The Forever Marriage

by Ann Bauer

  The three of them sat in silence for a few seconds and Carmen listened hard to determine if she could hear her cancer cells clustering, moving, raising rabble, and threatening to overtake.

  “It sounds like you have a lot to think about,” Fred broke in. “No pressure from our side. You just let us know what your decision is. And you know, I hope, that we only want the best for you.”

  I do not know that! Not at all. Everything had changed, yet again. All images of her boss as father, lover, or protector had completely disappeared. Carmen rose. “Thank you,” she said, holding out her hand, which he shook formally this time.

  “I’d be happy to go over the two insurance plans with you, Carmen.” The other man stood, too, but she was not going to give him the satisfaction of another heartfelt moment.

  “Great,” she said, gathering her purse. And without another word—about insurance or the two client projects she was late delivering—she turned and left.

  Carmen was home by 4:15, which was just in time to call the benefits office at Hopkins. It turned out the preacher was right.

  The man on the phone looked up Jobe’s employment history with a series of tapping keys that Carmen could hear and said, “Yup, died April seventeen. I show you’ve got eight more days. And the lifetime benefit limit is five million. Should I send you the paperwork?”

  “Sure,” Carmen said. It was already past pick-up time today so the form would go out in tomorrow’s mail. Then she’d have seven days. She could leave this dilemma up to the U.S. Postal Service. If the envelope reached her in time to complete the transaction, she would take the five million over eighteen months. If not, she’d stay on at work and keep her paltry million-dollar coverage for the duration. Heads or tails.

  “That is so totally not like you,” said Jana when Carmen told her. “Come on, Car. You see what’s going on here, don’t you? I mean, you’re not stupid. You’ve been paying premiums for how many years, and now your company wants to drop you on the spot because you’ve got cancer? It’s not right.”

  Carmen shrugged. They were sitting on the porch in the sun, drinking margaritas. If she was going to start chemo in a week, Carmen had decided she would eat and drink everything she wanted for the next seven days. Plump up and enjoy things while she could, before the metallic taste and ceaseless nausea set in.

  “I don’t know.” Carmen, in a rocker, leaned back and closed her eyes. Why was it that dying sunlight felt better than any other kind? “Do you know why we took my insurance in the first place? Because Jobe was sick and we knew it. He’d gone into remission after the first bout and we thought it was a good idea to have double protection. So we were trying to game the system; and now the system is trying to game us … me … back.”

  “Why do you work?” Jana leaned forward, picked up the pitcher, and refilled them both. “You never talk about your job. You certainly don’t get your identity from it, which, by the way, I love. But you don’t even act like you like the work. It’s something you tolerate, a place where you kill eight hours a day. For Christ’s sake, you guys are loaded. It’s not like you need the money. Even the insurance. Couldn’t you get by without?”

  Carmen shook her head, eyes still tightly closed. “You’d think. But having money almost makes it worse. We have millions, cancer costs tens of millions—or more. It can wipe out fortunes, depending on how long you live.” She paused. How many times had they calculated Jobe’s chances, the potential costs and number of days he had left? Now the people she’d worked alongside for three years were doing this with her. Maybe everyone came down to this in the end: inherent value versus liability. Jobe wasn’t the only one.

  “Anyway. Change of subject. I asked Siena to come down.”

  “You think it’s time for your sexually active teenager to start drinking with us?”

  “Sure.” Carmen half opened her eyes. “I’d be all for it if it meant she’d mellow out and lose her death grip on Troy.”

  Jana snorted. “That’s literally what it is, you know.”

  Abruptly, Carmen sat up. “Do you realize what would happen to her if I were to die? Or get to the point where I’m just lying in bed, useless?” She pictured Jobe, that last month, his waxy skin and fetid breath, his motionless body able to do nothing but need. Were she to reach this point, who would tend to her? Jana had the café, Danny wouldn’t dare. Now that Olive knew how Carmen had betrayed her son, surely she would refuse. That left Siena. Carmen could see her daughter trapped in this house with a disabled young man, a terrified younger brother, a dying mother. “I owe it to her to shoot myself if I start to get really sick. Or crawl away somewhere by myself to die.”

