The Bright Hour Page 2

  The saintly nurse rolls her eyes, and John heads out to get Freddy some chicken wings and broth from his favorite Chinese restaurant—something with low carbohydrates that won’t further elevate his blood sugar. While he’s gone I call my mom.

  “I know it’s going to sound like I’m making this up,” I say.

  First I tell her the news from my MRI, then Freddy’s diagnosis. They want to keep us here for three to four days—to get his blood sugar under control, stabilize his kidneys, teach us how to give him shots—even though John is already a pro.

  Benny isn’t allowed to stay on the ward because it’s flu season, so John takes him home after dinner. We talk on the phone later that night.

  “I really didn’t want to tell you,” John says. “In fact, I considered taking him straight to the hospital and telling you I’d decided to take the kids on an impromptu trip. It just seemed really important not to let you find out.”

  Freddy’s asleep at last. I’m lying nearby on the foldout chair, lights off in the hospital room—just the flash of the heart monitor, sending out a steady code into the night like a lighthouse: okay for now, okay for now, okay for now.

  “I’m so glad it was you who was on parent patrol,” I say. “I think it would have sailed past me. I kind of feel like I’ve had a lobotomy.”

  “Oh yeah, I wasn’t going to tell you that part either, but I had them take care of that as well,” he says. “It seemed for the best.”

  6. Nonplussed

  The Queen of Triple Negative Breast Cancer: that’s the doctor I have the great fortune of being squeezed in to see so she can determine how to treat this aggressive-seeming, hormone-negative tumor, the clinic coordinator at Duke Cancer Center tells me.

  John and I take a selfie in the exam room while we wait.

  “This is what two completely terrified people who are trying to act like they’ve got it all under control look like,” I say, showing it to him.

  “How many people do you think are going to feel you up today?” he says.

  The first appointment is at 9:20 a.m., and we don’t leave the clinic until 6:00 p.m. Dr. Cavanaugh is smart like a switchblade and wears knee-high black boots with her white coat. She looks completely together. She might be my polar opposite.

  She seems to terrify everyone around her, and John and I both love her right away. She knows the details of my case off the top of her head. She refers to my cancer as being “highly curable.” She says she prefers to call chemo combinations “recipes” because “cocktail” makes her think about having a drink too early in the day and that’s disappointing. So maybe we are not polar opposites.

  “I like how nonplussed she seems by the whole thing,” I say to John after she leaves the room and I’m wiggling back into my sports bra. There is still a huge bruise on my breast from the biopsy, and I have to keep reminding myself that it is not the tumor—just a side effect. “She’s totally unimpressed by my cancer. Maybe even a little bored by it. I think that’s good.”

  “I don’t think nonplussed means what you think it means,” says John, half listening to a work voicemail he’s missed.

  “Really?” I say. My shirt is inside out. He helps me pull it back over my head. “Doesn’t it mean blasé—like not worked up about something?”

  “It’s the opposite.” Now he’s groping around under my shirt with one hand as he googles the word on his phone with the other. “I don’t believe you,” I say. He shows me the definition.

  “Oh,” I say, pushing his hand away. “Then I like how non-nonplussed she is. And I am frankly nonplussed by your behavior in this exam room.”

  The rest of the day: scans, waiting, talking to pharmacists, more waiting, and meeting the rest of the team—the radiation oncologist, the surgeon. The surgeon makes me smile when he makes a Freudian slip while referring to the choice between lumpectomy and mastectomy as being “my incision” instead of “my decision.”

  7. At Chemo School

  Everyone is fiercely upbeat as we learn not to eat rare tuna and how to tie a square scarf and what kind of mouthwash is good for mouth ulcers.

  I sit with a friendly-faced nurse and a number of other newly diagnosed folks in their seventies and eighties, crowded around a table in the bowels of the cancer center. There are so very many of us, actually, I might be suffocating.

  “Are we having fun yet?” asks an abundantly lipsticked lady as she fiddles with her cane.

