by Nina Riggs
8. Summer House
Here is the summer house—the picnic dishes, the drawer of dull knives, the white sheets on the line that work the air of the cooler days like sails, like lost souls, like wings that need more imagining, filling the yard—huffing and brimming.
Here are the seventy-year-old antlers, the glass buoys, the miniature cairns of white pebbles, yellowed paperbacks, checkers, frayed semaphore flags, the tightly furled nests in the eaves of barn swallows.
Here is the swallow herself—swooping, whirling, screeching—frantic to return to her four wet beaks.
Here is the path to the gravestone like a trick map, like a prank, like an incomplete thought. Here the dip in the lawn where the groom found the bride, here the fever of remembering, here the work we do that we love to do.
Here lay my baby in my mother’s lap, drifting through his dream of the whine of an outboard. Here on the porch, the sweet globe of a plum. Here the tooth that pierces the peel like a door burst open, like a flood, like an afterlife.
Here are the children engulfing the house in a game of sardines, each one tucked tighter into the pooled dark of the closet until a single child is left to enter the room calling out, sensing in the hush that the rest have found each other—her hand lingering on the doorknob.
9. Reconstruction
Ginny writes: “It’s such bullshit that there are plenty of Joan Crawfords and assholes like my husband running around among us and your mom is not.”
She lost her dad a few years back—suicide. She knows what to say and what not to say. “We threw my sweet dad into the Beaufort River with three ospreys flying over (he loved ospreys because the daddies take care of the babies). There is something awesome about returning them to the earth.”
Her breast reconstruction has gone terribly wrong in the noncancer breast that they took off for good measure. An infection. The doctors have had to tear out the implant until things settle down and they can try again. For now we are both just two left boobs—mine real and hers fake.
“My mom’s death feels exactly like this wound on my chest,” I text her. “Sometimes I get confused about which pain I’m feeling.”
“I know,” she says. “Me, too.”
10. Red Face
Another thing I’ve spirited from my mom’s possessions is her blue cruiser bike. My dad tunes it all up for me, and it fits me really nicely, unlike her Tevas.
With the chemo, I’m back on the steroids. Before the kids get home from school, I fly down the hill on Mendenhall Street all wild and nonbraking. I zip along the greenway, bugs flying into my mouth, and realize I am both laughing out loud and completely out of breath.
On the way home, I have to walk the bike up the Mendenhall hill. I pass a neighbor walking his dog who stares blankly at me and my heart-attack face after I say, “Hey! How are you?” until I gulp, “Nina! The green house with the red door! Breast cancer!” Why do I say that last part?
It registers. “Oh hi,” he says, “Are you okay?”
First of all—Ha. Yes. Totally.
Second of all, I do not know. I wish there was someone else we could ask.
11. The Ache
Right before all your hair falls out, it aches. Like a ponytail pulled back for too long. And even after it’s all gone, the ache resurfaces. You run your hands through the air, but assuage nothing.
John and I get a babysitter so we can join Mark, Anne, and my dad at the bar the first Friday after the memorials. I sit in the car for several minutes before we go in, trying to shake loose the hairs that have already let go. I am noticeably patchier when we sit down at the table than when we left the house. I am fighting enormous tears and Anne reaches out and squeezes my hand and asks how I’m feeling. Mark says, “This is not fair.”
My parents and Mark and Anne had a standing Friday night date—almost up to the end. When she was too unwell to go out, my mom and Anne would hang out in the salon while Mark and my dad went to the corner bar. Then, blood full of cocktails, they would all reconvene for food—sometimes around my mom’s bedside—where’d she’d be sipping a gin and tonic and they’d all be laughing their heads off and telling dirty jokes and sometimes singing and playing music until past their bedtime.
My mother was the queen of dirty jokes, mortifying Charlie and me from middle school into adulthood. How do you make a woman scream twice? What did the pilot say to the stewardess? She had predictably poor timing and a knack for fumbling the punch line, which made the jokes far funnier than they normally would be.
