The Bright Hour Read online

  One of the children with the picnicking family is breaking off pieces of waffle fry and tossing them over the railing. The mother is holding him on her lap, but hasn’t noticed. She is talking urgently on the phone and keeps glancing back in at all of us patients in the treatment area. A grandmother looks on from across the table, smiling and clapping with the child each time a chunk of food disappears over the rail. At chemo, I can never find my center anymore. It’s like a big, empty ocean.

  17. Fire Alarm

  “What do they do to you at chemo?” asks Benny as I’m snuggling in bed with the boys before school. Every morning while John is in the shower, they both run from their room and climb in here and we power cuddle. Freddy has me draw pictures with my fingers on his back that he has to identify. Benny behaves like some kind of baby animal that I have to guess each morning.

  This morning, he keeps sniffing and scrunching his nose and wagging his bottom and making little yipping noises. “A baby fennec fox,” I say. “Nice, Mom!” he exclaims.

  Don’t get too excited: I have an inside line. He’s been a fennec fox the last six days in a row.

  “So, they put me in a chair and they give me medicine,” I tell them, sketching my fingers over Freddy’s back. “It’s actually not too bad.”

  Both of the boys dislike chemo days because when they leave me I’m pretty normal and can help them fix their waffles and everything, and by the time they get home from school I’m pale and cranky and want to be left alone.

  “I would escape,” says Freddy. “I would get Benny to pull the fire alarm and then I would run out the door when no one was paying attention.”

  “But I want the medicine,” I say. “Just like when you were in the hospital and we wanted the medicine to help with your diabetes.”

  “Oh man. I always forget that part,” says Freddy. I’ve just finished sketching a hot air balloon on his back. “Is it a heart? I mean, not a heart symbol but like a real human heart with veins coming out of it?”

  “No. But I like yours better,” I say, erasing the smooth skin slate with the pads of my fingers.

  18. Advanced Directive

  More suspicious country: What would Montaigne make of signing a will or an advanced directive or a health-care power of attorney—of the notaries and their poised stamps and the smell of coffee brewing; the documents and their copies of copies of copies; the fresh black ballpoints scattered on the board room table?

  John and I take the elevator to the nineteenth floor of the building where John used to work in private practice. I have worn a sundress but I am suddenly very cold and longing for a sweater. Our friend, Adam—an expert in handling estates with dozens more zeros than ours—works at the firm and is standing there to greet us when the doors open.

  Adam and his wife, Melissa, are close enough friends of ours that we have considered them possible guardians of our children. Their kids are our kids’ best friends. I went to grad school with both Adam and Melissa; John and Adam later survived law school together; our four boys were all born at the same time; we live around the corner from each other. We vacation together, spend Saturday evenings cooking in each other’s kitchens, hug and feed and reprimand each other’s kids as if they were our own.

  “Ugh,” says Adam when he sees us. “Hi. Sorry you have to be here.”

  “If they’re lucky and smart, everyone ends up here eventually,” says John.

  Adam’s assistant is printing endless stacks of papers and we swivel in the cushy office chairs as she finishes. “Can I get you all a Diet Coke or anything?” she asks. We do not need a thing.

  “So, do people actually ever do really insane things in their wills,” I ask Adam as we wait for everything to be collated, “like give their estates to their dog or a waitress at the coffee shop or bury it on a desert island or whatever?”

  “Yup,” he says, and not one more word. Adam knows all the best secrets in town and wouldn’t tell a single one if his life depended on it, even when he’s had a lot to drink.

  Both Adam and Melissa are trained as poets, but I question Adam’s instincts as a fiction writer.

  “I don’t love all the drama in my job,” he told me once at a party. “The feuds and the illegitimate kids and the spurned ex-wives and the twenty-year-olds that suddenly stand to inherit millions of dollars. I try to just block it out.”

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “I would be taking detailed notes. I would be entertaining Melissa all evening. I would be making millions of my own dollars writing shelves and shelves of the most juicy, sordid best sellers ever.”