  “I know I am!” pipes up her husband, grinning at the nurse, then me.

  I text Tita, who had offered to come with me. “Now I really wish you had come. You would adore this scene.” She is a fiction writer, and she loves the inner workings of things: bodies, minds, relationships, support group meetings. She loves to pull things apart and examine every weird corner of them. We can spend hours dissecting a strange interaction at the grocery store or a waiter’s mannerisms or the emotional challenges her sister’s ex-boyfriend’s mother might be facing. “I feel like I’ve been granted access to the mecca of unexpected intimacy,” I say.

  “PLEASE. WRITE. EVERY. SINGLE. THING. DOWN,” she texts back.

  The nurse emphasizes the importance of condom use during midchemo sexual intercourse and everyone stares in my direction. I take furious notes in my binder. I underline condom twice, maybe three times.

  “I have the c-word but the c-word doesn’t have me,” someone says and we all nod.

  Discussing the chemo shellfish prohibition, a gray-faced man in a golf jacket announces that he has a “sexual attraction to pulling the shell off shrimp by the tail.”

  “Oh for God’s sake—this again,” moans his wife. After a big pause, everyone laughs for real.

  We recite the cancer center phone number aloud in unison, with gusto. We wish each other well.

  We graduate. We’re ready for the big leagues.

  8. In the Chemo Bay

  The treatment room has no doors. Maybe a pulled curtain, a hushed voice, but in the end it is an open sea of people waiting together to take in the poisonous stuff that we hope will make us better. Time moves differently here—so much waiting, so much taking place. All the double-checking and bracelet scanning. All the side effect management: Zofran, steroids, saline flushing. The please-repeat-your-name-and-birth-date. Do you need a snack? More water? The keen eyes of the hazmat-suited nurses, the steady drip-dripping of the IV, laughter, the smell of french fries, ginger ale tabs fizz-popping open, texts pinging in from all directions.

  “Are you doing okay?” I ask myself in the chemo bay.

  “I think so,” I say.

  9. Suspicious Country

  Right after the diagnosis, I find it nearly impossible to read. I can’t think clearly, and I don’t have the patience for the development of other people’s ideas and images.

  “Yeah, I had that, too,” my mom says when I mention it to her. “I did a lot of staring at the wall. And I watched every single episode of NCIS. It’s kind of like having a baby. Don’t worry—you’ll get back to it.”

  I remember a Christmas several years back when she was feeling very ill and directionless, and we spent a chilly weekend at the beach reading and discussing a biography of Michel de Montaigne. It left her on more solid ground. I pull out my old graduate school copy of the Montaigne Essays and start to read.

  In one of my favorite essays he writes about his brother’s sudden death at age twenty-three after being hit in the head by a tennis ball:

  He did not sit down or rest, but five or six hours later he died of apoplexy caused by the blow.

  With such frequent, common examples passing before our eyes, how can we possibly get rid of the thought of death; how can it not seem at every moment to be gripping us by the throat?

  Montaigne came to know death well during his life in sixteenth-century France: the loss of five of his six daughters in childhood, the sudden demise of his closest friend in his arms at the hands of the plague, a lifetime of debilitating kidney stone attacks.

 
It is a continual source of torment that cannot be assuaged at all. There is no place from which it may not come; we may keep turning our heads ceaselessly this way and that, as in suspicious country.

  Suspicious country—I’m beginning to know that place.

  Certainly, it is the far better name for a boutique in town called A Special Place Wigs: a chemo/hair loss specialty shop full of hats, bright scarves, wigs, appeasing creams, even sad little yellowing packets of eyebrow pairs shaped of human hair.

  The first time I went there, I opened the door gripping a paper prescription from my oncologist that said “head prosthesis.” In my postdiagnosis haze, I had thrown out the first one she gave me, thinking: Oh, this must be for someone else. I haven’t lost my head.

  Katrine, the stylist, shaved off what was left of my hair in a back room and helped fit me for my wig. Tita took lots of pictures and we laughed and laughed.

