by Ann Bauer
Carmen mused about this the following afternoon, as she left the boys—plus Jeffrey, of course—with a pot of chili and a pile of videos to drive the exact same route she had taken to retrieve her dad twenty-one years before. She was watching the road, sort of, but also seeing images of her father over the years. Thinking about how strangely durable he was. Despite the decades of heavy drinking, Antonio had aged well. He had that dapper, elastic look that skinny, older Italian men often had, a little like Sinatra without the voice. He’d cut back in the past few years from six Scotch-and-waters a night to three on his doctor’s advice. Mornings, he played thirty-six holes of golf. There was—she pulled into the parking lot, wincing as her arm brushed her own sore breast—no deterioration in sight.
“Hey,” Danny said softly, opening the door even before she could knock. He must have been waiting, listening for the particular sound of her keys. Pulling her inside a little roughly, he faced her and looked intently—as only he could, sized perfectly to match—into her eyes. “How are you?”
“I’m, um, okay. Scared actually. And kind of mad at the world. But okay.”
“What can I do?” A pleading question.
Carmen turned away and made a project out of settling her enormous purse on the floor. If this was the way it was going to be, she might have to leave.
“That guy.” Her voice was sharp and she could see that Danny was hurt, so she stopped and gathered her breath, softening it. “You know…. Tell me about the inspector you talked to.”
Holding her hand as if they were two children on a playground, Danny led her to the bed and sat. “Basically, he said he’ll charge you about nine thousand dolars to come out and run all his tests on the place, everything from radon to lead paint to toxic mold.” Danny shivered, breathing out, and she could smell the four or five cigarettes he’d smoked in a row that afternoon, probably downstairs on the hotel steps. “It’s amazing how many dangerous things can live in a house.”
Carmen did not react. This was a side of Danny she’d never seen and she couldn’t decide whether she liked it or not. He was cocky, the kind of man who would bring his wife over to his mistress’s dinner table and introduce the two with a smirk. He’d never taken anything very seriously. Or at least, that’s what she’d thought. It was possible, however, that she wasn’t the best judge of character. Bad or good.
“Anyway, that’s basically it. The price is for testing only; it doesn’t include any mitigation. That can cost up to a couple hundred grand. And the guy said he usually doesn’t find much: maybe one or two levels that are on the high side of normal, but nothing he can really point to.”
“That was surprisingly up front for a man who could make nine thousand dollars just by sweeping his special detectors around my house.”
“Yeah, well, I told him this was for close friends of mine. The husband had already died of cancer; the wife was just diagnosed. He got a lot more sympathetic after that.”
Carmen looked down and grinned at their locked hands as an odd, alien warmth spread through her. She relaxed, possibly for the first time since the biopsy. She liked it when Danny lied. Also, there was something about the idea of him being a close friend of Jobe’s that made her amused and hopeful. She closed her eyes and the image she’d seen before—that floating series of golden rings, moving gently through her mind—appeared again.
Now there was the soft feeling of his face against hers, hands like wings on her jaw, the gentle working of his lips and tongue against her mouth. Carmen lay back slowly but without strain; it was as if something were supporting her all the way down. When her back touched the pillows, Danny moved his hands to the front of her shirt. This was the first time they’d been together since the day he found the comet, which was now gone. He had unbuttoned her and was leaning down to kiss her collarbone.
Abruptly Carmen sat up, nearly clocking him, and pulled her shirt around her.
“What? What’s wrong?” He sat back, hands up, like a suspect.
“My … I can’t.” First there had been the gash in her chest, oozing blood-tinged pus into gauze. Then the bruise that spread like ink under her skin. It was fainter now, green and lavender instead of that dark death color. But the ugliest part was the concave pocket Dr. Woo had left in her breast, with skin folded and stitched unevenly. He’d been pleased when he saw how it was healing and Carmen inferred that she looked the way she was supposed to a couple of weeks after surgery. But it made no sense. What was all this excitement about “saving the breast,” if it was going to end up mangled and purpled and green?
