The Instant When Everything is Perfect

by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

  “Sally,” he says, patting her knee. “Give it time.”

  “I know my hair will fall out. That seems like the worst indignity.”

  He nods. “It does happen.”

  “I’ve lost my breasts,” she reminds him.

  “I know.” He blushes, drops his gaze, and pats Mitzie’s back.

  “Have you ever seen what it looks like?” Sally says. Of course he knows what illness looks like, having lived through the years with his wife. But Sally’s scars? Her mastectomy deformity? He’s probably never seen anything like it.

  Dick shakes his head and looks out the window. She can see his pulse beating on the side of his neck.

  She is shaking with something like fear, but it feels different, like electricity in her body, an energy that is pushing away the dull throb of ache in her stomach.

  “Can I show you?” She knows that Scotland might vanish, just like that, a puff of dream snuffed out by truth.

  Dick runs his hands on Mitzie’s body. Sally expects to see his thighs flex as he stands, pushes away from her couch, her living room, her. She hears what he will say, his, “Now, I think that’s a crazy thing to ask me. I’m going to go now. I’ll show myself out.”

  The back of Sally’s neck tenses, and when she brings her hands to her robe to close up the neck, he looks at her and holds out a hand as if to stop her.

  “Yes.”

  Sally wants to ask him if he’s sure; if he really can stand the scars on her chest; if he ever wanted to see her naked in the first place. But if she asks him anything, she won’t show him. And in a way, she’s never really looked at the scars herself. Of course, she’s taken a shower and cleaned herself with soap and water and dried herself off with a towel. Every morning, she puts on her camisole or her cotton shell, pulling fabric over her chest, trying to ignore the two mean pale eyebrows of scar where her breasts used to be. But she’s never really looked, in the way that looking means seeing, means understanding.

  She pushes back her robe, letting it fall behind her. Then she slowly unbuttons her nightgown, her fingers shaking as she maneuvers the small white buttons through the holes. One, two, three, four, five, and then there is enough room to push her shoulders through the opening. Shoulders, chest, and then scars. With her eyes closed, she holds her body out to him.

  The living room air licks cold on her skin, the prick of chill running along the lines of her just-healed incisions. In her body, her heart has taken over, drowning out all her other organs, the rush and pound of blood in her ears and throat and stomach and groin.

  And then something happens, something that has never happened. As she sits, trying to hold herself still, the shaking in her body threatening to spill her to the floor, she feels Dick’s quiet fingers touching the diagonal line of puckered flesh where her left breast used to be.

  She keeps her eyes closed, unable to believe what she feels is real. But he runs one finger and then two back along the scar and then he does the same on her right scar, back and forth, as light as a moth.

  Swallowing, Sally slowly opens her eyes and there he is, leaning forward, his eyes on her chest, his face not sad, not disgusted. Interested. Compassionate. Calm.

  He looks up at her, nods, carefully places his full palm on the middle of her chest in between her incisions. “It’s going to be all right,” he says. “You’re . . . It’s you.”

  She doesn’t believe that her incisions or her operation are her, and she doesn’t think that anything will be all right because it never has been before. But this moment is all right. And maybe, Sally thinks, as she leans against Dick’s shoulder and lets him button up her nightgown, she can pretend that the next moment will be all right and then the next. Maybe, if she’s lucky, she can fake her way into next week when this intense chemical sickness and pain will disappear.

  

  The nausea is like nothing she’s ever felt before, not when she was pregnant, not when she caught the stomach flu that year Dahlia brought it home from fifth grade camp. It is worse that food poisoning, except she doesn’t have diarrhea. Her whole body feels the need to expel, to purge, to release everything inside her at once. If she could, she’d pull her guts out with a string and leave them on the bathroom floor, ridding herself of the parts that hurt.

  She kneels by the toilet, Mia’s right hand holding her shoulder, her left hand her forehead.

  “Mom, let me bring a basin to your room. You need to be in bed.”

  Sally shakes her head. The only thing that feels good besides Mia’s touch is the cool, white tile under her knees. Then she throws up again, but there is nothing to throw up, her gag empty and croaking.

  She waits, gags again, and then she slumps back onto Mia. Mia’s body is shaking, and Sally realizes that her daughter is crying. She thinks to pat Mia’s thigh, but she can’t move her hand.

  “I thought Dr. Gupta gave you something to stop the nausea,” Mia says, her voice full of confusion. “It shouldn’t be like this. How can it be like this for four months?”

  Mia pulls Sally against herself, and Sally knows how Lucien and Harper must have felt, so much comfort in Mia’s body, the exact way a mother should feel, soft belly, strong arms.

  They sit on the bathroom floor like this for a while, until Sally knows the nausea has passed, the chemicals so deep into her body now, there is nothing left for her to purge.

  “Let me take you to bed,” Mia says, pulling Sally up off the floor, and then she’s actually picking Sally up. Her baby is picking her up, carrying her to the bed, tucking her in. Sally closes her eyes and hears Mia on the phone, talking to someone, her voice sharp, direct, harsh. Then there is another call, one that is calmer and longer, Mia’s voice different, fuller, sadder, light. Then there’s a laugh, a giggle. A pause. Another string of quiet questions.

