by Ann Bauer
Carmen looked down at what she’d written on the page: TUESDAY, JUNE 12, 2 P.M. The symbols materialized like carvings in a headstone and her breath came sharply. This had been happening more and more; panic rose in mundane moments like a wild, bitter wind. But there was nowhere to go with it, no one to scream at or seek comfort with. Even Jana did not know the extent of her betrayal, the fact that she had—when Jobe’s doctor’s face had turned grave and he’d used the words mortality rate and terminal—rejoiced faintly in the privacy of her own head. It had been an unspeakable secret: Her own life sentence was being commuted by this freakish twist of fate. Abruptly, now, she recalled the day that Jobe, at twenty-five, had predicted it. He’d said he would die young. He’d informed her. It was the reason he could gather his nerve back then to take her dancing and coax her into his childhood bed. Did this, in some small way, let her off the hook?
She could not answer this. So, breathing slowly, she tried to work through the next conundrum. There were only two real possibilities, so far as Carmen was concerned: Either she was being punished for her sins against Jobe and had been sentenced to cancer by some judgmental deity, or there was something poisonous about this house, something lurking and ready to attach itself to the children, now that both the parents had been done in.
Clearly, she would prefer the first. At least then her children would be safe. But she would need to resign herself to the fact that her own life had been entirely misspent. It would not matter that she had stayed with the man and raised his children, showing the world a devoted wife and mother; what would come to roost, spreading its cancer throughout her chest, was her rancid, unloving heart.
But if the latter explanation were true, they were all in danger. She should be picking up the phone again, talking to someone who could come out and test the soil, the walls, the air quality … whatever it was that made human cells turn mutant. Only she had no idea whom to call.
Danny! She came to this as one finds the answer to a game show question: The moment she quit concentrating, it popped into her head. Danny did this for a living. He helped people figure out these answers. Now the next question was, did she call his cell phone number—which was programmed into hers—or go downstairs to look up the one for the information desk at the library? Fuck it, she didn’t have time to worry about etiquette; besides, what if one of his colleagues answered? How, exactly, would she explain her situation to a stranger?
She pushed speed dial 3 and listened with growing irritation as the line rang and Danny’s voice mail clicked on. “Listen, I know I’ve been out of touch. Sorry.” She looked around the quiet room and realized that she was on her marriage bed, in the very spot where she’d been unwilling to talk to Danny before. “But I really need to talk to you. I have a few questions—professional. I need your help researching something. So, um, call me.”
Carmen was calmer now, but ridiculously worn out from fear. She walked downstairs, her bare feet sticky against the wooden steps. Luca was in the living room. His bus must have pulled up while she was on the phone. He sat slumped on the sofa, eyes crossing slightly as he gazed down at a cushion; no one else was in sight.
“Hey, what’s up?” she asked.
“Nothing.” The word was not only thick but languid, and Carmen realized it was very literally true. In years past, she’d never worried about Luca’s summers. Once he was released from school, Jobe, whose schedule freed him up around the same time, would take over. What they did together was a mystery, but movies reeled through her head of the two of them heading out the door—Jobe arcing over his older son like an oak—and metal doors creaking open then slamming, the soft revving of the car engine. Often, they would be gone all day.
She sat next to Luca, desperate to fill in for his father but feeling woefully inadequate. “Do you have anything planned for this afternoon?” she asked then instantly regretted it. What would he have planned? A date? A movie? A game of ultimate Frisbee? He could neither handle money nor drive.
Luca turned to her with lazy eyes, blinking. “No,” he said.
The cell in Carmen’s pocket rang and she reached for it. “Why don’t you go shoot some baskets?” she said, stuck between wanting to care for her son and trying not to treat him like a child. It was a delicate balance under any circumstances, especially right now as she burned from shame. To have failed to calculate Jobe’s loss in terms of Luca—and figure out how to mitigate it—this, even more than her other sins, was unforgivable. She’d been not only selfish but blind. “We’ll go out later, to a movie and dinner. We can take Michael and Jeffrey. Where are they, anyway?”
“CVS.” Luca nodded. “Twizzlers,” he said gravely, elongating the two z’s, then rose. She answered her phone at the last possible second as Luca pushed the screen door aside, making a space just large enough for his body to slip through, and disappeared outside.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Car, you alright?” Danny asked. He sounded guilty, his tone a little strangled. It occurred to Carmen for the first time that he had never called to ask about her doctor visit.
“No, actually, I have cancer.”
“Oh, Christ.” Danny took a long breath and choked at the end. “Hold on. I gotta get out of here.” She heard him mumbling in the distance—the phone no doubt held down by his hip, covered with one hand—and then there was the leaf-crunching sound of movement.
“Okay, I’m outside now,” he said after this, his voice nearer now than it had been without the stone library walls to make it echo. “What’s going on?”
