Happy Family

by Tracy Barone

  When she walks in the door, she’s hit by the resounding stillness. In the past, Cheri loved having the house to herself. But now she keeps the news on in her office at all hours—is she turning into a little old lady, watching TV to keep her company? Or just a bad-news junkie? While there are still a few hoops to jump through with UN inspections, an invasion of Iraq is looking imminent. She imagines Samuelson firing off impassioned e-mails to Washington, making a list of sites that need to be protected, warning about the antiquities that could be destroyed in the event of a war. In a normal world where Michael didn’t have cancer and there was no Richards, Cheri would have been adding her name to those e-mails.

  At least now she has a little something to occupy her mind. The package from Peter Martins finally arrived—the photocopies of the tablet pieces he’d identified, along with his notes “for your edification and eyes only.” Two-D representations go only so far; Cheri knows she needs to have and to hold all of the fragments, including the ones in Baghdad, to determine how they fit together before they could be translated. Peter wouldn’t attempt a transliteration without the pieces in Baghdad. And neither should you, she tells herself as she hunkers down in her den and spreads the copies out on the floor.

  Translating a dead language that scholars could approximate only phonetically was the kind of maddeningly complex work that appealed to Cheri’s type A personality. Precision. Control. Working with cuneiform put her in the same zone she achieved at the shooting range. There were six hundred signs that the Sumerians used regularly; knowing which code words went with which symbol was the easy part. Even a slight directional change in one character could alter the meaning. Words and sentences would collapse, change, emerge as something different, then disappear again. That was for an assembled tablet. This was a tease, an unsanctioned taste, but it was a welcome distraction, far better than pawing through Ugaritic texts for the umpteenth time.

  What are you without your work? She hears Michael in her head and starts to panic; is he okay? Rather than risking getting Jessica on the phone, Cheri calls Bertrand, who goes on about Michael’s “indefatigable spirit” but confides that he looks thinner. Bertrand says he’s forcing Michael to take naps; they can afford to slow down the pace. It’s upsetting that everyone on Michael’s crew knows more about what is going on with her husband than she does. They’re enclosed in the terrarium of their road show, and whatever’s outside of it reanimates only upon their return. She’s experienced this on his other shoots, but this time the question he’s tracking is about his own life and death. Cheri knows that as long as Michael is on the hunt, he can be the predator and not the prey. She understands it perfectly and knows that she can’t really claim to understand how he feels at all.

  The Lamppost Survives

  It’s always nighttime when the voices come prodding. As Cheri’s lying in the dark, trying and failing to stop her lazy Susan of a mind from circling back to “Things I Hate About Her,” the phone rings. Michael sounds panicked. “Bertrand’s daughter was in a car accident. It’s bad and she’s in the hospital—” Michael’s voice is breaking up due to a poor connection. After hanging up and calling back, all Cheri gleans is that Bertrand flew home yesterday as soon as he got the news. Karen is in the ICU at Northwestern Memorial. The last time Cheri saw Karen, she was in their kitchen with Bertrand, proudly showing off her baby bump. Cheri feels ashamed that she’d felt an ugly twinge of envy at the time. When the connection is better, Michael tells her that eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant Karen was driving home from Whole Foods when she swerved to avoid a raccoon in the street and drove smack into a lamppost.

  Cheri is haunted by if-onlys. If only Karen had left the house a few minutes later; if the counter man had kept her waiting for just a few seconds longer; if she’d bought an SUV, because who gives a shit about carbon footprints when this can happen? The lamppost survived. So did Karen, albeit with extensive injuries—four broken ribs, internal bleeding, and a serious concussion—but the baby did not.

  Michael tells Cheri that a memorial service will be held for the baby tomorrow afternoon, at the hospital chapel, since Karen is in no condition to travel yet. He’s coming home for the service, arriving at O’Hare in the morning around eleven thirty. Of course he’ll be there for Bertrand at a time like this, though Cheri can hear in his voice the anxiety over completing the shoot on schedule. “It’s only one night,” he says, more for his benefit than Cheri’s. “Let’s meet at the chapel.”

