The Cabin, Page 2

  I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Black hair, so thick I’ve broken brushes trying to drag them through the waves. It hangs to my shoulder blades, dry and loose and brushed out. Shimmers, glistens. Adrian says he fell in love with my hair first, and then with the rest of me. I don’t blame him—if I’m vain about anything it’s my hair. It’s never felt the touch of chemicals, and I religiously trim the split ends, condition, brush it out every night the way Mom used to. My olive skin is naturally tan and tans darker at even the least glimmer of sun. I’m slender, maybe a bit too slender, and my ribs show. But I’ve got abs, which is nice considering I never work out. I always drop weight when Adrian travels. I work twelve to eighteen hours a day as many days in a row as Dr. Wilson will let me, and I often either forget or don’t have time to eat.

  I’ve been spacing out in front of the mirror for…I don’t know how long. Long enough that the bathroom is fogged with steam.

  I linger in the shower long after I’ve shampooed and conditioned and scrubbed my skin. I soak up the warmth, let it loosen my tight muscles.

  The water goes warm, then lukewarm, and I finally turn it off. Towel mostly dry, use my magic wand to brush and dry my hair at the same time: my Dyson hairdryer. God, that thing is amazing. My crazy thick hair would normally still be wet hours and hours after the shower, but that thing makes it so I can brush it and get it dry enough to go to bed without my hair being soaking wet.

  I don’t bother with clothes. Just fall naked into bed, climb under the covers. Bedside table alarm clock: 1:36 a.m. My shift starts at seven.

  One more thing I have to do before I can sleep.

  I call Adrian. It rings exactly twice, and then he answers. “Hi, baby.” His voice is muzzy, thick and slow with sleep. “Doing okay?”

  “Long. Hard. We lost someone.”

  “Shit.” A sad sigh. “Work again in the morning, yeah?” He somehow convinced Lacey in scheduling to email him my schedule every week. He probably gave her a signed book or three.

  “Yeah. Seven.”

  “You could’ve called me on the way in.”

  “I have to call you at night. I need to hear your voice so I can sleep.”

  “I know.”

  “What’d you do today?” I ask.

  “Toured the site of the Battle of Yorktown.” He’s working on a Revolutionary War piece about a Redcoat who falls in love with the widow of a rebel…a man he killed. It’s in the developmental stages, he says.

  “Get some good material?”

  “Eh. I think Yorktown is later than I’m planning on setting the bulk of the story. I might hit Lexington and Concord next.”

  “When will you be home?”

  “Thursday, maybe Friday.”

  “I miss you.”

  He sighs, heavily. “I love you, Nadia. So much.”

  “I know,” I say, smiling to myself.

  “Don’t you ‘I know’ me, woman.” A snort. “I need some sugar.”

  I reach out, twist on the bedside lamp. Pull the phone away from my ear, switch to FaceTime. The screen resolves into a grainy image of Adrian, covered to his chest with a hotel comforter, lying down, smiling up the phone. I flick the blankets off; pan the camera down to show him my naked body. “How’s that for some sugar?” I murmur.

  He groans a laugh. “Aww hell, Nadia.” A sigh. “So beautiful. Miss you so much.”

  “Get home and you won’t have to miss me, because you’ll have me.” I turn the phone so it’s on my face. “In fact, come home early, and I’ll even take the day off work and keep you in bed with me.”

  “Make it two days, and I’ll be home by noon Thursday.”

  I laugh. “Are you bartering with me, Adrian Bell?”

  “Sure am.”

  I laugh. “Fine. I’ll get all day Thursday and Friday off, if you’re home Thursday by noon.”

  “You have a deal, my darling.” He passes a hand through his hair, mussing the already messy blond locks. “But be warned, I won’t let you leave the bed until at least midnight. I might even handcuff you to it.”

  I wriggle, smirking at him. “Oooh, threaten me with a good time, why don’t you.”

  He scrubs his hair again, and I see a Band-Aid on his forearm, on the inside, near the crease of his elbow.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “What’s what?”

  “The Band-Aid. Did you get hurt?”

