The Tenth Song

by Ragen, Naomi

  To which she could only answer: “Tell me again!”

  And he would repeat what she already knew: that he had transferred a client’s money to a hedge fund in England that came highly recommended. Unbeknownst to him, this fund had a manager who had transferred that money to terrorist groups. The feds were convinced he was a venal, willing participant. “But I didn’t know . . .” he would beg her, his voice growing louder and louder.

  And she would have nothing left to say to him but the worst thing she could say: “Why didn’t you know? Why weren’t you more careful?”

  So she didn’t say anything, swallowing the words like a cup of arsenic.

  She looked at his back, then walked out the door.

  Second by second, minute by minute, her anger grew and multiplied like some splitting amoeba that infects the entire body in record time. It did not stem from any question of her husband’s guilt or innocence. At most there might be a remote possibility that he had made an honest, stupid mistake, or there had been some innocent misunderstanding now misconstrued. No, it wasn’t that. It was the idea that this was hanging over his head and he was doing all he could to exclude her. She felt like a child whose parents had made decisions that were only now being discovered because of the consequences which had fallen on her. She felt completely in the dark, forced to stare through keyholes and under doors, scavenging for information.

  It had been like this with the cancer too, she thought, that same infuriating desire to go it alone. He’d pushed her away with both hands. What had she done to deserve this kind of dismissal? Didn’t he understand? She didn’t want to be separate from him. Like that old wedding vow that gentiles took: For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health. She was in it with him. He was the love of her life. Her partner. How could he not understand that, not trust her enough to let her in? She thought of that old couple in the movie Titanic who refused to be parted even when the ship was going down, the wife refusing her place on one of the lifeboats.

  It had been their cancer; and now it was their court case. They would float above it or go down together. Why couldn’t he understand that? And what would happen to their marriage if she couldn’t convey this to him before it was too late? Like the ball bearings in some never-quiet machine, they scraped and scraped against each other, until their nerves were raw and their wounds bloody.

  Small things irritated her: a sour look on his face; the way he rose from the table after eating without lifting a finger to help clean up; the way he closed a door just a tiny bit too hard; the way he let the phone ring without answering it. And there was that look he got when the fax machine beeped—a look of anguish.

  “How many eggs did you use in this omelet?”

  “I don’t know. Two . . . We’re running low.”

  “Why is that?”

  She could see his jaw flinch in anger.

  “I . . . I didn’t get to the store yesterday. I was so busy.” She smiled, but he didn’t respond. “I’ll get to it today.”

  “What, are you trying to save money, is that it?”

  Like being inches away from a person with pneumonia who coughs on you without covering their mouth, the germs of his anger and pain infected her.

  “Why, is that such a bad thing?” she shouted back.

  “Right, let’s talk about it! I know you blame me for everything that’s happened. We’re going to be poor! Is that it?”

  “I wish I could just tear these people limb from limb! That big-shot prosecutor, those FBI robots . . .”

  “Yes, that would be wonderful! Then I’d have to use whatever’s left of our money to bail you out of jail.”

  “I can’t help how I feel! I’m entitled to feel any way I want!”

  “Really? Well, this is the way I feel!” He picked up his plate, flinging the eggs into the sink, then stomped out of the room.

  She sat down at the beautiful marble kitchen counter, staring indifferently at the wall of crimson ceramic tiles, grateful to have been spared the humiliation of household help looking on.

  Esmeralda was gone, paid off and sent packing. She’d been polite and cold when they gave her notice. The week after she left, Abigail realized her favorite gold-and-lapis earrings had gone missing. In the weeks that followed, she discovered some silver candlesticks and a small jade elephant had also disappeared.

  “I’m going to report her to the police,” Abigail fumed.

  The idea infuriated Adam: “That’s all we need now. More publicity!” When they got into bed that night, their backs were stiff and they were facing opposite walls. Some impulse made her turn around. Her fingers smoothed his brow. He reached out to her, pulling her to him, burying his face in her shoulder.

  “I’m so sorry, Abby.”

  She caressed him silently in the dark as they clung to each other, survivors in a home torn apart by a hurricane.

  In the evenings after dinner, they sat beside each other on the living room couch, drained of words. “Do you want to play some Scrabble, watch a video?”

  “No, I think I’ll just go out for a walk.”

  “Do you want me to come with you, Adam?”

  He shrugged. “If you want.”

  She put on her down-filled parka, gloves, and a scarf. The Boston cold was already brutal as she walked beside him through dark, deserted streets, carefully picking her way through the ice. But he was walking way too fast for her to keep up, his head down as he plowed forward, oblivious. Finally, he glanced sideways. Then he turned around, staring at her, waiting for her to catch up. “Are you cold? Do you want to go home?”

  “No, I’m fine,” she lied, her nose blue, her fingertips numb.

  “Look, why don’t you just go home?”

  “Why are you trying to get rid of me?”

  “You don’t have to do this to prove something.”

  “Is that what you think? That I have something to prove?”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? You need to be Mrs. Perfect. Stand by Your Man. I don’t need your pity. Just go home, Abigail.”

