The Nearness of You

by Amanda Eyre Ward

  “You’re classy,” said Pam. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  Despite herself, Suzette was flattered. “Get scrubbed in,” she said.

  “Yes, boss,” said Pam.

  But before Suzette had time to prep for her 1:00 P.M. angiogram, she was paged for a donor run. An ambulance waited outside St. Luke’s, and Suzette called Hyland as it sped her through the city to the airport. “I don’t know how long I’ll be,” she said.

  “We’re supposed to meet Gail and Oliver,” said Hyland. “At Applebee’s.”

  “I know,” said Suzette. “I’m sorry.”

  “OK,” said Hyland.

  “Honey,” said Suzette.

  “I know,” said Hyland. “You don’t have to say it.”

  The ambulance turned in to George Bush Intercontinental Airport, following signs to John F. Kennedy Boulevard. Suzette peered out the window as they drove onto the tarmac, parking next to a private jet. “We’re here,” said Suzette. “At the jet. I have to go.”

  “Goodbye,” said Hyland, cutting the line.

  Suzette sighed, closed the phone, and stepped out of the ambulance. She nodded to the pilot, grabbed the transport cooler, and climbed the stairs to the passenger entrance of the jet.

  “Six-week-old baby in Amarillo. Dallas didn’t have a match,” said Stefan Vaughn, the senior resident, who was already on the plane, flipping through the chart. “Motor vehicle accident. No insult to the heart. They did the second brain death exam an hour ago. Donor echo looks good.”

  Suzette nodded. They both acknowledged the baby’s death with silence. The stewardess offered a basket of cheese and crackers. Suzette shook her head. She closed her eyes as the jet began to pick up speed, barreling down the runway. When they were airborne, she opened her eyes again. Stefan was spreading Brie on a Ritz cracker. “Come to think of it,” said Suzette, “I will have a snack. And a coffee, please.”

  “Of course,” said the stewardess, unbuckling her seatbelt and heading to the galley kitchen.

  “I could get used to this,” said Suzette.

  Stefan nodded, brushing crumbs from his lips.

  A waiting ambulance at Amarillo International Airport transported them to the hospital. The operating room was filled with teams of surgeons: the baby would give up both her lungs, eyes, and kidneys as well as her pancreas, liver, small intestine, skin, and bones. But everyone was waiting for Stefan and Suzette, as the heart was removed first, transforming the patient from a state of brain death to a body without a pulse. The tiny cadaver was already prepped and draped on the operating table, and Suzette was relieved—it broke her to see a dead baby in his or her entirety, though she never let on.

  Suzette bowed her head. She tried to take a fraction of a second to be thankful for all the lives this sweet little girl would save. And then she got to work. Although quiet days seemed to hold menace for Suzette, when the risks were real she was utterly calm—in her element. She opened the baby’s chest, clamped the aorta, cooled and removed the heart. It was no bigger than a rubber ball. Suzette placed the tiny organ in her palm.

  “Nice, nice,” said Stefan.

  Suzette carried the heart to the transport cooler. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Suzette and Stefan ran back to the ambulance. In Houston, a baby was being prepped for the donor heart, which would survive out of a body for only four hours, maybe less. When they landed, Suzette carried the cooler from the jet into another ambulance, which sped her back to St. Luke’s.

  Pam was waiting in the OR next to another tiny baby, this one pink—alive. Suzette glanced at the chart: a girl named Bella, three days old. Suzette put on her headlight, magnifying loupes, surgical cap, and mask. For seven agonizing minutes, she scrubbed her wrists, forearms, and hands. She slipped on her gloves. The circulating nurse tied her robe, and Suzette entered the OR. “What are you doing here?” she said to Pam.

  “Double shift,” said Pam.

  Suzette inhaled, readying herself to transform a tragedy in Amarillo into a Houston miracle. To give life after ending life. The small, cool heart. The pulse of the oximeter. Her own hands—sterile, steady, unerring. Suzette loved her job fiercely. She reached for the scalpel.

  —

  When the operation was over, she took a shower and headed home. It was late, and she figured Hyland would be asleep. Suzette parked in their three-car garage next to Hyland’s Volvo and took a moment—in the hushed dimness, her car engine ticking as it cooled—to feel proud.

