Page 8 of The Cabin
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.
So this has to be carefully timed.
I just need a little help showing her how I feel. The emotions, the need, the drive, is all there. It’s real, more powerful than ever. I just need a little help forcing my body to match my mind, my heart. My body is the weak thing, the failing thing. And I’ll be damned and double damned if I’ll let it slow me down, if I’ll let it stop me from showing my beloved, beautiful wife how much I love her, how much I missed her, how much I need her and want her.
Nope, nope, nope.
So, I take a little blue pill, since I’m only a few minutes from home, and they take a few minutes to kick in.
I’m on our street when I call her. It rings exactly once.
“Hi,” she breathes. “Where are you?”
“Passing the Johnstone’s house.”
She inhales sharply, and there’s a smile in the sound. Not a grin, not a smirk, but that secret smile only I know. A half-curve of the right side of her mouth, eyes narrowing, jade-green eyes luminous and hot. It’s a secret smile just for me that says you have no idea what you’re in for, buddy.
“I just got home from work,” she says.
“Have you showered yet?”
“Getting in right now.”
“Don’t.”
“I smell like—”
“Nadia.” I wait, and she’s quiet; I’m pulling into our driveway. “Just stay where you are, like you are.”
“I have to get work off of me.”
“I’ll do it for you.”
“I don’t want work on you.”
The smell of sickness, she means. The indefinable scent of possible, potentially imminent death. The scent of sorrow, the tang of fear. It’s palpable to her, and it’s why she’s such a fierce zealot about showering the moment she gets home. Protecting me, and our home, from all of it.
“Nadia.”
A sigh. “Okay.”
I feel a desperation right now. I haven’t seen her, or touched her in over a week, and for us, it’s an eternity.
But it’s a desperation borne of…something more. Something else.
Something I dare not, cannot even give name to in the deepest, hidden sanctum of my own mind.
I leave my bags in the car. Bring only one thing: a small velvet box, in my hip pocket. I pinch my cheeks and slap them on the way up the stairs, to put color in them.
I feel the little blue pill working. It’s me, too, though. It’s not that I can’t get hard, it’s that it can be difficult to stay that way, to keep from blowing too soon. The pill just restores some of my former stamina.
Our bedroom door is closed. I smell her: she’s put on perfume. Chanel. A gift for our fifth anniversary.
She’s in the process of taking her hair out of the braid—that’s part of her ritual, in the morning and when she gets home, like a warrior putting on his armor. She puts on her scrubs, bottoms first, then the top. Brushes her hair and puts it in a tight, severe braid, and then knots the braid into a bun at the top of her head. Some thick black eyeliner under her eyes. Moisturizing lip gloss—something I have bought for her in the past. Then she wraps her stethoscope around her neck, and she’s armored against the day.
When she comes home, the stethoscope goes in her purse. She begins with the braid, unknots it. Slips the tie off the end, and slowly eases the locks out of the binding of the braid. She then shakes it out, the kinked tresses sticking to each other at first. Brushes it out. Then, and only then, does she begin removing her scrubs, top first, then bottoms. The shower is usually going, warming up. She’ll brush her teeth.
