The Forever Marriage (8 page)

The procedure itself was as Carmen remembered. She was ordered to turn, lift her arm, slant her body at a weird angle so her breasts could be smashed between two plates. And as she had the first time, Carmen wondered how much damage was being done. A few of these lifesaving tests and a woman could end up with two stretched-out teats dangling to her knees.

The technician did her right breast first, pictures from the front and the side, then released that one and gingerly lifted the left onto the Plexiglas platform of her machine. “Will it hurt, because of the …”—Carmen forced herself to speak the way others did, using the word they preferred—“lump?”

“It shouldn’t. But if it does, you tell me the minute you feel anything and we’ll stop and readjust.” She was young, probably not yet thirty.
What did she know about these things?
But the girl patted Carmen’s back in a friendly way and scratched it a bit with her long fingernails, which felt good even through the fleece. Carmen relaxed and was surprised when her left breast lay squashed below her that the comet neither hurt nor popped from the surface of her skin. She’d been expecting to see an outline, the way you did with a baby’s foot when it kicked from inside.

“Everything okay?” the technician asked.

“Fine,” Carmen said, though it was at least in part a lie.

They had her sit in the waiting room, still in her robe, in case they needed more “films,” as the technician referred to them. Carmen did nothing as she sat, neither reading a magazine nor drinking tea, but simply waiting for what she knew would come. And then it did.

A man emerged from a back room—the first one on staff that she’d seen since entering the breast center—and introduced himself with a name she immediately forgot. They needed an MRI to follow up, he told her. Then, most likely, a needle aspiration biopsy. It would be relatively painless; just a little local anesthesia. She would be able to go home and cook dinner for her family tonight.

“Only a guy would say that like it’s a desirable thing,” she cracked and he smiled, but she could tell he was thinking she should, indeed, be grateful. There was a family, she could feed them. These things might not always be true.

This time Carmen was given a gown that tied in front. It seemed to have been made of wax paper and was, again, pink: the color of the stuff you had to swallow when you were nauseated. The socks they gave her—thankfully, however much they clashed—were a pale blue. Then she was led down a long hallway by a wide-hipped woman who looked like a prison matron. The sweet, young technician had disappeared; Carmen was, apparently, too far gone already for her.

Inside a steel-gray room, the matron extended her hand like a knight to help Carmen up onto a wide metal table. “Are those what I think they are?” she asked, pointing to a bustier-shaped contraption that lay on the table’s surface.

“Yep. That’s where your bosoms will go. So let’s just get you ready.” The matron reached out and began untying the gown, oblivious to the intimacy of the act. Carmen leaned back, almost enjoying the play. “Chilly in here,” she said.

“You’ll be warm soon enough. That’s something a lot of gals complain about: the heat.”

“What heat?” The woman had eased the gown back from
Carmen’s shoulders so that she sat bare-chested in the strange room. It was amazing how good that felt, almost like the wanton feeling of going to a topless beach, which she and Jobe had done once on their honeymoon. Now she recalled his face—her young husband—when she had wriggled out of the top half of her one-piece suit and lay back on a towel. He’d stood over her, supposedly blocking the sun but also obstructing people’s view of her, until she’d had to beg, “Please sit down, Jobe. You’re throwing a shadow and I’m getting really cold.”

He’d sunk to the sand, cross-legged beside her, and taken her hand. For an hour they’d stayed this way, Carmen touched by Jobe’s protectiveness but also shamefully titillated by the idea of men and women walking by and ogling her perfect, naked breasts.

“Okay, now, you’re gonna lie this way.” The woman pivoted Carmen on the shiny surface so she was facing the bustier thing. “I need you to lower yourself down into the coil and I’m going to guide you in.”

It was like doing a reverse push-up: Carmen had her hands on either side of the cast and the matron, standing at the head of the table, had reached out to grab one dangling breast in each hand so she could settle them into the cups. This was not a woman who appealed to Carmen; some did, but they tended to be slim and rugged, women strangely like herself with dark, wavy hair and muscular arms. Still, she couldn’t help but be turned on when anyone touched her breasts. It had happened at every gynecologic exam she’d ever had. Danny could make her come simply by standing behind her while she was fully clothed, rubbing and pinching her nipples through her shirt. Even Jobe had figured out that touching her there was a catalyst, the magic key to orgasm no matter how awkward their sex.

