by Ann Bauer
“We should probably head back,” Jobe said, looking around as if this wetness were something foreign and completely unexpected. Possibly dangerous.
Carmen hesitated. It was exhausting trying to draw him out, make him laugh. She dreaded having the entire evening ahead: dinner in one of Riomaggiore’s cramped little cafés, then hours in their room with nothing to talk about and nowhere to go. That endless dance they did where she waited for him to touch her, both wishing he would and hoping he wouldn’t. “C’mon, let’s do one more,” she said. “We can make it four-fifths of the way, to Vernazza. Besides, I love that name. Ver-naaa-zaaa. It’ll be fun.”
It was not fun. Jobe never objected, but less than half an hour passed before Carmen said, “I’m sorry, I think you were right. Maybe we should turn around now.” The drizzle had turned to a steady, drenching rain, not cold but unusually thick. And the dark was settling around them. Carefully, as if they were in danger of losing their place, Carmen and Jobe pivoted in the dirt and started walking back.
Whereas they had started out in a pack of tourists, the two were now utterly—permanently, it felt to Carmen—alone. Both the storm and the night deepened. They had to slow their pace, peering at their own feet simply to find the path. “Do you want to stop, try to get some shelter under there?” Jobe asked her, pointing at a bent tree.
Carmen shook her head then realized he probably couldn’t see her. She was crying but it didn’t matter; the rain kept washing her tears away. “Let’s just keep going,” she said. “We can find a place to stop in Corniglia and wait this out.” But as they inched on, she recalled the closed-looking little town and wondered what they’d find. An old church, perhaps? A pub with a one-eyed bartender? The cottage of some strega who would punish her further by making her eat feathers and pins?
Time passed. It seemed like hours and Carmen would have sworn that night had intensified beyond any degree of darkness she’d ever experienced before. She no longer tried to hide the fact that she was sobbing and bumped up against Jobe, hoping he would put his arm around her, say something comforting, even just take her hand. “Are you okay?” he asked, speaking loudly because it was somehow harder to hear in the gloom.
“How much farther do you think?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Let me look.” Jobe stepped away, two long strides, and climbed onto a rock at the edge of the path. He raised one hand to clear the rainwater from his eyes. “I think I see …”
Carmen saw him begin to fall, like a tree that had been sawed through. His feet went out from under him on the slippery surface and Jobe tipped forward, one hand reaching back in the air to grasp nothing, pitching headfirst toward the black water below. It was a long way, maybe a quarter of a mile. Or half. Who was she to say?
In a flash, Carmen saw the bed in which they’d laid the night of their wedding. She felt again the terrible loneliness of being trapped there. She recalled her dread at going back to their room in Riomaggiore, her dread that all of life would feel exactly like this. And she saw how easy the answer was: All of that misery could be averted if Jobe were to fall.
She didn’t have time to consider her part in things, whether there were actions that were right and others that were wrong. These were only facts that came to her. A situation had presented itself—miraculously—that would solve all the problems she faced, and without her having to make her feelings clear.
It couldn’t have lasted more than a second, but Carmen had a feeling of prescience and certainty unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. Surely this was no coincidence. It was being shown to her, presented with everything but voice-over, and she now knew the truth: Jobe would have to die for this awful mistake to be undone.
She saw it all unfold in her mind, scene by scene. At the same exact time she leapt forward and grabbed his outstretched hand.
AUGUST 2007
Carmen stared as the nurse, a hefty middle-aged black woman, slid the little weight left and left and left again on the beam of the scale.
“One twenty-five,” she said.
Carmen stepped off the platform and reminded herself to breathe evenly. It helped with the vertigo. “Finally, after all these years, my driver’s license is right.”
“Sounds good to me. I’d kill to be 125.” The woman flipped through her records. “Where did you start?” She scanned, pretty brown eyes darting all over the page. “Okay, I guess that’s not so good: eleven pounds in two weeks. Are you really sick? Lots of puking?”
