Benny tells me his favorite part about it is that he likes to holler really loudly when they are going fast. “I scream whooooo-eeeeeeee up into the air and it makes me feel good!”
My dad tells me that one time, on one of their more ambitious outings—about fifteen minutes in to a smooth ride just outside town—he could feel Benny’s arms start to slacken their grip. And he could feel the helmet resting on his back. Benny was falling asleep.
“Come on, Benny—stay with me!” he said, jostling his torso gently to try to wake him up without startling him.
Benny woke up.
“You can’t do that again,” my dad said as they waited at a red light. “It’s not safe. You have to stay awake so you can hold on.”
“But it sure felt good,” said Benny, who was able to hold it together the rest of the way home.
I think of this feeling sometimes—and I can imagine that sort of letting go: warm, dangerous, seductive. What if this is what death is: The engine beneath you steady; those that hold you strong; the sun warm?
I think maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to fall into that, to loosen the grip at the waist, let gravity and fate take over—like a thought so good you can’t stop having it.
8. Intervention
“I had this dream,” I tell my dad one day. “Mom was back—and she was pissed at us. Ranting and raving around in her bedroom at all the things we’d let go of or weren’t keeping up with. Like plants we’ve let die and the dishes that are in the sink and the unvacuumed dog bed and things like that—sort of a regular Saturday morning from when she would get on one of those tears. She was telling you all the things you needed to get at Lowe’s. After trying to reason with her and not getting anywhere, I pulled you out into the hallway. ‘This is untenable. We have to have some kind of intervention!’ I was saying. ‘We need to tell her she’s a ghost and she shouldn’t be here so much. Is this happening a lot?’ and you said, ‘Well, yeah—she’s here most weekends these days, and lots of afternoons when I get home from work.’ I was saying, ‘Dad, we need to tell her she’s dead. We have to let her know she can’t keep coming here and telling us what to do.’?”
My dad is laughing. “That’s so weird,” he says. “I had basically the same dream yesterday. That I was sitting on the patio and she was raging around pointing out all the weeds I’ve left to grow and all the places where the garage needs patching.”
My poor mother—the legacy of a taskmaster. My dad and I click two beers together on the porch and look at the sky.
9. The Point toward Which You Were Constantly Heading
We start up book club again—about six months after my mom died. It’s never really a formal discussion, but one day Anne sends out an email inviting us all to come to her house. There is a shock to the ease with which we gather our chairs a little closer, adjust our banter for five instead of six. Where did she go? I keep thinking.
“I couldn’t imagine ever doing this without her, and yet here we are,” I say to the group. We sit in a circle in Anne’s living room, our plates and wine glasses propped around us on tables, our books in our hands.
We’ve chosen Helen Macdonald’s recent memoir about her obsession with training a goshawk in the wake of her father’s sudden death. The book is as dark as they come—even the cover, mostly black—like each of us holding a little tomb.
“Well, this one maybe didn’t have the best timing for us,” says Linda. “I could barely read any of it!” We all laugh. We can’t quite remember how we selected it.
“And it’s definitely not for vegetarians or the faint of heart,” says Tita.
The book is full of raw meat and mouse carcasses and visceral descriptions of the instincts of a predator. I loved it.
“It’s weird,” I say. “For me—I can’t find books dark enough right now.”
The things I’m loving these days: things where everything is not okay, and that’s okay—or not. Montaigne incredulous: “Did you think you would never reach the point toward which you were constantly heading?”
10. The Bridge
Ginny’s cancer becomes metastatic about eight months after mine. “Do you have room in your goddamn boat?” she texts from the doctor’s office. “Lung and bones. Looks like our road trip down the nipple highway just hit a dead end.”
The next day she trades in her Mazda crossover for a red convertible Beetle. I visit her down in Charleston the following weekend and she takes me out for a joyride: our modified Thelma and Louise moment—although we each know that we each think about pulling a stunt like that sometimes.
“I can’t sleep,” she says, our two sets of chemo curls blowing in the wind as we cruise up over the bridge out to Isle of Palms. “I’m just too fucking sad to sleep.”
11. Embers
April, a recent scan: All my tumors are stable for now. No new growth.
These are the appointments you don’t expect as a stage four cancer patient. I didn’t see this part coming: respite, good news following catastrophic news.
Instead I focus on these kinds of things: a motel on the side of I-40 near Graham, North Carolina—bereft on the shoulder of an off-ramp—called the Embers Motor Lodge. I am not confident it has seen better days, but I hope it has. And I equally hope the name never ever changes. If I someday have a psychotic break and run off to have an affair with the UPS man, look for me there first.
It’s generally a quiet spot—occasionally a maid’s cart on the sidewalk, a folding metal chair outside the tidy dark mouth of a guest room door, a car or two in the lot. It looks like the kind of place that rents mostly by the week or month, although it’s hard to take in much detail at seventy miles per hour. But over the last year on the many trips back and forth to the cancer center at Duke, this one scooter—parked outside the second to last room—keeps catching my eye. It’s there almost every time.
The scooter is screaming, Write a novel about me: its loyal presence outside that room, the small shell of hard luggage screwed to the back for transporting all worldly possessions, the possible DUI that precipitated it, the parade of curtain-drawn days of the last year of the owner’s life in that box of a room, the job she (can she please be a she?) is trying to get it together to apply for at the Waffle House just under the overpass on Route 54. The very fact of her smoldering on the lumpy mattress each night. I feel like she and I would have some stories to tell each other about this past year: waiting to catch flame.
Ginny comes up from Charleston to get a second opinion at Duke. I’ve told her about the scooter, and on her way to Durham she pulls off at the exit and stops at the motel. She texts me a picture from the parking lot. There is a heart-shaped wreath dangling from the crooked numbers on the motel room door.
“The plot thickens,” she writes.
We name the fictive waitress Lyla. We decide she’s looking for her father—Lyle—but only has an old photograph and this heart wreath she found in her mother’s closet when she died. It helps us somehow to think like this, to imagine the countless vulnerabilities and stories that fill the world.