The Instant When Everything is Perfect

by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

  “A little bit in college. Ford—“ she stops, sighs, continues on. “Ford shamed me out of it. I used to have a little hidey spot where I’d go behind a classroom building, and he’d find me. So I quit. The next thing I knew, I was pregnant with Lucien. I guess my body gave the all clear.”

  Robert is silent, but she can feel his pulse, his heart, against her body.

  “What about you?”

  “No,” he says. “But I smoked a lot of pot my senior year of college once I was accepted to UCSF medical school. That was the year my father died. The first year of med school, though, convinced me to stop smoking pot. Actually, I thought I had every disease I studied. Lung cancer was my biggest fear. So since then, I just drink a little bit. Nothing else.”

  Mia rubs her face on his neck, strokes his sides, reaches a hand to his ass, which is small, tight, and rounded.

  “Robert,” she says.

  “Hmm.” He kisses her temple, and his penis stirs.

  Mia moves on top of him, looking down into his pale blue eyes. His hair fans out on the pillow, and she reaches down to stroke a lock against the smooth cotton. Her body is coming out of its lethargy, her mind spinning with desire and fear.

  “This was so nice,” she says.

  “And?” His face stills, waiting.

  Here is the spot, the place. Now. She could do it now. She could tell him that she has to go home and she has to stay home, for good, forever. She needs to say she can’t do this to Ford, who deserves her trust or to Harper, who still needs her full attention. Mia could insist that there should be no more emails or meetings or lunches. What she’s done wasn’t so bad, right? Only once. She won’t tell Kenzie. She’ll never write a sex scene like this in any of her novels—no afternoon trysts, warm adobe bedrooms, beautiful doctors with long lunch breaks. She’ll just drive home, shower, and then make her family a big dinner. She’ll convince Ford that once and for all—no matter what he says—that they need to go to a therapist. In a month, a half a year, a year, this afternoon will be like a movie she watched, a whirl of flickering, transient images. She won’t even ever write about adultery any more period, keeping her characters faithful and happy, committed ‘til death do them part, each novel with complete with a tidy, uplifting resolution.

  Then, when she’s eighty, Mia will sit in her rocker and think, That was a lovely dream. How nice.

  And if she leaves now, if she throws on her clothes and drives home fast, Robert can never break her heart, as she imagines he might. After all, she’s married, overweight, confused. She’s no prize catch, and eventually, he’ll figure that out. Or maybe he already has. He hasn’t even told her very much about himself; she’s not yet heard the story about how he killed someone. He’s let her into his house, that’s all.

  But he’s looking up at her, his eyes wide, his mouth set. This is the man who made her blush so deeply the first time she met him, she can still feel the cell memory of it, the way everything inside her seemed to expand. This is the man who excites her so much, her body and her mind have finally found each other, as she always imagined they could.

  As she looks at this man underneath her, she knows she could get sucked down into wanting. Of wanting what she’s always wanted. Mia knows she’s greedy. To want more is selfish. To want more is to test fate, pulling one final, gaudy thing on board simply to lose the rest of the load she’s collected for years. Hasn’t she been gifted with her children and her husband and her writing? What about her teaching and her mother and sisters and her friends? But the need for this thing in her body, this loving with Robert, has always been there. For years, she’s been saying goodbye to her want, watching it float away on a life raft to the middle of an uncharted ocean. Goodbye, she thought, waving as she sailed on. Maybe next life.

  She touches Robert’s face, kisses his mouth, looks at him and then the clock. “How long is your lunch hour?”

  “I don’t have to be back until three,” he says, almost laughing. He flips her down and brings his mouth to her chest, sliding his face along her body until he reaches a nipple.

  Mia opens her legs to him, his penis hard against her thigh. So there will be more, she thinks. I don’t have to wave goodbye just yet.

  He lifts her head from her breast and reaches for another condom on his bedside table. His hair falls onto her face, the room streaks of light and dark, the rest just Robert, his smells, his skin, his voice. She presses her lips on his throat and listens to the crinkle of the little foil package.

  “Mia,” he says, pushing inside her, his body hot for hers, at least for now.

  “More,” she says. She moves with him, toward him, against him, around him. Mia closes her eyes.

  Eleven

  Sally

  Sally sits in the white vinyl recliner in the treatment room at Inland. Unlike many patients on chemo, she has decided against the port-o-cath, the catheter inserted on her chest for an ultimately less painful course of chemo. Instead, she told Dr. Gupta she’d had enough tragedy to her chest, and she didn’t care if her arm was poked and pulled every three weeks.

  “The last thing I need is another damn tube in there,” she said.

  “Hmm,” Dr. Gupta said, scratching his cheek with his pen. “May I see your right arm then, Mrs. Tillier?”

  She held out her arm, and he examined her skin, her body, laying his slim brown fingers on the soft, thin flesh between her fore- and upper arm. Then he ran his hand down to her hand, peering at the weave of blue at her wrist.

  “Your veins look good, Mrs. Tiller, so I will acquiesce. However, if there is trouble at a later date, I will insist on the port-o-cath.”