  “You are such a jerk. You really are!” she said, turning swiftly on her heels, not wanting him to see the tears that flowed down her cheeks, burning like hot wax in the freezing cold as she hurried through the dark night. Turning the corner, she felt her feet suddenly disconnect with the sidewalk. With horror, she felt her body tip uncontrollably forward. She reached out one hand, but it was too late. She crashed on her knees, her breast hitting the pavement hard.

  In the warm bathroom with its blue tiles, she dabbed disinfectant over her scratches. Days later, a big black-and-blue mark formed just above her nipple, together with a little lump that felt like the stuff of every woman’s nightmare.

  “What is that?” Adam said as they undressed for bed, alarmed.

  “I fell.”

  “When?”

  “That night, on the way home from our walk. I slipped.”

  “Oh. I shouldn’t have let you go alone. I’m so sorry, Abby. I’m such a jerk.”

  “Yes, you are,” she agreed.

  He touched her gently. “I feel a lump. Do you feel it?”

  She touched herself. “It’s probably from the fall. But I’ll see the doctor.”

  She lay in bed thinking: Maybe it’s cancer. Maybe I’m going to die. She hadn’t had a mammogram in years, afraid the X-rays might give her cancer, confident that she would follow in her mother’s footsteps and live to a ripe, cancer-free old age.

  “It’s probably from the fall,” her doctor agreed without examining her. He was a very religious Jew. I will have to find another doctor, she thought. But the lump disappeared after a few weeks, along with the bruise marks, healing without a trace. She had a mammogram. It came out clean, and the reprieve gave her the first joy she had felt in weeks. She knew now that she didn’t want to die. She wanted to live.

  And then, there was suddenly a lull. The lawyers didn’t call. The fax machine didn’t ring. They exhaled.

  “Let’s go for
a picnic!” she suggested.

  “In this weather?”

  “Please, Adam. I’m going crazy.”

  He touched her face. “Okay.”

  She took some leftover chicken and a few slices of corned beef, a package of rolls, and cans of pickles and olives. They traveled to Concord, traipsing through Louisa May Alcott’s picturesque little house, because she was Abigail’s favorite writer. They parked the car overlooking frozen Walden Pond. As she unpacked the lunch and gave out paper plates and napkins, he took out a copy of The Portable Thoreau.

  “‘Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety is about,’ ” he read aloud.

  . . . how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to live a primitive frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life, and what methods have been taken to obtain them . . . For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

  “Do you want corned beef, or chicken?”

  “Chicken, my love,” he said, turning the page.

  I am a parcel of vain strivings tied

  By a chance bond together.

  Dangling this way and that, their links

  Were made so loose and wide,

  Methinks,

  For milder weather . . .

  She laughed. “That sounds more like me than you. I am very loosely tied together these days.”

  He slid over and put his arm around her. “I don’t want you to worry, my love. It’s going to be all right. Whatever happens.”

  “How can you say that, Adam?”

  “Because as long as I have your love and the children and grandchildren are well, I’ll be fine.”

  She touched his face, searching his eyes. “Really?”

  “Really.” He smiled.

  Could it be true? she wondered. For him, for myself? “You know Thoreau was a maniac. I’m sure the mosquitoes ate him alive out here,” she said gaily.

  “Ah, you are such a romantic, my love!” He laughed, closing the book.

  They sat quietly, watching the clouds swim by in the cold blue sky, reaching out for each other’s hands. When they got home, she brought out a bottle of wine they’d purchased in the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, a kosher Italian Cabernet. She filled two of her best crystal glasses and brought it to him. In the living room, he was playing music from the Four Tops.

  “Where did you find that? It’s a zillion years old.”

  “I’ve had it stashed in a secret place all these years.”

  They had gone to a Four Tops concert the summer before they got married, driving out on country roads from jobs in Catskill hotels. Joining an overflow crowd of New York Jews sitting in the balcony of the old upstate theater, they’d sung, clapped, and roared with approval for the four suave, velvet-voiced black men.

  “Remember this?” She straightened her arm, raising the palm dramatically: “When you think that you can’t go on.”

  “Just reach out, reach out!” He joined her.

  “Here, drink this.” She handed him the goblet.

  He drained it, then put it down carefully on the coffee table. He lifted her half-filled glass from her hands.

  “But I’m not finished. . . .”

  He put it down beside his own. Then he took her hands and pulled her up, putting his arms around her waist, entwining his fingers through hers. They took off their shoes, sliding around on the polished wood floors.

  “I’LL BE THERE WITH A LOVE THAT WILL SEE YOU THRO-OOOO,” they shouted, their voices rising until they were hoarse. They collapsed on the rug in laughter.

  “My love.”

  He pushed her gently until she lay down beside him in front of the fireplace. They clung to each other, making love with a gentleness and urgency they had not felt for many weeks.

  Their days took on a new rhythm. She got up early to clean the house and go to work. He got up even earlier, raking leaves and preparing breakfast before disappearing into his home office to study his case. He seldom left the house except on the days they were obliged to meet with their lawyers.