Carmen shook her head. “Only twice. But everything tastes terrible—dead, kind of—and I’m just incredibly …” They were still standing in the hallway; she glanced around to see who was listening. “Constipated. It’s been something like eight days since I, you know, went.”
“Yeah, lots of women have that.” The nurse sighed as if to say it’s not the dying that’s so bad, it’s the not being able to shit. “That’s because of the anti-emetics. They stop everything coming out, doesn’t matter which end.”
“Makes it hard to eat,” Carmen confided. “You think about everything just sitting there. In your stomach. Rotting. Like garbage.” Like cancer. She didn’t say that part, but the thought hung there.
The exam room was chilly. Once the nurse had taken her blood pressure and temperature and left with a promise that Dr. Woo would be in soon, Carmen got up to look in the mirror over the sink. She hadn’t weighed 125 since the year she met Jobe. She remembered her body back then, how sleek and limber it had felt. Now her abdomen was rock-hard and stuffed; she was so tired she sometimes slept entire days away. But when she raised her arms in the sleeveless top she wore, they looked youthful and slender. Her collarbones were prominent—on display like some finely crafted musical instrument—the skin over her cheekbones hauntingly thin and blue. Her hair, cruelly, had never looked better. It was plush and full around her lean face. So far cancer had given her back five years, at least to the naked eye.
Perhaps, she consoled herself, this is why Michael had barely reacted to the news. She and Olive had been waiting for him when he came home from school a couple of days before, sitting around the table in the kitchen, trying to pretend they were simply meeting over coffee.
“Have a seat,” Olive said the moment his backpack hit the floor. “It’s been ages since I’ve heard about school.”
Carmen had fixed Michael a snack while they talked—a self-consciously ornate arrangement of crackers and cheese on a plate—then sat and picked up her cold prop of a cup. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she’d begun. “I went to the doctor the other day …” Then she’d watched his swarthy man-child face closely as she said the word cancer. Across the table, Carmen could feel Olive tightening, as if girding herself. But there had been no great tsunami of grief.
“Are you going to the hospital?” Michael had asked. “Will I have to stay with Grandma?” He’d chewed, eating the cheese and the crackers separately. Only at the end, after his food was gone and Olive had risen to get him some juice, did Michael look at Carmen closely. He peered at her in a way that reminded her of Antonio, when he suddenly focused his attention after a long spate of work or drunkenness.
“Are you alright, Mom?” he’d asked in an eerily old voice. Behind him, there was a shimmer: tall like a weather front, darkness filled with stars. Then it was gone, and Olive was on her way back to the table with a bright red glass of Cran-Apple juice. Carmen swallowed, caught between the truth and the right answer.
“I’m okay,” she’d finally said.
Now there was a knock and almost simultaneously the door began to open. “Everything all set in here?” Dr. Woo called. Carmen dropped her arms and jumped away from the mirror, hopping up on the exam table where she belonged. This was the promptest doctor she had ever met.
He shook her hand, sat on his stool, put his hands on his thighs, and frowned. “How’s the tummy?” he asked.
“Bearable,” she said.
“Good, good.” Woo smiled broadly. “For t
wenty years, I heard more about nausea than about cancer. It was the worst part. Now …” He held up his hands like a magician who’d just performed a trick. “In most cases. Gone.”
“I’m, uh.” She looked down at her swinging feet. “Really constipated.”
“I see that.” For a moment, Carmen thought he meant he could tell by looking at her. Then she glanced up and saw him reading her chart. “A little milk of magnesia might help with that.”
“Seriously? I should just pick it up at the CVS? That’s it?”
The doctor shrugged. “As cancer patients go, Mrs. Garrett, you’re a dream. No excessive vomiting. No signs of anemia. Healthy in every other way. With you, I don’t worry so much about tolerating the chemo. Though keep in mind, you’re still in the honeymoon stage.”
“This is my honeymoon?”
