by Nina Riggs
“Scootch up in your cradle a little,” says Nelson, the radiation therapist, as I lie on the metal table, “We need to line up the lasers with those crosshairs on your belly.”
After forty-five minutes of angling and measuring and scootching and waiting, my arms—placed above my head—go numb and start to cramp. I’m dehydrated from spending the drive home vomiting after the last treatment. I wiggle my shoulders and Nelson’s partner Kelly pops up at my head almost instantaneously. “You can’t move, baby. Not even a twinge. Now we’re going to have to do the imaging all over again.”
“I’m so sorry,” I’m saying. I’m trying not to cry.
“I know,” she says, patting my thigh. “It’s not your fault, but you have to try harder.”
For the last five days John and I have been sitting around doing what all the other camp-sending parents do I guess: basking in our serenely quiet and clean house, eating crackers and cheese and beer for dinner on the couch while simultaneously hitting the refresh button every two minutes on the Facebook page where the Camp posts hundreds of daily photos.
“Did you see the one of Freddy photobombing the counselor photo? Typical.”
“Yup. Did you see the one of Benny in the paddleboat with his stuffed animals? I think he was smiling. Do you think he was smiling?”
We’ve both been nervous about Benny—a profound homebody and on the very young end of the campers. And stubborn as hell.
It’s Freddy we get the call about, though. Joy—whose camp nickname is Springs—isn’t Joy already a pretty solid camp nickname?—is on the line. Everyone has self-selected camp nicknames. The camp directors go by Wallaby and Lotus.
“Foxtrot and The Platypus are both fine,” she says. “But we’ve been having some behavior problems with Foxtrot the last few days. He doesn’t always listen when he’s asked to do something. And yesterday during Feet on Bed, he and a friend were roughhousing and he kneed another boy in the privates.”
Oh, Foxtrot.
“I am so sorry, although I am not supersurprised to hear this,” I say. “Foxtrot has these issues at home as well.”
“No biggie,” she says, “He’s a trip—smart, hilarious, superresponsible with his diabetes care. Just didn’t want you in the dark on this because he won’t be welcome back to Camp Kesem if this behavior continues. It’s too sensitive of an environment.”
“Of course,” I say. I’m holding the phone lying in bed with a scented sleep mask over my eyes to keep the nausea at bay. “I get it.”
Looking up helps—with nausea and when your kid is on the verge of getting kicked out of Cancer Camp.
On the way home in the car while I was puking over and over again into the McDonald’s bag, my dad—my poor dad!—spotted some kind of dirigible up in the clouds over Graham, not far from the Embers exit.
“Look at that,” he said—and we did, admiring its noiseless, almost imperceptible movement from where we were on the highway below. I like direction that looks aimless but isn’t. Just subtle. Just making its way without hope, without despair. Isn’t that what Isak Dinesen said about writing? Same with living.
“That Platypus though,” says Springs before we get off the phone. “He’s his own man, isn’t he. He’s doing just fine.” Surprises.
The long game remains a little hazy. Other than radiation, there aren’t a lot of other treatment options available, although this landscape is always changing. The big hot thing in breast cancer (and many cancers) right now is immunotherapy, but it is still largely only available through clinical trials (unless, as Dr. Cavanaugh suggested, I wanted to donate a building to Duke Hospital or something).
I am not eligible for any of the trials yet, unfortunately, because I have to fail a round of postmetastasis chemotherapy in order to qualify. That’s fine, but the problem is that Dr. Cavanaugh feels strongly that it is my immune system that is keeping the cancer from taking off like wildfire right now, and more chemo that is unlikely to do anything will only deplete my immune system.
“Couldn’t you just pretend to take the chemo pills—if it’s just to make you eligible for the trial? How would they ever know?” asks my dad.
I’m thrilled at the idea of this small act of rebellion.
Even still: All of the US-based immunotherapy trials are still currently randomized and blind, which means you only have a one-out-of-three chance of getting the actual drug and not the placebo.
