The Nearness of You

by Amanda Eyre Ward

“Look,” said Suzette. “She met with the clinic psychologist. She was cleared.”

  “Cleared?” said Patsy angrily. “Whatever that means. And I’m sorry for you, you’re old and you want a baby. I understand that. But Dorrie’s just a child. Nobody asked me what I thought! Why didn’t anybody ask me?” She banged a kettle down on the stove top. They sat in silence as the water heated to a boil. Patsy filled two mugs and brought them to the table, sinking into the chair opposite Suzette.

  “She told us she wanted to help us,” said Suzette. “She said she needed money for college, and she wanted to give us…” Suzette rubbed her eyes, remembering that the fertility clinic had told them that Dorrie’s file wasn’t complete, that she hadn’t handed in all her papers. But Suzette and Hyland hadn’t cared. They’d gone ahead anyway, choosing to believe what Dorrie told them, which was what they wanted to hear.

  “You don’t know one thing about her,” said Patsy flatly. “Not one thing about her.”

  “But why did she want to be a surrogate?”

  “I don’t know,” said Patsy. “Well, yes I do. She needed money.”

  Suzette nodded, realizing how much she had wanted to buy into the story of a saintly young woman who wanted to help the Kendalls out of kindness, who would trade a perfect baby for money and fade away.

  “I love her, though,” said Patsy, her eyes downcast. “I love her no matter what she does. I hope she knows that.”

  Suzette was motionless, dread filling her like a cold liquid. “Do you think she’s…had a breakdown of some sort? Of a mental sort?”

  “I don’t know what,” said Patsy. She stood, grabbed a framed photograph from the mantel, and shoved it into Suzette’s hands. “Look!” said Patsy. “She’s a good girl! She didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

  Suzette gazed at the picture of Dorrie, solemn in a white lace dress. She almost felt sorry for her. Scratch that, she did feel sorry for her. But then a new conception of Dorrie crept into Suzette’s mind: a volatile girl who might have snapped, who might forever remain out of sight, existing only in their imaginations as the probable mother of Hyland’s baby, someone who could be anywhere, could be failing Hyland’s child, or even abusing him or her. Life with this version of Dorrie would be more horrible than even Suzette could bear.

  “I’ve got to find her,” said Suzette. “Where could she be?”

  “I have no idea,” said Patsy. “I already said that. If I knew, I would tell you.” She took Suzette’s hand, squeezed it, and let go. “She’ll come home,” said Patsy. “This will all sort itself out. The baby will be fine.”

  “Do you really think so?” asked Suzette.

  The phone on the counter rang, and Patsy leapt up to answer. “Hello? Hello?” she said. And then she turned away, but not before Suzette saw her face change, almost melting with relief. Patsy’s eyelids fluttered shut, her forehead relaxing as if being touched. Her shoulders caved inward.

  “I’m sorry, she’s not here,” said Patsy, her voice soft. “This is a wrong number,” she said gently. And then she put the phone down. She turned back to Suzette. “It was a wrong number,” she said with an edge of defiance.

  Suzette did not reply, staring at Patsy. There was a long moment during which the only sound in the room was faint, tinny laughter from a nearby television.

  “Well, it’s late,” said Patsy. She took Suzette’s untouched tea, dumped it into the sink, and rinsed the mug. She opened the dishwasher door, pulled out the rack, and placed the mug upside down. “I don’t think Sleepytime tea really does anything to make you sleep, do you?” she said. “You’re a doctor, right? What’s your professional opinion?”

  Suzette didn’t answer. Patsy hovered by the table. “Well, I’m going to go to bed,” she said.

  Suzette nodded and stood up. “May I use the bathroom?” she said. “Long drive back to Houston.”

  “Help yourself,” said Patsy, indicating a powder room off the kitchen.

  “Thank you,” said Suzette. The bathroom was small with yellow carpeting and blue tiled walls. Three dolphin-shaped soaps rested in a ceramic container beside the sink. It was a shame to use one, but Suzette didn’t see any other options. As she lathered the small animal, she stared at herself in the mirror. This was the home where Dorrie had grown up. It made Suzette uncomfortable to think about Dorrie as a person with a childhood home, with a childhood. It had been much easier not to think about her at all.

