Page 6 of The Cabin
I am very, very good at this kind of lying.
My lies have won literary awards. They’ve been turned into movies, 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.
