The Forever Marriage (3 page)

Carmen closed her eyes and felt a shift in her head, a gear locking into place. “Or,” she said, opening them, looking at her two sons at once, “it could be you and your dad had a way of communicating that none of the rest of us understand. Maybe that’s your, you know, gift, the way Michael …”—she shifted, the word
gift
still lingering, precious and too sweet on her tongue—“the way your brother has a talent for making people laugh.”

The boys actually seemed satisfied with this, which surprised her. And above them, for a fleeting moment, Carmen saw something glimmer: a leaf-shaped luminescence twirling in the air. Then she blinked and it was gone. Fatigue, she decided. This was far more difficult than she’d anticipated.

In fact, it was not at all what she’d imagined. Having Jobe gone.

The next day was Saturday and it rained, a cold, continuous sheet of steel. Spring had gone into hiding.

Siena had returned that noon to her job as a waitress at the Pizza Pub. Michael had a baseball game that got called off but he immediately found a friend’s house to go to. Carmen drove him the five blocks so he wouldn’t get wet. And in between looking at the road she
glanced at her son whose expression eased in tiny shutter jerks—like a time-release series of photographs—as they moved away from the house, the site of his father’s death.

“Have a good time,” she said as he put his hand on the latch.

But instead of throwing the car door open and calling back, “Okay!” as he always had, her younger son turned to her and said, “You, too,” in a perfect mortician’s voice. She stared as he unfolded himself from the car and walked—Jobe’s walk, with a slight swing to his left foot—hurriedly up the drive.

On the way home, Carmen thought about how nice it would be if Danny came over. They could make love with hands and mouths like octopus suckers, attaching to each other in a hundred different ways under the water, then when they were finished they would lie and listen to the rain. She squinted, trying to recall if she and Jobe had ever done that. Before she had begun to chafe at their marriage in earnest she hadn’t been attracted to him, exactly, but she found him warm and comforting and it was pleasant enough to be touched by him when her body was ripe.

There was a time, while she was pregnant with Siena and sexed-up all the time, that she recalled straddling him one night and riding him, looking down to see his horsey Abraham Lincoln face contorted as he concentrated on the task at hand, ignoring that and putting it out of her head and imagining instead that he was a woman with long, dark hair. How to account for the penis, she didn’t know or care. It was rare enough that she and Jobe succeeded in getting this far, Carmen was determined to take advantage; in her fantasy, there had been a group of rapt men watching from the corner of the room.

Suddenly, something darted in front of her car and she braked hard. A raccoon or a small dog, she couldn’t be sure. Or maybe there was never anything at all. Carmen breathed for a moment and drove on slowly. The thought came to her that she was her children’s only parent now. There was an extra burden of responsibility to stay alive.

She pulled into the old garage and turned the key. There was silence, and she missed the way her previous car used to tick after she
switched it off. They had meant to replace this garage. It was the next project that Jobe and Luca were going to tackle, once spring came. At least that had been the thought last winter, when Jobe was still planning to live, before myeloid leukemia came to fill the vacuum where lymphoma had been.

Carmen got out of the car and ran out the wide open door of the garage—which required manual closing, something she would not stop to do today—thirty feet to the house. By the time she got inside, her hair was streaming with rain.

She climbed the creaky wooden stairs and went into the bathroom to towel off. She was lucky she wasn’t as short as her sister, Jobe had commented when they bought the house, because the medicine cabinet, set permanently into the wall, was so high. But even at five-foot-seven, in bare feet, Carmen’s chin was cut off by the mirror’s bottom edge. Taking her towel into the bedroom, she stood in front of the full-length mirror that Jobe had affixed to the back of the door. Faded jeans and a black shirt, no makeup, silver rings on the long, slender fingers that had just recently begun to wrinkle. It was the uniform of the domesticated bohemian, only now there was no one around to tame her. Carmen had the option to become the sort of middle-aged woman who ricocheted through town in long, brightly striped scarves and caftans and earrings made of tiny bells.

But of course
—it was like a voice intruding, neither male nor female, speaking directly into one of the synapses of her brain—
you always could
.