I’m sitting next to my Dad at the bar. I am a B-list stand-in for my mother, who would never be crying like this. Who would be making this whole table laugh as the cancer gnawed on her bones.
12. The Little Brick House
We return to Massachusetts for a family wedding a month into the latest chemo. We leave the kids at home with friends. I shave my head tidily. I go bald-headed to the rehearsal dinner. My aunt Cami, who has gone two rounds with breast cancer, takes me in her arms and sways with me for a moment.
We stay with my Emerson cousins in Concord. Their house is just a brisk walk through the Estabrook Woods away from where we lived when I was young, long before Charlie was born, in the tiny brick cottage on my great-grandparents’ estate. Past Punkatasset Hill, the sledding hill, and Hutchins Pond. Past the ghostly stand of white birches. Across the meadow and up along the fire road. My cousins lived in my dead great-grandparents’ house across the field, and more cousins lived in a house just down the road.
The estate was sold decades ago to a family with the money to keep it up: Fancy stables now sprawl over the site of the old barn and an immaculately shingled farmhouse stands where my great-grandparents’ rambling homestead once stood—a grand but unsettling house with three stories and back stairways and a ghost named Mr. Dutton. The old driveway where my cousins and I learned to ride our bikes has been regraded as a gentler slope—almost like a trick of memory. But the little brick house still stands on the far side of the field.
It is much quainter than it used to be—a rose-covered trellis, a picket fence around the perimeter, dormers, a bright blue door—but completely recognizable. John and I walk toward it along the fire road. The house appears to be empty.
My mother often described the time we lived here as the happiest in her life, which is odd, considering she—born and raised in Panama—was transplanted here into the Yankee den from California for the snowiest winter in years. That year—the winter of 1981—snow fell through April in impossibly huge, magical piles that my mother and I had never dreamed of. One November morning when I was four, while I was sleeping in a makeshift bed of blankets by the back door while my dad built a stairway up to the attic—which was being converted into my bedroom—I woke up under a drift of snow from a blizzard that had blown the door open in the night. I remember my toes cold and wet, thawing between my parents’ warm, sleepy bodies when I scrambled into their bed.
My father taught my mom and me to cross-country ski, and we would clamp on our skis sitting on the back stoop and disappear within minutes into the silence of the Estabrook Woods. Even by age five, I understood that this life was unsustainably simple. If you wandered into the barn you would find: chickens, an uncle tinkering with a tractor engine, a half-built kite, the echo of my dad chopping wood across the field. Once, I remember hearing screaming and then laughter as my cousin Bonnie and I dug holes in the yard by the brick house. It came from our mothers in the garden. Mine had stepped on a garter snake and it had bitten her. “You are brave,” I remember saying to her as she iced her ankle in the kitchen while cleaning lettuce. “I can’t believe you survived a snakebite!”
The earliest seeds of anxiety: I am lying in bed in the attic on the night before the first day of kindergarten, afraid to roll over, afraid to breathe deeply—for fear that I will miss the first crackle, the first hint of smoke from a fire that could burn our house to the ground and keep me from ever becoming a kindergartener or being able to wear the new red turtleneck and
tan corduroy skirt that matches Bonnie’s, laid out on my dresser for morning.
In two years, my grandparents’ bodies will be filling with cancer. The grown-ups will be older and thinking about careers and next steps and houses of their own. The houses at Estabrook Woods will need to be sold or repaired. My mother will have grown to despise winter—its isolation, its piles of coats, its metaphorical kinship with the Yankee heart.
“Talking to you about your feelings is like sliding down an icy road,” she will say to my dad. “Sounds kinda fun,” my dad will say. They will slip and spin out and glide and slip again for the next thirty-five years.
“Will you take a picture of me here by the steps?” I ask John as we prowl around toward the stoop of the empty brick house where I remember, with Bonnie, burying a cereal bowl in the dirt that we hope anthropologists will discover thousands of years from now as a key to civilization.
I adjust my chemo cap.
