The apartment was a maze of cardboard boxes, each one labeled with a black marker: Kitchen, Winter Coats, Books. But the most important label wasn’t on a box; it was on the boarding passes sitting on the counter. Destination: Charles de Gaulle.
It was happening. My husband and I were set to move to Paris for my dream job. It was a position at a gallery I had been courting for five years. We had sold the cars. We had said our goodbyes. We were forty-eight hours away from a new life.
Then the phone rang.
It was two days before the flight. My husband, Leo, answered. I watched the color drain from his face. He sank onto a packed box, his hand trembling.
“Mom?” he whispered. “Slow down. What do you mean?”
He listened for a long time, then looked at me with devastation in his eyes.
“His mom called: ‘I have stage 4 cancer. Please don’t leave me.’“.
The silence in the apartment was heavy. How could we leave? How could we sip wine by the Seine while his mother withered away alone? We couldn’t. We were good people.
We cancelled everything.
The gallery position was given to someone else. The flight credits were banked. We moved into his mother’s guest room.
For the next half-year, my life shrank to the size of a pill organizer. I became her full-time nurse. I bathed her. I cooked her special meals. I listened to her weep about how much she needed Leo, how he was the only thing keeping her alive.
But something gnawed at me. She never let me go to the oncologist appointments. She claimed she was “too proud” to be seen weak by anyone but Leo. And oddly, she didn’t seem to be losing weight. Her hair stayed thick and lustrous.
One afternoon, while she was napping, I saw her purse tip over on the kitchen counter. A frantic spill of tissues and lipstick. And an orange prescription bottle.
I picked it up. The label had been peeled off. Inside were large, white oval tablets.
I frowned. I took one out and typed the imprint code into Google. Pill Identifier.
The search result loaded. Calcium + Vitamin D Supplement. Over-the-counter.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I searched her room. I found three more bottles. Iron supplements. Fish oil. Six months later, I found her ‘chemo pills.’ They were just vitamins.
I stood in the center of her room, the bottle burning a hole in my hand. The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow. She never had cancer. There was no tumor. There was no Stage 4. There was only a desperate, narcissist woman who just couldn’t stand losing control of her son.
She had stolen my dream job. She had stolen six months of our lives. She had played on our deepest fears and our kindness just to keep Leo within arm’s reach.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t wake her up. I walked downstairs to where Leo was working on his laptop.
“Pack a bag,” I said, my voice ice cold.
“What? Why? Is Mom okay?”
“Your mother is healthier than I am,” I said, tossing the bottle of vitamins onto his keyboard. “It’s all a lie, Leo. She faked it to keep us here.”
He stared at the bottle, the denial warring with the logic in his eyes.
“I am leaving,” I told him. “You can stay and be her prisoner, or you can come with me and live your life. But I am done.”
I pulled out my phone. The gallery hadn’t held the job, but Paris was still there. I booked a one-way ticket to Paris that night.
I left the house without saying goodbye to her. As the taxi pulled away, I didn’t look back at the window where she was undoubtedly watching. I looked forward, toward the airport, leaving the sickness behind me.