  “Oh, that. Uh, yeah, a branch caught me. No big deal.”

  “Hmmm. But it was bad enough you needed a Band-Aid?”

  He typically refuses to use them. Usually he just rinses cuts out with soap and water and then super-glues over them. Which, as an ICU nurse, drives me a little nuts. So a Band-Aid is weird.

  “Oh, well. My tour guide insisted. She was such an earnest, sweet little thing that I couldn’t say no. She didn’t know a thing about Revolutionary War history, bless her heart, but she was trying.”

  “Sweet little thing, huh?” I tease, my voice drily sarcastic.

  “Oh stop. She was all of sixteen and it was her first job, and I guarantee you she got it because her mom worked in the gift shop or something.” He yawns, and then I do.

  “You gave me your yawn, asshole.” I laugh.

  “You work another double tomorrow?”

  “Alan is insisting I take the afternoon off. So just the morning shift.”

  “Good man. I’ll have to send him a bottle of whiskey or something.”

  “Alan doesn’t drink. Send him some fancy tea instead.”

  “Oh, the irony,” he laughs. “Buying tea as a gift while in Boston researching the Revolutionary War.”

  I want to laugh, but I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “I love you.” Pause. “Nadia?”

  “Love you, Adrian.”

  “Nadia.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Diamond solitaire earrings, or a sapphire pendant necklace?”

  “Neither. Just you. Snuggles and kisses and lots of sex and you making me that fancy pour-over coffee.”

  “Nadia.”

  “Sapphire. The only diamond I own is the one on my finger, the one you put there the day you proposed. It’s the only diamond I want.” I’m asleep, mostly. My brain and my mouth haven’t quite gotten the memo, because I miss him so damn much.

  “Talk to you tomorrow. Sleep good, my love.”

  “You too.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.” It’s whispered, barely audible.

  I feel my phone slip out of my hand and thunk onto the floor, but I’m too far asleep to care.

  Magic; Lies

  I wish I could say I’m not a good liar. But that would be a lie.

  I lie for a living—that’s all fiction is, after all, when you drill down to the molten core of it: I, the writer, create in my mind a pair of characters, two people who did not heretofore exist, and I strive to make them seem real. I give them backstories. I give them foibles and flaws. Scars, peccadilloes, fetishes. Like you, like me. Then I come up with a way to force them into orbit around each other. This is the plot—the path of their orbits as they intersect, creating a necessary collision. The collision results in not destruction as in true astronomy, but creation. This collision is where the magic happens. It’s the real lie. It’s a lie that these people exist, that this story is real, or even possible. The happily ever after carries on after you’ve read those words: The End. You, the reader, come to me begging for that lie. You relish it. That lie provides you with comfort, with entertainment, with emotions your real life may lack. You know exactly what I’m doing, but like any accomplished magician, you don’t know how I do it. Even the above explanation doesn’t show you how I tell my lies, or how I perform the magic, the sleight of hand, the prestidigitation which turns ideas in my brain into real people on the page.

  I am very, very good at this kind of lying.

  My lies have won literary awards. They’ve been turned into movie
s, which themselves have won awards. Movies made from my books have launched careers.

  I am also, perhaps unfortunately, good at lying in other ways. I just am. It comes naturally to me. I’m a storyteller. I could have been an actor, but I’m far too self-conscious for that. I comfort myself with the fact that, in general, I do not lie in everyday life. I’m not practiced at it. Lies do not come smoothly. I must work at them. Create them, smooth out the edges like a blacksmith with a hammer and anvil.

  This is what I’m doing as I drive home from the airport: working on my lie. The best lies, as any accomplished liar knows, contain a counterintuitively disproportionate amount of truth. You can’t tell a whole lie. As in, you can’t create a whole fiction to cover your ass. For it to work your story has to be more truth than lie.

  For example: I really did go to Lexington and Concord. I really did go to Yorktown, and there really was a blissfully, almost comically young and uninformed tour guide. I really did spend most of my time in the libraries in Boston and Philadelphia, researching. It really was a research trip. Ninety percent, at least, was research. This is the truth, and not a word of it is made up, embellished, or fabricated. The lie in this case, you see, is one of omission.