* * *
“Life is a progress, and not a station,” says my great-great-great grandfather Emerson. In 1837, forty-five years before he died in his house down the road in town, he also wrote this in his journal:
I said when I awoke, After some more sleepings and wakings I shall lie on this mattress sick; then, dead; and through my gay entry they will carry these bones. Where shall I be then? I lifted my head and beheld the spotless orange light of the morning beaming up from the dark hills into the wide Universe.
Orange. “Did you think you would never reach the point toward which you were constantly heading?” asks Montaigne.
13. Kind of Blue
John is on a mission to complicate things with something that can fetch. “What about this guy?” reads his fifth email of the morning containing a link from petfinder.com. “He loves brisk walks and kids. He’s recovering from a scrotal infection and likes to dig but otherwise he’s perfect!”
I guess I’m not exactly dissuading him from his search. I’m in the market for something to hold and snuggle these days. Ellie, our old black mutt, is not a snuggler.
So we drive to Charlottesville—three hours—to adopt Blue, an Australian cattle dog.
I love Route 29 as it climbs up Virginia. The uncrowded lanes and all the roadside family restaurants and sleepy service stations and the tiny towns of Hurt and Tightsqueeze. The aboveground pool dealers and shed dealers and dump truck dealers. The sprawling ranch partially remodeled as a Monticello replica and all the crosses and the Dairy Queens.
The boys want to give Blue a new name. From the backseat, for the whole ride there: Can we call him Maverick? Can we call him Sheriff? Can we call him Alberto? Can we call him Obsidian?
The whole trip home I ride in the way back with the new dog in my lap licking my face. I don’t notice the three hours because I am very busy falling in love with his crazy black belly spots and what Freddy called his “boyish eyes” and his coy, smart face. He licks the boys’ ears from behind them and makes them laugh. He obsessively watches every single person come out of a gas station and when it is finally John he starts to whine and wiggle with excitement like he’s known him for years.
I can’t stop smiling at John when our eyes meet in the rearview mirror. “How about Pancho,” he says somewhere near Lynchburg—and that seems just right.
“Pancho. You’re Pancho,” I whisper to the dog. “And you’re in our family.”
Everyone is happy. Well, everyone except Ellie. She is having a quiet, protracted nervous breakdown on the floor behind the driver’s seat.
What started out as the dogs seeming a little standoffish to each other when they first met in Charlottesville devolves into full-on mortal enmity after about twenty-four hours at home. They can’t be in a room together. Blue/Pancho snaps and bullies. Ellie quakes and hides. We catch Ellie trying to dig out of her own backyard.
We speak to a dog behaviorist on the second morning. “I can fix this,” she says, “but it won’t be easy. And in the end it may not be the right thing for either dog. If it were me, I’d take him back. There are lots of great rescue dogs in the world. You need to find the right one for everyone in your family.”
The sadness of the boys, who have been conspiring about how to rig up a ramp so the dog can sleep in their top bunk, is big. After we break the news, they take Blue/Pancho out in the yard and the three of them play basketball together for almost an hour—Freddy shooting baskets, Benny running around kicking leaves off the court, the dog leaping into the air to rebound the ball. I video the whole thing on my phone and keep it there, just to make it even worse.
Blue and I leave for Charlottesville on our own right after John takes the boys off to school the next day. Ellie won’t even come out from her new bunker under the chair in the bedroom to pee.
We listen to NPR and Paul Simon the whole way because no one is there to tell us not to. Blue loves “Under African Skies” but is exasperated by the lack of clarity from the Dutch report on the Malaysian plane shot down last year over Ukraine.
He sniffs the Virginia morning vigorously through the window crack, then groans a little and falls asleep with his head on my thigh and his body sprawling awkwardly over the gearbox and into the passenger seat.
What is the opposite of a sleeping dog’s head in your lap while you drive?
The ride home is the slowest of the four trips. I mostly think about work and to-do lists. I cry a little. The next day I’m due at Duke to meet my radiation oncologist and talk about the next phase of treatment so I also think about tumors and cancer cells and what the hell the doctors say to you if they do all the things they know how to do and there is still cancer left.