  The death of a baby destroyed the natural order of things; the parent should always die before the child. Parents should fly on separate planes so if one goes down in a fiery crash, the children aren’t orphaned.

  The next day, as Cheri contemplates what to wear for the memorial of an infant, she’s struck by the irony: when she was trying to get pregnant, all she saw were pregnant women. Now that Michael has cancer, she’s immersed in grief. After nine weeks apart, she will spend her first minutes with Michael in the company of mourners. How many days did he have until his last? This was the question Michael was trying to face by making this documentary, but Cheri didn’t want to know. Nor did she want to count how few she was going to be sharing with him. She’s suddenly leveled by the reality of time. How little Michael may have left; how much of it was wasted these past few years in moments of lost connection.

  Cheri picks her most conservative black dress and places one demure gold hoop through each earlobe despite her profusion of piercings. At the last minute, thinking of Jessica, she puts on lipstick. The hospital chapel is filled with Bertrand’s family and friends, some of whom Cheri recognizes from Karen’s wedding. The room is like a yoga studio: candlelit, scented with lilies and patchouli, a guitarist to one side playing James Taylor songs. People mill about, sipping herbal tea. “Karen, I’m so sorry for your loss,” Cheri says, bending to hug Karen, who is in a wheelchair with a rose-colored scarf wrapped around her hospital gown. Her face has a purplish bruise on one side, and she’s clutching a small bouquet of wildflowers.

  “Thank you,” she says, her eyes blurred with tears. “We’re choosing to look at it as a celebration of life.” Cheri isn’t quite sure how to respond. Bertrand comes up behind her and gives her a hug. It’s devoid of his usual papa-bear warmth.

  “Michael’s plane was delayed; he’s in a cab now,” he says. “Thank you for being here.” Cheri nods and starts to offer her condolences to him, but Bertrand, ever the producer, notices an elderly man with a walker and goes to help him find a seat. It’s then that she notices the small white casket on the dais. Cheri is taken aback to see that it’s open. People are going up to pay their respects; some put in a flower or a note. Other than for one of her former professors, the only funeral Cheri had ever attended was Sol’s. He had wanted a closed casket. As well versed as she was in ancient rituals, she hadn’t participated in many modern ones, but she slowly makes her way up to the pulpit. Inside the casket, the baby is perfect; uncreased, pink-hued, seemingly sleeping peacefully. Moon kissed, still blessed. It reminds Cheri of the Victorian photographs of dead infants posed to look as peaceful as cherubim. Those were creepy, but this is just sad. Where is Michael? she wonders with a tinge of impatience. Cheri feels slightly self-conscious without him, as well as overdressed. For this “celebration of life,” she’s one of the few people who chose to wear all black. Cheri takes a seat by the door and drapes her coat on the next chair to save him a spot.

  A female minister with a gray bob steps up to the podium, and the musician puts down his guitar.

  “Josephine’s parents and family wish to express gratitude for her brief presence in this world. Let’s take a moment to let in the joy she brought to everyone who anticipated her arrival. Who is to say that this child didn’t lead a more impactful life in the few short hours God granted her than most of us do in our entire lives? It is not time that determines the quality of our existence.”

  Cheri cranes her neck to look for Michael as people stand up and read poems in wavering v
oices and speak about how moved they were by this little girl’s fight. Cheri’s underarms dampen and she feels her throat closing like she’s swallowed pepper. How many more platitudes does she have to hear? When Michael slips in next to her, her heart drops. His clothes hang on him and he’s got the prominent Adam’s apple of a very old man. Everything about him seems to have diminished. “Hey, kiddo,” he says.

  “Hey, you.”

  “It is hard to comprehend why God would do this,” the minister says. Cheri is looking at Michael, trying not to stare. His color is off, way off. “There are no answers, save that each life, no matter how long or briefly lived, is a precious gift. It’s not about the amount of time we are here, but how we use it, how we love.” She ends her sermon and people nod and close their eyes in silent prayer. Michael’s face looks pained, and she doesn’t think it’s solely because of the occasion. Behind the wear of the road, the exhaustion, there’s a searching vulnerability in his expression. Suddenly, what Cheri read in his diary feels utterly irrelevant. Jessica is utterly irrelevant. Cheri wants to leap to her feet and yell, Life is fucking unfair, people! She can’t believe she doesn’t have an Ativan on her. The room is close and cloying.