  Montaigne writes: “When a horse stumbles, a roof tile falls, however slightly a pin pricks, let us immediately ruminate on this: ‘So, what if this were death itself?’ ”

  When the scissors’s snips are brusque and sudden. When the clippers buzz on. When your new hair emerges sleek and orderly from a shoebox.

  I love about Montaigne that, despite roving bands of thieves and constant political upheaval, he reportedly never kept his castle guarded. He left all his doors unlocked. He acknowledged the terror that could come. But by considering it and allowing it in, he resolved to live with its presence: “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about it or—still less—my unfinished garden.”

  My wig smells toxic and makes me feel like a bank robber. But maybe it is just a cloak for riding out into suspicious country.

  10. I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)

  Freddy is eager to go back to school the day after he is released from the hospital. We show up in the nurse’s office with meters and insulin pens and alcohol swabs and glucagon kits and care plans. He is mostly focused on the silver lining that now he is allowed to eat a seemingly unlimited amount of beef jerky. But I see him moving differently through the world now—like he always has a bag over his shoulder. A bag filled with the words: Injections. Chronic disease. Glycemic index. Ketones. Hospital.

  Then I remember this one night in the early 1980s. My dad and I were riding in his old white pickup down Route 128 somewhere north of Boston when it overheated, leaving us stranded on the side of the highway in a thunderstorm.

  This was the era when breaking down still meant walking to find a phone. And I was about eight—not really old enough to be left in a truck at night on the side of the highway. So, during a pause in the downpour the two of us set off into the long wet grass toward a smattering of dark houses not far from the exit ramp.

  Everyone’s power was out with the storm, and it took a few tries before we found someone with a working phone to let us call my mom, who was certainly starting to worry. Then we trekked back out to the truck to wait until she came to pick us up.

  The truck battery was still working, so we cranked up my dad’s favorite cassette at the time—Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book. The windows were all fogged up and I still remember how the cab of that pickup smelled—a mix of sawdust and orange peels and dirt and coffee. Just like my dad.

  I dozed a little in and out, my head lolling on the scratchy woven upholstery, with Stevie singing “I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)” over and over again, and then we’d rewind and listen to it again and my dad would get kind of falsetto and harmonize-y on the “I Believe” part and I was the most contented, up-past-my-bedtime, headlights-in-the-dark-counting, adventure-haver there ever was. And then my mom arrived in our little Volkswagen Rabbit and ferried us home safely to bed.

  Freddy is about the same age now as I was then. I’m trying to be wide open with him about his disease, my cancer, the treatment, the parts I’m nervous about—to make it less scary. Maybe not the capital F fears, but all the lower-case ones for sure.

  I scan him for signs of trauma, distress, anger. I ask him how he’s feeling about a hundred times a day, fending off my own topsy-turvy guilt and uncertainty.

  The other day, poking at the latest IV scab on my hand, he said, “Sometimes I miss the hospital so much I could cry.”

  The hospital. The beeping machines. The sallow 3 a.m. light of the hallway. The narrow vinyl couch and paper sheet. My matted hair. My jumbled belongings on the chair, the pink breast cancer tote. The pee jug I nervously watched for signs of ketones in Freddy’s urine. My son tangled in his tubes and wires. The four hours and twelve minutes when they thought he also had an undiagnosed heart problem. The endless parade of techs and nurses and doctors. That hospital?

  “I loved playing those video games the whole time,” he said. “And remember how you would climb in the bed and cuddle me at night and we would just talk?”

  Oh. That hospital. The smell of his sweaty curls tucked under my chin. The way he would squeeze my hand whenever someone new walked into the room. The steady puffs of his breathing I hadn’t lain awake listening to since he was a baby and I was a delirious new mother.

  So here is the thing: Is it possible then that my dad wasn’t actually having the time of his life like I was—after driving late at night in the rain, dragging his kid to strangers’ houses, and sitting on the busy shoulder of Route 128 and eventually having to abandon his blown-up truck for the night?

