The Bright Hour

by Nina Riggs

  Hogsmeade, on the other hand, is a very realistic re-creation of a place that does not exist—except vividly in the minds of many visitors. Teenage boys stream past us in black gowns. Four-year-olds and middle-aged women stand together in front of storefronts, working out spells with wands. Freddy has emphatic opinions about restaurants: “I think we should eat at the Three Broomsticks. In the books, it’s excellent.”

  The line is very long though, so instead we grab foot-long hotdogs at a stand outside the entrance to Diagon Alley and find a place to rest our feet on some empty steps—only to be asked almost immediately if we would move for a moment by several visitors, so that they could take a picture they have traveled hundreds of miles to snap. It appears we have mistakenly stopped for lunch on the steps of the façade of the London townhome of famed Harry Potter wizard Sirius Black at 12 Grimmauld Place.

  “Excuse me,” says a tween in braces as she edges up next to me on the stoop. “I’m so sorry. I just really need to see if there is any chance that this door opens to somewhere.”

  How can you deny someone led by this instinct? I know it doesn’t open, but I move my bag of potato chips out of the way. She knocks and pulls hard on the latch. After two tries, when nothing gives, she shrugs and smiles—rejoining her family and moving back into the throngs.

  * * *

  In the same way my fingers keep sifting through our various passes and tickets, my brain keeps trying to sort the levels of surrealness. Everywhere, quartets just like ours—and my family growing up—make their way. And in many of these little units, one member looks possibly unwell: functioning, but with something in their eyes that suggests the glimmer of the underneath.

  As we thread toward the park exit that afternoon, the Minions ride has a one-hundred-and ten-minute wait—for those without an Express Pass.

  “A hundred and ten minutes,” says John. “That’s just incredible.”

  He’s opted against the Xanax after all, but he’s feeling the high of hopping on the water taxi and heading back to Portofino Bay—the unmitigated thrill of a crowd-free afternoon.

  * * *

  I was here once before, when I was a year older than Freddy. Well, not here exactly—but at that esteemed amusement park down the road. Charlie was still in a stroller. I can’t stop thinking about my parents. On that trip, they were a couple years older than John and I are now—yet they seemed so much more grown up: my mom stewing in stress, at every moment on the verge of yelling about the location of the traveler’s checks and the free meal coupons for the Contemporary Resort. Everything a fine hair from catastrophe, checking the strapped-on wallet under her pants line with the ritual of an OCD pattern. It was not unlike our trip to Portofino.

  At some level, I think travel has overall become less stressful since I was a kid—with the advent of bank cards, the euro, electronic ticketing, the iPhone. Fewer moments of stark panic on the way to the airport, at least. But maybe I am also generally less uptight of a traveler than my mom.

  I am trying to know myself. I want a better sense of what kind of mother the kids will remember me to be. It’s hard: I am not done becoming me. I am still in the works. I still aim to be softer in some places, firmer in others. Someday—impossibly not that far from now, the boys will come to Orlando with their own families—memories etched in each of their brains of this visit here—and they will learn something of themselves, too. The shape of themselves: their arms around their kids on the teak bench, that hospital bed on the children’s ward, my dad’s old Datsun on the side of the highway.

  As we walk together now across the Portofino piazza in the late afternoon sunset of winter, I feel us—me, John, the boys, my mom somehow—all of us hurtling separately—yet so very close to one another—toward the future.

  * * *

  Back at the resort pool, John and I sip real alcoholic beverages while the boys run around on a fake sand beach. We clink champagne glasses that have been specially designed not to break on the ground cover surrounding the pool, as the bartender explains to me when Freddy later knocks mine off the table with his towel.

  “At least I’m here with you,” I say to John—an inside joke of our relationship. At least I’m here with you is a line from one of the Llama Llama books that we have read to the kids before millions of bedtimes: “I think shopping’s boring, too,” said Little Llama’s mama when the baby llama was having a meltdown in the llama version of Costco. “But at least I’m here with you.” We’ve said it to each other a hundred times over the years—words of solidarity and disarmament on the battlefields of parenting.