  In the kitchen, lined with wide windowsills on which Hyland grew herbs in deep blue pots, Suzette made a cup of tea, using the microwave instead of the expensive Italian teakettle perched on the six-burner stove. As Suzette waited for her water to boil, she looked at the Viking, which had been chosen by Hyland during the renovations she’d had little to do with. How did it turn on? She wasn’t sure. On top of two burners was a giant slab of metal. A griddle? Who knew?

  As a girl in upstate New York, Suzette had taught herself how to open a can with a knife. She took great pleasure in the fancy tea she could now afford—dried “Egyptian Chamomile blossoms” and “sweetly subtle citrus slices” enclosed in a “specially created silky Tea Pouch.” In the low glow from the skylight that stretched across the kitchen ceiling, Suzette read the box: “Surrender and treat your palate to a sumptuous delight.” Suzette breathed in the lavender scent of the cleaning products Nancy used to oil the floors and polish the appliances and counters each day, even when no one had cooked a thing. Nancy shopped, too, following Suzette and Hyland’s lists to the letter. (She was better at choosing clothes for Suzette than Suzette was herself—the one-shouldered gown Suzette had worn to the Menil Collection Gala had been perfect.)

  Hyland was not asleep. He was at his drafting table sipping sake. Since a work trip to Kyoto the year before, he’d begun drinking sake in the evenings from a tiny ceramic cup. He was partial to the milky-looking Dreamy Clouds, which was difficult to find in the United States, but not impossible.

  “How’d it go?” he said, looking up. Hyland wore pajama pants and a navy T-shirt, his feet bare on the rungs of his stool. He was heavier than he’d once been, but Suzette found his bulk attractive. Substantial. He looked important, with his pages of blueprints and mechanical pencil. Suzette loved his architect handwriting—the neat capital letters. She wondered if the maybe-baby would have his toes: long and thin, with oval toenails.

  “Good,” said Suzette.

  “Well, it didn’t go so well with Gail,” said Hyland, turning to face her, his tone flat.

  “Oh.”

  “She wants a mother who’s involved,” said Hyland.

  Suzette felt as if she’d been slapped. “Did you explain the situation?” she said, her voice sharp.

  “I’m just telling you what she said,” said Hyland, opening his hands.

  “That’s not fair,” said Suzette. She stood in the doorway, clutching her teacup.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Hyland. His shoulders fell forward. “But it’s a fact,” he said. He rose from his desk and went into the living room, collapsing onto the low-slung leather sectional.

  Suzette felt hot. She followed Hyland, sat down in the chair facing him. She set her cup on the glass table. “Well, to hell with her,” she said.

  Hyland shook his head, picked up Artforum, and pretended to read.

  “We’ll find someone else,” said Suzette.

  “I know,” said Hyland. He put down the magazine and sighed.

  “What is it?” said Suzette, reaching to touch his neck.

  “I don’t know,” he said. Suzette moved next to him on the couch, put her arms around him. Her shaggy-haired Hyland. He put his head on her shoulder and she held him.

  “I’m not going to apologize for doing my job,” said Suzette, after a time. “You have to know that. I’m not going to stop being my best because of this…” She struggled for the words to define what they were doing, then repeated, “because of this.”

  He n
odded, gathering himself, moving to the opposite side of the couch. They lay facing each other, legs outstretched and aligned. “I understand,” he said. “I do.”

  “Then what’s the matter?” said Suzette. He shook his head. Suzette lay back into the pillows. “Go on, say it,” she said, grabbing his foot.

  “Sometimes I have this dream,” said Hyland. “We’re married, and we live here in this same house. But every time you touch me, I can’t talk. I’m mute or something. Like, I can open my mouth, but no sound comes out.”

  Suzette crossed her arms over her chest. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Hyland shrugged. “I’m not a dream analyst,” he said. “I’m an architect.”

  “You should quit your job,” said Suzette, picking up her teacup, taking a sip, then resting it on her stomach.

