The Forever Marriage (24 page)

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 He texted the name and address a few hours later: the very same hotel, now tired and outdated, where her father had stayed when he came to Baltimore for her graduation—the last time he’d visited before Jobe’s funeral.

Carmen mused about this the following afternoon, as she left the boys—plus Jeffrey, of course—with a pot of chili and a pile of videos to drive the exact same route she had taken to retrieve her dad twenty-one years before. She was watching the road, sort of, but also seeing images of her father over the years. Thinking about how strangely durable he was. Despite the decades of heavy drinking, Antonio had aged well. He had that dapper, elastic look that skinny, older Italian men often had, a little like Sinatra without the voice. He’d cut back in the past few years from six Scotch-and-waters a night to three on his doctor’s advice. Mornings, he played thirty-six holes of golf. There was—she pulled into the parking lot, wincing as her arm brushed her own sore breast—no deterioration in sight.

“Hey,” Danny said softly, opening the door even before she could knock. He must have been waiting, listening for the particular sound of her keys. Pulling her inside a little roughly, he faced her and looked intently—as only he could, sized perfectly to match—into her eyes. “How are you?”

“I’m, um, okay. Scared actually. And kind of mad at the world. But okay.”

“What can I do?” A pleading question.

Carmen turned away and made a project out of settling her enormous purse on the floor. If this was the way it was going to be, she might have to leave.

“That guy.” Her voice was sharp and she could see that
Danny was hurt, so she stopped and gathered her breath, softening it. “You know…. Tell me about the inspector you talked to.”

Holding her hand as if they were two children on a playground, Danny led her to the bed and sat. “Basically, he said he’ll charge you about nine thousand dolars to come out and run all his tests on the place, everything from radon to lead paint to toxic mold.” Danny shivered, breathing out, and she could smell the four or five cigarettes he’d smoked in a row that afternoon, probably downstairs on the hotel steps. “It’s amazing how many dangerous things can live in a house.”

Carmen did not react. This was a side of Danny she’d never seen and she couldn’t decide whether she liked it or not. He was cocky, the kind of man who would bring his wife over to his mistress’s dinner table and introduce the two with a smirk. He’d never taken anything very seriously. Or at least, that’s what she’d thought. It was possible, however, that she wasn’t the best judge of character. Bad or good.

“Anyway, that’s basically it. The price is for testing only; it doesn’t include any mitigation. That can cost up to a couple hundred grand. And the guy said he usually doesn’t find much: maybe one or two levels that are on the high side of normal, but nothing he can really
point
to.”

“That was surprisingly up front for a man who could make nine thousand dollars just by sweeping his special detectors around my house.”

“Yeah, well, I told him this was for close friends of mine. The husband had already died of cancer; the wife was just diagnosed. He got a lot more sympathetic after that.”

Carmen looked down and grinned at their locked hands as an odd, alien warmth spread through her. She relaxed, possibly for the first time since the biopsy. She liked it when Danny lied. Also, there was something about the idea of him being a close friend of Jobe’s that made her amused and hopeful. She closed her eyes and the image she’d seen before—that floating series of golden rings, moving gently through her mind—appeared again.

Now there was the soft feeling of his face against hers, hands like wings on her jaw, the gentle working of his lips and tongue against her mouth. Carmen lay back slowly but without strain; it was as if something were supporting her all the way down. When her back touched the pillows, Danny moved his hands to the front of her shirt. This was the first time they’d been together since the day he found the comet, which was now gone. He had unbuttoned her and was leaning down to kiss her collarbone.

Abruptly Carmen sat up, nearly clocking him, and pulled her shirt around her.

“What? What’s wrong?” He sat back, hands up, like a suspect.

“My … I can’t.” First there had been the gash in her chest, oozing blood-tinged pus into gauze. Then the bruise that spread like ink under her skin. It was fainter now, green and lavender instead of that dark death color. But the ugliest part was the concave pocket Dr. Woo had left in her breast, with skin folded and stitched unevenly. He’d been pleased when he saw how it was healing and Carmen inferred that she looked the way she was supposed to a couple of weeks after surgery. But it made no sense. What was all this excitement about “saving the breast,” if it was going to end up mangled and purpled and green?

“Does it hurt?” Danny asked, still sitting some distance away.

“Not.” She breathed out like a dragon. This was humiliating. “Not anymore. But it doesn’t feel
good
anymore either.”

“You’ve tried?”

“You mean?” She swallowed, disgusted by the idea. “No. I haven’t.”

“So. Let me.” He seemed to be growing as he sat there. Carmen blinked. This was a strange illusion: Danny, whose compact size and flippancy she’d relied upon, becoming suddenly grave and large.

“Let you what?”

“Let me …” He reached out slowly, as if she were a skittish dog, and peeled her fingers from the shirt she was holding closed. “Try.”

This time, when Danny lowered her it was he who held her on the way down. “The lights,” she muttered. “Can we?”

“Don’t move,” he said and got up to pull the curtains shut—including the heavy ones designed to block light during the day—and turn off the room’s two lamps. The room was murky, brighter than night, lit from the edges of the windows and the crack under the door. When Danny came back to the bed he stood over her for a moment, looking down. Then he pulled his own shirt over his head without unbuttoning it. “Take your clothes off for me.”

Even his voice seemed deeper than before and she obeyed, first sliding out of her jeans by arching her back and moving her hips from side to side. Then she removed her socks and finally sloughed off the shirt she’d been holding tight around her.

Danny stood another few beats, simply looking at her, and Carmen felt herself growing warm. Slick with desire. Her body seemed not to understand the circumstances. “Take off your pants,” she said in imitation of him, and he laughed but did what she said.