“Does it hurt?” Danny asked, still sitting some distance away.
“Not.” She breathed out like a dragon. This was humiliating. “Not anymore. But it doesn’t feel good anymore either.”
“You’ve tried?”
“You mean?” She swallowed, disgusted by the idea. “No. I haven’t.”
“So. Let me.” He seemed to be growing as he sat there. Carmen blinked. This was a strange illusion: Danny, whose compact size and flippancy she’d relied upon, becoming suddenly grave and large.
“Let you what?”
“Let me …” He reached out slowly, as if she were a skittish dog, and peeled her fingers from the shirt she was holding closed. “Try.”
This time, when Danny lowered her it was he who held her on the way down. “The lights,” she muttered. “Can we?”
“Don’t move,” he said and got up to pull the curtains shut—including the heavy ones designed to block light during the day—and turn off the room’s two lamps. The room was murky, brighter than night, lit from the edges of the windows and the crack under the door. When Danny came back to the bed he stood over her for a moment, looking down. Then he pulled his own shirt over his head without unbuttoning it. “Take your clothes off for me.”
Even his voice seemed deeper than before and she obeyed, first sliding out of her jeans by arching her back and moving her hips from side to side. Then she removed her socks and finally sloughed off the shirt she’d been holding tight around her.
Danny stood another few beats, simply looking at her, and Carmen felt herself growing warm. Slick with desire. Her body seemed not to understand the circumstances. “Take off your pants,” she said in imitation of him, and he laughed but did what she said.
He climbed on top of her, carefully, and perched on his knees so their pelvic bones matched. He was hard inside his boxer shorts and the fabric between them made her breathless, the way she had been once when he bound her wrists over her head with the tie from a hotel bathrobe then fucked her agonizingly slowly, stopping and starting again, until she begged him to make her come.
“This feels good, doesn’t it?” he said, voice floating to her through the room’s haze and she nodded, closing her eyes.
Danny bent over her; she could smell tobacco and coffee as he neared her face. At some point, he must have taken his hair out of its customary ponytail because it fell on all sides of her, tickling her ribs and making a dark tent around her head and shoulders and neck. He reached under her and unhooked her bra, drawing it off, letting it fall to the floor. Carmen kept her eyes shut. They’d adjusted to the darkness—even in middle age, her vision was perfect—and she didn’t want to see his face.
“Does this hurt?” he asked, circling the nipple of her right breast with his finger.
She shook her head. That was the side that was still whole and healthy, at least so far as she knew. Dr. Woo had given her the sense that cancer might be lurking anywhere, ready to latch on with its sharp, rotten teeth.
“And this?” Danny had moved laterally to the left now; she could feel the shift in his body. But there was no sensation on her skin. It felt dead, like a layer of plastic had been inserted between her nerve endings and the rest of the world.
“It doesn’t hurt.” She tried to keep the frustration out of her voice. She could no longer feel his cock between her legs, either. He must have gone soft just looking at her. “But it’s like I’m n
umb. Maybe you should just …”
“Quiet!” She opened her eyes and met Danny’s in the gloom. He smiled, a kindly librarian. “Just be quiet and let me take care of things.”
“Okay,” she said, feeling suddenly, inexplicably, sleepy. She shut her eyes again and lay without struggling, giving in. Then something started, like music so low it’s barely audible. There was a weak signal from her left side, a tiny fork of lightning. She made a sound and moved against the sheets; Danny brought himself down more fully along her body and she felt him rock hard against her leg.
Shifting, using her hands to pull him back into position, she used him shamelessly, humping his still-covered penis until she was on the edge of orgasm. “Stop!” she said, and realized that he had been sucking on her nipples, each in turn, and the left was now working nearly as well as the right. It was a fainter feeling—like a voice coming from downstairs instead of the next room—but it was there.
“Now,” she ordered. It was so easy to take over, become the instructor. And Danny seemed not to mind.