  “Yeah?” Jana sounded either fascinated or horror-stricken. There was a fine line. “Where would you go?”

  “I don’t know. The woods? Some hotel? That’s where the money would come in handy.” Carmen’s voice trailed off as the screen door hinge creaked.

  Siena stepped out onto the porch, balletlike, in bare feet with her long hair hanging like a cape around her narrow shoulders and back. “What’s up?” she asked. It was impossible for Carmen to tell how much her daughter had heard.

  “Sit down,” Jana said. She scooted over and made twice as much room as Siena needed on the cushions of the rattan loveseat.

  “Sweetheart,” Carmen said. “I think we need to …” She stopped and Jana and Siena sat quietly, staring, like an audience waiting to be informed or entertained.

  “I’m trying to make some plans for the next few weeks.”

  “Your mom is worried she’ll be sick, the way her mother was,” Jana interrupted. “She’s concerned that you might end up the way she did as a kid: lonely and resentful because you’re responsible for too much.”

  Carmen looked at Jana, amazed. They had never discussed this specifically; Carmen didn’t think she’d even thought it clearly. But Jana had just located the exact center of the problem. Siena could become just another version Carmen, with all that that entailed.

  “I feel awful,” Carmen started again. “Not that there’s anything I can do about it, but you just don’t need this on top of the thing with your father. And I’d like to make sure we have plans in place so you don’t end up feeling responsible.”

  “Me, I can be a plan.” Jana drained her glass, cross-eyed, appearing less than ever like a viable plan. Still, Carmen warmed. She could see Jana coming over with pot and getting them all high—Carmen to ease her through the crushing nausea and pain, Siena to help her forget her burdens—then feeding everyone through their munchies.

  “Your grandmother is here for you, too. Nate and Jessica. You can call your Aunt Esme if things get really bad.”

  Siena made a disgusted face and Carmen laughed. It shouldn’t have made her happy that all three of her children found Esme irritating and frumpy. But it did.

  “There’s Troy,” Siena said, gazing down at her own toes. “He’ll help me. And his mom. She’s really cool.”

  Carmen felt a stab of jealousy for this cool mom—no doubt married to her soul mate and cancer-free—who would be supporting Siena. She struggled to put that aside and concentrate instead on what damage could come, how history might repeat.

  “I understand you feel that way now,” Carmen said slowly. “But I think there’s a danger in your relying too much on Troy and his family. Especially if things are bad here. If I’m …”—she swallowed and made the decision to go ahead and say it; shocking Siena might actually help—“dying. It will make you vulnerable in a strange sort of way. And you could, if you’re not careful, get, uh, stuck.”

  “Stuck how?” Siena was eyeing her warily. Suddenly, Jana was, too.

  “You know: indebted. You could start to feel like you owe Troy and his mom. Like you need to give them something back. You could end up sort of attached to these people for life, if you’re not careful. Because they helped you through a hard time and suddenly you feel like there’s no way out.”

  “Is that what happened to you?” Si
ena gaped at her. “You felt like you owed Dad so you married him?”

  There was a moment of silence. Carmen looked at Jana, wild for help but there was none there. You got yourself into this…. Jana’s expression seemed to say as she settled back against the cushions like a bear.

  There had to be a reason she was doing this, Carmen thought. First Olive, now Siena. It had to be intentional, on some subconscious level. She was finally telling the truth. And it was possible that there would never be another chance.

  “Yes, in a way, that’s what happened to me. I was like you, sort of. I’d lost both of my parents in a different way: my mother had died, my father was an alcoholic.” Carmen glanced at her salt-and-tequila-smeared glass. “But I was responsible only for myself. I didn’t have brothers….” She waved at the upper story of the house, though neither of the boys was there. “I didn’t have all the things that might fall to you.”