He climbed on top of her, carefully, and perched on his knees so their pelvic bones matched. He was hard inside his boxer shorts and the fabric between them made her breathless, the way she had been once when he bound her wrists over her head with the tie from a hotel bathrobe then fucked her agonizingly slowly, stopping and starting again, until she begged him to make her come.

“This feels good, doesn’t it?” he said, voice floating to her through the room’s haze and she nodded, closing her eyes.

Danny bent over her; she could smell tobacco and coffee as he neared her face. At some point, he must have taken his hair out of its customary ponytail because it fell on all sides of her, tickling her ribs and making a dark tent around her head and shoulders and neck. He reached under her and unhooked her bra, drawing it off, letting it fall to the floor. Carmen kept her eyes shut. They’d adjusted to the darkness—even in middle age, her vision was perfect—and she didn’t want to see his face.

“Does this hurt?” he asked, circling the nipple of her right breast with his finger.

She shook her head. That was the side that was still whole and
healthy, at least so far as she knew. Dr. Woo had given her the sense that cancer might be lurking anywhere, ready to latch on with its sharp, rotten teeth.

“And this?” Danny had moved laterally to the left now; she could feel the shift in his body. But there was no sensation on her skin. It felt dead, like a layer of plastic had been inserted between her nerve endings and the rest of the world.

“It doesn’t hurt.” She tried to keep the frustration out of her voice. She could no longer feel his cock between her legs, either. He must have gone soft just looking at her. “But it’s like I’m numb. Maybe you should just …”

“Quiet!” She opened her eyes and met Danny’s in the gloom. He smiled, a kindly librarian. “Just be quiet and let me take care of things.”

“Okay,” she said, feeling suddenly, inexplicably, sleepy. She shut her eyes again and lay without struggling, giving in. Then something started, like music so low it’s barely audible. There was a weak signal from her left side, a tiny fork of lightning. She made a sound and moved against the sheets; Danny brought himself down more fully along her body and she felt him rock hard against her leg.

Shifting, using her hands to pull him back into position, she used him shamelessly, humping his still-covered penis until she was on the edge of orgasm. “Stop!” she said, and realized that he had been sucking on her nipples, each in turn, and the left was now working nearly as well as the right. It was a fainter feeling—like a voice coming from downstairs instead of the next room—but it was there.

“Now,” she ordered. It was so easy to take over, become the instructor. And Danny seemed not to mind.

He stood, leaving her uncovered and briefly cool, to pull off his underwear. Then he straddled her again, his cock extended like a flag. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispered, and somehow the words twisted brightly in her head to become exciting.

“Please,” she said, not knowing if she meant “Please do hurt me” or “Please don’t,” but not caring, either, because there was only
sensation and that was better than deadness and it felt like nothing she’d ever experienced before: loud and strange and foreign but wonderful. Like a teenage boy, she came within minutes and he then speeded up, determined. A few hard thrusts and he let out a long, strangled groan.

He rolled off her and they were side by side on the bed, breathing raggedly. It was growing later and the light seeping in around the curtains had begun to blend with the tenor of the room. “Did that work?” he asked after they were quiet again.

“Yeah, that worked,” she said. For the first time she could ever remember, she reached out and held his hand.

For once, instead of disappearing each in their own direction, they stayed together, side by side in the narrow hotel bed, talking in a desultory, nearly married manner about Carmen’s home inspection, Danny’s attempts to get Mega into credit counseling, the insurance dilemma, and finally—for the first time—her kids.

“Michael doesn’t have Jobe to talk to anymore, and his older brother has Down’s so he can’t be of much help.” Carmen decided to skip the part about Luca’s already being in conversation with his dead father. “Jobe’s brother, Nate, is terrific. He loves my kids and spends time with Michael when he can. But Nate’s got his own life. A wife, a job, two kids of his own.”

Danny shifted and found a more comfortable spot but didn’t let go of her fingers. This closeness—and the talking—was new; she was surprised how much she liked it. “Now he’s going to watch his mother get …” She stopped. There was no point describing to Danny how ugly she was bound to become. Soon enough, he’d see.

“I could try,” Danny said. “Talking to him.”

She turned toward him; he remained on his back. There was no way to tell what he’d meant. This was the first time they’d even discussed the children. Danny had never wanted children and made it clear from the beginning he wasn’t interested in the day-to-day. Surely
he wasn’t offering to step in and become that out-of-the-blue uncle figure for her son. “What are you saying?”

“I mean, I could take him to a baseball game or something. You know, do guy stuff every once in a while.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean ‘why’?”

“I mean, that’s not what we do. We don’t get entangled. No commitments, remember? Don’t look at me like that. It was your rule.”

“So?” Danny let go of her hand and got out of bed. “I wasn’t talking about that. This isn’t a fucking marriage proposal, it was an offer to help you out in a tough situation. But forget it.” The last three words came out muffled as he bent to pick up his boxers.

“Of course it’s not a marriage proposal. You’re already married.”

Danny had pulled his jeans on over his shorts, but he paused now, the zipper and button still undone. He targeted her with his eyes. “Yes, I’m married. And you’re not anymore. Is that what this is about? You want me to
marry
you now?”

Carmen lit up with rage. But a tiny part of her was still quiet, still measured. How had this happened so fast? One minute they were in bed together, close in a way they’d never been before, and now …

“No, I don’t want you to marry me. For Christ’s sake, I’ve never wanted to be married to anyone! I was so anxious to be single I actually
wished
for my own husband—who never did a single bad thing in his whole life—to die.” She was breathing hard again, and sobbing. “That’s how desperately I wanted to be single. That’s how awful I am. So just.” She huddled, her knees drawn up with the sheet over them, head bowed so she could see the tangled ends of her hair. “Go.”