The Forever Marriage (18 page)

Dr. Woo nodded, an assent to her flattery. “That’s a very good question, Mrs. Garrett. But the therapy is not intended for cancer cells I missed—though that is a remote possibility. It’s intended for tumors that are growing elsewhere in the breast tissue, and according to your daughter’s report it’s very likely there are some. For whatever reason, her body is making a cancer that feeds directly off her hormones. Even right now, she is probably at a stage in her cycle where there is a wave of estrogen or progesterone.” Both of them turned to look at Carmen, as if examining her for evidence. “I cannot be certain, of course, but my guess is that there are other tumors just beginning. We could cut off the supply of hormones tomorrow and hope that takes care of the problem.” Dr. Woo shook his head. “But research shows that just isn’t enough. It allows a growing cancer to get in under the wire, so to speak.” He turned his hands up and shrugged. “As I said, I’m a cautious man. And you might want to seek a second opinion, but I would ask you not to wait too long.”

Carmen put her head back. The room was stifling, or she was having a hot flash, or she was being corroded from the inside by some rampant cancer. Whatever it was, she needed badly to leave. “I don’t want a second opinion, I believe you,” she said, not to the doctor but
to the air above her tightly closed eyes. “Let’s get this on the books. Just tell me when I can start.”

Because it was rush hour when they left, Olive took residential streets all the way back to Carmen’s house, driving just as steadily as before, but the fancy, old-fashioned speedometer needle hovered at about twenty-seven miles per hour. It felt as if they could be in the car for hours.

“Do you mind?” Carmen asked and flipped on the air conditioner. She huddled in front of her vent and was nearly asleep when her cell phone made its text message sound. “How was ur appt?” Danny had keyed to her. She stared at the words for a moment then turned off her phone and threw it into her purse.

“Are you sure about this, dear?” Olive asked. She was staring ahead, her face like granite. She looked as she had that last night with Jobe. “Wouldn’t you like to get a second opinion? I can make some calls, find out who’s best at these things.”

“Thank you.” Carmen reached out to touch Olive’s shoulder. “But I think we just
saw
who’s best. Besides, I knew it would be like this. I had a feeling. In a way, that doctor was my second opinion. I was the first.”

Jana would understand this line of thinking. But it was a risk to be talking about this with Olive, who might decide something devastating had happened to her daughter-in-law’s brain as well. Carmen watched, curious, while Olive formulated her answer.

“I understand,” she said and nodded. “George always teased me about my ‘feelings.’ He thought it was all nonsense. But if you know it, you just do.”

Carmen nearly laughed. “Well, who’da thought we were both so psychically inclined?”

“Sometimes …” Olive gripped the steering wheel and looked straight ahead. “Sometimes, I think I can hear him speaking to me.”

“George?” Carmen asked.

Olive chortled. “Good Lord, no. That man barely said seven words to me when he was alive. He couldn’t be bothered to call me from an overseas trip. I’m sure he’s not reaching out from the great beyond.”

“So are you talking about Jobe?”

Olive hesitated, then nodded. “Once or twice, I could swear I’ve heard him. He was always the sweetest, the most devoted of my boys. Will was born with the drive to conquer and I think he forgets his family for months at a time. Nate is a lovely young man and I adore him. But Jobe. It’s like he’s still … watching. Because he knows how strange and lonely life can get. Oh, I know I sound crazy, don’t I?”

Carmen was warm, lazing in the late afternoon sunshine that came in through the passenger window glass. It was almost possible to forget—momentarily, at least—about what the doctor had said. After all these years, she and Olive were coming to an understanding: They had more in common than most real mothers and daughters. Neither had loved her husband; both had experienced mysterious events. Putting these two things together, Olive probably
knew
how she, Carmen, had felt about Jobe. No longer would there need to be secrets between them.

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Carmen said, closing her eyes, feeling the car ride the way she had when she was a sleepy little girl. “There was one night, up in the attic. He, uh … appeared to me. Only he was huge, and sort of faint around the edges. Honestly, it could have been a dream. I don’t know.”