  So now her right arm is held out on a little platform on the side of the chair, the Cytoxin hanging above her on an IV stand. Mia sits in a metal chair next to the recliner, her lap top resting on her knees, the electrical cord winding behind Mia’s chair and plugged into the wall.

  “I thought the point of laptops was being able to bring them anywhere without . . .” Sally waves her left arm. “Attachments.”

  Mia stops typing, holding back, Sally knows, a sigh. “The batteries only keep it going for about a half an hour. Maybe a little more. It’s no big deal to plug it in. The nurse said it was fine—wouldn’t interrupt any special machines or anything.”

  Without warning, Mia smiles at Sally, and Sally pauses. Her whole body pauses. There, in this instant, here is baby Mia looking up at Sally as Sally dries her on her lap after a shallow bath in the big porcelain tub. Mia with her dark brown eyes, joyful, happy, giggling in her baby roundness. Mia, the baby who when on Sally’s shoulder, patted Sally’s back in the same rhythm that Sally patted Mia’s.

  This same baby, child, girl, woman looks at Sally as the drug feeds into Sally’s body, winding into her bloodstream.

  “Are you excited about the book?” Sally asks, thinking that this is the reason for Mia’s happiness.

  “Uh?” Mia looks up from her computer screen. “Oh, yes. Of course. I’ve got all those trips coming up. You’ve talked to Nydia and Dick, right? About coming here with you while I’m gone?”

  “Dick has special plans for me. He said I’ll be the only chemo patient in the world who’s had so much fun.”

  Mia shakes her head. “He really likes you.”

  “Are you surprised?” Sally asks, knowing that in a way, she herself is.

  “Of course not, Mom. It’s just that you haven’t, well. It’s not like you’ve really wanted a . . . “

  “Boyfriend.”

  Mia’s eyes widen. “He’s your boyfriend.”

  Sally waves her hand. “I don’t know. Let’s call him my genteleman caller. A good, vague term.”

  “Wow.” Mia turns back to her screen but doesn’t type.

  “But Nydia will help out too,” Sally says. “Dick can’t do it all.”

  Mia nods but does’t turn to look at Sally, and Sally wonders what Mia is really thinking about.

  Finally, Mia closes the computer and puts it on th
e table next to the bed. “Listen, Mom, Katherine could come out. For a week.”

  “No, no. It’s all covered. Never mind it. It will all work out. But tell me about the book.”

  “Good reviews so far.” Mia bites her lip.

  “Then what is it?”

  Mia pushes her hair back, her bangs sticking straight up from her forehead. Sally read somewhere that parents are in love with their children, but children aren’t in love with their parents. Would this theory explain why Sally’s heart feels heavy now with love for her child? Mia is here--not in love with Sally but here anyway, out of duty or obligation or need or fear. But here anyway.

  “Mom,” Mia says. “It’s nothing. Do you want me to read to you?”

  “Do you have your book? With all this going on, I haven’t had time to read the copy you gave me.”

  “No. I’m sick of that story. My story—“

  She stops, shaking her head again. She reaches into her bag, pulling out an assortment of paperback novels and holding them out like a fan. “Pick, Mom. Pick your story.”

  Sally’s veins pinch and burn, the crackle of the drug inside her starting to flare into fire. She reaches out her left hand and taps the dullest book cover, something brown and green and indistinct.

  “This one. This is the story I want to hear.”

  Mia laughs. “Strange pick. A Hole in the Heart. Can you take it?”

  Sally nods, knowing she’s had a hole in her heart for a long time, since David died, and all her organs and flesh and muscle and bone have learned to live with it.

  Closing her eyes, Sally nods and then leans back on the recliner. Soon, there is the lull of Mia’s voice, the story of a girl in her mind, and then nothing but the crackle of drug, the noise of the hospital, and then nothing.

  On the way home in the car, Sally turns to Mia. “I’m going to Scotland. In five months.”

  Mia keeps her eyes on the road, but her mouth opens and then shuts. Quickly, she glances at Sally and then focuses on the traffic in front of her. Unlike Nydia, Mia is a careful driver, a safe mother driver, her hands locked at ten and two, the positions Sally remembers screaming about one day in the old Buick Sportswagon after Mia tried to make a U-turn using one loose hand.

  “Scotland? On a tour? Who’s going with you? Nydia? Marlene from the bridge group?”

  “No. I’m going with Dick.” Sally stares straight ahead at the traffic, but then says, “He’s a good man. He—he’s encouraging.”

  Again, Mia’s mouth opens and closes, but she doesn’t glance at Sally this time. Seconds pass. Outside the car, traffic presses in, flows out, moves along. The sky is the color of new blueberries.

  “Good,” Mia says finally. “Okay. But are you sure?”

  “Yes. It’s not as if—you know, I don’t really know if he, well, wants to go to another level.” Sally feels flushed, her heart beating under her missing breast. “I’m not sure if he wants me that way. But we get along so well. He’s been wonderful during all this.”

  “He has.” Mia turns right and merges into oncoming traffic. “I like him a lot, Mom.”