Carmen glanced around. Still, the boys weren’t back. But she’d have to be fast. “I went in for a mammogram on Wednesday. They saw something on the films and took me immediately for an MRI. Then a biopsy. And I got the official results on Monday.” She counted on her fingers. This was Friday. Had it really been only four days since her future contracted and her entire post-Jobe life began wavering in front of her like a mirage?
“I’m going in for surgery next week. Tuesday.” Less than two weeks from the mammogram to possibly losing a part of her body. Fourteen days if she counted back to Danny’s actually detecting the cancer. She ran one finger along the rough wood grain of the table. She might have had an extra month or two of ignorance without him. Or maybe, if it hadn’t been touched and examined and named, her comet might have dissolved, those deranged cells turning into brown powder she could simply cough out.
“Goddamn, I was afraid of that.” Danny’s voice brought her back to reality. “Carmen, I’m …” He stopped and she heard the flare of a match. Looking outside, she saw that it was windless, everything preternaturally still: the best weather to be a smoker outside. “Listen,” he said, and the change was complete: Here was her husky lover, certain and soothing. “I want to go with you. To the surgery, I mean. Have you called anyone else?”
She stopped moving her finger. “No. But how do we explain this?”
“If there’s no one else there, we don’t have to. The doctors aren’t going to care. What do you think, the nurses are going to check my marital status? I’ve got about twenty personal days racked up so it shouldn’t be a problem.”
Carmen considered this. She imagined Danny sitting in a chair while she lay on a metal slab dressed in a backless shift and had a needle inserted into her arm. Then there would be that fog after, as she was coming out of the anesthesia acting not drunk but dumb. She would be sick and weak. Jobe had been stalwart about minor surgeries but twice she’d had to stop on the way home so he could lurch out and vomit by the side of the road. She had gotten out and run around the car, only to stand helplessly while he retched and the traffic whipped by. Then she’d hunched beside him to put one hand on his knee and ask, “Better now?” before helping him fold back into the passenger seat where he sprawled with a gray, dead-looking face.
She didn’t want Danny to see her this way. That wasn’t part of their deal.
“Where would you take me after?” she asked now. “It’s not like you ca
n show up here and blend in with the kids. They’d wonder who this guy was and why he was around all of a sudden. They’d ask questions.”
“Tell them I’m a friend,” Danny said. “They don’t know all the people you do. They’d probably just go along.”
“Not in this situation. Siena would know.” Carmen saw her daughter’s flashing, appraising eyes. Heard her words from that first night: You seem glad that he’s dead.
“I suppose you’re right.” Was there a hitch of relief in these words? Disappointment? She couldn’t tell. “So who are you going to get?”
“I’m thinking Jana. Though she’ll have to get someone to fill in at the café. It’s going to screw up her whole week.”
“Yeah, I think she’ll understand.”
There was a pause. Time, she knew, for Danny to crush out his cigarette and head back inside. “The reason I called,” Carmen said quickly. “I’m worried about the house: first Jobe’s lymphoma, now this. I think maybe this place is contaminated somehow and I was hoping you could …” She waited, but Danny did not fill in the words. Clearly, he had no idea what she was hoping he could do. “Would you look this up, do some research, you know, help me figure out who to talk to, what kind of contractor can find out if we’re living in Amityville?”
“Car?” Danny’s voice was gentle. “Didn’t you tell me once that your mother had breast cancer? That she”—he hesitated slightly before finishing—“died of it?”
Carmen stopped, shame filling and confusing her. Having the house checked out had seemed like such a reasonable, scientific path to follow—the sort of thing Jobe might have thought of—but it was only more voodoo, her trying to avoid the facts. “Yes,” she said, her tone as grudging as the teenager’s she’d been back when her mother was ill.
“Well, you know this disease runs in families, right?” Danny asked. “Any woman with a first-degree relative is twice as likely—”
“Jesus! Do you memorize all these statistics?”
“I can’t help it. They stick in my head.”
Carmen wandered in circles, scuffing her bare feet against floor and carpet in turn, feeling crazy. She’d always thought of Danny as the anti-Jobe. Now, here they were, having a conversation she could easily imagine having with her husband before he died.
“Forget about it,” she said. Outside, she could hear the younger boys calling to Luca; then they were climbing up the porch steps, plastic bags full of candy rustling against their knees. “It was a stupid idea.”
“No, no, I’ll call someone today. It can’t hurt. What are you thinking about, like chemicals, formaldehyde, asbestos, that kind of thing?”
“Sure.” She hated being soothed. “Listen, I really have to …”
She was about to say go, but then Danny broke in, speaking in a continuous rush: “I’m worried about you …. I can’t sleep …. Ever since that day, I’ve been wishing I could be there …. I think … I love you.” Then there was a click.
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 thunking 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 ye
ars 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.