  “Yeah, I’m thinking you might not make it as a lawyer for very long,” he said.

  Perusing the documents, Adam has to direct us to some tough questions before we can sign: the world’s darkest quantitative reasoning test. “Check next to your preferred option,” he says.

  I want to receive BOTH artificial hydration AND artificial nutrition. I want to receive ONLY artificial hydration AND NOT artificial nutrition (for example, through tubes). I want to receive ONLY artificial nutrition AND NOT artificial hydration (for example, through tubes). I want to receive NEITHER artificial hydration NOR artificial nutrition.

  Then: “Initial here if you prefer SHALL. Or here if you prefer MAY,” he says in his calm voice, just like: Do you all want wine or a beer?

  In the case that I am incapacitated, my health-care providers MAY withhold or withdraw life-prolonging measures or SHALL withhold or withdraw life-prolonging measures.

  I look at John and kind of shrug and initial next to SHALL. May or shall. I may go for a stroll on the moors later. I shall be late for tea.

  But of course: no. That is not it at all.

  “Why does our common language, which is so plain in its other uses, become obscure and unintelligible in contracts and wills?” asks Montaigne.

  I have an inkling. I’m sure Montaigne did, too, if he lingered at all on that thought—the tennis ball careening through the cool morning, our heads turning ceaselessly this way and that. It is exactly like the immaculate conference room, the stacks of papers, the brewing coffee, the notary and witnesses in waiting, Adam in his tie.

  I, NINA ELLEN RIGGS, the Testator, sign my name to this instrument, and being first duly sworn, do hereby declare to the undersigned authority that I sign and execute this instrument as my Last Will and Testament and that I sign it willingly, that I execute it as my free and voluntary act for the purposes therein expressed, and that I am eighteen years of age or older, of sound mind, and under no constraint or undue influence.

  Here is what it says eight hours later in our plain and common language—kitchen darkened, kids asleep. It takes all its clothes off next to the bed. It searches the hook for the nightgown, massages the lump that presses against the skin at just past midnight on the breast clock, glances at itself in the mirror. I am gone. It says: I was here—right here—look at this ink, the curl of the N—and now I am gone, and I leave these things to you: my spouse, JOHN A. DUBERSTEIN, because you have survived me.

  19. In the Dark

  A warm evening. Dinner party on the back deck—candles, another good bottle brought to the cleared table, a swarm of children darting in the backyard.

  We piece it together later—long after the dishes are dried and John is tugging off my shirt and Freddy shows up in our doorway saying there is something “very Scooby Doo” happening over his bed and I watch a bat swoop out from the boys’ room into the stairwell—that the screen door must have been left partly open.

  But my feeling was that the bat had to be mad to enter during the evening’s buggiest hours—inching along the molding and flattening in the curtain folds and making its way upstairs.

  An aimless chase, and we corner it in the mudroom, but then it disappears into the infinite nowhere of our clutter—immortal just like that—possible in every deep cupboard, every stack of towels, every tool bag.

  For hours John and I stand shifts in the darkening and darkened yard. I hold the ra
ke for courage and watch the lit mudroom for any flutter, any fleck of brown, any glimmer of certainty to confirm: location, manner, existence.

  The loud dark lawn is an unsettled audience—crickets and cicadas, their restless catcalls. Night is a belly of bugs, and all around, other bats were leaving their roosts in trees and chimneys, signaling flight with ultrasonic clicks, a neutral, hollow sound—surprisingly unmammalian—the sound of thought, the sound that asks you not to pull apart the pieces of night:

  A snake’s rattle, but much slower, the freewheel on a bicycle coasting downhill, an invisible child dragging a stick along a fence, the lullaby I concocted for Benny as a baby on those million nights of his waking—

  the flag says thwap thwap thwap,

  the fan says clickity clack,

  the lights go blinkity blinkity blinkity

  blinkity blinkity black.

  It was a song I never sang very gently, but with a kind of conviction.