  What happens to little scraps like this, when there is only one person left to get the allusion? I picture a piece of paper—soggy and unreadable—that I saw a groundskeeper fish out of the canal with a net earlier in the day when we were waiting for the water taxi. What is the use of an inside joke with the dead?

  “I sure wouldn’t ever want to do it with anyone else,” John says, putting his arm over my shoulders.

  The sun on our backs is real. And Benny’s laughter on his way down the pool’s impressive waterslide—made to look like the ruins of an ancient temple—is real. And the boys’ still-little bodies, wrapped in towels, blue-lipped and shivering in our laps after they decide the day is done: They are real.

  * * *

  I will never travel with my nearly grown sons through Italy. Let’s just say that. Just as they will—probably—never buy an espresso with lire or navigate the world without a handheld map that knows their exact location and the likelihood of a coming squall to hamper their hike along the cliff side from the villages of Corniglia to Manarola. That world is gone.

  Instead, we follow our children down manicured paths through an overdeveloped inland swamp, whispering remember you must—we all must—die in their ears as they find their way through worlds rebuilt and worlds that never were.

  30. Tumor Burden

  Another hospital stay—this time, my lungs. I’m not breathing well. Tests, scans, waiting. The doctors suggest a cause they are investigating: the microscopic invasion of the lymphatic ducts in the lungs of millions of unimageable cancer cells. Lymphangitic carcinomatosis. It is not a good development.

  “The tumor burden could be quite high,” the pulmonologist says, “making it hard to get the oxygen you need.”

  Tumor burden: like a backpack you might put down, like a worry you might unload, a crime you might confess. I’ve been here five days: the river of nurses and techs and transporters; merry-go-rounds of doctors; vitals and alarms. Someone urgently needs to weigh me at 3 a.m. Something is beeping.

  Sometimes it feels like the whole world is beeping.

  * * *

  Outside, a dreary January morning: low clouds draped on the helicopter; uncharacteristically warm and muggy. Around noon, a hospital transporter comes for me and wheels my bed down a long corridor and into the abyss of the hospital for another breathing test, and all during our passage I can see, inside the cell-like rooms we pass, the face of the new president on dozens of TV screens. The world is anxious: The cloud cover has shifted under the tightrope. Everywhere, the tumor burden is high.

  “How are you holding up today,” says the breathing tech in the windowless room. “All things considered?”

  I’m not sure to which things he is referring exactly. I don’t know if he is sure either.

  “I’m okay,” I say. “Considering. How are you?”

  He says he is fair to middling.

  “Of course, that’s what I always say,” he says. “Because it about always fits.”

  When the scan is done, he says, “Bon voyage, madame,” holding open the door as the tech wheels me back into the hallway. “Hasta la vista. Ta-ta for now. Have a blessed day.”

  * * *

  When I am back in my room there is a covered tray by the bed I forgot I had ordered. There, in the chocolate pudding, I discover a continent of whipped cream that I plan to explore. And also a dish of peaches, which somehow—even in
their thick syrup—are plump and firm: a suggestion of rebellion in their freshness—sweet and lovely on the tongue.

  John has just returned as well—after spending a few hours at work and at home with the kids—and is now hunched in his impossible recliner by the window where he’s been spending his nights, catching up on email on his laptop.

  “Well, that’s a mess,” he is saying, sipping coffee from his thermos.

  Behind John, I can see billows of steam rising off the top of the hospital buildings, and the midday light—what there is of it—that filters through the ninth-floor window is silvery and thin.

  Everything is strange—so unlike anything we have done before—and everything, too, is exactly as we imagined.

  31. Scrummle

  “So, do you know what ‘scrummling’ is?” asks Benny as we cuddle in bed on the night before I start a new chemo regimen. Downstairs: the sound of our new at-home oxygen compressor—kicking on, kicking off. I don’t yet need the extra air in bed.

  I’m on the laptop, searching unsuccessfully on the regular Internet forums for people’s experiences with the cocktail. Then it occurs to me that I’m not finding much because generally these people are pretty dead. It’s not like with the earlier drugs where everyone’s buzzing about hair loss and metallic tongue.