  “You’re probably right,” said Hyland. “The Willie Nelson Condominiums are ruining my life. The splash pad. The mirrored walls. My God, I hate condo developments for young people.”

  “You could be a stay-at-home dad,” said Suzette. “I could see it. Really, I could. You could hang out at the park, teach the baby to paint…make peanut butter and bacon sandwiches with the crusts cut off…”

  “Now I’m hungry,” said Hyland.

  “Me, too,” said Suzette.

  “We actually have peanut butter and bacon,” said Hyland, standing up and moving toward the kitchen.

  “Oh my God, I love you,” said Suzette. “Though I have to note that bacon is not fabulous for the arteries.”

  “No you don’t,” called Hyland, approaching the refrigerator.

  Suzette laughed, following him. “I’ll never get to see the truck called HIZ,” she said.

  “Nor HERZ,” said Hyland, placing a cast-iron pan on the stove.

  Suzette moved behind him, reached around his waist, and rested her head on her husband’s strong back.

  The bacon smelled delicious.

  3

  Months passed: the ordinary river of days, but one now shimmering with the possibility of something—of someone—more. After several failed connections, a self-described “devoted housewife” from West, Texas (not to be confused with West Texas), chose the Kendalls. Nina Cortez was thirty-two, her dossier filled with snapshots of her three biological children. This would be her first surrogacy. Nina was nervous, she told the Kendalls over a strip mall Chinese lunch.

  “What do you mean nervous?” asked Hyland.

  “So many things can go wrong,” mused Nina.

  “That’s true,” said Suzette, spooning wonton soup from a Styrofoam bowl.

  “But so many things can also go right,” said Hyland.

  “I guess so,” said Nina. “I mean, of course! Of course, Mr. Kendall.”

  “Call me Hyland, please.”

  Nina nodded, her smile forced. She began injecting herself with hormones that Friday, as soon as the check cleared.

  —

  A few weeks later, Hyland deposited his sperm into a sterile cup and returned to the fertility clinic waiting room. “All set?” said Suzette, putting down a two-year-old issue of Good Housekeeping.

  Hyland nodded, blushing. He glanced around, but they didn’t know any of the other couples. Suzette surmised they were a decade older than most. Hyland put his hands in the pockets of his khakis and rocked back on his sneakers. “Well…” he said.

  Nina smiled at Suzette and Hyland, gathered her mint-colored handbag, and followed the nurse into Dr. Richmond’s office. “Here goes!” she said, giving the Kendalls a thumbs-up.

  Both Suzette and Hyland returned the gesture. When Nina was out of earshot, Hyland murmured, “Jesus, this is strange.”

  “Are we supposed to wait here?”

  Hyland shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “Did they have, like, dirty magazines back there?” whispered Suzette.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  Suzette hesitated, then said, “Yes. I really do want to know.”

  “An old copy of Hustler.”

  “An old copy of Hustler,” said Suzette thoughtfully.

  “Yup,” said Hyland.

  Suzette felt uneasy. She took Hyland’s hand and squeezed it.

  “Well,” said Hyland, “it’s not like I’d imagined.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Suzette. She gritted her teeth. She was sorry, deeply sorry that she couldn’t be the easy, breezy, fertile wife Hyland might have wanted, but she was also weary of being made to feel that she was lacking. It was Hyland, after all, who’d changed the rules, who all of a sudden wasn’t satisfied with all they had.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” said Hyland.

  “Right,” said Suzette. She checked her beeper, but no one had paged her. She scrolled through old messages on her PalmPilot. There was the one from the clinic about Patricia, who had decided Hyland and Suzette were too old. There was the one about Harriett, who wanted to help a couple with “stronger faith.” There were also replies from nanny services and a Baby Proof Expert named Lynn. And there was another note from her best friend, Meg, who wanted to see her, who missed her.

  “I’ve got to call Meg,” said Suzette.

  “Now?” said Hyland.

  Suzette understood that he wanted to hold these moments sacred—the moments of conception, though they were spent in a lemon-scented waiting room rather than their marital bed. Suzette had the fleeting thought that she should seduce him in the clinic restroom, but it seemed like a ton of effort, and he was likely spent from his laboratory orgasm. “Being parents isn’t about this,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how we get her, or him. What matters comes later.”