“Recovery tends to get harder with each successive treatment. There are more minor symptoms. Heartburn, hair loss. I want you to call me immediately if you become very dizzy or light-headed. We’ll get you in here for a blood test. Otherwise, everything looks very good.”
He stood. That was it? He was done advising her, leaving her to fight through the thicket of cancer and life and work and kids all by herself? She needed to ask something, find out something more. “You said with me you don’t worry so much about the chemo. What do you worry about?”
Woo was standing, readying himself to go. He was a regal-looking man from this angle, Carmen thought. Small but sober. A little warriorlike in his white coat. “Youth, Mrs. Garrett. It’s our greatest challenge here.” He looked at the door—a little longingly, she thought—but sat back down. “Studies show the number of years between recurrence grows increasingly larger with age. This has nothing to do with you in particular, of course, but on average a woman in her early forties, like yourself, is more likely to present with another tumor within five years than, say, a woman of sixty-five. It’s not a perfect predictor, and there are other factors.”
He leaned back, resigned to staying now. “Years ago, I had a forty-five-year-old patient with only one, single breast cancer event.” He held up his forefinger. One. It was the only integer, Jobe had once told her, that was neither prime nor not prime. “She’s nearing sixty now and her biggest health concern seems to be arthritis. But in most cases, youth makes me cautious. The body is still fast; it grows things well. Hair, nails. New skin where it is cut or burned.” The doctor wiggled his fingers, the way someone might simulate sprouting plants. “Fetuses—whole living human beings—in a woman so young as yourself.”
Carmen saw again her own image: rosy, unlined cheeks and thick, long hair. The phantom baby that could be but was not—thank God—growing inside her.
“Mathematically, I would prefer your chances if you were ten years older, which is why I insist on pursuing every treatment. At the same time, you should not feel burdened by statistics. I as your doctor must take them into account. You, however …” He shook his head. “Remember. Groups are consistent; individuals are random. You are but one point in a set of millions. Your course is not determined.”
He rose to leave again, but more slowly this time. “Have I answered your question?”
“Yes, thank you,” Carmen said quietly.
After he was gone, she gathered her things and let herself out. There were people in the halls of the clinic but they floated past Carmen, like faces in a dream. “One point in a set of millions.” Through the dark concrete parking ramp and as she drove out into the glinting sun, the phrase echoed like a far-off but persistent series of bells in her head.
Carmen was pawing through a box of papers when Danny showed up early, looking as nervous as if he were there to take her daughter out on a date.
“Prompt today, aren’t we?” she said, as she let him in. “Where’s the guy who used to keep me waiting twenty minutes in a hotel room?”
He blinked rapidly, looking as if he didn’t know whether to storm out or laugh. “I thought it was important. Kid just lost his father, his world keeps getting turned around. Showing up on time seemed like the least I could do.”
“That’s sweet.” She moved in and put her cheek briefly against his neck. It was warm. “I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to say. This just feels a little strange, you know, you being here.”
“It feels strange to me too.” She backed away, in case Michael heard them and came out. Danny looked around him. “This isn’t what I imagined.”
“But, wait …” Carmen pictured the cockier version of Danny, standing across this very room, chatting with Jobe’s brother Will. “You’ve been here before. After the funeral.”
“I suppose.” Danny stared soberly, as if he were just now mourning Jobe. “But it seems different now. Or, I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention back then.”
There was a pause. “So,” Carmen broke in, “what did you imagine?”
“Something haughtier, I guess. More …”
“Expensive looking?” He nodded and she laughed. “That would be my mother-in-law’s house, plenty of ancient Chinese vases and Persian rugs. I’ll have to wangle a dinner invitation for you.” She stopped to consider Danny and Olive together at a table. She couldn’t picture them in the dining room but could see them together in the kitchen—at the table where she and Olive had eaten grilled cheese sandwiches on Carmen’s first night in Baltimore—using their fingers to pluck bites from the same roasted chicken.
