In Her Eyes

by Renée J. Lukas

  It was scary. She’d be the worst kind of conservative, possibly a dictator. She was already assembling a team of like-minded robots around her.

  That night, I tried to sleep, but anxiety came ripping through me. Into the bathroom for another antacid…

  She was going to destroy the country. Maybe I was the only one who could stop her. You have these kinds of all-or-nothing thoughts at four in the morning. Since I’d been the one to betray her years ago, I may have started this chain reaction, through which a creature had been born, anathema to everything we once felt, believed, together in that dorm room. What had I done? Of course I could hear Carmen’s voice inside my head, telling me that I was being an egomaniac for thinking it was all about me. What can I say? I’m an Aries, and it is all about me. Maybe this time, it really was. So maybe I was the only one who could stop it.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Adrienne

  We had a pretty good jam session that night. After the guys left, I was alone in the warehouse, a new one we’d found with a reasonable rent. It was right in the city, which made it easier to get to and from. Some of the band members thought it was creepy when it was empty. Not me. I reveled in the aloneness and the darkness—so much I’d done a song about it.

  I took a deep breath. What did I want from Robin? What did I want?

  The strings, still hooked to the amplifier, waited for my instructions. I ran my fingers over them in a way I never had before. The reverberation shook the warehouse walls, and I just kept going, letting the sound twist and turn, covering up what I didn’t want to face.

  I was unsettled inside.

  What did I want?

  When we were in college, I resented Robin’s attempts to make me think like she did. In fact, I fought her every step of the way. The more she went on about sexist things, the more I railed against her. Now it seemed I wanted her to be like me, emboldened by the differentness I felt sure we’d shared.

  Was that it? Did I need to know? Robin marrying a man didn’t change my belief, because I’d known plenty of women who were also married to men, who had never come in their lives, by the way. These women would gaze at me from the audience with a certain longing that stretched beyond curiosity. Whenever I saw that look—so familiar, so intoxicating—I was tempted to act on it. But I never cheated on Carmen. Not physically anyway.

  I played by myself until sweat poured down my face, onto my hands. I tried to scribble the notes down on paper in case I forgot them, but my fingers were moving faster than my brain could keep up.

  This was my only release. I couldn’t get answers to the questions zooming through my mind at all hours of the day and night. And all the while Robin was rising in the polls. She might very well capture the highest seat of power. The thought was unimaginable.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Adrienne

  I’m standing in front of a grave on a windy hill. The other gravestones scatter to the outer edges of my vision, leaving only hers. Her name. Jenny Carmen Laronda. The person I’d fought with, made love with, laughed with…and realized way too late that I loved. I dropped to my knees and touched her name, the letters etched in cold granite, and I imagined how cold her body must be. Would always be.

  I used to say never to live your life with regrets, but this one…it’s the biggest regret of my life.

  Carmen had been complaining about headaches for months. I wrote it off as stress from all the clients she took on. She started drinking more. The first thing she did when she got home was grab a glass of wine.

  “Why are you taking on so many?” I asked, watching the cabernet pour like blood into a glass.

  “It’s my decision.” She got tight-lipped, and I’d know there was an avalanche coming.

  “No, really. Why?” I blocked her way out of the kitchen until she told me. I couldn’t stand the slowly boiling resentment; I preferred direct, in-your-face communication. It was easier to deal with. She was seething under the surface, the way she rolled her lips together as if holding something back.

  She set down the glass of wine and leaned against the counter. “I need these clients!” She glared at me.

  “It’s my fault?” I nodded, backing out of the kitchen. “I’m the one who’s making you work like a dog?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” she barked, “your music isn’t giving us much security.”

  I went into the bedroom and slammed the door. So I was the cause of her stress. Her drinking. Her headaches.

  The next morning, she woke up, unable to move because the pain in her head was so bad. I placed cold packs from the freezer on her forehead and at the back of her head.

  “Maybe you can’t drink wine,” I offered.

  “I’m sorry, Adrienne.”

  “It’s okay.” I couldn’t stand to see her in so much pain. It was constant. No painkillers would work. And some of them would come on whether she drank or not.

  “I didn’t mean to say what I said,” she mumbled. “I believe in you. You know that.”

  “I do.” I applied gentle pressure to the cold pack on top of her head. “Just rest.”

  The next day, when she felt better, she got dressed for work.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I watched her close her briefcase on the bed.

  “Going to work.” She shrugged as if I was crazy.

  “You’re going to the doctor.”

  “I don’t have time,” she insisted.

  “The hell you don’t. Yesterday you really scared me.”

  Her headaches had become part of our lives. They sort of snuck up on us, and without realizing it, we were planning whether or not to go out based on how she was feeling.

  “This is no way to live!” I heard my voice shouting as if in anger when I was really scared out of my mind.

  Maybe the tone of my voice scared her too, enough to make that appointment.

  She had an MRI. They found a brain tumor. When the doctor told us, my legs almost gave out from under me, as I heard him chatter on about treatment plans, stage four—that one snapped me out of my shock.

  Everything sounded as though it were in an echo chamber. “Stage four?” I repeated.