  Siena paused. She’d brought a bottle of Diet Coke out to the porch with her and she lifted it now, tipping her head back in the sunlight to drink and looking to Carmen like some carefree girl in a commercial. Again, there was a flicker of jealousy, but it was dimmer than before. Carmen stretched her arms up and saw that they were slightly leathery. She became middle-aged anyway. Staying in the wrong marriage, sacrificing herself to a dying husband, didn’t erase the years. Justice didn’t apply. Her skin aged. Her breasts not only hung lower, they’d started behaving badly. There was—no matter how she lived—a finite period of time left.

  “Are you telling me you’re going to die?” Siena asked. And as on the night she’d first learned about Carmen’s cancer, she sounded angry. This hostility was fear! Carmen not only recognized it, she remembered it. Sunlight glinted between the gaps of the tall trees standing like sentries at their property line. And right in front of Carmen’s eyes Siena shifted into and out of her younger self: young Carmen in the mirror with makeup streaking her cheeks; a slightly older version in a hotel room in Richmond, Virginia; Carmen in a sheath dress on her wedding day.

  “No, I’m not going to die. Not now, anyway.” The trees rustled and bowed in a sudden breeze, and Carmen let her head loll back in a reverse prayer posture. Still, she was praying that this was true. “I’ll be really sick for a while and it might seem like I’m going to die. I won’t be much use. Your brothers will be frightened. You will be lonely.” She raised her head and locked eyes with her daughter. “But you don’t have to find someone else to take care of you. I’ll be back.”

  Siena cracked a weak smile. “I’ll be back,” she mimicked in a low, raspy voice. “You sound like the Terminator.”

  “How do you know about The Terminator? That movie came out when I was about your age.”

  “Everyone knows about the Terminator, Mom. It’s on TNT, like, every other weekend. I’ve only seen it, like, nine times.” Siena pulled her feet up onto the seat and propped her chin on her knees. “How do you know you won’t die? Daddy did. He didn’t want to, either.”

  “No, he didn’t want to but that’s different from knowing. From the time he was a teenager, Jobe said he knew he would die young. It was only a question of when.” She paused, then when no one else said anything, Carmen went on. “I don’t feel that way. This all feels more like a … test, or something. Not the end.”

  A darkened patch of sky slid across the sun, plunging them into dusk, and at the same time everything quieted. The scent of barbecue from a far-off neighbor’s grill drifted over the porch. Carmen lifted her nose to inhale the plum-colored, crackling fat air and began actually believing what she’d told her daughter. Eventually she would be fine, weathered but alive.

  “Oh God! You have gone entirely off the deep end, Mother.” At first Carmen didn’t even recognize the words as Siena’s. They came so abruptly, interrupting her calm. Besides, in twenty years of parenting Carmen had never been “Mother,” only Mom.

  “I’m not crazy, Siena.” It was difficult to say this with conviction while actively questioning it herself. “It’s just that I think there are things in this world we don’t understand. Your father dealt in such things, mathematically. It makes sense that he might …” She was rambling, totally confused by what she herself was saying, not believing a word of it. No one interrupted her, but Carmen quit speaking anyway and closed her eyes.

  “I’m not Michael, you know,” Siena finally said, her tone withering now. The girl was a remarkable change artist, from angry to sympathetic to disapproving in three minutes flat. “You don’t have to make shit up. I’m not Luca. I don’t think I ‘see’ the ghost of my dead father appearing to me in the middle of the night.”

  “Wait. Jobe’s been appearing to Luca at night?” Jana asked.

  “He said so and she”—Siena tilted her head toward Carmen—“agreed with him that that’s what was happening.” Overhead, the darkness passed; the sun returned, only paler. “I thought,” Siena went on, looking at Carmen, “that you were only trying to make him feel better. But now you sound like some kind of freak, going on about Daddy having these ‘premonitions’ before he died.”

