prince or even an old Beatles album. But Jobe had listened to those only as a concession to her. It was classical music he loved because it was mathematical and helped him think. He’d also enjoyed disco, Carmen recalled, grinning into the night. Sister Sledge. The Bee Gees. It made no sense unless you listened to the rhythms and counted; dance music tended to be as metrical as Beethoven or Bach. But her husband hadn’t been the least bit self-conscious; he kept his Earth, Wind & Fire collection filed between Dvorák and Grieg, just where it belonged in his world.