  “I do not,” I say. “Do you?”

  “Sure. It’s a secret sound,” he says. “A puppy sound. Only puppies can hear it. And you and I are brand-new puppies who haven’t opened our eyes and only know how to scrummle.”

  “Does MacDuff know about scrummling?” I ask MacDuff on the floor.

  “He used to,” Benny tells me. “But he might have forgotten now.”

  “Now that you mention it,” I say to him, closing my laptop and snuggling us both down deep under the covers, “I think I do remember scrummling. From when you were a baby.”

  “That would make sense,” says Benny. “It’s a being-born sound.”

  No sound that feels farther away to me these days than a being-born sound. Here in our waning thirties, some of my closest contemporaries are having babies. My best friend from high school is about to give birth to her fourth. Bonnie and her girlfriend have hatched a plan to conceive. My mom was pregnant with Charlie when she was exactly as old as I am now. It feels impossible, as my days are filled with imagining how to wind things down, that someone my age is winding things up, preparing new life, getting ready to scrummle.

  “It’s kind of a digging sound,” Benny tells me. “Like scrumma scrumma scrumma, scrumma scrumma scrumma. Like you’re moving toward something, even though you’re already happy where you are.”

  “Oh yes, I definitely know that sound,” I say. “Can you do it even when you’re not really a newborn puppy?”

  “Only if you know the secret,” he whispers. “That you’re not really moving anywhere. You just make it look like you are to someone who isn’t paying close attention.”

  32. The Bright Hour

  According to Freddy, the apocalypse has come. Today is his birthday—ten—and despite my passionate resistance over the last decade to gun play, we have given him the granddaddy of weapons: the Nerf N-Strike Elite Demolisher 2-in-1 Blaster, a semiautomatic, batteries-required, 2-in-1 missile-launching, cartridge-loading blaster that is so heavy it needs a strap.

  “Seriously, Mom—this is basically world ending. Who even are you anymore?” Freddy says when he rips off the wrapping paper at the breakfast table.

  For the first time since I have been home from the hospital, the sun is out: a warm, health-filled, spring-will-come, balm of a sun. After school, I denounce homework (birthday, sun) and the boys holler and mud-kick out into the wide yard with the Great Demolisher and some lesser demolishers. I am still short of breath and weak, but I come sit on the steps of the back deck in a T-shirt and sweat pants and feel the light on my skin: There is life—this bright hour. Let us make good use of time, whispers Montaigne.

  “What are you guys pretending?” I ask when the boys come panting to a stop for a moment by my side.

  “Well, I am the leader of a rogue posse of survivors after a devastating nuclear tsunami has wiped out most of the world,” Freddy says. He is dressed up in his Slash leather jacket from Halloween, aviator sunglasses, a self-styled balaclava, snow boots—and of course the Demolisher. “Benny is my executive assistant revolutionary and we are trying to get to a safe haven in the tree house where our comrades have sent signals that there is a food supply.”

  “Yikes,” I say. “Sounds intense.”

  Benny yells “Nuclear tsunami!” and leaps off the steps next to me, thrusting a sword into the air. In his other hand he is somehow carrying a notebook, an extra Nerf gun, and a stuffed turkey vulture.

  I can hear through the open window that John has come home from work—rustling in the kitchen, maybe with the birthday cake.

  “I’m on the deck,” I call out.

  “Okay,” he calls back. “I’ll be out there in just a sec.”

  Something in his voice—just a sec—a sliver of impatience, an edge—makes me flash to our voices that taut night in the bedroom not long after I was diagnosed. My voice: I have to love these days the same as any other. His voice: I’m so afraid I can’t breathe.

  We’re making our way like this, though: We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other.

  Already, the boys are off to the wilds again—whooping and surviving. It will be getting dark soon—the sky has started with that eerie postapocalyptic light of a warm evening in winter—but I am not ready to call them back in. There is nothing in this whole world that could make me call them back in.