  I’m leaving out the ten percent of the trip, the detour to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, which happens to have one of the top oncology departments in the country. I’m leaving out the reason I was there in the first place, the reason for the entire research trip: an experimental variation of chemotherapy, designed to reduce certain side effects, such as hair loss and the violent liquid expulsion of poison from both ends of my gastric system.

  It is successful for what it is: I still have my hair, most of it. It’s more brittle, thinner, but it’s there. And I only spend forty-eight hours or so being violently ill, rather than the days or weeks of the normal rounds of chemo.

  How, you might ask, have I managed to keep all this from my wife?

  And more to the point, why?

  I’ve kept it from her via a very elaborately planned series of research trips, where I build my research schedule around the chemo and recovery days. If I’m still feeling under the weather when I get home, well, jetlag is a bitch, right?

  I’m also traveling to receive the best possible treatments. Experimental stuff, cutting edge. I can afford it, and if it’ll prolong the inevitable, I’ll try it.

  The inevitable being Nadia finding out I’m sick.

  Sick.

  Such a trite, flat, flimsy descriptor for this ninth circle of hell.

  Sick is the flu. Sick is a cold, or you get pneumonia or something. Sick is…sucky but recoverable. It disrupts your day, your week, your month.

  But this?

  What I’ve fought hardest against is that when you get the C-word, you become it.

  You’re not just sick.

  You don’t have cancer—you are fucking cancer.

  I hate that word.

  I never utter it. Rarely even think it.

  I’m sick.

  That’s it.

  If I focus on that, on just being sick, it’s manageable. It’s a series of things, which need to be done, in order to not be sick.

  Ready for the real leap of logic? Here goes.

  If I’m just sick, it’s no big deal. I can handle it. I can manage it. I don’t usually tell Nadia when I’ve got a headache, or feeling feverish or coming down with the flu. See, she’s a nurse. But with Nadia, it’s not just a job. It’s who she is.

  When we first got serious, to the meet-the-family stage, I spent an afternoon with Nadia’s mom. She told me a story about Nadia, when she was five, or maybe six. Very young. Precocious, serious even then. I could see it, little Nadia with her black hair in a thick braid, a pink ribbon tied at the end of it. She’d be wearing tiny shiny black Mary-Janes and white stockings, plaid skirt, white button-down—she went to a private Catholic school. Anyway. Nadia, young and serious, refused to go to school one particular day. Her daddy was sick. He claimed it was the flu, just under the weather, I’ll be all right in a day or two, baby girl, just go to school. Nadia was no dummy. She knew. Daddy wasn’t just sick, he was Sick. She saw it.

  She categorically refused to go to school. No amount of threats of punishment or bribery could convince her. She had to take care of her daddy. And she did. A day, then a week. Then it was a month. She would give him his medicine, she would do her five-year-old dead level best to make him food, make him eat, spooning soup into his mouth and, being five, getting as much on them both as in his mouth.

  “I let her,” Nadia’s mother had said, tearing up. “I shouldn’t have, she was too young, I knew it then and I know it now, but…she just had to do it. I couldn’t stop her. You know how she is, how once she’s set on something, there’s no stopping her. I knew then it was who she was—a nurturer, a caretaker. She takes care of people. If you’ll let her, if you don’t stop her, she’ll take care of you, until there’s nothing left of her. Nothing left of her for her.”

  She had stared me in the eyes. Taken my face in her hands. “You can’t let her do that, Adrian. If you love her, you have to make sure she takes care of herself. If she gets a whiff of you being sick, she’ll drop her entire life, her entire existence to take care of you. She won’t sleep, won’t eat, won’t rest, won’t do anything but care for you until you’re better. It’s…well, honestly, it’s compulsive, with her. I hesitate to say obsessive, but that’s pretty near the truth of it.”

  So, you see. I have to take care of her. If she knew I was sick, she would quit her job, she would baby me and sit at my side for every round of chemo and every experimental treatment, and she’d do her best to take the burden of my sickness on herself, and I just can’t put that on her.