  “I guess so,” said Hyland.

  Nina came out shortly afterward. She seemed surprised to see them. “Everything good?” said Hyland.

  “Yes,” said Nina. “All good. I’ll call you when we find out if it…takes,” she said.

  “Sounds great!” said Hyland heartily.

  “Thank you, Nina,” said Suzette.

  —

  They drove home in silence, Suzette gazing out the passenger window at the trees, lush and verdant after a rainy spring. Houston was a city with personality—loud and bright, faintly marshy and rotten around the edges. Perhaps this was a place where she could be a mother. Suzette tried to imagine herself wearing a pink visor and a ponytail, driving a giant Voyager van. The image would not coalesce.

  On the flagstone porch of their house, Suzette saw a trio of giant cardboard boxes. “What on earth?” she said.

  “Oh, it’s my stuff from New York,” said Hyland.

  “Your stuff from New York?” Suzette narrowed her eyes. She had no idea what he was talking about, and she didn’t like it one bit.

  “Some of the things from my…from my parents’ house. It’s all been in storage, all these years.”

  “Oh,” said Suzette. She could not think of one thing else to say. Bitter panic rose in her chest.

  “I thought maybe it was time,” said Hyland.

  Suzette had always seen his past as a clean slate: miserable, lonely, over with and done. She felt the same about her life before she’d met him. As a duo, they’d walked away from the burning houses of their youths and built anew. (Not literally—their home was built in the late sixties—but metaphorically they’d built a brand-new dwelling. Of dreams. Of hoping that everything would be OK and savoring the simple joys. But now, here were boxes of smoking embers, sitting on their porch, just waiting to ruin everything, to set fire to their…to their new…to their house built of hope…)

  Suzette blinked, trying to ignore the incoherent chatter in her brain. She helped Hyland drag the boxes inside and watched as he opened them carefully with an X-Acto knife and removed framed photographs, baby blankets, boxes of papers. “There’s furniture, too,” said Hyland. “A whole house full.”

  Suzette made tea. Why had she never wondered what had happened to his dead family’s belongings? Was this what a male midlife crisis looked like—a man cl
ose to tears, fondling his own baby blankets?

  “It felt like it was time,” Hyland repeated.

  “OK,” said Suzette. What did he mean by this? That a baby would want to see his or her grandparents’ junk? Or that the thought of having a child had made Hyland nostalgic? Why had it not felt like the right time for the last fifteen years? Suzette told herself not to read too much into the boxes. They were just objects, after all. They weren’t necessarily harbingers of doom. Although they certainly could be harbingers of doom.

  Suzette picked up a photograph of a woman in a wedding gown. The woman had Hyland’s heavy eyelids, his fine nose. Even her bemused expression was familiar. “Your mother,” said Suzette with wonder.

  Hyland nodded.

  “She looks just like you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I never knew all this…existed.”

  “Yeah,” said Hyland. “Aunt Deb told me everything was in storage. I called her last week, and she told me where.”

  “Last week?”

  Hyland nodded, unfolding a child’s sweater, releasing the scent of mothballs.

  “Where should we put it all?” asked Suzette.

  “The baby’s room?” said Hyland. He had decided, without Suzette’s input, that the upstairs office would become the “baby’s room.” All of Suzette’s papers and the bills had been moved downstairs, and the desk set (not valuable, but one Suzette liked nonetheless) had been left by the curb for “large garbage” day.

  “The baby’s room,” said Suzette miserably. “OK.” One by one, they unpacked the objects. Suzette put the picture of Hyland’s mother on the mantel. She put the blankets and clothing in the empty room. They were solemn as they handled the remains of Hyland’s life before the accident.

  “It can happen in an instant,” said Hyland. Suzette thought of Nina Cortez, her womb, Hyland’s baby.

  “What if you love the baby more than me?” she said softly. “What if you leave me?”

  “What did you say?” called Hyland, halfway up the stairs with a cardboard box.

  She didn’t answer. Four weeks later, when Nina called and said, “It didn’t take,” Suzette did not feel disappointed, but relieved.