  20. More Steroids

  I have wallpapered the mudroom and reorganized the tools and the pegboard. I have installed a pea-gravel patio and a fire pit in the backyard next to the new deck my dad built for us. I have planted herbs, annuals, peppers, and squash. Three new hydrangeas, a gardenia, a Japanese maple. A trellis, a climbing clematis, a little shade garden near the willow oak. Boxes of geraniums. I have assembled a rocking chair and spread fifteen bags of mulch. I only stop planting because I’m avoiding the cashier at the garden center. “Welcome back again, Nina,” he says when I walk in through the gate. He knows my name from my debit card. I know his from his name tag. “Hi, Clark,” I say without being able to make eye contact.

  Every day when John comes home from work I drag him out to the yard and beam expectantly. “Please stop,” he says. “It’s beautiful, but you have to slow down.”

  “Make me,” I say. Tears explode from my eyes.

  “Have you tried actually sitting in the rocking chair yet?” he asks, hugging me.

  Then I’m up late reading Montaigne essays and dozens of articles about gardening that I find on Pinterest. And I’m up late reading cancer books: Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds; Paul Kalanithi’s gorgeous memoir; Claudia Emerson’s brutal book of poems, Late Wife. And I’m reading Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl because I can’t stop reading it—even though my book club rejected it for being too dark. Instead, we settle on Adam Johnson’s bone-chilling novel about life in North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son, so I’m up late reading that, too.

  21. Book Club

  For years, my mom has hosted book club at her house every month. She likes not having to go out. It’s her and three of her close friends: Linda, Anne, and Teresa. And me and Tita. My mom always sits in the giant leather chair in the living room and doesn’t eat very much. The drug from the clinical trial she is on makes her feel nauseated a lot of the time—although she is almost always dressed and mostly cheerful and up for a glass or two of wine. The rest of us gather around on the sectional, eating smoked salmon on crackers and salad.

  “It’s a good thing that we read Orphan Master’s Son instead of something dark,” jokes Tita. “Isn’t there a book version of Schindler’s List we could try next?”

  “Oh come on,” says my mom. “Why is everyone so afraid of the dark?” She’s only half kidding.

  “Maybe we’re not,” I say. “Maybe we just feel like we’re supposed to be.” But I can tell that not everyone agrees with me.

  “It seems like our most fun discussions happen when we get to trash the really terrible, shallow books,” says Linda.

  “True,” says Anne, whose taste runs very similar to mine. “The beautiful, heavy ones have a way of shutting us all up. But I think somehow I’m okay with that.”

  “Me too,” says Teresa, who loves heavy-duty historical nonfiction.

  “I don’t know,” says Linda. “I guess I’m open to the dark stuff—I can always skim. But I can’t deal with cruelty to animals. No tortured dogs or horses or anything. That’s where I draw the line.”

  “Totally agree,” says Tita. We all end up nodding.

  “Are we weird or what?” says my mom. “Tortured men, raped teenagers, dying mothers: We’ll somehow endure those. But skeletal dogs: No way, José.”

  We settle on Factory Man, a book about the decline of the furniture industry in southern Virginia, for next month.

  22. Beastie Cats

  Two nights before my postchemo scan I have a dream so imposing it displaces my reality for most of the following day.

  I’m lying in a darkened ultrasound room, gooped up with ultrasound goop, my right side propped on the foam wedge, arm curled above my head, and the doctor is running the transducer across my chest and into my armpit like a little boy zooming his matchbox car. I look up at the screen where usually all you see is that strange universe of shadows and ghosts that is allegedly your insides, and instead I see two tigers pacing the perimeter of my chest wall.

  It’s not a totally foreign image. We have two tigers of our own in Greensboro. Two startling four-hundred-pounders, part Bengal, part Siberian, rescued from somewhere—maybe the offspring of circus tigers—that live tucked in the woods that abut Lawndale Avenue at the Greensboro Science Center.

  Beastie cats, one of the boys used to call them.

