by Nina Riggs
My broken skeleton and I stay home these days.
It’s not like me to allow something so reckless as my kid on a motorcycle. Of course they wear helmets and my Dad is a paragon of safety, but this is objectively not a prudent idea—or possibly even a legal one. It’s something else completely: perilous and fantastic. I think of the five-point harness booster seat in my car and wonder at the incredible contortions that logic can do. I love watching Benny’s arms wrapped firm at my dad’s waist.
Benny tells me his favorite part about it is that he likes to holler really loudly when they are going fast. “I scream whooooo-eeeeeeee up into the air and it makes me feel good!”
My dad tells me that one time, on one of their more ambitious outings—about fifteen minutes in to a smooth ride just outside town—he could feel Benny’s arms start to slacken their grip. And he could feel the helmet resting on his back. Benny was falling asleep.
“Come on, Benny—stay with me!” he said, jostling his torso gently to try to wake him up without startling him.
Benny woke up.
“You can’t do that again,” my dad said as they waited at a red light. “It’s not safe. You have to stay awake so you can hold on.”
“But it sure felt good,” said Benny, who was able to hold it together the rest of the way home.
I think of this feeling sometimes—and I can imagine that sort of letting go: warm, dangerous, seductive. What if this is what death is: The engine beneath you steady; those that hold you strong; the sun warm?
I think maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to fall into that, to loosen the grip at the waist, let gravity and fate take over—like a thought so good you can’t stop having it.
8. Intervention
“I had this dream,” I tell my dad one day. “Mom was back—and she was pissed at us. Ranting and raving around in her bedroom at all the things we’d let go of or weren’t keeping up with. Like plants we’ve let die and the dishes that are in the sink and the unvacuumed dog bed and things like that—sort of a regular Saturday morning from when she would get on one of those tears. She was telling you all the things you needed to get at Lowe’s. After trying to reason with her and not getting anywhere, I pulled you out into the hallway. ‘This is untenable. We have to have some kind of intervention!’ I was saying. ‘We need to tell her she’s a ghost and she shouldn’t be here so much. Is this happening a lot?’ and you said, ‘Well, yeah—she’s here most weekends these days, and lots of afternoons when I get home from work.’ I was saying, ‘Dad, we need to tell her she’s dead. We have to let her know she can’t keep coming here and telling us what to do.’ ”
My dad is laughing. “That’s so weird,” he says. “I had basically the same dream yesterday. That I was sitting on the patio and she was raging around pointing out all the weeds I’ve left to grow and all the places where the garage needs patching.”
My poor mother—the legacy of a taskmaster. My dad and I click two beers together on the porch and look at the sky.
9. The Point toward Which You Were Constantly Heading
We start up book club again—about six months after my mom died. It’s never really a formal discussion, but one day Anne sends out an email inviting us all to come to her house. There is a shock to the ease with which we gather our chairs a little closer, adjust our banter for five instead of six. Where did she go? I keep thinking.
“I couldn’t imagine ever doing this without her, and yet here we are,” I say to the group. We sit in a circle in Anne’s living room, our plates and wine glasses propped around us on tables, our books in our hands.
We’ve chosen Helen Macdonald’s recent memoir about her obsession with training a goshawk in the wake of her father’s sudden death. The book is as dark as they come—even the cover, mostly black—like each of us holding a little tomb.
“Well, this one maybe didn’t have the best timing for us,” says Linda. “I could barely read any of it!” We all laugh. We can’t quite remember how we selected it.
“And it’s definitely not for vegetarians or the faint of heart,” says Tita.
The book is full of raw meat and mouse carcasses and visceral descriptions of the instincts of a predator. I loved it.
“It’s weird,” I say. “For me—I can’t find books dark enough right now.”
The things I’m loving these days: things where everything is not okay, and that’s okay—or not. Montaigne incredulous: “Did you think you would never reach the point toward which you were constantly heading?”
10. The Bridge
Ginny’s cancer becomes metastatic about eight months after mine. “Do you have room in your goddamn boat?” she texts from the doctor’s office. “Lung and bones. Looks like our road trip down the nipple highway just hit a dead end.”
The next day she trades in her Mazda crossover for a red convertible Beetle. I visit her down in Charleston the following weekend and she takes me out for a joyride: our modified Thelma and Louise moment—although we each know that we each think about pulling a stunt like that sometimes.
“I can’t sleep,” she says, our two sets of chemo curls blowing in the wind as we cruise up over the bridge out to Isle of Palms. “I’m just too fucking sad to sleep.”
11. Embers
April, a recent scan: All my tumors are stable for now. No new growth.
These are the appointments you don’t expect as a stage four cancer patient. I didn’t see this part coming: respite, good news following catastrophic news.
Instead I focus on these kinds of things: a motel on the side of I-40 near Graham, North Carolina—bereft on the shoulder of an off-ramp—called the Embers Motor Lodge. I am not confident it has seen better days, but I hope it has. And I equally hope the name never ever changes. If I someday have a psychotic break and run off to have an affair with the UPS man, look for me there first.