He stood, leaving her uncovered and briefly cool, to pull off his underwear. Then he straddled her again, his cock extended like a flag. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispered, and somehow the words twisted brightly in her head to become exciting.
“Please,” she said, not knowing if she meant “Please do hurt me” or “Please don’t,” but not caring, either, because there was only sensation and that was better than deadness and it felt like nothing she’d ever experienced before: loud and strange and foreign but wonderful. Like a teenage boy, she came within minutes and he then speeded up, determined. A few hard thrusts and he let out a long, strangled groan.
He rolled off her and they were side by side on the bed, breathing raggedly. It was growing later and the light seeping in around the curtains had begun to blend with the tenor of the room. “Did that work?” he asked after they were quiet again.
“Yeah, that worked,” she said. For the first time she could ever remember, she reached out and held his hand.
For once, instead of disappearing each in their own direction, they stayed together, side by side in the narrow hotel bed, talking in a desultory, nearly married manner about Carmen’s home inspection, Danny’s attempts to get Mega into credit counseling, the insurance dilemma, and finally—for the first time—her kids.
“Michael doesn’t have Jobe to talk to anymore, and his older brother has Down’s so he can’t be of much help.” Carmen decided to skip the part about Luca’s already being in conversation with his dead father. “Jobe’s brother, Nate, is terrific. He loves my kids and spends time with Michael when he can. But Nate’s got his own life. A wife, a job, two kids of his own.”
Danny shifted and found a more comfortable spot but didn’t let go of her fingers. This closeness—and the talking—was new; she was surprised how much she liked it. “Now he’s going to watch his mother get …” She stopped. There was no point describing to Danny how ugly she was bound to become. Soon enough, he’d see.
“I could try,” Danny said. “Talking to him.”
She turned toward him; he remained on his back. There was no way to tell what he’d meant. This was the first time they’d even discussed the children. Danny had never wanted children and made it clear from the beginning he wasn’t interested in the day-to-day. Surely he wasn’t offering to step in and become that out-of-the-blue uncle figure for her son. “What are you saying?”
“I mean, I could take him to a baseball game or something. You know, do guy stuff every once in a while.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean ‘why’?”
“I mean, that’s not what we do. We don’t get entangled. No commitments, remember? Don’t look at me like that. It was your rule.”
“So?” Danny let go of her hand and got out of bed. “I wasn’t talking about that. This isn’t a fucking marriage proposal, it was an offer to help you out in a tough situation. But forget it.” The last three words came out muffled as he bent to pick up his boxers.
“Of course it’s not a marriage proposal. You’re already married.”
Danny had pulled his jeans on over his shorts, but he paused now, the zipper and button still undone. He targeted her with his eyes. “Yes, I’m married. And you’re not anymore. Is that what this is about? You want me to marry you now?”
Carmen lit up with rage. But a tiny part of her was still quiet, still measured. How had this happened so fast? One minute they were in bed together, close in a way they’d never been before, and now …
“No, I don’t want you to marry me. For Christ’s sake, I’ve never wanted to be married to anyone! I was so anxious to be single I actually wished for my own husband—who never did a single bad thing in his whole life—to die.” She was breathing hard again, and sobbing. “That’s how desperately I wanted to be single. That’s how awful I am. So just.” She huddled, her knees drawn up with the sheet over them, head bowed so she could see the tangled ends of her hair. “Go.”
They were silent for a time. Out in the hall, doors creaked open and thudded closed. People ran and laughed and got ice. The darkness deepened. Carmen waited for Danny to walk out, for their door to slam shut.
Instead he walked forward and put his hand on her head, atop the long, curly mass of hair that would soon be gone. “I’m not leaving,” he said.
Carmen raised her head, exerting pressure against his palm. She felt about six years old. “Why do you even like me?” she asked.
There was a faint memory, something she couldn’t place. A cool night, a sugary smell, the movement of a swing. Then it disappeared.