“I like to think not, dear.” Olive reached out to pat Carmen’s leg—while driving! This was as broad a gesture as it would be for some other women to sweep you up in their arms. “I’ve always hoped that there was more than this world. I hoped that for Jobe, and for myself, because wherever he is I’m going there soon.”

And now for me, too
, Carmen thought. But she didn’t say it.

“It must have been hard living with George all those years.” Carmen opened her eyes but stayed curled in the shower of sunlight, drunk on its golden shine. “Did you ever think of leaving?”

“Goodness, no.” Olive made her signature hand wave—a regal dismissal—then clamped down on the wheel again. “He was a good man. We had three children. It was … my life.”

“But didn’t you ever wonder?”

“Wonder what, dear?”

“You know. What else you might have done. Who else you might have met. Didn’t you ever play that game where you give yourself a completely different ending?”

Several seconds went by and Olive didn’t answer. Finally, Carmen focused her eyes and looked. Her mother-in-law had slowed to around twenty miles an hour. Her lips were pursed, and her shoulders shook.

“Olive?” Carmen said.

“Are you telling me,” the other woman whispered, “that you wished for something else? That you were playing this ‘game’ while you were married to my son?”

Carmen sat up as if jolted. She was confused, behind somehow. They had been sharing something, like mother and daughter, meeting on the same otherworldly plane. Now, in an instant, Olive was again Mrs. Garrett, the matriarch at the massive dining room table. And inside Carmen was a twist of bright fear.

“I thought that’s what we were talking about.” Her tone always became more certain, nearly condescending, when she was threatened. Carmen could hear it but was powerless to change it. Besides, the only option was to become mewling and needy, which would have been worse. “A good man, three children. Doing what needs to be done.”

They were only four blocks from Carmen’s house, yet Olive pulled the car over and turned the key to Off. The interior began immediately to grow stuffy, but Olive was shivering. She was at the stage of life where every temperature was some variation of cold.

She opened her mouth to speak twice before actually forming words. “I loved my husband, for all of his … quirks,” she said finally, her gaze fastened on some point in the distance. “The question is: Did you love yours?”

Carmen sat. The heat of the sun had turned punishing in the closed, idle car. Snippets of the doctor’s speech were running through her head: “three months of chemotherapy,” “put you into menopause immediately.” But these complaints seemed paltry, now, compared to the fierce cruelty she had unthinkingly inflicted on Olive. Carmen ached to take it back, for this single conversation to be the one decision in her life that she could re-script. She would gladly live again through the twenty-one years of a cool and confusing marriage rather than do this damage. Slowly, she forced herself to look at the old woman in the seat next to her, the Marilyn Monroe shape suddenly flaccid and hunched, like a plant midwither.

“Olive,” she said, as gently as she was able. “I thought you knew.”

There was a pause. The phrase “moment of silence” joined the others in Carmen’s head. The heat was stultifying; she had to concentrate to breathe. Then Olive turned the key: Cool air rushed out of the vents, washing Carmen’s skin in relief.

“I did,” said Olive, nodding slowly. “I did know. But I hoped and prayed with everything in me that I was wrong.”

Carmen spent her twenty-first birthday in New York with Olive, in order to give Jobe time to finish his dissertation. They had a suite at the New York Palace. “I’m sure it’s not as nice as if my son were here with you,” Olive said as they stood on the deck, looking over the honking, moonlit city streets. “But I’m honored that you’re willing to celebrate with me.” She lifted a sizzling glass of champagne and clinked it with Carmen’s, which she had already drunk half of. “Happy Birthday, dear.”

The wind picked up and Carmen’s dark hair—grown long and thick over winter—blew across her face. It still surprised her that she was here with this woman she hadn’t even known on her last birthday, acting more like a daughter than she had with her own mom.

It was Olive who’d discovered her sneaking out of Jobe’s room that drunken night nearly ten months ago. Carmen was afraid, smelling of sex and sweat and Scotch, holding her shoes and tights, peering down the labyrinthine hallways trying to remember which direction her room was in. She turned to look over the banister into the foyer, to reorient herself and recall the path she’d taken when she first entered the house, when Olive materialized on the marble tile wearing
a long, dark robe, her cap of bobbed silver hair looking exactly as neat as it had at dinner. Carmen wondered, for one lazy second, if perhaps it was a wig.

