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.