It’s generally a quiet spot—occasionally a maid’s cart on the sidewalk, a folding metal chair outside the tidy dark mouth of a guest room door, a car or two in the lot. It looks like the kind of place that rents mostly by the week or month, although it’s hard to take in much detail at seventy miles per hour. But over the last year on the many trips back and forth to the cancer center at Duke, this one scooter—parked outside the second to last room—keeps catching my eye. It’s there almost every time.
The scooter is screaming, Write a novel about me: its loyal presence outside that room, the small shell of hard luggage screwed to the back for transporting all worldly possessions, the possible DUI that precipitated it, the parade of curtain-drawn days of the last year of the owner’s life in that box of a room, the job she (can she please be a she?) is trying to get it together to apply for at the Waffle House just under the overpass on Route 54. The very fact of her smoldering on the lumpy mattress each night. I feel like she and I would have some stories to tell each other about this past year: waiting to catch flame.
Ginny comes up from Charleston to get a second opinion at Duke. I’ve told her about the scooter, and on her way to Durham she pulls off at the exit and stops at the motel. She texts me a picture from the parking lot. There is a heart-shaped wreath dangling from the crooked numbers on the motel room door.
“The plot thickens,” she writes.
We name the fictive waitress Lyla. We decide she’s looking for her father—Lyle—but only has an old photograph and this heart wreath she found in her mother’s closet when she died. It helps us somehow to think like this, to imagine the countless vulnerabilities and stories that fill the world.
* * *
At the good-scan appointment, Dr. Cavanaugh—just back from a weekend of silent meditation—reminds me of the necessity of staying in the present with this stuff, not trying to extrapolate to the future.
“I’m not making any promises. I have no idea what this means,” she says, swiveling on her stool. “But let’s just take a moment to be in the moment and acknowledge this, right now, is great news.”
She shuts her eyes an
d assumes a vaguely meditative stance and takes some soft-belly breaths while I gaze at her.
Then, fluttering open a moment or two later: “You know—hold it not too tight and not too loose—isn’t that what the Buddhists say?”
Oh my God, yes! I want to yell. And: How?! This is the very crux of my whole existence. And honestly, of course—all of our existences, whether we realize or acknowledge it or not.
I am reminded of an image that one of my cousins—a woman who lost her husband to a swift and brutal cancer last year—suggested to me recently over email: that living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss. But that living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss, only with some fog or cloud cover obscuring the depths a bit more—sometimes the wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover.
Speaking of abysses, when we get home after the good-news appointment I do my first googling ever of survival rates—meaningless as I’ve been reminded that they are. They are indeed truly hideous for my situation. Nothing new—challenging to stare right into on the brightly lit screen, though.
After that I abandon the medical website and refocus my attention on the Embers Motor Lodge. An Internet hit on an obscure travel site offers me the only glimmer of history I could find about it: an anonymous contributor talking about his father, who as a teenager worked at the steak house once attached to the motel alongside a waitress who was married to major league pitcher Tom Zachary, a Graham, North Carolina, native who was famous for allowing Babe Ruth’s record-setting home run in 1927.
There is now a discount cigarette outlet where the Embers Steak House once was.
After an almost twenty-year career in baseball, Zachary died just down the interstate in Burlington in the late ’60s. I picture his wife the waitress, season after season, simmering away as she refilled water glasses and asked diners what temperature they preferred their steaks. Let’s call her Faith. I imagine her driving a scooter along Route 54.
There is a period of four days while I am in radiation treatment and traveling back and forth to the cancer center daily when the scooter is missing.
“Something terrible has happened,” I keep saying to John. “I can just feel it.”
“It might not always be the worst-case scenario,” says John. “Sometimes it’s just regular life.”
I stare at him doubtfully from the passenger seat.
On one of those drives I notice the door to her room is open. There is yellow tape across the frame.
“Oh my God,” I say.
“Hey, come on. It’s not necessarily crime tape,” John says. “It could say CAUTION—maybe they’re remodeling. It could say CAREFUL WET PAINT.”
The next time we drive past the Embers, the tape is gone and the white scooter is back in its spot.
* * *
We grope toward the future. Spring comes. We replant our garden. We roast Easter peeps over the fire pit in the backyard. Bunnies and mosquitos are born. Lazy curls bud and sprout from my bald head. I restart physical therapy and Pilates for my back, despite the advice from the spine surgeon that it “probably isn’t worth it”—given my prognosis of a couple years.
I swallow bottles of pills and herbs and vitamins; I rub frankincense into my feet to boost immunity and lower inflammation; I practice soft-belly breathing. The kids sign up for baseball and swim team. I nurse their fevers, sign their permission slips. When he gets home from work, John carries hamper after hamper of laundry up and down the stairs.
John carries so many things.
We laugh at the dinner table. We snipe at each other. We try not to. We make summer plans. We are captivated by a news story that a hole has formed in the sun the size of fifty earths. A coronal hole, they call it—where hot plasma traveling five hundred miles per second is spilling out into interplanetary space every minute of the day.
“Are we in danger?” asks Benny, for whom the extinction of the dinosaurs is never a distant thought. “Isn’t it bad that something that is burning so hot and close to us is doing things that scientists don’t understand?”