The shorter game: The dogs still haven’t quite settled down. John should be home with the boys sometime midafternoon. MacDuff is on alert at the front door—barking at every Saturday morning lawnmower that growls on, every weed whacker, every bike wheel that tick-ticks by.
Ellie is lying at the foot of the bed. She can no longer hear or see very well. But if she feels me roll over in the bed she’s up standing at attention in a split second, staring at me. “What are we doing,” she implores. “What’s next?”
“I have no idea, you crazy girl,” I tell her, patting her head. “Let’s wait and see.”
15. The List
John is a superstar dad, but now I keep a running list on my phone of the things I’m worried no one will teach my kids: table manners, how to play Scrabble without getting in a fight, long division, how to pack light, how to find the orange juice in the refrigerator.
“Let’s say aloud all the people who could help Dad take care of us,” says Freddy one night when I am tucking them both into the bottom of their bunk bed.
They still prefer to sleep together.
We make a list.
“Man, that’s more than I can fit on both hands,” says Benny with an enormous grin on his face.
Freddy reaches toward me for a hug and says nothing.
16. Jump Around
I pick up John during his lunch hour so we can go on a date to the medical supply store to buy me a cane. With the tumors in my hips and pelvis, I’m having a harder time getting around. John tries to talk me into one that is camouflaged for duck hunting and another that is clearly from some Lord of the Rings fantasy he had back in middle school, but I choose a dark blue one with a comfy rubber grip and a floral pattern that looks like bathroom wallpaper from the 1960s. I’m pretending that I’m starting a hip new craze that people don’t even know about yet—like vaping or lumberjack beards or bone broth. Canes: the new frontier in walking. Like walking only better. Extra virgin, cold-pressed walking.
Two days after I get the cane, John, Tita, Drew, and I go see Grandmaster Flash in a concert that starts after 9:00 p.m. and is held in a huge parking lot downtown. We are neither the oldest nor the youngest by far. Flash himself is two years shy of sixty. We dance and get bumped around by the crowd for an hour and a half. I use the cane for an extra boost off the ground when he mixes in “Jump Around.”
The next day I can’t get out of bed and I have to double my fentanyl. I resign myself to the bigger-size patch. Once I go up in the fentanyl dose, it seems I never go down.
17. The Hit Woman
One night I have a dream I am being stalked by a hit man—or a hit woman, rather. She has a badge and is dressed like a lawyer, although slightly disheveled and with a French accent. She has been following me for days when I finally turn around and confront her.
“Look. You don’t have to do this. It’s not etched in stone,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” she says, holding her gun inside her suit jacket. “I do. It’s my job.”
“Please,” I keep saying to her. “I have kids. They are little. And they need me. Can you give me just a few more years? I promise to go nicely if you can let me have a few extra years with them.”
In the dream, I cry in a way I have never cried before. I am hysterical. The situation is too cruel. This is the saddest thing I have ever imagined.
“We will see,” she says, shrugging and walking away. “I will see what I can do.”
I tell John about the dream when we wake up.
“Oh my God,” he deadpans, pulling me close, hugging me.
“Imagine if something like that were actually happening to you.”
I punch his arm. All day I am haunted by what I am unable to feel.
18. Adult Supervision
Would you believe me if I told you that around the same time that Ginny’s cancer spread, a second scooter started showing up at the Embers Motor Lodge, sharing a space in the empty parking lot with the first one? A couple times they’ve both been gone at once, but usually at least one of them is there. One has a cover; the other is left exposed to the elements.
Ginny’s lung metastases make her eligible for immunotherapy because the tumors can be biopsied and measured more precisely than mine. She’s been looking for a clinical trial, and it seems there is a really good option at UNC. But even after signing a thousand consent forms and having painful bronchoscopies and long days of lab work, there is still an epic waiting period to find out if you qualify. They have to send part of Ginny’s tumor to Europe. And apparently some European bureaucrat has been holding things up—or at least that’s what the trial coordinator at UNC says.