  I hate lying to her.

  Hate it.

  I’ve never lied to her about a thing. Not a single other thing. Not even, when we were dating, and I got drunk at a party and made out with another girl. I told her, the very next day. She broke up with me, and I didn’t see her for two and a half weeks, until she got sick of me sending her a dozen roses every day, box after box of chocolate, pages and pages of college-ruled notebook paper with “I’m sorry” written on it a hundred times. Mixtapes burned onto CDs of handpicked songs. She finally realized, somehow, that it had been a stupid drunken accident. Honestly, I’d been so blitzed I’d thought it was Nadia. When I realized it was someone else, I stopped, threw up, and ran away. Stupid. But an accident. Not an intentional betrayal. I’d never do that.

  I hadn’t lied then.

  I told her it was my fault the time I got into a car accident. I’d been messing with the radio and rear-ended someone.

  I face the truth, no matter what.

  But this is…

  This is bigger than that.

  I have to protect her. If she knew I had cancer, it would kill her right along with me. Her force of will is exactly that powerful. And I can’t handle that. Can’t have that on my conscience. I know she’ll be angry. She won’t understand. Hopefully, she’ll never know. But if somehow the worst comes to pass, by the time she finds out, what’s done will be done. She’ll have anger to deal with as well as grief, but at least she’ll be alive.

  At a red light, two blocks from home, that’s what I think: at least she’ll be alive.

  And it guts me.

  She’ll be alive.

  After I’m gone—if I’m gone—she’ll be alive.

  The light turns green, but my foot is stuck on the brake. Horns blare, shouts are muffled and dim. I can’t swallow, can’t breathe. Force myself off the road, into the parking lot of a KFC.

  She’ll be alive.

  I’ll be gone.

  I’ve never really allowed myself to even consider that truth.

  Because this is Nadia. And my Nadia is loyal to the very bone, to the atoms. Down to her component electrons and neutrons, she’s devoted to me. If I die, she will mourn me the rest of her life. And that life will be short, if she has anythin
g to say about it. She won’t just grieve, she’ll wear black forever, like Queen Victoria is said to have done. She’ll cut herself off from life. She will drive the empty shell of her body to work, and she’ll put on a mask along with her scrubs and stethoscope and rubber gloves, and she’ll care for the patients in the ICU, and she’ll drive the empty husk of her body home again, and every thought will be about me. Grieving me. Mourning me.

  She will be alive…

  But not living.

  I’ve been developing this story for her and, up to now, I think my subconscious has been telling me some truths. This could be my last story. I’ll fight until there’s nothing left, but I can’t ignore the possibility. But this story, this love story I’ve been working on. It’s about second chances. Moving on after loss. I think my forebrain was thinking of it as a poignant set of themes, disconnected from my life. But it’s not.

  It’s more than that.

  It’s for her.

  But…now that I begin to allow myself to really think about this, it’s a big, complicated, thing.

  Because she’s complicated. Complex. Deep. For more than ten years I’ve loved her, and I’m still just beginning to plumb her depths, to understand her.

  Then an idea forms.

  Sitting in the parking lot of a KFC, two blocks from home, still a bit nauseous, whether from chemo or the cancer or this realization, I don’t know—I understand what I have to do.

  It’s just going to require a lot of thought, a lot of care, a lot of planning.

  Best-case scenario, it’s all for nothing. I’ll get the all clear, cancer free.

  A niggling worm in my gut is worried, perhaps far more than worried, that it won’t be for naught.

  I wipe my face. I’ve been crying, apparently.

  I collect myself.

  It’s eleven twenty-six, Thursday. I promised her I’d be home by noon.

  I keep my promises.

  I also promised I’d tie her to the bed and not let her leave for days, and that’s a promise I intend to keep as well. That part is tricky, though. Chemo has a lot of awful side effects. It is poison, after all. One of those side effects is sexual. Not one of desire, oh no. That’s as intact and fiery as ever. Energy, though, is an issue. As is physical ability to sustain the necessary hardness to act out that desire.