“Okay, now you’re in. I’m going to put an IV in your arm.”

Carmen closed her eyes. Her back was starting to hurt already from being propped this way and she was worried now. If surgeons had to cut the comet from her, would they also cut the nerves that made her shudder that way? It had never, in all the years of watching pink-ribbon-wearing women marching on TV, occurred to her that mastectomy was the equivalent of castration above the waist.

“Relax now,” the matron said. “This won’t hurt much. You’re not a fainter, are you?”

“Hardly,” Carmen said, her voice muffled against the pillow under her chin. “But what would it matter, anyway? I’m lying down.”

There was a burning feeling on the top of her right wrist, then the rush of fluid entering her. “There,” said the woman, taping the needle into Carmen’s arm and patting it curtly. “Now, I need to put some ear plugs in, to keep you comfortable.” Again, she was sliding something into Carmen’s body: this time, a squishy little bullet in each ear. Then another pat. “You’re all set. I’m going to run and get the MRI guy and we’ll start.”

Nothing happened for a while but Carmen didn’t really care. They must have stuck some kind of sedative in the IV. She had drifted into a gauzy fog, her back forgotten, when the table she was on began to move. “Carmen?” A man’s tinny, muffled voice came from nowhere and everywhere. “We’re going to need you to lie perfectly quiet, okay? If something happens, if you start to feel sick or dizzy, you just say so. The machine is miked. But otherwise, I want you to hold yourself as still as possible. Ready to start?”

It was odd, speaking into this tubular cavern, trusting that her voice would be heard. But she did. “Sure, go for it,” Carmen said, and within seconds the most incredible banging racket started around her, sounds like the battering of a thousand deer hooves against a huge tin can. There was nothing to do but lie propped and let this happen and Carmen was doing fine, until the reality of what this could mean flared out at her. She saw her children lined up, Luca and Siena and Michael at another funeral, watching another casket being lowered into the ground. This made her not panicked so much as angry. Not only was it wrong for her children to lose both their parents so young, but she had
earned
this part of her life. She’d stuck out twenty-one years of marriage, trying as hard as she could under the circumstances to be a good wife; surely she had a little freedom coming to her! Could it be that now—just as she was about to find her way back on to the right road—Carmen, too, was going to die?

“It will be very hard for a while,” the voice coming through the speaker said. Only this time it didn’t sound so echoey and metallic; also, it was a few shades lower. “But you’ll be fine in the end.”

She shifted to the right, craning her head to look over her shoulder. “I need you to lie still, Carmen,” said the original voice. “Just a few more minutes and then we’ll do your contrast.”

“Sorry,” she muttered, but the word was lost in the combination of deer thunder and anxiety. Then she felt the warmth the nurse had talked about, a slow turning-to-orange like the heating of a burner on an electric stove. And—as she had that day with Danny when he’d found her comet—that long, smooth hand on her forehead and another on the back of her neck.

“It will be fine,” she heard again, only this time it was more like a vapor of words, neither spoken nor written on the air but something she could not pinpoint that was in between.

After the MRI, she waited again, growing cold and shivering in her wax gown and blue socks. And when the matron came back, Carmen knew immediately from her eyes that the comet had burned through all their tests. A four-year-old could look at the images and know.

“Doctor saw your results and he wants a biopsy,” the nurse said.

She offered her hand as if Carmen were frail and needed help out of her chair. And to her surprise, Carmen accepted it gratefully, pressing her palm to this large woman’s, feeling the sturdy workings of healthy blood and flesh under her own weak skin. She was light-headed as she rose and wished fleetingly for Jobe to lean against, his arm reeling her in against the long, tall trunk of his chest.

“This is going to sting,” the nurse admitted as they walked toward a door marked with a number 8. “My advice is to breathe through it.”

“You could just give me some of that stuff you used for the MRI,” Carmen said. “That worked like a dream.”

