The only Protestant Christian hymn Carmencita could think of at the moment was “Oh, What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Itzaak was now searching the little night table next to her bed. That at least had a few things in the drawer. A tongue depressor. A laminated 1987 pocket calendar from Hazelbury’s Body Shop. A small pad of plain white paper with a cardboard back. Itzaak snatched the pad from the drawer and held it up in triumph.
“Here,” he said. “Here is the paper. Now we have only to find you a pen. Should I go to ask the nurse for a pen, Carmencita? You don’t seem to have one here.”
I’ll give it one last try, Carmencita thought. She concentrated very hard. She willed her left foot upward. To her surprise, it went. It fell back to the bed again almost as soon as she’d got it up, but it went.
“What?” Itzaak said.
Carmencita did it again. It hurt.
“I don’t understand,” Itzaak said. He went down to the foot of the bed and looked at the lumps under the blankets where her feet were. She did it one more time and startled him so much he jumped back.
“I don’t understand,” he said again, and then stopped. “Oh,” he said. “Carmencita. You are very intelligent. I always knew you were very intelligent. Here is a pencil.”
Good, Carmencita thought.
Itzaak extracted the pencil from under the clip and brought it up to the head of the bed.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Carmencita? It will be much too much of a strain, I think. You are supposed to be getting your rest.”
Carmencita raised her left hand and let it drop again. Itzaak gave her the pencil and brought over the pad. Carmencita was right-handed, but that was much too complicated a problem to go into at this point. She couldn’t sit up to see what she was writing, either. It hurt too much to move her head in any direction at all. She felt the pencil in her fingers and brushed against the paper on the pad with the side of her hand. Then she gave it a try.
Si, she wrote. She couldn’t remember the English word for it. It was a perfectly simple word. She’d known it since she was two. She just couldn’t remember it.
Itzaak picked up the pad and looked at it.
“S. I.” He shook his head. “This is the beginning of a word, Carmencita? Do you want me to try to figure out what it is?”
She gestured and he gave the pad back to her. He held it down under her hand to help. She wrote, si, again, and then, in a burst of brilliance and energy she wouldn’t be able to match for several days, she followed with NOT NO.
Itzaak took the pad. “S. I. Not no. Oh. Oh. I see. Si. Not no. Yes.”
Carmencita got the pad back and wrote, SI in the biggest letters she could make. She wondered what they looked like.
“Yes,” Itzaak said happily. “You mean yes. But yes what? That you will like Hanukkah?”
If the human race had to rely on the perceptive intelligence of men, Carmencita thought, it would have been extinct a couple of million years ago. She gestured for the return of the pad and got it. She got a grip on the pencil and tried one more time. She was really very tired. Exhausted. It was difficult to keep this up. She got out some semblance of MAR—she really wished she could see what she was doing—but that was as far as she could go. Her hand felt numb.
Itzaak looked worried. He took the pad away from her but didn’t look at it. Instead, he stared into her face.
“You should not put yourself to so much effort. You will make yourself more sick than you already have to be. It is not something I would like to happen.”
It wasn’t something Carmencita wanted to happen, either. She raised her left hand and lowered it again, doing her best to point to the pad.
Itzaak got the message. He looked down at the pad and read. “M. A. R.” He looked thoroughly bewildered.
“Yes, not no. And mar. Carmencita—”
Carmencita Boaz had heard often enough about light bulbs going on over people’s heads. She had seen enough animated movies and read enough comic books to know it was a popular culture cliché. She had never seen anything in real life that might equate to it. Itzaak’s face at this moment did. His eyes were brighter. His smile was wider. His face glowed as if he’d been hit by a hot pink spot. He was ecstatic.
“Carmencita,” he said. “Carmencita, this is wonderful. You will marry me. You will marry me.”
Carmencita raised her hand and lowered it again.
“Of course,” Itzaak told her, “this is no place for a woman like you to receive a proposal of marriage. We will go out as soon as you are better and do it all properly, in a restaurant, with candlelight. I will start at the beginning and tell you I love you and go right on to the end. And in a year, Carmencita, I will be an American citizen. Do you understand?”