Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [101]
The river has an uncanny way of drowning out ambient noise. Anything outside two hundred feet off the river’s bank is quieted by the canopy. The exception to the rule is a clear night when the sound seems to bounce off the skyline and shoot like stars onto the river’s surface, where it floats upriver, carrying every second or third note. I bent my ear toward a noise I couldn’t place.
“What’s that sound?”
“Local carnival.”
“What? You mean like with a Ferris wheel, people guessing body weights and somebody barking at the yak woman?”
He chuckled. “Just a bunch of gypsies running from the law.”
“We ought to fit right in.” I was quiet a minute. “You know if they got a carousel?”
“Yeah. Don’t know how well I’d trust it. Kind of old.”
“They got a head gypsy?”
“If that’s what you want to call him.”
“You know him?”
“Not too well, but we’ve spoken.”
“You think you could get us in…after hours?”
“What do you have in mind?”
37
Two years passed. Abbie’s health became tidal—it ebbed and flowed. A tug-of-war between chemo and cancer with her caught up in the middle. Some days she could get out of bed, maybe once a week I’d push her down the Battery in her chair, but for the most part, she was bed-or couch-ridden and withering away in front of me.
Somewhere in here, it struck me—the truth in all this. Normal cells have automatic self-destruct buttons that they punch after they’ve served their purpose. They live, do what they were made to do, then pull the cord. Suicide is expected. At the end of the day, cancer is nothing more than a cell or group of cells that refuse to die. And to make matters worse, cancer cells are not foreign. It’s not like they come from somewhere else. Our bodies make the very thing that kills us.
I have a difficult time with the logic in all of this.
It’s strange. I know my wife has cancer because they told me, but I’ve never actually seen it. Never touched it. I don’t have any real connection to it other than it’s killing my wife.
Cancer hurts beyond the pain. It is a cycle of diagnosis, prognosis and scan. We live not paycheck to paycheck, but scan to scan. Every time we stand in the doctor’s office and hear the scan results, we think, It’s getting bigger and I can’t do a single thing about it.
That may be the single worst feeling in the world.
Any positive report is tempered by our experience, and the knowledge that no matter what the doctors do, we will always believe there are still cancer cells in her body. We feel as though we’re always just one scan away from hearing the word metastatic, which is often followed by, I’m going to miss you.
Riddled with fear, sadness and stress, our imaginations run wild like they did when we were kids and the monsters camped out in the closets. What’s worse, we listen like Captain Hook, haunted by the ticking of the clock. Cancer-free moments are the exception, not the norm. We have progressed from beating it, to living with it…to just living. I have become more defensive in posture, building walls to insulate us from the bad news. Because there’s always more. Life and death are always on our mind. Idle thinking is no longer idle. I wanted so badly to think in future tense, to talk about summer movies, buy two tickets to the next Superbowl, plant a garden, put off something, schedule an appointment to get her teeth cleaned, plan a vacation, but then would find myself standing in the produce aisle and asking myself, Should I buy green bananas?
If there is one plus, it is this: For someone with cancer, life is more real. They feel more. It’s like having the senses of a blind and deaf man and yet you can hear and see just fine. Abbie says it’s like the difference between a six-inch black-and-white TV and an IMAX.
38
JUNE 8, EVENING
At 10 p.m., I woke Abbie and fed her some eggs, an RC cola and a Kit Kat—her favorite. “You feel like getting up?”
“Foooooor you?” The slurring struck me, pile-driving my spine down into the earth. “Yyyyyeeeeessss.