Danny sighed. “I don’t know, Car. Sometimes I really don’t.” He paused, and she thought that was all there was. “But I think it has something to do with your fierceness. You take care of everyone—even Jobe, the guy you say you never loved. At the end when you were cleaning the shit from his sheets. I kind of liked that. Jesus, you’re kind of a bully but …” His hand dropped away and he sat on the bed next to her. “For some reason, I just sort of. Love you for it.”
Carmen nodded. There were glimmers of that long-ago ice cream shop appearing in her memory like a house behind a thick stand of pines. She rested her head on Danny’s shoulder and they stayed that way, silent, until he had to leave and go home.
Olive arrived at dawn dressed in a smart yellow suit—the kind one might wear to an afternoon luncheon—and pushed her way through the screen door onto the sun porch where her son had died. Carmen stood watching from her spot in the kitchen. It was approximately where she’d been when Jobe stopped breathing, and this time, too, she was holding a cup in her hand. But—because she was leaving to be stuck with needles, poisoned and instantly nauseated—rather than coffee, she was drinking weak tea.
“Hello, dear.” Olive crossed the porch and set her purse down on the kitchen counter. “Are you ready?”
Never! Carmen shivered. “Just about,” she said. “Can I get you something?”
“I’m fine.” Olive fingered the brooch at her throat. It looked like rhinestones but Carmen knew it was not. “I stopped for a little breakfast on the way here.”
“Okay.” Carmen gulped the last inch of her tea and put the cup in the sink, feeling irrationally irritable and rushed. “I’ll just grab my stuff and we can go.”
They had been like this—formal and stilted—since that disastrous talk in Olive’s car, the day of the meeting with Dr. Woo. Olive had phoned the following evening to ask when Carmen’s first chemotherapy session was scheduled and inform her that she, Olive, would be accompanying her. There was an unnaturally hard edge to her voice. Carmen wondered for one frantic moment if her mother-inlaw simply wanted a front seat to her suffering—to watch the shrew, who hadn’t loved her son well, writhe and retch and die.
But when she climbed into the front seat of Olive’s Mercedes, Carmen had to hoist herself over a pile of supplies on the floor: bottles of sparkling water, brand-new magazines, a bag of
hard ginger candies. “I was remembering Jobe’s treatments,” Olive said curtly. “I thought those things might help.”
“Thanks.” Carmen slumped, which was due to the early hour but also, probably, to the way she was dressed. She’d been warned to make herself “comfortable” over and over, as if you could be comfortable while someone was pumping toxins into your blood. Grudgingly, she’d put on her sweat suit, fuzzy white socks, and tennis shoes. Her hair was unbrushed and wild, which she liked. The more present it could be, the better.
“I have a favor to ask,” she said. As if this weren’t favor enough. But Olive didn’t seem perturbed.
“What can I do?”
“I need to tell Michael, today. I just haven’t had the … I know I should have. But he’s so young, and he’s still really upset about Jobe. I thought it might be easier on him if you were there.”
“Of course.” Two words, perfectly even. Suddenly, Carmen was irritated with Olive. With this whole uncomfortable situation. It was a puzzle whether she had a right to be, but she was too anxious to figure it out.
“I still don’t know what to do about my job,” she volunteered after a few miles. Here was a nice, neutral topic. “I got the paperwork yesterday and reinstated Jobe’s insurance, just in case. But I don’t know if I want to let go of mine … stop working.” Carmen looked out the window. It was early enough, there were only a few cars on the road—mostly people drinking coffee out of enormous white paper cups.
“Do you like your job?” Olive asked. “It’s always been hard to tell.”
Carmen narrowed her eyes. Olive’s voice was pleasant. But this could be code, a clever way of circling back to the subject of Carmen’s fickle nature. Finally, she shrugged. “I don’t love it, I don’t hate it. It was …” What? A way to bide time, to get out of the house, to provide an easy excuse for her afternoons with Danny? “No, I guess I don’t really like the work much. I just always thought I should.”