  Is it Ford? Sally wonders. Did Mia ask him to come over?

  But even before Mia hangs up the phone, Sally feels herself fade into a grainy sleep, one that rides just above the itchy burn of the drug killing everything inside her.

  The next afternoon, Sally and Dick sit outside on her patio on the new teak chairs Sally bought before the diagnosis. The sun has slanted down toward the hills, shadows triangling the cement. Dick is drinking iced tea, and Sally holds a glass of tap water. Mia spent the night and then drove down to Inland to pick up a drug she must have convinced Dr. Gupta to prescribe, detailing in length Sally’s reaction. Now Sally feels better, her stomach tolerating the water and the chicken broth Mia made before leaving just after lunch.

  “I told them you’re going to need a home nurse if this keeps up,” Mia said. “That got him to order up the anti-nausea drug. He said it will start working quickly. I just hope he knows what he’s doing.”

  “Thank you,” Sally said. “He’s a good doctor, really. I don’t think he knew how I would feel.”

  Mia shook her head. “Now I know what you meant all these years about the ‘crappy HMO.’ Nothing seems to be based on patient care. Just cost.”

  Though the nausea has subsided, the drug makes her feel a little floaty, a little alien. Dick seems to be hovering in an almost imperceptible white fuzz.

  He puts down his iced tea and smiles. “The air will do you wonders. When Ellen was in the nursing home, I’d take her out every day. Used to make her smile when nothing else would.”

  Sally nods. “You were good to her,” she says.

  “What else can you do?” he says. “How else can you live?”

  “You don’t have to be so nice to me,” she says. “You could just forget to come over, starting now. You could decide to cancel Scotland. You could pack up and move closer to your son.”

  Dick shakes his head and then looks up, blinking against the light. “Maybe so. But I like you, Sally. Always have. Even back when Ellen was still alive in the home, and you’d say nice little things as we passed by each other. Talked to Mitzie. Seemed interested.”

  She had been interested, hadn’t she? Sally thinks so, but may
be she was just being polite to the nice man and his sick wife, acting the way her mother taught her.

  “Smile!” Frona said through lightly clenched teeth, as the Sorensen’s and the Volbergs’ and the Thomas’ walked in the door. “Say something pleasant.”

  But no. That’s not true. She liked when Dick stopped by, taking off his golf hat as he spoke to her. She’d felt sorry for Ellen, sloping in her wheelchair seat, but she’d admired something in Ellen’s always cheerful face. Sally had even liked the little yipping Mitzie.

  And after Ellen died, if Sally is honest with herself now, she knows she timed her walks to Dick’s, clear that if she started out at 3.15 heading north, she would catch him at 3.35 heading south. They would have a nice ten to fifteen minute chat, and Sally would part from him, mulling over the questions she would ask him next time.

  And besides, he had his hair. All of it. Not a comb over. Not a little round patch of skin on top. Sure it was white, but he had a thick head of wondrous curly hair that Sally wanted to touch.

  For a second, she flashes to Dick’s hand on her chest, the gentle touch of his fingers.

  “I was interested,” Sally says quickly. “But it’s going to take more than interest to keep you coming back here these days. I’m not going to be in shape for much more than sitting.”

  “You’re going to be fine,” Dick says, and Sally wonders how many times he told that to Ellen as she sat slumped crooked in her wheelchair at the home.

  But Sally isn’t Ellen, not yet. Hopefully not ever. “You’re right,” she says, feeling the new drug push calm through her body. “I am.”

  Twelve

  Robert

  Mia’s body is like an ocean Robert wants to swim in. So he swims. He pulls and strokes and sucks in her salt. He rides the waves of her orgasms, he slips his hands over the eddies of her hips, the current of her long, solid thigh muscles.

  Quiet now in his bed, his left hand cups her right breast, and he wants to tell her things that she probably doesn’t want to hear, things she can’t hear now. He wants to tell her how her breast in his hand feels different than all the breasts he feels every day. Yes, it is composed of flesh and fat like all women’s breasts, but these, this, are hers.

  Gently, he squeezes her softness. Robert loves the subtle sag of her breasts as she stands before him, the way they spread to the side when she is underneath him, the way they sway when she is above him. With his fingertips, he follows the whoosh of almost invisible stretch marks from pregnancy and nursing. Her nipples are large, rose colored, thick. Even now, he can feel them on his tongue.

  This is their second time at his house, and he knows by the way he’s already begun to grow hard again—by how much he needs her—that these stolen Tuesdays and Thursdays will never be enough. They haven’t been able to meet for a week because Sally has had a violent reaction to the chemo. When Mia called him from Sally’s house one day, he almost blurted, “I’ll come over to help,” but he knew he couldn’t. He’s not official. He’s a secret, and mostly, that’s all right.