  Those were the worst, looming on their calendars like black holes. She hated being there. It was like being on line for a painful procedure, worse than a root canal or a bone-marrow transplant.

  Their attorney Marvin Cahill was one of the top men in his field. He was about their age, with a balding head and keen, cool blue eyes. He was not a hand-holder. The opposite. “Let me put all the cards on the table” was the way he began almost every other sentence, followed by worst-case scenarios.

  “I don’t know, does he really think you’re innocent? Or is he just constantly covering his ass, anticipating disaster?”

  “That is what a lawyer is supposed to do. He is very, very cautious. And very thorough. That’s a good thing.”

  “But he keeps hinting that you should consider making some deal.”

  “That’s not true!”

  She said nothing, astonished. All she ever heard from Cahill and his associate, another senior partner in one of Boston’s top firms, was how to avoid actually proving Adam’s innocence. If he admitted to a lesser charge . . . if he could provide valuable information about Gregory Van and Christopher Dorset, who were the really big fish the feds were after . . . then it could be worked out, etc., etc.

  “Let’s put our cards on the table! You are facing serious jail time, and a monetary fine that will destroy your family. You should seriously consider a plea bargain.”

  “No, I won’t. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m completely innocent. Even if it takes my last penny. Even if I wind up behind bars for life”—the words made her shudder—“I’m not going to admit to something I haven’t done. As for Gregory Van and Christopher Dorset, I’ve told you all I know.”

  It took her days and many sedatives to recover from a visit to the lawyers.

  “Don’t come with me. I can go alone,” Adam said.

  The words were an echo from the all-too-recent past, from a battle just barely won against an enemy that had also ambushed them out of the blue. It had been five years, but it felt like yesterday.

  Midday. Sitting at the dining-room table, reading the newspaper. The door opened, and he came in. She didn’t even look up.

  “So,” she said, turning the page, engrossed by some stranger’s tragedy, awaiting with only half an ear confirmation of that which she was already so sure she knew. “Was the biopsy okay?”

  He was the kind of man who always took his time to answer a question. But there was something about the quality of the silence between them that made her finally turn her head and look up at him. She wasn’t the least bit afraid, just curious, as she took in his handsome greying head, the shirt of some soft material with its open collar still showing the tan left over from Kauai, Queenstown, and Cairns.

  They’d only been back two weeks. It had been the trip they’d planned for practically all their lives. Three months traveling the world, freed from years of brutal 6:00 A.M. partings and 10:00 P.M. workday endings. Making off with the loot of their stock gains, they’d shocked their doubtful children, escaping to a fabulous second honeymoon.

  Awaiting his assurances she thought, as always, how very handsome he was.

  “No,” he finally said without inflection. “It wasn’t okay.”

  One thirty in the morning, sitting in her office scanning the e?mails from the LMS sarcoma list, a group you really don’t want to belong to, typing in desperate questions. She’d spent a day at the hospital, waiting and waiting on endless lines, running down long, dreary basement passageways leading to the hallowed offices of the professors and experts who were going to save her husband with their priceless knowledge. And Adam, sitting patiently, waiting his turn, forgetting to give his file and number to the nurse who was arranging the queue. “How will
they know to call you?” she asked him. He was annoyed at the question. She went in to the nurse, who was up to twenty-three, when his number was fifteen. She went back, taking the file from him and handing it to the nurse.

  All their knowledge was gleaned from hurried meetings with young physicians, who, in their white coats, glanced over the files, telling them things like: “You don’t have to come back to have the stitches taken out. You can do that anywhere.” Or: “The margins are clean.” They held ballpoint pens and added short notes onto pieces of green paper full of bad handwriting from other doctors.

  In their calm routine, the doctors gave them the sense that they were not losing the world, that they were still part of ordinary life: long lines, appointments, options.

  It was only at one thirty in the morning, alone in her office on the computer, that some anonymous list member, Lang09, a cancer-ridden doctor in a chat room on the other side of the world, finally explained what their doctors had not: that her husband’s numbers were not good; that the margins weren’t clean, they were dirty. Dirty with cancer cells. “And that is why your husband needs radiation.”

  And if that doesn’t work, she cannot help thinking then . . . He is going to die. My handsome love, my husband, the father of my children. He is going to die, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. The children all think I can save him. After all, didn’t I find the surgeon, the best expert in the country? Didn’t I? But they don’t understand that even the best, the Sarcoma King himself, is helpless.

  Should I share the horror of these e?mails? But she didn’t want to frighten the children. Shoshana had just had another miscarriage, after years of fertility treatments. Josh was off in Hollywood, following his dreams. Kayla was just finishing her second year in college. She had given her children too much information already.

  She had no choice, then, but to go it alone. She was part of it, the strange, dark world between life and death that is called a malignant sarcoma. There were other natives here who spoke a new language which she was trying to learn: The word “stage” used in conjunction with something that has nothing to do with theater. Stage 1, 2, 3, 4, and you’re out. Margins, the space you needed between the tumor they cut out and healthy skin. Do you have one centimeter or don’t you? If you don’t, you are in trouble.