Face Of The Monster

7 - Cure

I walk into the room looking down.

If I look up, he will see it in my eyes. He will see it in my lips, in my coloring, in the arch of my eyebrows. He knows me, he knows me better than anyone does. He'll see it. I'm sure of that.

"Emmy!" he calls when he sees me. Poor dear, still excited to see me. He doesn't know what I have done.

I walk to his bed, trying to rearrange my face into an unreadable expression. At some point, he will look at me, and if he looks at me, I can't let him see the guilt written all over my skin. "Hi," I say, taking a seat beside him.

He looks awful as ever. His cheeks are hollow and his eyes are sunken. His skin has gone from warm brown to sickly yellow. His lips are dry and feel like sandpaper when I touch them. I run my knuckle over his bottom lip, then under his eyes. I want to kiss him, but then he would know.

He would know.

"Come here," he says, patting his mattress. "Lift your head up. I want to look at you."

I sit on his bed, my eyes filling with tears the moment I sink into the thin mattress. He can see it, can't he? Can't he?

Ricky cups my cheek in his hand, turning my face back and forth. "You look so sad," he whispers.

"I am," I tell him.

He runs his hands over my body, watching my face while he touches me. I look away, forcing myself not to cry. "I'm coming home tomorrow," he says. "We should go out for dinner, you and me. Leave the kids with Isabel. Wouldn't that be nice?"

I think of the picture window, a dark tarp taped over the hole where the glass used to be. "That would be nice," I agree. "But . . . maybe we shouldn't go out. We can just wait for the kids to go to sleep and have a bottle of wine . . ."

We've been married fifteen years, Ricky and I, since I was nineteen and he was twenty three. And whenever I go out with my girlfriends, they all want to talk about one thing: how many times a week they have sex with their husbands. I don't usually partake, but when asked I answer honestly: "Whenever we can find time."

And we do. Sometimes, on my way home from work, I'll stop by the school and wait for his class to be over. Then we turn off the lights and do it on the floor behind his desk. He'll corner me in the laundry room sometimes while the washing machine is roaring loudly enough that the kids can't hear.

These past nights, I've missed feeling his kisses on the back of my neck, inviting me for more. I miss him reaching over and stroking the inside of my thigh, asking me wordless questions. I miss the little touches, the little gestures that used to be so important to our relationship.

I know he's sick. I know he doesn't have the energy to expend on such things, but that doesn't make me feel any less neglected.

Enrique closes his eyes, feeling his way up my stomach. "I wanted to talk to you about something," he says. His hand lingers over the little bump left over from my two pregnancies. His hand is warm and inviting.

"What's wrong?" I ask.

"Nothing's wrong." His index finger dips into my belly button, giving me a gentle tickle. "Just wanted to talk about something." He pats the mattress again. "Lay down."

Once again, paranoia ignites in my stomach. If I lay down, he will know. "Why?"

"I want to hold you."

Who am I to deny that to him? Either way, I'm awfully tired. I barely slept at all last night. When I got home from Phoebe's, no one was in bed. Even when we finally got all the kids down for the night, there were two hours worth of messes to clean up.

I ease myself down beside him, taking a deep breath. He doesn't smell like my husband; he smells of hospital shampoo and disinfectant. I curl up beside him and let my muscles relax, wondering if I will ever get up. The bed is tauntingly warm, teasing me with the fact that I will have to leave it soon and go to work.

Closing my eyes, I ask, "What did you want to talk about?"

"I'm just going to say it," he says. Uh oh. That's never a good sign.

"What is it?"

"I think we should have another baby."

My heart releases a whole vat of adrenaline into my system. My veins are buzzing with terror, with panic. What did he just say? "R-Ricky?"

He props himself up on his elbow, leaning over me. "Oh, come on, Emmy. There's nothing to look so scared about. I just . . . I just want you to think about it."

I don't want to think about it at all. I want to get off this siren song of a bed and get out of this fishing net of a hospital. I start to slide out of the bed, but Enrique grabs me around the waist and brings me back.

I feel suddenly guilty. He looks so weak, so sad. Why can't I humor him just for right now?

"Well . . ." A baby. A baby, his baby, probably without him. What am I supposed to say? "Why, Ricky? Why now?"

He sighs at the ceiling. "I want you to have something to remember me by."

"But I already do," I remind him. "We have two other kids. That's enough, isn't it?"

To my surprise, he shakes his head. "It's different, with a baby. Tiago and Cande, I love them and you love them, but you know they drive you insane. They drive you absolutely crazy and you love them, but I know that deep down," he says, slipping his hand under my shirt. His palm rests over my heart. "You hate them, just a little bit."

He traces my collarbone while I gape at him. I feel tears collecting in my eyes.

This feels like betrayal. This feels like he has given me away, sold me out. These are things a mother hides that a father might know, but never does he speak these words. These are not things to be said aloud. These are things to hid away, things you try to kill again and again. But these are not things that can be, should be put into words.

"Why would you say that?" I whisper.

He can see the hurt in my face. His eyes soften. "Emmy, you know what I meant."

The worst part is, yes, I know exactly what he meant. I want to cry and cry until we are both just rotted corpses, nothing left of us but the haunting shells of people.

He goes on. "All I mean is that if I--" his voice catches. "If I die, I know what will happen. You're going to withdraw from everything, from your family and your job and your friends. And everyone's going to try to help you, but you aren't going to let them." He lays back down, already exhausted. He presses his face into my hair and continues, "But if you have someone to take care of, someone who needs you for everything, someone you love unconditionally because they're, well . . . perfect. If you have that, I think you might be able to survive this."

An iron fist clenches my heart. I can't look at him. "I don't want another baby," I say. I don't.

"Think about it."