Free The Forever Marriage by Ann Bauer Page B

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