Down in the kitchen, she made a second pot of coffee. She’d always consumed too much when Jobe wasn’t there to drink his share and now he would never again oblige her by taking his cup and a half. Again, the strange rudeness of this thrust itself at her. She had yearned to be unyoked from him for years but had never computed all the small inconveniences Jobe’s absence would cause, or the flashes of loneliness: that first morning after it happened, waking before dawn in bed and sobbing until she could hardly catch her breath. Carmen
shook off the memory and washed the metal apparatus of the coffeemaker, picking the silt off with a paper towel, calling for Luca to come down.

“Hey, honey?” Her voice was raised and artificially bright, like in a horror movie when the heroine is trying to deny that she is scared and alone inside a big empty house. “How about some chocolate coffee?”

This was something Jobe had dreamed up for Luca, who tended to be sleepy in the morning and difficult to awaken for school. He would heat half a cup of milk in the microwave, then fill the rest with coffee and squirt in a spoonful of chocolate sauce. When Carmen objected, saying this was like having dessert for breakfast, Jobe showed her the ingredient list on the flavored non-dairy creamer she used. She could still see her husband’s hairy, many-jointed finger, pointing to the sugar content—5 grams—and tapping the side of the carton. She’d been furious then but had taught herself in the weeks that followed to drink her coffee black.

Luca came down the back stairs now, a narrow wooden passage that led directly into the kitchen. He stood with his head cocked to one side, watching from his small eyes as she measured the chocolate carefully with a large metal spoon. Outside, the rain had picked up and was making the sound of hundreds of corks tapping on the tile roof. The coffeemaker sent off clouds of steam.

“It might not be as good as Dad’s,” she said, setting Luca’s mug down on the table.

He shrugged and shuffled forward, pulling out a chair and sitting tentatively the way he did, like a traveler who’d stopped to rest on a rock. Carmen took the chair opposite him and held her cup in both hands.

“How are you doing?” It sounded as if she were reading from a script.
What to say after your son’s father dies
.

“Okay.” Luca took a sip of the drink and looked worried.

“More chocolate?” she asked, pushing against the long wooden table in preparation to stand.

“No. It’s too much.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“T’s okay. Dad told me…” Luca got up then, tipping his ovoid body out of the chair and walking over to take the pot of coffee from the warmer. He poured about two ounces into his cup then waved his hand over the top. Carmen watched, fascinated. Was it possible her son could perform incantations using nothing but coffee, chocolate, and milk? “Want some?” He held the pot forward and Carmen let him refill her cup, even though she was starting to feel the buzz inside her bones.

Luca sat again and Carmen reached for something to say. Jobe never seemed to have this problem and could sit with Luca for hours, communicating in single words and small random gestures. Jobe had never, she thought with furtive affection, displayed the slightest frustration with Luca’s disability. Sadness, certainly. But even that only at the very beginning, and then he was done.

“It used to rain like this when I was in London,” Carmen said. “All the time. I remember feeling like my hair would never not be wet.”
I was your age
, she almost said. But then she was struck by the quick bolt of pain that always came when she compared her firstborn to other twenty-year-olds, even herself back then. For her the sadness had never quite disappeared.

Luca said nothing and she went on. “But the day I met your dad was sunny and warm. It was like … being born, you know? Coming out of this wet cave into the light.”

She knew it was ridiculous, talking to him like this. Luca didn’t understand metaphor; he barely knew the facts about childbirth. Yet he nodded gravely, as if he understood everything.

Carmen, aching, wondered what she could do for her son. “How about goulash tonight?” she suggested. This was the meal he requested each year for his birthday. It was his favorite, and Jobe’s, though she could never get it quite spicy enough for the two of them no matter how much paprika she put in.

“Good,” he said, nodding so dramatically his chin kept hitting his chest.

“We’ll invite Troy,” Carmen said, and again Luca nodded, but more gently this time. Then they sat silently, drinking their coffee, listening to the sound the rain made on the roof.