In the next, she was struck with embarrassment: Mrs. Garrett surely knew. It was 4:00 a.m. and Carmen was standing outside of Jobe’s still-open room. Reaching back, Carmen gently pulled the door closed then started down the stairs. Maybe she would be allowed to get a few hours’ sleep before leaving. Or—she paused midway down—it was possible the woman might simply shove her out the front door.

Stoic, mouth twitching, Olive watched her descend. “You couldn’t sleep either?” she asked when Carmen reached the bottom.

This was not what she’d been expecting. Carmen blinked and shook her head.

“Tell you what. I’ll make us something to eat and put on some tea while you go in there and wash your face.” Olive put her hands on Carmen’s shoulders and gave her a little tap in the direction of the powder room off the foyer.

Carmen waited until she was inside to turn on the light. Then she faced the mirror. Her face was streaked with lavender shadow and black eyeliner; she looked like something out of a teenage horror movie, about to be bludgeoned. For just a moment, she imagined that’s what Olive had in store.

But when she stepped into the kitchen—easy to find because it was at the back of the house and lit brilliantly—Olive was standing at the stove. “Grilled cheese sandwiches,” she said. “How does that sound?”

Olive was glad to have company, Carmen realized that night. By the time they stood side by side on the rooftop deck at the New York Palace, she’d figured out one other thing: Olive had been secretly thrilled to see her coming out of Jobe’s room. She’d always wished for a daughter; she told Carmen this one afternoon while they shopped for clothes. It wasn’t that she didn’t love the boys, of course. But it was hard living in a house full of men, all scientists and math
geeks, who said little and wouldn’t have noticed if she painted the walls bright orange.

Also, Jobe was her favorite and she so wanted him to have a nice girlfriend. “He’s the most considerate of my boys,” she’d said. “Even as a young child, he was the one who wanted to give away his allowance and bring poor people home to stay with us.”

“Is that what I am?” Carmen asked, only half joking. She still questioned Jobe’s family’s offer to help her with her last year of school. “Just some poor girl he dragged home?”

“Of course not,” Olive said, her hand fluttering. “
You
are like an extended family member.”

But she was not yet, in any way, a family member. And this was exactly the point. Olive wanted her son to have what he wanted. And Jobe clearly wanted Carmen. So here she was.

“Have you thought about what you’ll do after graduation?” Olive asked, settling into a padded deck chair so she was facing the setting sun. “It’s nice that it coincides with Jobe’s finishing up. George and I were thinking we might send you two on a trip.”

“You’ve already sent me on a trip.” Carmen turned toward the older woman and spread her arms. “We’re here, in New York, staying in the nicest place I’ve ever seen—probably ever
will
see.”

“Yes, of course, but this is for your
birthday
. And it’s for me, too. A break, a girls’ getaway weekend. That’s all.”

Carmen closed her eyes and leaned back. There was no real danger of falling: the terrace wall hit her a few inches above the waist. But she liked the dizzying possibility. It was a little like the way she’d felt with Rory the last time, when he ran his hand down the front of her T-shirt then leaned in to kiss the hollow at the base of her throat. She shivered now, simultaneously turned on and disgusted. Even thinking such things in front of Olive was a betrayal.

“You barely know me.” Carmen’s eyes were still shut and her voice soft, absorbed by the wind. “I don’t think you should be doing all these things for me.” To her embarrassment, she felt tears gathering in her throat and turned, sightless, in the direction of the setting
sun. She would miss Olive terribly. It would be like losing a mother all over again, only this time someone she adored. And Olive, surely, would hate Carmen for the rest of her life.

“I know more than you might imagine.” The wind had died down suddenly, and Olive’s words cut neatly through the air.

Carmen shook her head, swiping at her eyes as she pushed the hair out of her face. Then she refilled her glass and held up the bottle. Olive raised one finger and downed her champagne. Swallowing and nodding, she said, “I’d love some, thank you.”

Carmen poured and they sat, side by side, in their padded chairs. “What do you think you know?” she finally asked, hoping Olive would turn and say,
Everything. I know you only tolerate when my son touches you, that you went out the other night with a real estate agent and let him finger fuck you under the table in a dark bar
.