  “So,” Sally says. “When this is over. When I’ve had a month off and can eat again and my butt doesn’t look like a skillet, Dick and I going to take a tour. Historic Celtic Sites. Denair Parvati at the Triple A set it all up. I’ve paid my deposit. A month, with a week in Ireland to boot.”

  “Oh. Wow. Okay.” Mia gives her a quick look. “It will be fun.”

  Sally sits back, suddenly feeling empty. What was she expecting? A fight? Not from Mia, surely. That will come later, with Katherine. Maybe it’s that the trip doesn’t sound like enough, not yet. It doesn’t sound like as much life as Sally wants. A tour to Scotland. So what? People go on tours all the time. She turns her head to look at the group of people on the corner waiting for the light to change. She really wants to go; she really wants to be with Dick. So what is it that she’s looking for? What does she imagine? What does she want?

  The crosswalk flashes its green man, and Sally suddenly she sees herself lifting her blouse, showing her scars to someone other than Dr. Jacobs, someone other than Dr. Groszmann. She’s showing them to Dick, and the look on his face is not what she imagines.

  “Well,” Sally says loudly. Mia almost flinches. “How about a quick milk shake. You know how I love them. Strike while the iron is hot, while I still feel like eating. The nurse said about day three I will feel ill.” Feel like dying is what she heard under the nurse’s words. Well, Sally has already felt like dying, but she has her blue pill now—the one Mia snuck into her daily regime that changed things—and she won’t give it up.

  “Okay,” Mia says, making a right onto Main Street. “A milk shake. Even though I shouldn’t.”

  Mia shrugs, and Sally leans over and puts her hand on Mia’s warm thigh.

  “You’re lovely,” she says, wanting to add joyful, giggling, round, as beautiful as a wet warm baby. But lovely seems enough. Mia smiles and drives on, taking them toward something sweet.

  In the time before the nausea, Sally cleans her house. She digs through the back of the guest room closet, finding old Christmas wrapping paper and warranties for appliances that she’s long ago given to the Goodwill. When she moved from the Monte Veda house to her condo, she kept some board games, imagining that she’d need to have something to do with Lucien and Harper as well as Matt and Mike when they visited. But none of the boys were interested in Scrabble or Monopoly or Life, asking Sally to go down to the video store instead to rent movies. So now she pulls the games out of the closet and stacks them on top of David’s old puzzles.

  After Nydia offers and then takes Sally’s donations to the Goodwill drop box, Sally goes through her photos. The last year she put any photos in an album was the year after David died. For one year, she pretended, and there are the girls in birthday hats and at swim meets and at Girl Scout meetings. For all the world—the world that would have looked at Sally’s albums—the family seems normal, intact, complete. After all, it could have been David behind the camera, clicking away.

  Sally drives down to Longs Drugs and buys five large photo albums. For hours, she sorts the pictures by year, trying to construct a chronological narrative, and then, slowly, she slips the photos in the albums, pressing down on the sticky plastic, trapping the images forever.

  On the Sunday following her chemo, Sally feels the drug open its fist and grab her stomach. Her head begins to pound, her body feels light, weightless, nothing, like one of the dust bunnies under her bed. She moves only from her bed to the living room couch, slumping against the arm rest.

  Then she seems to sink, falling into each and very cell, her insides heavy. She wants to lift out of her body before the throbbing, aching dullness gets worse; she needs to get out of her own body. She remembers feeling this need for escape during her labor with Mia, pulling on the nurse’s arm and saying, “I need to go home. Now.”

  There’s a yap at her door and then a knock. When she doesn’t answer it right away, Dick rings the bell once, and then again. Sally pushes herself up, and opens the door, knowing that if she doesn’t answer, he’ll call 911 or Mia. Or worse, Katherine, asking for expert instructions.

  Dick steps back when she opens the door, and Sally wonders for a second if her hair has fallen out all at once or if she looks crazed with pain and fear. But then she realizes he moved back only so she could push open the screen door.

  “How are you doing?” he says, stepping inside and taking off Mitzie’s leash. The dog jumps on the couch and curls up in a tight dog body circle.

  Sally smoothes her hair, adjusts her robe as she stands before him, feeling messy and unkempt. Dick watches her, his eyes wide, waiting for an answer.

  “I’m not doing too well today. Maybe I overdid things the past couple of days. I’ve been cleaning.” She motions to the couch, and they both sit down.

  “You can’t do everything at once. You need to get well first. This is only your first round, Sal Gal.�
�

  She shrugs and pushes her robe away from her chest, her body warm and clammy. “I don’t think I’m going to do well with chemo.”

  “It’s hard, that I know,” he says, and Sally thinks of Ellen. He does know. Dick slaps his knee lightly. “But it can be done, and you’ve the spark to get through.”

  “It—this will sound strange.”

  “What?” He moves a little closer to her.

  “Chemotherapy tastes funny.”

  Dick smiles, and then tilts his head back and laughs. Sally can’t help but smile as well, even though there’s some kind of metal taste in her mouth. Metal, or something cold, hard, unnatural.

  “Only you,” he says.

  Sally shrugs. “I just wish it were over.”