  This place, under the fluorescent lights, with murals on the walls that are supposed to cheer people up…everything was offensive. How dare they hang a pastoral scene in a lobby of death? As if a country road can change a horrific diagnosis. Everything was like a choking collar I wanted to rip off so I could breathe again.

  I couldn’t look at Carmen. I didn’t want to show her an ounce of pity. That would kill her before any tumor would.

  I don’t remember that we talked much on the cab ride home. Usually, when she was down, she liked to be left alone. But now she took my hand. Now, she seemed different, as did everything else—the light, the trees, the air somehow, even the outside of our Victorian building. It was all a bad dream.

  “I have to finish the will I started,” she told me, scurrying around the apartment, looking for papers. She pulled out a box with her tax stuff and started rummaging through it.

  I came up behind her and circled my arms around her, holding on tightly. Our life together, and all the missteps, flashed before my eyes. But mostly her—her laugh, the way she danced the first night I met her, everything. I could tell from her short intakes of breath that she was starting to lose it, but she turned around, wiped her eyes and said, “I need to do this, okay?”

  I nodded and left the room. Keeping busy was her way of dealing with the unthinkable. Carmen was going to go to work for as long as possible.

  I went to band practice only when she was at work, because I wanted to spend all the time we had left, together.

  “You don’t have to be here,” Jerry said.

  “Fuck that,” I said. “She wants me to be here.”

  The songs on the album This Perfect Life were all written during that time. The title of the album was a sardonic inside joke between me and Jerry about how life was just a series of hor
ror shows. This explains the darker, angrier music. I did a lot of the wailing that I got popular for on that album. My voice was supposed to go up on a high note, but it just came from some other place inside, somewhere raw and bleeding. Fans loved it, and I did it on other songs afterward. But it never felt quite the same.

  Carmen started calling me during her ride home at night. We talked more in those phone calls than we ever did face-to-face. For someone to get to know you, your thoughts and opinions on everything, to laugh at your jokes…then she takes all that with her when she goes. It’s like everything you shared gets buried with her. I wouldn’t let myself think too far ahead, because if I did, I thought I’d never stop crying. I couldn’t ever let her see that.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Adrienne

  Our friends Jacky and Dana came over more frequently to play games, mostly to distract us from the impending doom that hovered over our apartment like a curse.

  Tonight the door swung open, and Jacky emerged first, thrusting the box of Taboo into my arms. Jacky was tall and imposing, her short-cropped black hair and matching dark eyes giving her a severe appearance that was quickly diffused by her playful personality.

  “Time to get your asses kicked,” she announced, pushing her way inside.

  Dana, her ex and now best friend (a situation in the lesbian world I never could quite manage), was the opposite—short, blond and someone who took herself more seriously than a medical examiner.

  “Don’t say that,” she snapped at Jacky. Then to me, “She can be a little insensitive.”

  “Thank God,” I said. “We need some insensitive around here. And you’re the ones who will be getting your asses kicked!”

  We sat on the floor and set up the game cards on the coffee table. Jacky and I had glasses of wine. Dana insisted on keeping her “wits,” even though they’d come in a cab. Carmen abstained because of the thousands of pills she had to take.

  Since Carmen was the sick one, all the jokes were directed at me, which was good. It helped to alleviate my constant, consuming guilt.

  Jacky and Dana were a team, as well as me and Carmen. They went first.

  “Where Adrienne’s songs will never be played,” Jacky said.

  “Radio!” Dana shouted.

  I faked a look of outrage, resting back against the base of the couch, grateful they were here.

  Jacky pulled another card. “Sometimes I say you act like this.”

  “Baby!” Dana’s intensity rivaled that of a cheetah about to hunt. I swear, she scared me at times.

  Jacky pulled another word. “We used to say that Carmen was Adrienne’s ‘blank’ wife.”

  Dana stalled. Panic on her face.

  “We said,” Jacky continued, “that Adrienne treated her girlfriends like…”

  “Trophies!” Dana exclaimed right before the buzzer.

  Jacky looked at me. “Do plurals count? It was ‘trophy.’”

  “No, they don’t!” I got up to pour myself more wine. “So that’s what you think of me?”

  Carmen smiled sheepishly, her face between her knees. Okay, I knew it wasn’t about me. But ever since Carmen got sick, I wasn’t allowed to have any emotion that wasn’t entirely pure and admirable. If Carmen rolled to my side of the bed, leaving me with a sliver of space until I eventually rolled off and hit the floor, it didn’t matter that I got no sleep—because she was dying. That trumped any annoyances a normal couple might have. She’d wanted me to act normal around her, but how can you really do that? I wasn’t allowed to be a bitch for any reason. Acting out took on a whole new meaning against the stark backdrop of cancer.

  And Carmen herself wasn’t the calm, saintly trope in movies who is able to see things from a greater, more benevolent perspective since her time was limited. No, she was angry or at least irritable, as I would be, most of the time. I wasn’t allowed to tell her to lighten up either. How could I?

  When Carmen went to the bathroom, Jacky took the bottle from me and poured more for herself. I was, after all, a selfish and embittered host.

  “C’mon, Drew,” Jacky said. “We were just playing.”