“Hello?” Danny’s voice and questioning tone interrupted her fantasy.
Carmen turned and there was Luca, planted in the doorway, watching Danny. “Hey, sweetheart.” She cleared her throat. This was ridiculously awkward. “You remember Danny, from the funeral?”
Luca didn’t respond one way or another but continued to stare, slit-eyed, exactly the way she’d taught him not to when he was a child. It didn’t seem right to correct him now that he was an adult; that would be humiliating. But why did Luca have to backslide in front of Danny, whom she’d tried to keep separate from every messy, imperfect detail in her life?
“Luca. Hi. It’s good to see you.” Danny stepped forward, crossing between Carmen and her son, to extend his hand.
Please shake his hand, Carmen willed Luca silently. Whether in response to this or not, he did.
“Are you here for dinner?” Luca raised his nose as if to sniff the air. No, there was nothing cooking.
“I’m here to take your brother to a ballgame, actually,” Danny said.
“Grandma and I are …” Carmen jumped in to reassure Luca that she and Olive were taking him out, as well. Forever trying to make up for his disability with movies and treats.
“Michael’s afraid,” Luca told Danny, interrupting Carmen. “He cries all night.” Luca made two fists and twisted them in front of his eyes in a comic book demonstration.
Danny was silent for a moment, looking Luca over. Once again, as she had in the chapel, Carmen saw how similar they were in size. These two men looked each other straight in the eyes.
“What do you think he needs?” She’d never heard Danny’s voice so gentle, certainly not with her. “What should I do for your brother?”
“Did you know our dad?” Luca asked.
Danny shook his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t. I think I would have liked him.”
“He was very smart.” Thmaart. Luca said this word reverently, which pained Carmen to the point that she almost missed what came next. “It’s like God died.”
It was a simile. This was the first thing Carmen noted. Once, a rather dim, young speech therapist had listed for her the things Luca could and could not learn to do. She would be able to help Luca eliminate the thickness from his pronunciation, the woman said, but he was incapable of grasping higher-level language skills, such as metaphor and simile. Carmen grinned. The woman had been wrong on both points.
Then, she heard the actual words her son had used. It’s like God died. For a moment, the world around her felt turned inside-out in the way of a reversed glov
e that looks right except for the seam. Then it flipped back.
She blinked and glanced at Danny who wore a questioning expression, as if asking her, What do I say now? Carmen shrugged. But she stepped forward and put her arm around Luca, drawing in his warmth. “Why don’t you go find your brother, then get ready for dinner?” she said. “Grandma will be here soon.”
“Okay.” Luca turned to go, then seemed to remember something. He turned and stuck his hand out again. “It was nice to meet you.” Words that long-ago speech therapist had taught him. She had—despite her prejudices—done a few things right.
“You, too,” Danny answered. “And I’m really sorry about your dad.”
After Luca left, everything was different. Her world had intruded completely and Carmen knew that she and Danny could never go back to the thrilling, secretive relationship they’d had before. So she might as well go for broke. “Got a couple minutes before you have to go?” she asked. “I’d like to show you something, get your opinion.”
Danny checked his watch. “Sure. I did leave the house way too early. Mega was …” He caught himself, still trying to adhere to the old rules. “Anyway, I’ve got time. What is it?”
“Come.” Carmen led him down the hall and into the dining room, where she’d already spread two boxes’ worth of papers across the surface of the table. “I’m trying to organize these. Figure out what’s important. But it’s like trying to glue together a bowl after it’s been shattered. Every piece looks similar. At least to me.”
Danny raised his reading glasses and picked up the sheet nearest his hand, squinting at the tiny penciled numbers. He put it down and picked up another, circling the table. After repeating this a half dozen times, he looked up at Carmen and pulled off his spectacles, letting them drop to his chest. “Maybe he really was God.”
Michael must have heard their voices. He edged into the room, shy, dressed in jeans and a Baltimore Orioles shirt and hat.