  “He did.” Carmen could hear how stiff she sounded. This was unfair; it wasn’t she who had claimed to know the future. Jobe should be here to help back up her story. “Back when we were dating, when he was in graduate school, he told me he would die young. Just the way …” She looked at Siena—her open, disbelieving face—at Jana, who was leaning forward, grinning, obviously filled with delight at this turn of conversation. “The way Riemann had,” Carmen finished, though she was only handing her daughter more ammunition. My mom got cancer and now she’s, like, a total wacko, Carmen imagined Siena telling her friends, her teachers. She thinks she has visions. Carmen could see exactly how Siena would roll her eyes, the sympathetic looks from adults, the hugs of solidarity from other girls.

  Instead Siena pivoted to face Jana and report, “Luca actually believes he talks to Daddy now. In his dreams. It’s totally freaking Michael out. And she’s been part of the problem. Sometimes I think she believes it herself.” The girl shook her head sadly and in that moment everyone’s role shifted. Jana and Siena became the two rational parents on the couch, while Carmen—youthful, confused, gullible—faced them apprehensively from her chair.

  There was a moment of silence, a visible deepening of the plummy night sky.

  “Mom.” At least Siena was back to calling her that. “I can’t understand why you’re doing this. Frankly, you never seemed all that crazy about him when he was alive. What is all this stuff about talking to Daddy now that he’s dead?”

  It was not, though Carmen desperately wanted it to be, an impertinent question. Siena was measured, honest, genuinely asking. And Jana—the only person in the world qualified to answer the question other than Carmen herself—sat quietly between them. She said nothing but gave Carmen a quick sympathetic look.

  “There are things between a husband a wife that you don’t see,” Carmen started. She stared into two skeptical faces. “And it’s true that I didn’t, in these last years, spend much time just talking to your father. Because …” She searched her brain for the last time they’d sat over coffee, touched spontaneously, or laughed. But she couldn’t recall. “He was sick. And before that, we’d gotten sort of weirdly estranged in a way that married people …” She stopped. “I’m kind of sorry now. I wish I’d spent more time talking to him. I think he was an interesting guy, and I like the idea that maybe my chances aren’t completely gone.”

  It was another lame attempt to appease her daughter, but it was also truer than anything else she had said. Carmen leaned back in the gathering dusk and felt her body, still hers, cells both whole and diseased clinging together in the web they’d devised. Siena sighed. She gathered her Diet Coke and rose. “I need to call Troy,” she said. Carmen met Jana’s gaze and something like humor passed between them. They both knew what the topic of the conversation would be, and the tone.

  “Say hi for me,” said Carmen, and Jana winked at her.
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  After Siena left, they sat for a time in the growing dark. “Do you really wish you could talk to Jobe, or were you just making a point?”

  “Sometimes.” Carmen rocked. “It seems like he’s the only one who would understand. I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Huh.”

  “I always kind of liked him, you know, as a person. I just never should have tried having sex with him.” With voices disembodied in the dark, Carmen thought, they could have been teenagers, or a couple of octogenarians sitting together in the old folks’ home.

  “Well if he’s a ghost, sex shouldn’t be a problem anymore.”

  “Yeah, you’d think.”

  Before Jobe died, Carmen had imagined that she and Danny would meet more frequently after—or at least more spontaneously—but in fact, just the opposite was true. She’d never realized how often Jobe was with the boys, at ball games or eating dinner with Olive, when she was lying in various hotels around town.

  Michael was slowly coming out of the bewildered funk of losing his father and beginning—tentatively—to act like a near-teenage kid. Once, she saw him laugh at something Jeffrey said then cover his mouth, as if he were embarrassed; but lately, he seemed to be struggling to balance the two realities. His father was dead; his own life would continue. Carmen watched her youngest more and more vigilantly as the week before her treatments dissipated. She still had not told him about her cancer. A coward, she’d been waiting to see if either Siena or Luca would break the pact and talk to their brother. So far, neither one had.

  Under these circumstances, the idea of leaving her twelve-year-old to meet her lover felt obscene. It was only when Danny called with the name and number of a house inspector and asked for the dozenth time if he could see her that Carmen relented.

  “I’ll get the room,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about anything except being there.” He texted the name and address a few hours later: the very same hotel, now tired and outdated, where her father had stayed when he came to Baltimore for her graduation—the last time he’d visited before Jobe’s funeral.