“What stuff?” They pushed through the door and into yet another room of white tile and steel. “All we did was pump a little saline into you, then some contrast. There was no need for any sedative.
Some women, they panic inside the tube. But other than that one time, you were perfect.” She helped Carmen up onto another cold metal table and fussed over her like a nanny, untying and retying more tightly the laces on her gown. “We did hear you talking to yourself in there, but sometimes that happens. It’s a little like a sensory deprivation tank. People have their visions.”

Carmen lowered herself onto the paper-covered pillow though it was the last thing she really wanted to do. Suddenly, she was terrified. More than anything, she wanted to get up and go home—forget this had ever happened—the same way she’d tried when she was giving birth to Luca. Prior to this, she’d assumed there was always the option to change her mind; when, halfway through a thirty-hour labor, she’d realized this was a permanent trap that would go on without her control, she thought she might go insane.

A doctor came in and spoke to her, but she barely listened. When he unsheathed a long needle and stood aiming it at the tiny X she and the matron had together drawn on her breast with a pen, Carmen was bored.
Just let this be over
, she thought. There was a prolonged, burning sensation. A few minutes of painful probing. And then it was done.

Pathology would have to process the biopsy; he would then add these results to the others. Someone would call her within two days to schedule another appointment. Carmen nodded. She would have agreed to anything in that moment simply to be able to retrieve her clothes and leave.

Walking into the house, Carmen felt as if days, or weeks, had passed since she’d last seen it. Objects appeared bold, as if each was at the center of a still life: the ceramic bowl in the hall where she dropped her keys, the staged portrait of their family from six years ago that hung in the living room, a pair of shoes that Michael had left—one toe crossed over the other—on the dining room floor. Each nearly pulsed with presence. Overwhelmed, Carmen wanted to hide.

But when she entered the kitchen and saw Siena hunched over an enormous book, everything righted and Carmen nearly cried. “What’s up?” she said, struggling to keep her voice normal.

Siena crossed her eyes and wrinkled her freckled nose. “Calculus.” She spit the word out like a curse. She was wearing her hair in two long braids, which made her look wholesome and about twelve. Carmen ached hard to go back in time and fix things. Five years would give her the chance to … what? Exercise more? Eat more broccoli? Remain faithful to Jobe?

“Need help?” Carmen offered absently, still wondering what happened to the people that they were: to Luca, in high school, and Michael, only a small child.

“Yeah sure, Mom. Pull up a seat. Tell me everything you know about derivatives of cubic polynomials.”

Carmen stiffened. “I might know more than you think.”

“Really?” Siena’s sarcasm cleared like a thundercloud shattered by sun. She looked at Carmen hopefully.

“No, not really.” Carmen pulled out a chair anyway and sat. She stared at the paper in front of Siena and was bewildered that her daughter could make such foreign-looking hieroglyphs.

“Something wrong?” asked Siena. “You look … funny.”

“No, I’m just missing your father. He would have known how to help you with this.” She hadn’t planned to say that. She hadn’t even known she thought it. And the moment it was out of her mouth, Carmen was terrified that she’d made a terrible mistake. Reminding Siena of Jobe’s absence—looming as it already was—seemed cruel.

But as she opened her mouth to apologize and met Siena’s eyes, Carmen saw that just the opposite was true. Her daughter was teary yet luminous, her young face filled not with horror but awe. “Yeah, he would have,” she said softly.

There was a moment’s pause, and into it Carmen let out the breath it seemed she’d been holding all day.

The call came precisely forty-eight hours later. It was a hot Friday afternoon filled with the hazy sound of insects. Carmen was pulling weeds, which had always before been Jobe’s job. She was on her
knees. And as she dug into her pocket for the phone, she understood this was it. The answer had been screamed by her cancer cells into a pathologist’s face, noted on a form for the doctor, conveyed to the staff. Carmen’s feet, propped toe-first in the dirt, felt deadened, like stumps.

“Doctor would like you to come in for a consultation right away next week,” the caller said.

Carmen’s heart was shrinking, becoming—she was sure—the size and texture of an apricot pit. The cancer might be spreading there as well.

“Glenda?” she said, remembering the voice and the name tag of the woman who had helped her with her paperwork. “Is this Glenda? Do you remember me?”