  “You don’t get to call me Drew.” I slumped back down on the floor against the couch.

  “You’re going to have to get a freaking sense of humor fast,” she warned. “You don’t want your somber face to be the last thing she sees.”

  “Stop it!” Dana cried in a hushed voice. “Don’t talk like that.” She hit Jacky on the knee. “Your clues were really offensive.”

  “Aw, hell,” Jacky said, “everything offends you.”

  “I meant to her,” she said, pointing at me, “you idiot.”

  “Nah, it’s fine.” I had to say that. I had to be the selfless, flawless partner—the opposite of everything I truly was. That was my new role.

  “Oh, please,” Jacky continued, still glowering at Dana. “And me looking like the portrait of Dorian Gray was so sensitive?”

  She was referring to a game the previous week when Dana had had the word “portrait.”

  “It was the first thing that came to mind,” Dana protested. “Bite me.”

  “See, I want this!” I cried, watching the two of them. “I want to be a normal couple with her, but I can’t.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Jacky said. “We’re not a couple.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “I used to be able to tease her, but now it feels…cruel.”

  I had to stop talking once I heard the bathroom door open. I understood that once a fatal illness knocks on your door, you can never have a normal life again. Most of all, I couldn’t stand the faces of pity on friends who looked at us differently, like we were no longer a whole couple but now broken in some way.

  Jacky touched my shoulder. I was grateful at how she tried to stay as annoying as possible, as if nothing had happened. I treasured it.

  * * *

  Then came the night I fell asleep on the couch, watching TV. There were no messages on my phone. I sat up, rubbed my eyes and noticed it was eleven o’clock. Carmen would’ve called by now. Her usual nightly call was three hours late. I looked around, vaguely aware of the local news buzzing in the background.

  I called her phone. No answer. I set my cell down on the couch cushion.

  “The Zakim Bridge has been completely shut down.” A bundled-up reporter stood outside, chattering about something. I tried to call her office, but in my foggy fatigue, I accidentally picked up the TV remote and turned up the volume.

  “The victim’s name has not yet been released, and the cause of the accident remains unknown.”

  I saw what looked like a blue Acura, though the color was hard to see at night, twisted like a rope up against the guardrail.

  There were a million blue Acuras in Boston just like Carmen’s car. It wasn’t even a possibility in my mind that it was really hers. But soon I got the call. It was her car. She was answering a client’s text on the way home. All she did was text the letter “K.”

  After all she’d gone through, that’s what took her life. I sometimes wondered if that wasn’t a better way to go than what she’d had awaiting her at a hospital. I sometimes thought it was, in an odd way, merciful.

  * * *

  As her casket was lowered into the ground, I thought her accident was the ultimate “fuck you” from life, always reminding me that nothing would go as we planned, not even the bad things. I could only hope that it was a better way to go. Either way, I felt helpless about pretty much everything now.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Adrienne

  I came back to the apartment and everything reminded me of her—a sweater hanging on the back of one of the bar chairs in the kitchen, her signature on a check she was writing, the scent of her head on the pillow. I had this weird sensation, of how we make our plans, go about our days, and death can wipe it all away like footprints on a beach. Oh, I was super fun to be around during this time.

  In the weeks that followed, Carmen’s death fo
rced me to take stock of my own life. What was any of this for, this crazy life? What had kept me going was the belief that it was about more than eating, sleeping and dying. My dream, to be an accomplished musician, was the spark that kept me going until I could finally see the flames, only they came intermittently and I never could make a go of it enough to survive. I’d walk through the city streets and wonder how many other people were living in the shadow of a failed dream. And was that why antidepressants were so popular?

  I sat with my head in my hands, feeling the fading light from the living room windows. I’d loved this apartment. Could I ever make it my own without thinking of her every time I turned a corner? I was nearly late for yet another shit job—this one at a call center, listening to people complain about their Internet service. I was now in my mid-forties, time to put up or shut up. Had I given all I could? Was it time to finally give up the dream?

  I decided to call in sick. This wasn’t the kind of part-time job where they cared if someone died in your family or, in my case, not even family. I needed to get my head together. By nighttime, I’d made a huge decision. I was going to burn my guitar and go for a career among the Beige People. It was okay if I didn’t fit in. I needed to eat. I’d finally figured out why so many people ditched their dreams—it was about survival. Carmen’s retirement, which she’d willed to me, wasn’t something I wanted to live on day to day. I was going to put it into savings because I didn’t know what the future held. I was getting older, I was trying to act accordingly. I’d need to call Jerry in the morning and tell him to get another singer. It wouldn’t be an easy call. It would take everything I had not to cry. I knew I was killing myself or at least my soul. But staring out the big picture window in this gorgeous apartment in a gorgeous city, I couldn’t live this life rummaging through garbage cans and surviving a Boston winter outside.

  This was my lowest point. I had nothing left in me.

  Then the doorbell rang.

  I pulled a baseball bat out of the closet, stepping quietly over the wood floor. I wasn’t expecting anyone at ten o’clock at night. When I peered through the peephole, it was Linda Sumter, standing in her overcoat, looking business as usual. She’d be the first one I’d have to tell.