“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 Nina 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.