“They’re not sure,” I say. “It’s kind of a mystery. But no one seems super worried about it.”
In the meantime, the articles we read tell us to watch out for beautiful side effects: the hot plasma leak has kindled a storm of dramatic auroras that can be seen from Earth. The sky is on fire, but it is basically okay.
I had a hunch my scans would be good news when we were driving to my appointment and we passed the Embers: The scooter was parked out front.
We are month to month—Lyla and me—but we are holding steady, I was thinking to myself. A controlled burn. It’s terrifying, but maybe we can go a good long way like this.
12. What Would Natalie Portman Do?
Sometimes I’m sad about everything: the way my grilled cheese sandwich tastes, how nice my socks feel, a song John is playing in the kitchen. One time he puts on this goofy Loudon Wainwright song that was on a mix tape I used to listen to during my commute from the boys’ school in Bethesda back into the District when we were newly married and everything was about to begin and it makes me burst into tears about the shortness of everything.
Freddy finds me crying on my bed up in my room—and I make no real effort to hide it.
“What’s going on?” he says, climbing up next to me and patting my shoulder. “What are you so sad about?”
“The idea of dying,” I say, not at all sure this is what you’re supposed to say to your nine-year-old. “And how much I love you.”
“Jeez. That’s pretty heavy-duty stuff, Mom,” he says. “When I feel that kind of sad I play my drums. You should try it sometime. I go in my room all sad and mad and when I’m done I feel like a new person.”
“That’s really awesome,” I say, wiping my cheeks, thrilled that we have destroyed our neighbors Josie and Joe’s baby’s first year of sleep for a decent reason. “I should give it a whirl one of these days. I bet I’d like it.”
In the movie version of my life, one day one of these waves of obliteration sweeps over me while John is at work and the kids are in school and I peek into Freddy’s room and give the drums a go and sob and play and find peace. I know I’ll probably never do that, but I like imagining it now whenever I look in his room. Like Natalie Portman or some other gorgeous girl whose nose doesn’t swell when she cries, bent over the drum kit sobbing and raging at the universe until she can’t anymore.
13. Off Battleground Avenue
Out at the science center, one of the tigers dies: Kisa, the female. I read as much as I can about it in the local paper, but there aren’t many details. She was a month away from turning twelve. She had been acting strange, had a uterine infection, didn’t recover from the emergency surgery they gave her. Axl, the male, has been left alone.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve been out to visit the tigers. My kids have aged out of going to the science center as a regular activity. But reading about Kisa, I am awash in images from the survival days: strollers, diapers, Cheerios, and sippy cups. The boys running on the path past the lemurs—the forsaken lemurs—straight for the tigers. Always the tigers. Beastie cats! they are yelling. I want to roar with you!
These are the days that go on forever: Melissa and I pushing our bright strollers along the path, discussing mastitis, autism markers, Montessori versus Waldorf, vasectomy versus the pill. We are mad at our husbands who are always working, mad at our lives—so small and long. We discuss with horror the meningitis that stole our friend’s daughter—sixteen months old. We cannot imagine. We cannot. We cannot. “Slow down boys!” we are calling. “You have to stay with us!” String cheeses and juice boxes and potty time and Do you really think it is a wise choice to roar at a tiger?
Axl prowls the perimeter. Pacing and pacing—staring down the boys and their juicy red fingers and their sticky mouths. Kisa above on the rocks—her gaze far above ours. Nap time we are saying now,
say bye we are saying—and now back in the parking lot we are feeding our folding strollers into the mouths of our vans.
Who will Axl fuck now—so vigorously and so often? And who will know, so calm and certain, what threats lurk in the woods along Battleground Avenue. Who will be listening to the cars that pass, and the birds that fly overhead but never land here.
I learn from the paper that the tigers came to Greensboro from the Conservator’s Center in Burlington—about a half hour off the interstate if you get off at the Embers Motor Lodge and head north.
14. Camp Radiation
It’s July, and school is out—has been forever, will be forever. This morning, the dogs are at odds. They usually play fight and nip at each other’s ears and paws for hours—the boys call it the Morning Match, the Afternoon Attack, and the Dinnertime Duel—but there is an edge to it today. Some yelping, a growl. One knocks the water bowl, the other slinks under the dining room table to sulk during the Morning Match. Maybe they’re trying to fill the gap of the lack of conflict in the house with the boys gone.
John just left to pick them up from their week at Cancer Camp. I guess we’re going to have to stop referring to it so breezily now that they’ll be home. Camp Kesem. A camp for kids who have a parent dealing with or dead from cancer. A tiny beautiful loving little nest of a place. I wanted to go back up into the Shenandoahs with John to fetch them but I am not up to it. This latest radiation treatment has been grueling.
I have a new tumor on my spine—up at the T7 vertebra. Also some new cancer at the site of the L2. Plus the ones in my hips. For this treatment they give me a higher dose of radiation than what I’ve become used to, and because the tumor is resting right next to my spinal cord, precision is that much more important. They make me my own personal body mold to hold me in the exact same position each time.