  Mia turns into his arm pit, rubs her face on his side, bringing a hand up on top of his chest, her fingers running along his sternum. “You always smell like tea.”

  “Must be my cologne. It’s called Tea.”

  Mia pushes herself up. “Are you kidding?”

  “Yes.” Robert pulls her down, putting both arms around her. “It’s not my cologne. It’s a soap. I get it at Trader Joe’s.”

  “But why does your breath smell like it? Are you a soap eater?”

  “Well, let’s think about this. I drink tea. Do you think that’s it?”

  She pushes at him and then pulls herself on top of him. “Smart ass.”

  Mia hovers over Robert, her eyes dark under her bangs. She leans down and kisses him once, pulls back, and then presses her body on his and kisses him again.

  Feeling her, all of her, feeling himself respond, everything becomes liquid, water, a swirl of sea foam.

  “I start my book stuff tonight,” she says later. “A lecture to a fiction group. They love to ask me about my entire life, ask for me to send a book to my agent, want to get something published tomorrow, and then only one person in the back row will buy a book. Writers are the worst. Like vultures. I know from personal experience. I am one.”

  “I don’t have the new book yet,” he says, looking quickly at his bedside table. He’s almost done with The Daisy Plate Incident, but he’s having trouble reading it and it’s not because of the title. Whenever the main character Quinn speaks, he hears Mia, feels her, the reaction in his body too strange to maintain a long read.

  “Oh, I think you’ll get a free, autographed copy,” she says, pulling back the covers and sitting up. “Maybe I’ll write something x-rated on the title page.”

  “You better not. When the historians find it later, there will be dissertations on Mia Alden’s secret love affair with a mysterious doctor.”

  He hears her quick intake of breath, sees her face still. She pushes a hand through her hair and exhales. “Right.”

  Robert touches her thigh. He shouldn’t have said that, shouldn’t have reminded her about how she’s doing something wrong. They both, he understands, know they both are.

  “So, you’re going to Bakersfield this weekend?”

  She nods. “You know what they say about Bakersfield.”

  “No.”

  “Sun, Fun, Stay, Play. City motto. It’s also the home of the Buck Owens’s Crystal Palace. You should see it. Full of country memorabilia and a thousand photographs of Buck Owens with any celebrity he could drag into view.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Oh, I’m a tremendous favorite in Bakersfield. The public can’t get enough of me. I go every year, and I don’t leave until I go to the Crystal Palace.”

  Robert runs his finger down to her kneecap and then back. “I’d like to see it.”

  She starts to laugh and then stops. “Really?”

  “I could meet you there. Saturday night. Meet you after your reading at the hotel. Then in the morning, we could take in the amazing sites.” Robert is talking but he feels like he’s holding his breath, knowing that rejection could come any moment in the look on her face, the movement of her shoulders, the position of her spine.

  But Mia doesn’t pull away, change, shift. Instead, she places a hand on his belly and says, “Yes.”

  

  Because of the time change, it is still dark when Robert starts his run, the sky an eerie slate gray, a luminous streak of white coming up over Mount Diablo. He has a long day today, two surgeries, follow-up appointments with patients, new evaluations, which are the worst, the women still reeling from their diagnoses.

  A car spins past, the headlights glowing like moons. Robert quickens his pace, turns up a dead-end street, headed for the open space at the end of the cul-du-sac. Inside the houses, lights flick on. A dog barks from inside a garage. Up in a live oak on the approaching hill, a robin begins to sing.

  With every footstep, he’s thinking about Mia, but he’s also thinking about Ford, this man Mia is married to but doesn’t—what? Love. She loves Ford. They spent all these years together, some happy, some quiet, some slightly discontent and anxious. Ford never did anything harsh, violent, mean. Mia told Robert that they simply grew apart, but growing apart means that at one time there was partness. Wholeness. Something to lean away from.

  And now, after Robert has slept with his wife, Ford has become a person to Robert, a man he has conversations with as he walks from his office to the hospital building, when he drives to work, when he runs.

  “Ford,” Robert asks, “do you still love her?”

  Ford stares at him.

  “Because if you don’t, well, I have to say I do. I know it’s early, but I do.”

  Ford kicks at the floor with his shoe, puts his hands in his pockets, listens to Robert.

  “She loves you. I know that. But she says she doesn’t really connect with yo
u in a lot of ways. She never did, Ford. She told me.”

  Robert pushes up the hill, swinging his arms. Ford crosses his arms and nods.

  “You have Harper at home. That’s hard. I know Mia doesn’t want to do anything to hurt him. Or Lucien. So, I’m asking. Can she leave you? Can I have her?”

  Just as he does every time—compliant and kind and silent—Ford nods again, and Robert whisks him out of his mind, concentrating on reaching the ridge, already needing the breath of the down slope.

  Mia would not like being asked for, as if she were property. She would not want to be had. She would not want Robert to ask Ford’s permission for anything related to her. Robert knows this because he’s read her novels, knows that her strong female characters--Susan and Quinn—would not tolerate becoming possessions, things belonging to any man.