  There are a number of fascinating but unnerving things about the tigers: the way they hyperfixate on stroller wheels and errant toddlers; the volume at which they both roar when the male mounts the female (not infrequently); how some suburban Greensboro subdivision practically backs up to their habitat, how the female keeps incessant watch from her rock lookout while the male naps in the shade, how in some spots there is basically just the equivalent of an elementary schoolyard baseball backstop between you and them.

  But the most disconcerting thing about the beastie cats is how they pace. It’s that measured, obsessive, nervous stalking you might recognize from your dog during a thunderstorm or a restless night before a set of important scans.

  The science center keepers say the reason the tigers pace is because they are craving human contact—they were bottle-fed as babies, and they miss being close to people, which is why they like the perimeter of the enclosure so much. It’s where the people are.

  I don’t know. What is this, really? It reads a little more like madness to me. Decades before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the poet Jorie Graham wrote this about the hot, dry scirocco wind in Italy:

  Who is

  the nervous spirit

  of this world

  that must go over and over

  what it already knows

  Maybe it’s not really madness though. Maybe it’s an entirely sane response to being denied human contact. Or to very many things—results and treatment protocols and the future.

  So, the beastie cats are pacing the chest wall.

  Yesterday morning—after a restorative, humanizing walk in the near-rain among many heart-stoppingly beautiful blooming gardens and yards with a good friend who lost both her parents in a year and whose dog just died—I was remembering the dream. Simultaneously nonplussed and not nonplussed, I was thinking: There are tigers in the woods here and they are a little off their rockers, but that’s the place where we live.

  STAGE TWO

  1. Something Gray Like Grief

  First ultrasound ever: I’m sixteen weeks pregnant. The darkened room, John standing at my side. We’re watching the tech—then a doctor who enters from another room, then another doctor—wade again and again into the ocean of my belly, find our growing boy there—his spine curving like driftwood, his thunderous heart. It’s the strangest thing we’ve ever seen. We can’t stop watching the screen/ocean. Him.

  But they’re taking too many pictures. Too many measurements. His feet. His legs. His brain. His heart. His feet again. No one is talking at all, until suddenly someone says, “Well, I guess by now you know something is not quite right.”

  * * *

 
; We don’t exactly, but we were starting to. We’ve never been here before. I find myself remembering the time we took our old dog, Zilch, to the ocean for the first time.

  We let him out of the backseat of the car, and he beelined for the beach—racing circles in the dry sand, sniffing the bite of tidal decay, knots of seaweed, rotting crab shells, a dried black purse of skate eggs.

  Eventually he nosed his way to low tide’s edge, the gentle lick of the inlet slapping the sand, and then, when the wet of seawater meets the wet of nose, he froze, as though only just then realizing this was not his backyard water bowl.

  We watched as he planted his front paws into the uncertain earth, then raised a wary head to scan his surroundings—where the ocean reached in a thousand blue directions, as massive and inscrutable as sleep, as bad news.

  He took two steps backward, stopped, and growled. The world was even stranger than before. Something gray like grief passed through his eyes before he turned his glance to a low-flying gull and chased it.

  * * *

  Talipes equinovarus, they tell us after the scan—club foot. It sounds like something that has been flung toward us from the dark ages. My brain is groping through Beowulf. Idiopathic, they say. Sounds like Greek for a Shakespearean fool, but it turns out this is good news: not part of a larger, scarier complex of issues. Just the foot. The right foot.

  Not the world ending, but the ground shifting. Everything is stranger than before. Will he walk? They are talking about surgeons and casting and braces, about cutting his Achilles tendon just after birth. We have only just learned he is a he. Fixable, they keep saying.

  Later at home, John bans me from obsessing on the Internet, but agrees to read me a list of people he finds born with club feet. It turns out it’s not just obscure, misanthropic rulers. There are athletes on the list: Troy Aikman. Kristi Yamaguchi. Mia Hamm. Freddy Sanchez—who won the batting title in 2006 for John’s hometown team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and for whom the shapes in the ultrasound-verse will soon be named. Eight years later—leg casts, orthotic brace, surgery—we watch him round the bases, slide into third.