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 rake 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.