It was a raucous evening. Not only did Troy show up, but also Michael’s friend, Jeffrey—an undersize boy who adored Luca genuinely and followed him through the house, imitating the way he walked not out of meanness but awe.

There was a crowd of kids around Carmen as she poured oil into a cast-iron pan and set the meat in to sizzle. She distributed cutting boards and they chopped onions and garlic and red and green peppers while she opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a sturdy glass. Once, the house shook with wind, and this was followed by a loud pause and a crack of thunder, then torrents of rain. Jeffrey retreated to the couch in the den—trying to look casual through his terror—and had to be coaxed back into the group by Luca. As Carmen spooned tomato paste into the pan, Troy turned on the kitchen radio and she heard a familiar beat and synthesizer chords, then the sweet, high voice that had threaded through her high school years:
Now the mist across the window hides the lines / But nothing hides the color of the lights that shine
.

“Oh, my God, turn that up!”

“This?” Troy turned, looking perplexed. “But it’s …”

“Old people music. She knows.” Siena shrugged. “Just indulge her and it’ll be over soon.”

“Indulge
me
? You used to love this album.” Carmen took a swig of wine and closed her eyes, catching a glimpse of the jaunty, young Jobe dancing in his metronomic way with a blanket-swaddled baby girl in his arms. “We used it to put you to sleep when you were a baby. I always thought I’d play it at your wedding.”

Troy shot Siena a winsome look and Carmen stopped, a box of elbow macaroni poised midair above the bubbling water, to watch. Jobe’s death had done something to her relationship with her
seventeen-year-old daughter; it had gone from sweet to fiery in only a matter of days. Carmen pictured Troy and Siena plotting like a pair of Shakespearean characters, texting back and forth, meeting furtively at night, growing their little high school romance into a dramatic life-altering event.
Don’t do it!
She felt like shaking her daughter.
Look at me. I married your father when I was too young to understand the consequences and got stuck for more than two decades
. But of course, she couldn’t do that.

“Jeez, making a baby listen to this, that’s like … child abuse,” Troy said. And right in front of Carmen’s eyes, he and her daughter turned back into impertinent teenagers. This thought made her sigh with relief.

They sat in the kitchen, all six of them, almost like a family. Carmen passed the bowls of salad and steaming meat and noodles and got up twice—once for butter and once for more bread. As often happened while she was watching the children, she barely ate herself. They dazzled her with their unexpected opinions and differences. Of course she wouldn’t repudiate these three people for the chance to have had a real life all to herself! The idea of never having them seemed horrific right now: even Luca,
especially
Luca, who ate neatly and seriously, the way his father had, as if it were a job to be done.

Near the end of the meal, she felt her phone’s text message alert vibrating through the pocket of her sweater. And later, when she checked—while the older children cleaned up together and Michael and Jeffrey played a game of Risk—there was a message from Danny. “Miss U. Call me.”

Typically, she would have taken the phone outside, but the rain continued to pelt down. Carmen looked for a private place on the main floor, wandering from room to room. Siena and Troy were in the kitchen, lingering over the last few dishes. Michael and Jeffrey were sprawled on the rug in the living room. Luca was, by this point, in the den solemnly watching TV. She took the back stairs up but stopped when she got to the threshold of her bedroom. She and Jobe had shared this room—this bed—up until the last few weeks when
he could no longer make it up the stairs. Carmen had dreaded nighttime throughout their marriage: They’d become alien to each other, exquisitely careful, lying sealed off, each occupying a separate half of the bed.

But there had been other nights—random, scattered, occurring for small reasons—when the space between them had briefly disappeared. Seven years ago she’d had the stomach flu, for example, and was recovering: weak from a day of throwing up and another of leaving her body empty so she wouldn’t. Jobe had come into the room after tending to the children, then still young, and groaned slightly as he took off his shoes. He lay on top of the covers while she was underneath, anchoring her in a pleasant way. And when he’d reached out that evening to put his hand on her forehead—checking for fever—she had turned toward him and curled like a possum into the space under his chin. If he was surprised after months of feeling only her back in bed, he didn’t let on.