  The guitarist plays Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.” Cheri watches Michael make the rounds; he looks like a crane as he stoops to put his hands on Bertrand’s shoulders. She’ll give him a few more minutes and then she’ll insist he come home and get some rest. Is she the only one not feeling the hippie vibe, the magical thinking? Cheri half expects someone to flick a Bic and start swaying. She’s had enough. She locates Michael in the crowd and taps him on the shoulder, hoping to steal a moment of privacy. When he turns to her, focusing on her for the first time today, she sees the whites of his eyes are pale yellow. “Michael,” she says, her voice betraying her fear. “Michael, something’s wrong with your eyes.”

  She fishes around in her purse for a mirror.

  “What’s wrong with my eyes?” Michael pulls out his phone and looks into the camera.

  “I think you have jaundice.”

  “Fuck me,” he says.

  Call Me Ishmael

  Disaster! We are robbed; someone stole the car from Montclair. I should call the police, the insurance? Tell me what to do,” Cici shouts into the phone. Cheri thinks, I knew it, I just knew this would happen.

  “Mother,” Cheri says, interrupting her free fall of fretting. “Cici! It’s not stolen. I know where it is.”

  “You know? Why you not say something?”

  “Michael borrowed it. It’s been sitting there for years unused; it’s not like you need it, so just calm down.” It takes a moment for this to register with Cici.

  “Your husband stole my automobile? Why you no tell me?”

  “It’s not stealing, it’s borrowing,” Cheri says. “It’s safe and you’ll get it back, so whatever you do, don’t call the police. I’ll take care of it.”

  “He is a wolf in cheap clothing, always so nice to my face. What he uses it for? It is my property and I do not want any-body using it. Where is it, you tell me right now.”

  “You’re overreacting, as always. It’s just a car, Mother, he’ll return it in perfect condition, please don’t worry.”

  “Who are you to say what is and is not important? You think this is funny? You no tell me where it is, I will tell the police and they will stop him.”

  “Cici, I can’t take this crap right now. You’re concerned about a goddamned car and meanwhile Michael’s got cancer.” Cheri stops herself from saying more. She knew she couldn’t put off telling Cici forever but she hadn’t planned on breaking the news this way. “It’s in his pancreas. Which is bad, and he’s not doing well.”

  “Cancer,” Cici says quietly. “Where is this pancreas?”

  “It’s behind the stomach. I didn’t want to tell you and have you worry,” Cheri says. She also didn’t want to have to answer her mother’s endless questions or deal with her fear.

  “Why he not get the surgery to remove the cancer like they did for Cookie?”

  “It’s not in a place where it can be removed. Look, just tell me you won’t call the police about the car. Don’t screw this up for Michael.”

  “What? I am in the city doing nothing and you take my property, you no tell me why or that your husband he is sick with the cancer, and I screw up? Why you no tell me? Your father, he would not like that.”

  “I didn’t care what he thought when he was alive, so I certainly don’t care what he might have thought now that he’s dead. This isn’t about you or Sol.”

  Cheri is angry that she allowed herself to be caught in the crosshairs of her mother’s myopia. Cici’s helplessness infuriates her and makes her cruel. It doesn’t help that Cici’s call came on the heels of her learning through a colleague that Samuelson was in Washington presenting a list of locations in Iraq that needed to be protected, number one being the Iraq museum. If she weren’t benched, waiting on word from the academic gestapo, she could be adding her voice to the protest, taking part in something meaningful. Her heart feels like it’s one of John Paul Whatever Number’s squeaky toys, and she doesn’t have any more Ativan refills left. She’d called Dr. Vega, who, true to her word, wouldn’t give her more Band-Aids without seeing her for another session. Too bad that among Michael’s cornucopia of new meds there wasn’t anything Cheri could use.