  That instead he was worried and exhausted and barely coping? Does “I Believe” conceivably not evoke a shimmery world of adventure for him? Does he not now sing it to himself alone in the car and every time feel happy and loved and excited about whatever might happen next?

  A while ago, I asked him if he remembered that trip. “Oh, for sure. I was so wiped out when we got home.”

  I burned him a CD of Talking Book to replace his long-ago-busted cassette. The other night he had it on in the kitchen at his house, and it turns out thirty years later he still sings along in the exact same croony way to “I Believe.”

  Which makes my thinking go like this: When you fall in love with your kids, you fall in love forever. And that love forms the exact shape in the world of the cab of a beat-up pickup on the side of the dark highway—filled with safety and Stevie Wonder and okay-ness.

  Or the exact shape of a single hospital bed with two figures nestled in it. Which of course suggests that no matter what, the kid is going to be all right.

  11. Dancing with Myself

  Before every chemo appointment Tita and her husband, Drew, text me selfies of themselves making crazy snarl-lipped pirate/Billy Idol–type faces. “Rock n roll, baby,” Tita writes. “You’ve got this.”

  One time I am standing in the middle of the exam room trying to hold my blue hospital gown on while taking a selfie to send back to them of me making the same face when a tech opens the door without knocking. “Whoa. Everything okay in here, Ms. Riggs? You look a little off.”

  “I’m completely fine,” I say, trying not to laugh. “I was just trying to pretend I was a rock star for my friend.”

  “Oh, okay,” says the tech. “Well, I’ll be right back with the nurse just in case. Please take a seat and press the blue button if you need anything.”

  12. The Poetry Fox

  This one day at Duke, John and I spot a man in a furry fox suit. He’s sitting in the lobby with a typewriter. You give him a word, and he furiously types up a poem based on it, as you wait.

  I have a long wait at the crowded breast clinic, and John wanders off to find lunch. He stops by the poetry fox on the way back.

  A woman ahead of him gets a rambling prose poem about a childhood memory of Poetry Fox’s. Someone else gets a limerick composed around the word hope: nope, soap, dope. The fox seems a little worn down. When it is his turn, John gives the fox the word nonplussed.

  “Nonplussed,” says the fox. “Okay, fine.” And he types out a free-verse poem that, while indicating that Poetry Fox also does not
know the true dictionary meaning of nonplussed, is a worthy souvenir.

  Stay / nonplussed. Make / them work / to crack / you, writes Poetry Fox, among other things.

  “You’ll like this,” says John when he shows back up in the breast clinic with the typed poem.

  “Hmm. That’s not really my emotional philosophy,” I say. “I like being cracked open.”

  “It’s not a bad mantra for the medical journey, though,” says John. “Especially considering it came from a man in a fox suit.”

  “Good point,” I say. All the warfare jargon around cancer—the battling, the surviving, the winning/losing, the kicking its ass—hasn’t been ringing true for me. But I’m good with not letting it crack me.

  “I will be the densest little nut in the world,” I say to John. “Green and unyielding. A squirrel’s effing nightmare.”

  “One small spot,” says John, squeezing my hand.

  13. Dasein

  John and I met in a graveyard. It was during college at a summer job in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where we were both teaching assistants at a camp for gifted kids. I taught a writing class and he taught a course on existentialism. Our classes would sometimes cross paths on field trips to the historic, treeless cemetery down the street from the campus where the camp was held. Overlapping interests, you could say.

  “How’s your class going?” John asks as we both wander around the graveyard distributing handouts. He’s got these crazy blue eyes and a backward ball cap and a sexy smile, and he’s wearing a Bad Religion T-shirt and carrying a dog-eared copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness—in French. I mean: Forget it.

  “Not bad,” I say. “I’ll be relieved when the session is over though. Sounding like I know what I’m talking about all day is kind of beyond me. These kids are really smart.”