  Afterword

  Nina completed the manuscript for The Bright Hour in late January 2017. By then, we knew the cancer had spread significantly in her lungs. Her prognosis was grim. While working on the final edits of the book, she became weaker, her breathing difficult and labored, even at rest. She was admitted to Duke University Hospital on February 16. Later that week, after discussing the remaining treatment options with her oncologist, Nina decided to enter a hospice facility in Greensboro, five minutes from our home, rather than pursue an aggressive course of chemotherapy that seemed more likely to shorten her life than marginally prolong it.

  As the sun set on Saturday, February 25, Jennie and Bonnie took the boys home for dinner. They said good night to Nina, not goodbye. After midnight Nina’s breathing changed. I called her father and brother, who came out to sit vigil with me through the night. In my delirium and grief, I had flashes of Nina when she was in labor with Freddy ten years before.

  Morning was always Nina’s favorite time of day. Before she got sick, she used to bounce out of bed at first light, and she insisted on open blinds when we went to bed, even if we were in a hotel with an eastern exposure in the desert. So it seemed fitting that she died at 6 a.m. on February 26, just before the sun came up.

  —JOHN DUBERSTEIN, MARCH 2017

  Acknowledgments

  Nina really wanted to be around to see The Bright Hour go to press. But, while she did not live to see the book materialize fully, she died knowing it was in production and was keenly grateful to a great number of folks who made that possible.

  Nina’s agent at The Book Group, Brettne Bloom, is an astonishingly kind, talented, warm, and powerful human being. Having Brettne as an agent was like finding a sister Nina never knew she had. Lasting friendships sometimes do not get to last, sadly, but there’s no doubt that Nina and Brettne had already established the foundations of one.

  Nina also wanted to thank her editor at Simon & Schuster, Marysue Rucci. When we met with Brettne and Marysue in Greensboro, I could not believe that Nina had the good fortune to be involved professionally with both these women. I suppose it makes sense that Nina’s dream agent would obtain for her the perfect editor. Marysue not only took on the project of a dying woman, with all its inherent risks (noncompletion, for one), but made Ni
na feel as vital as any author—sick or well—could in the writing of a manuscript. She too forged a relationship with Nina that transcended their professional roles.

  During what would prove Nina’s only visit to New York and the Simon & Schuster offices, she was celebrated by her team at S&S before she’d even completed the work. Marysue had laid the groundwork, but a whole mess of Simon & Schuster folks followed suit, including: Carolyn Reidy, Jonathan Karp, Richard Rhorer, Cary Goldstein, Sarah Reidy, Dana Trocker, Ebony LaDelle, Martha Schwartz, Carly Loman, Jackie Seow, Thomas Colligan, and Lisa Rivlin. Special thanks to Zack Knoll at S&S and Dana Murphy at The Book Group for their wonderful work behind the scenes.

  Nina wanted to thank Samantha Hahn for the fantastic cover art, and Jenny Meyer, who handled Nina’s foreign rights. She was also incredibly grateful to all her foreign publishers, especially Australian publisher Michael Heyward and his lovely colleagues at Text, whose encouragement and feedback were much appreciated during the writing process. Also Michelle Weiner at CAA.

  Thanks to Dan Jones at the New York Times’ Modern Love column for publishing her piece, “When a Couch Is More than a Couch,” a dream publication for Nina and one that led directly to this book. Nina also wanted to thank Drew Perry, whose insightful edits were almost all incorporated into the book; Tita Ramirez; Melissa and Adam Tarleton; Heidi Levine; Amanda Moore, who read drafts of what would become The Bright Hour; and Cristina Henriquez, who advised Nina early on about how to develop a book project. Nina had the support of a very close circle throughout her life and her illness, including my sister Jennie Duberstein; Nina’s cousin Bonnie Dundee; her best friend since high school Eliza Harrington Myers; her brother, Charlie Riggs, and his wife, Amelia; and her father, Peter Riggs, the kindest, most supportive, and most quietly competent parent a girl could hope for and one of the best human beings I have ever met. Nina couldn’t share The Bright Hour with her mom, Jan Riggs, who passed away in August 2015. Nina’s resolve and clarity in the face of terminal disease is an implicit tribute to her mom, who was a source of much of Nina’s strength and clarity on mortality.