And I think: Right now, this is grieving. My mom feels a million miles away and that distance is permanent and inexplicable and I’m so tired of feeling scared and losing things. I think about why, one day when all my hair was falling out this time around, I was compelled to rewrite the last paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead” by replacing snow with hair:
It had begun to fall again. She watched listlessly the hair, silver and brown, falling obliquely against the lamplight. . . . It was falling, too, upon every part of the bed sheets and the bathroom floor. It lay thickly drifted in the sink basin and shower drain, between the wooden floorboards, on the hand soap. Her soul swooned slowly as she heard the hair falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
That was grief, I say to myself. It makes us dark and a little crazy.
By then, I am pulling back into Greensboro, and instead of going home I head straight to Target because buying poster board for Freddy’s social studies project about Panama is on my to-do list. There, I promptly lose one more thing: my purse—with an unusually flush amount of cash stuffed in my wallet due to selling my inherited dining room table on craigslist on a whim (dark and crazy, I tell you)—left in the shopping cart in the parking lot.
I realize it halfway home and drive like a maniac back up Battleground Avenue. It isn’t in the cart, still wedged in the return enclosure. I look back through my car—it definitely isn’t there. I walk into the store and must be staring wildly at the security guard because she immediately walks over to me and says sternly, “Ma’am, is there something we can help you with?”
They have it. Someone has just turned it in—an older woman who is in fact still standing there. I can tell by the look on her face she has clearly seen all the cash. “You’re very lucky it was me who found it,” she whispers. “You could have just had a very bad day.”
As I am walking back to the car, a text pings in from inside my purse. John.
“Are you back yet? You have to check out this one. He’s smart and low-key and gets along well with other dogs. Plus look at those ears!”
And there I am—because this is just what we do—sitting in the Target parking lot, door still open, clicking on the link.
14. Redemption
John eventually finds “the one” at a rescue shelter down
in Mocksville, about an hour from Greensboro. He is a ridiculous mix of corgi and collie and in his Internet pictures he looks like someone Photoshopped his huge, black, luck-dragon head onto his short, white body. His name is Azoo. John, the kids, my dad, and I all squish into the car and drive to the shelter on a school night after John and my dad get off work. The kids keep howling “Azoooooo!” Ellie is quivering in the backseat, still traumatized from Blue.
We are led into an unmarked warehouse carpeted with Astroturf and lined with secondhand church pews by a man named Tony who tells us to sit still and silently while he unloads dog crates from his pickup truck. Tony, close to seven feet tall with an unusual paramilitary/hippy vibe, appears to be more of a curator of dogs than shelter operator.
“I’ve brought three dogs here tonight,” he says, pacing in front of us on the Astroturf. “One is Azoo, who you requested. The other is Jordan—the collie mix you also expressed interest in. The third is an unknown. He’s brand-new to my farm and not on the website, but I thought I’d bring him along just in case. I will take them out one by one for you and Ellie to meet. I will ask you to keep your sons from making sudden movements until the dogs are at ease in the room.”
Ellie is curled up under the church pew, panting like a madwoman.
We love Azoo—he’s as fantastically patchwork in person as in his pictures—and Ellie loves Azoo and Azoo loves Ellie. But Azoo quivers and yips and hides between Tony’s legs whenever the kids come near. “I think Azoo might need a lower energy household,” says Tony.
Jordan enters the room like a racquetball—bouncing off the walls and the pews, into my dad’s lap, over the small barrier by the door. The kids can’t stop giggling. Ellie shakes in the corner, pees a little.
When the mystery dog comes out, I am sitting cross-legged on the floor with Benny in my lap. He sniffs us and promptly plops into our pile. Ellie comes over to give him a sniff, wags her tail. He’s so shaggy he looks like a Muppet—or like he’s wearing footie pajamas made to look like a dog costume. “I don’t know,” says Tony. “Something about this guy just speaks to me for you all.”