  Michael has been in the hospital since the funeral two weeks ago. They’d put a stent in to drain the bile and that had stopped the jaundice, but the cancer has metastasized to his liver. The doctors brought up chemo, but Michael’s response was “Appreciate that it’s never too late to nuke, but I’m still going to pass.” The Gonzalez regimen had gotten him this far—the clinic would continue to adjust his enzymes and supplements—and he was sticking with it. With steadfast resolve, Michael insisted he would do things his way, and finally the doctors had no choice but to discharge him. But as he and Cheri approached their street, he let out a deep groan. “Are you okay? Should I pull over?” Cheri asked. Michael’s face was painted with fear and he buried his head in his hands and began to weep. They sat in front of their house for what felt like a long time; she made little circles on his back until he pulled himself together. “Okay, I’m done,” he announced. But they both knew a corner had been turned; Michael’s homecoming was the beginning of the end.

  “If you can’t go on the road, the road will come to you,” Bertrand said, invoking his virile magic. Like Michael, he seemed to deal with his grief by throwing himself back into his work. It was as if he’d clapped his hands and the Oompa-Loompas converted HMS Base Camp into a set. Giaccomo, Michael’s cameraman, was suddenly everywhere at once, subjecting every detail of their lives to his lens. His very unobtrusiveness made his work more insidious. Cheri didn’t like to be photographed under normal circumstances; it made her self-conscious and provoked the half smile everyone thought was a smirk. Jessica had launched a website for the film and chatted with Michael by phone daily about their social media outreach. But the good news was she’d gone back to wherever she came from, most likely a college out of state.

  “You wanted him to be working and not beading.” Taya’s voice blasted through the phone. “It took cancer to kick his ass into gear and turn him back into the man you fell in love with, that’s why you’re upset. Listen, go back to that shrink. You need to talk to someone who specializes in this kind of thing. You’re so not a Jew.”

  In response to Cheri’s silence, Taya continues on: “Cheri. Talk to the shrink. Because, unlike me, who does nothing but obsess and talk about myself all day, you actually have real issues you’re dealing with. Hold on a sec, this fucking guy’s about to take my parking space. Hey, no—”

  Silence confirms they’ve been cut off. Cheri could have argued that her distrust of shrinks sprang from her being a cop and having to pass psych evaluations, some while amped on amphetamines, rather than from her not being Jewish, but Taya’s point was made.

  It wasn’t
as if Cheri shunned all forms of help. She’d had numerous online sorties with pancreatic-cancer support groups where people told one another “I’m praying for you” and swapped stories about how their husbands’ testicles swelled up like grapefruits at the end due to a salt imbalance. So that’s what they had to look forward to. She’d even gone with Michael to a visualization group for people with cancer at the hospital. She detested consciousness-raising, especially in a herd nobody would volunteer to join, but when Michael wanted to go, she went along.

  She sat with Michael in a circle of strangers, eyes closed, imagining their diseased organs to the beat of a therapist’s word drum. But instead of visualizing Michael’s pancreas, she had an image of him from the first vacation they took together, Michael singing “My Cherie Amour” like Stevie Wonder, his gray chest hair matted with salt, holding a trail of silvery fish in one hand, a Cuban cigar in the other. “Cherie amour,” he croons as he sloshes out of the boat and wades to shore with long strides, a pair of local Portuguese fishermen in tow. “We got your breakfast!” He was her Diego Rivera, her Hemingway, her Marc Bolan. The memory made her bone-crushingly sad, but the exercise seemed to cheer Michael, which was the point. “You should try the caregivers’ support group,” the therapist had said afterward, handing her a flyer. “They have much better snacks.”

  She thought about calling Dr. Vega again as Taya had suggested. There was something comforting about her silk blouses with the bows at the top and her fernlike plants. Despite her frugality with the scripts, Cheri liked her. They’d have the same conversation about Cheri going on some daily antidepressant with a name like Relieva. The commercials featured people balled up in bed, then suddenly out in a park playing Frisbee with a cute puppy. Why not show a homeless guy sitting in his own feces saying, “Homelessness is no problem since I’ve been on Relieva”? The last time she’d seen Dr. Vega, she didn’t even know about Michael’s diagnosis. Even with the Ativan she hadn’t been protected from emotional surges and she has to steel herself for what she knows is coming.