Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

Ifi sat silently across from him, her face resting on her palm, her eyes vacantly gazing across the room. She had returned to work, but she hadn’t cried, she hadn’t wailed, not like him. He remembered the look on her face that night, how for just a moment, she had seen Job, the doctor, and known, believed with all her heart, that he could fix their son and fix their futures. Then how suddenly her face had gone from hope to dashed dreams as she watched Victor’s life slip from his father’s hands.

Job’s breath caught. He set down the salt shaker. He pushed thoughts of his son from his mind. In silence, he ate both of their portions; later, he strained over the toilet to push out the hardened stool.

Before Ifi’s arrival, the years before the arranged marriage, he had imagined that the indignity of these American meals would be no more. No more spaghetti from cans and frozen hot dogs. Now, his life had turned in on itself. Before flying to Nigeria to bury his boy the next morning, he promised himself that he would rise early and prepare a soup — despite what he already predicted: the soup would be runny, with okra sliced too thin, mushrooms too thick, blocks of beef too tough, and the fufu would be stiff and crumbling, overcooked on a too-high flame.

That night, Ifi’s eyes closed, feigning sleep. Job pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her back. Without comment, she neither balked nor relented. He took it as a sign that she had forgiven him, that without his having said so, she knew he had finished with Cheryl. Things had been over for some time anyway. He had only called on her help in releasing Ifi from jail. He pressed his face into her back and ran his fingers down the side of her dry face. She had never cried, not even once. Job suspected — in all honesty, hoped — that she at least cried in his absence.

Daylight was just beginning, a fuzzy patch of clouds through the window screen. In an hour’s time, Job would be leaving for the airport to fly to Nigeria to bury his only child. For three weeks, he would sleep under mosquito nets at night, eat his mother’s stew, and listen to his brother rant about his latest ex-girlfriend. All of this would be pretense. Forget about the boy, they would say to him in their own silent ways. Move forward. Begin again. There is still time. Job dressed in his good pants, shirt, and tie. He had spent the morning ironing them. The phone rang.

“Who is calling at this time?” Ifi asked. She was hoarse; nonetheless, she looked more like herself.

“No one,” Job said. But when the calls didn’t stop, in exasperation, he finally answered.

Cheryl.

Before she could speak, he began. “Please, I beg you not to disturb my home.” He glanced back at Ifi. “My wife is not well.”

“Don’t shut me out, okay?”

Once again, he glanced back at Ifi, hovering in the bathroom doorway. “You hear me?”

“Job, don’t do this. Don’t be unfair.” Cheryl’s voice was flat and still, with the same gravel undertow he’d grown used to over the years. A smoker’s cadence. “I helped you.”

Ifi silently regarded him for a moment. Job forced a reassuring smile. After a moment, she retreated to the bathroom. She would sit on the toilet seat staring blankly at the walls surrounding her. He waited a moment for the sound of the water faucet. “You were not supposed to be there,” he said into the phone.

“You needed me. And I was there. Now I need you.”

“This is how it is,” he said softly. “My wife is not well. Not while she is like this.”

“Don’t be an asshole, Job. I get what we are. I never tried to make it anything else. I been married two times already, okay? I don’t need another one under my belt. Only thing is, what you’re doing, it ain’t fair.” Her voice was thick and churlish.

It softened him. He tried to understand where her ache came from. Hadn’t he been thinking the very same thought since that night? “What is this fair ?” he asked. Truly, he wanted to know, because he couldn’t understand what the word meant anymore. What was fair about a boy losing his life just as it had begun? Was it fair the way things had turned out with Samuel, with his education in America, with Gladys, with Ifi?

“We can be there for each other, Job, like we’ve always been. I know things have cooled down lately. I could feel it. But it don’t have to be that way. Let’s go somewhere. A trip. Someplace brand new.”

“No, no brand new.”

“Why not? Why do we have to make ourselves miserable? We can help each other. Just for a weekend, okay? We go away and come back, and then everything’ll be calm.”

Water still ran at full blast. Job sighed. Ifi had left the water running again. “We can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I have tried. .”

“We can.”

“No,” he said weakly.

In spite of his words, he felt the need to break away, escape from this empty house and Ifi’s dead eyes. What if I do it? he thought. What if I travel away and return with a renewed spirit? It would help him clear his head. It would help him understand. Because he could not understand it. What is all of this anyway? he asked himself. What is this marriage without the boy? What is this house without the boy? All that was left were objects. Objects were hollow inside. Like Ifi. “Where will we go?” he whispered.

“A cabin up north. My folks used to take me and Luther up when we were kids. Haven’t been back in years.”

Cheryl standing along a beach, her red hair swooped back by a breeze, her eyes lovingly set on him. He imagined it. Not like Ifi; her eyes were missing something, like a piece was gone, a piece that would never be retrieved.

“Okie,” he said. A weight lifted from his chest. He couldn’t believe he’d actually said it, and once he had, the arrangements began to take shape. He would make a cash withdrawal from his credit card, enough for a few days. He would ask for some extra leave time from work. They would understand. He would tell Ifi that there had been a delay, that he would be in Nigeria longer than expected. He would leave, with Cheryl. They would go away to this lake cabin. “I am going to my son’s funeral in Nigeria,” he said to Cheryl. “After I return.”

“Yes.” Cheryl let out a hoot. “This is so right,” she said. “Doesn’t it feel good already?”

“Yes, it does,” he admitted.

“This has been so hard for me, you know? I been fighting with everything inside.” She began to whimper. “God, I miss him so much.”

Job recoiled. He hated that sound, like snot trapped in her nose and wheezing its way through her lips.

“This trip will be so good for us, Job,” she said. “I just need to be with you. Then, you know, we can make it through this. And if we make it, we can make it through anything.”

“ We are not miserable,” he said, glancing at the bathroom. Water still poured from the bathroom faucet. “ We , my wife and I, are fine.”

“Job, I loved him too. You know that.”

Her voice softened, and the whimper turned into the crunch of tears, an ugly sound, a low, deep cry, the sound that he hoped day and night to hear from Ifi, a mother’s cry for her lost child. Not from Cheryl. She wants to cry for my son? I won’t have it. She is not the boy’s mother.

“No, you didn’t know him,” he said. He could handle her anger, her shouts, even her cigarettes, but not this. “You are nothing to him.”

“ That’s not fair.” Like a child, a whining, foolish child, the harder she tried to protest, the more guttural and pathetic her cries. “Job, Luther’s gone. My folks are gone. You and Victor, you’re my family.”