The days pass—a couple weeks. In cancer time, that feels like years, decades—like the remaining days of your life are soaring by on a busy interstate.
“Still no word on the trial of course,” Ginny texts one night. “I did two shots of vodka and then got into bed.”
“What matters is that you’re taking care of the important things,” I text back. It’s not yet 8:00 p.m. and I’m in bed myself.
She tells me she’s started thinking about taping lectures to her kids as future teenagers that her sister could email to them when the time is appropriate.
To her son, who is the same age as Freddy: “Keep it in your pants unless you are alone in the privacy of your own room or your own shower, and do not make your aunt clean up stiff/crunchy socks from around your room. It is perfectly fine to jerk off. Just be polite about it.”
She assures me I can borrow that one if I want.
To her eleven-year-old daughter: “If a guy ever grabs the back of your head and tries to pull/put your face in his crotch, that is a deal breaker. (Unless he has just gone down on you . . . and even then I think it is probably time to leave.).”
I say a silent hallelujah. I have always wanted a girl, and I’ve always been jealous of moms with daughters. But the idea of parenting a teenage daughter from the grave sounds worse than terminal cancer.
Ginny texts me another one: “Kids: if you ever get freaked when you are making out with someone and you suddenly think oh shit my mom can see this, please know that if heaven exists, and if I am there, and if I can watch what you are doing, I will politely draw the curtains and give you your privacy. At least, I think that’s what I’ll try to do. No, maybe I will watch to make sure you don’t do something disgusting.”
I love that one; oddly, it’s something I’ve thought about in terms of my own mom since she died, as though dying makes us more powerful parents than the living version of ourselves. Does she somehow magically now know how seldom I clean the downstairs shower? How bad I am at balancing my checkbook? That I’ve worn this pair of jeans three days in a row?
When our kids were littler, John and I convinced them that the word supervision meant a superhero-like all-seeing power possessed by some people—particularly grown-ups: Adult Supervision, Parental Supervision. And that we had it. For example, a sign on a hot tub that read Parental Supervision Required indicated that your parent must possess Supervision in order for you to go in that hot tub, so that they would know how you were behaving, whether they were watching you or not.
A run of good luck and intuitive guesses on our part have kept the ruse half-alive, but maybe when I die it will be strengthened just in time for tweenhood. I don’t want to make them paranoid, but I don’t mind fibbing to keep them honest. It’s not anywhere as diabolical as the stunt that Ginny’s friend Lee and her husband pulled with their kids by telling them that when the ice cream truck’s music is playing that means the truck is out of ice cream.
“What if we keep our email accounts open and give your sister and John our passwords?” I reply. “That way they can get a direct ‘mother is watching’ email whenever necessary.”
“Perfect,” says Ginny. “We can have them all ready to go and my sister and John can just press send: ‘Freddy, it has come to my attention that you have been looking at porn on the laptop. Not cool. Not cool at all. Disrespectful to women, and it can cause blindness. Please use your time more wisely. Love you, Mom.’ ”
Finally Ginny gets the go-ahead for the clinical trial. As long as she doesn’t get too sick in the meantime and as long as she’s not in the placebo group, she now has a one in five chance of the immunotherapy working its magic.
Twenty percent. Ginny’s oncologist tells her that when it works it’s a miracle, but when it doesn’t it’s a total dud.
“At least there’s no stress at all there,” Ginny says. “No giant pressure to wake up under each day.”
* * *
The day before one of Ginny’s lung biopsies for the clinical trial, we meet up at a fancy hotel in town for the night. Ginny brings her best friend Lee with her, and I bring Tita, and we all four sit on the patio in the fall evening, drinking cocktails at the hotel’s restaurant—just like ladies out on the town. The waiter comes over and lights the gas fire pit.
“Good to see you girls out early having fun,” he says. “Nice night for it.”
