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.
* * *
At the good-scan appointment, Dr. Cavanaugh—just back from a weekend of silent meditation—reminds me of the necessity of staying in the present with this stuff, not trying to extrapolate to the future.
“I’m not making any promises. I have no idea what this means,” she says, swiveling on her stool. “But let’s just take a moment to be in the moment and acknowledge this, right now, is great news.”
She shuts her eyes and assumes a vaguely meditative stance and takes some soft-belly breaths while I gaze at her.
Then, fluttering open a moment or two later: “You know—hold it not too tight and not too loose—isn’t that what the Buddhists say?”
Oh my God, yes! I want to yell. And: How?! This is the very crux of my whole existence. And honestly, of course—all of our existences, whether we realize or acknowledge it or not.
I am reminded of an image that one of my cousins—a woman who lost her husband to a swift and brutal cancer last year—suggested to me recently over email: that living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss. But that living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss, only with some fog or cloud cover obscuring the depths a bit more—sometimes the wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover.
Speaking of abysses, when we get home after the good-news appointment I do my first googling ever of survival rates—meaningless as I’ve been reminded that they are. They are indeed truly hideous for my situation. Nothing new—challenging to stare right into on the brightly lit screen, though.
After that I abandon the medical website and refocus my attention on the Embers Motor Lodge. An Internet hit on an obscure travel site offers me the only glimmer of history I could find about it: an anonymous contributor talking about his father, who as a teenager worked at the steak house once attached to the motel alongside a waitress who was married to major league pitcher Tom Zachary, a Graham, North Carolina, native who was famous for allowing Babe Ruth’s record-setting home run in 1927.
There is now a discount cigarette outlet where the Embers Steak House once was.
After an almost twenty-year career in baseball, Zachary died just down the interstate in Burlington in the late ’60s. I picture his wife the waitress, season after season, simmering away as she refilled water glasses and asked diners what temperature they preferred their steaks. Let’s call her Faith. I imagine her driving a scooter along Route 54.
There is a period of four days while I am in radiation treatment and traveling back and forth to the cancer center daily when the scooter is missing.
“Something terrible has happened,” I keep saying to John. “I can just feel it.”
“It might not always be the worst-case scenario,” says John. “Sometimes it’s just regular life.”
I stare at him doubtfully from the passenger seat.
On one of those drives I notice the door to her room is open. There is yellow tape across the frame.
“Oh my God,” I say.
“Hey, come on. It’s not necessarily crime tape,” John says. “It could say CAUTION—maybe they’re remodeling. It could say CAREFUL WET PAINT.”
The next time we drive past the Embers, the tape is gone and the white scooter is back in its spot.
* * *
We grope toward the future. Spring comes. We replant our garden. We roast Easter peeps over the fire pit in the backyard. Bunnies and mosquitos are born. Lazy curls bud and sprout from my bald head. I restart physical therapy and Pilates for my back, despite the advice from the spine surgeon that it “probably isn’t worth it”—given my prognosis of a couple years.
I swallow bottles of pills and herbs and vitamins; I rub frankincense into my feet to boost immunity and lower inflammation; I practice soft-belly breathing. The kids sign up for baseball and swim team. I nurse their fevers, sign their permission slips. When he gets home from work, John carries hamper after hamper of laundry up and down the stairs.
John carries so many things.
We laugh at the dinner table. We snipe at each other. We try not to. We make summer plans. We are captivated by a news story that a hole has formed in the sun the size of fifty earths. A coronal hole, they call it—where hot plasma traveling five hundred miles per second is spilling out into interplanetary space every minute of the day.
“Are we in danger?” asks Benny, for whom the extinction of the dinosaurs is never a distant thought. “Isn’t it bad that something that is burning so hot and close to us is doing things that scientists don’t understand?”
“They’re not sure,” I say. “It’s kind of a mystery. But no one seems super worried about it.”
In the meantime, the articles we read tell us to watch out for beautiful side effects: the hot plasma leak has kindled a storm of dramatic auroras that can be seen from Earth. The sky is on fire, but it is basically okay.
I had a hunch my scans would be good news when we were driving to my appointment and we passed the Embers: The scooter was parked out front.
We are month to month—Lyla and me—but we are holding steady, I was thinking to myself. A controlled burn. It’s terrifying, but maybe we can go a good long way like this.