We are, in fact, out early—since Ginny can’t have anything to eat or drink after midnight. At one point in the evening, she leans toward me from her luxurious oversize patio lounger, and I lean toward her from mine and she says: “Is it fucked up that I keep buying clothes for the kids for when they’re much older? Yesterday I went to the Gap outlet near the cancer center and spent a fortune on twelves and fourteens in boys’ pants. And I’ve been browsing prom dresses.”
“Totally fucked up,” I say.
Meaning: My friend, that’s one of the sanest things I’ve ever heard. Meaning: I never stop being amazed by how simultaneously cruel and beautiful this world can be.
19. Lyla
One afternoon on the way home from Duke, I catch a glimpse of someone who can only be Lyla in the parking lot of the Embers. The two scooters are in place and the door to the room is open and she’s wearing too-tight jeans and holding a cigarette, talking to someone in a beat-up sports car. She’s much fleshier than I imagined, bright peach skin and blond hair stringing down her back.
“It’s Lyla!” I’m yelling, and John’s yelling, “Jesus, stop yelling! You’re going to make me crash!” and I’m yelling, “Lyla! Put down that cigarette!” and then John is saying, “Of course Lyla smokes, what are you even talking about?” and I’m saying, “I really don’t like the looks of the guy in that car she was talking to.”
“Well we should probably stop and go back and you should tell her that right now, along with your smoking PSA,” says John. He usually rubs the back of my neck on the drive home from Duke, but now he’s stopped because I startled him. I’m wishing he would start again.
* * *
Lyla can’t stop making bad decisions. She spends a quarter of her paycheck on a pair of knee-high boots at the outlet mall. She oversleeps and misses her screening appointment for the Certified Nurse Aide program she’s trying to get into. She’s nicest to all the wrong customers at the Waffle House: the guy who is trying to make his way toward the casinos in Cherokee, the guy who suggests how she might look if she was only wearing her boots, the guy who has nowhere to stay and lost all custody of his daughter because some three-year-old kid at his mama’s daycare in the apartments where they’ve been living spilled juice on his Xbox controller and he told the little fucker to suck his dick and now there are child sexual assault charges pending.
She does make one or two good decisions: Sometimes at night when the a/c unit conks out and the guy with the custody situation is snoring and farting and the room gets so hot her thighs stick together, she climb
s onto the scooter and rides south on Route 54, out into the county, where she takes off her helmet and wastes a couple bucks of gas at top speed—which isn’t very fast but enough to unstick her hair from her neck, to feel a breeze where there is none.
Other times she slips out the motel door and pads over to the back of the cigarette outlet where they leave out a couple chairs for employee smoke breaks. There, she likes to pull one chair in front of the other and put her feet up and sit and watch the interstate stretching west toward Greensboro, then Winston, and then somewhere past all the lights: the mountains, where Cherokee is. Lyle used to talk about the mountains during his truck-driving days: hundreds of miles of monsters on the horizon, darker than the darkness of the sky at night.
At the Embers, it’s never really dark—with the interstate and the fast food signs and the gas station lights of nearby Graham glowing orange—like something almost on fire, like a cigarette, like something hot in her chest that says: There is no future. There is only this. The firmness of this chair holding you up. A little girl somewhere in town who doesn’t understand the word custody and misses her asshole dad. Not Lyle, but the possibility of Lyle. This nonstop river of cars headed who knows where. Somewhere—maybe thirty miles west—a woman who cannot sleep. A woman who is dying. A woman who can’t figure out how she is supposed to let go.
20. The Anniversary
A year after my mom’s death—August—I’ve just had a round of radiation for some new cancer in my spine—and now we’re on the Cape, back at the flagpole: Gin for Jan, I’m calling it, a circle of Adirondack chairs on the bluff. She loved the cocktail hour. Some of my closest friends are with us—Tita and Drew, Adam and Melissa—but otherwise it is just our new little family unit: me and John, our kids, my dad, Charlie and Amelia.