  When Suzette came out of the bathroom, Patsy wasn’t in the kitchen. Suzette lifted the phone receiver and hit *69, which Meg had told her about: apparently, when you hit these three buttons, the phone dialed the most recent caller.

  Suzette heard Patsy’s slippers whispering in her bedroom. The phone connected, rang once. Suzette gripped the doorjamb. She was short of breath, unmoored, standing in a stranger’s kitchen on Galveston Island. Suzette bit her thumbnail, tore the edge clean off.

  In the middle of the second ring, an answer. A brash voice, almost angry in Suzette’s ear. “Motel Claiborne, New Orleans,” said the man. “Motel Claiborne. Can I help you?”

  15

  Jayne

  At 8:23 A.M., when the Front Office Man went upstairs to evict the woman from Room 29, Jayne watched from her secret home. The woman from Room 29 looked confused, clutching her backpack, but not sick. Her eyes were fully open and met Jayne’s, unlike the half-lidded, dead eyes of the people who took medicine. Jayne knew that her old house on Chevron Avenue was empty. Jayne’s mother had some money under the mattress. It seemed that perhaps Jayne’s prayers for a way out were being answered.

  The first step was saying goodbye. Jayne went into her room and watched her mother sleeping. Her mother’s face had sores. The skin was as rough as the paper bags she’d once packed Jayne’s lunches inside, back when Jayne went to school. She’d write Jayne’s name on the bag and draw a heart around it; it gave Jayne a tiny thrill when she grabbed her lunch from the plastic bin each day.

  But now her mother’s hair was lank, unwashed. Her lips were bitten up and raw. Her arm was a landscape of scars. Jayne was sorry. She was so sorry, but she knew that she didn’t owe this person anything, not anymore. If her mother was going to choose the medicine over Jayne, then Jayne could stop being her daughter. It was only fair. Jayne knew it was only fair. Still she cried as she ripped a page from her notebook.

  She cried as she wrote, I love you and I will always love you and do not worry I am going to be fine. From JAYNE

  Jayne took the blanket that was bunched at the foot of the bed and she drew it up, tucked it around this woman’s shoulders. She laid her head next to this woman’s head on the pillow and closed her eyes and remembered. Then Jayne kissed the woman, and said, “Goodbye.”

  Step Two was sliding her hand under the mattress and finding whatever bills lay there. Step Three was her escape.

  16

  Dorrie

  I had struggled to wake when I heard a rough knock at my door. I sat up, nauseous and dizzy. The knocking continued. I stood, almost relieved that my sickly purgatory at the Motel Claiborne was over. I opened the door, and there was the man from the front office. He had let me make one phone call to Galveston, but even Patsy didn’t want me anymore.

  “Checkout’s at eleven,” he said. “Eleven yesterday.”

  I asked for a few minutes. He nodded. I dressed and put the motel soap and shampoo into my knapsack. I shuffled past him and climbed down the stairs. My throat was worse, my skin sweaty, my field of vision unnervingly blurry around the edges. I made it to the Mazda, got in, and locked the doors. I stared through the windshield, so tired I laid my head on the steering wheel and almost fell asleep.

  It’s hard to convey how lost I felt. Even though I knew I was out of options, I remained committed to keeping you. Making certain we would be together was the one thing that mattered to me, but it was also the one thing keeping me from going home. Maybe you were my excuse to start a new life, I don’t know. But I felt for the first time that I wa
s doing something worthwhile, growing you (though you needed all of my energy, it seemed, and more food than I could afford or keep down). I knew you would love me, and I yearned for that love.

  I jerked when a face appeared in the driver’s-side window of my car. It was the girl who liked to read, Jayne. I shook my head—it was too late to make a friend at the Claiborne—but Jayne motioned for me to roll down the window.

  “I saw you leave,” she said. “I saw them kick you out. If you don’t pay on time, that’s what they do to you. I could have told you that.”

  I nodded, too worn out to engage.

  “We used to have a house,” said Jayne. Her eyes were pale hazel, her expression earnest.

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “I can take you there,” said Jayne. I remember thinking that someone needed to comb the knots from her sunlight-colored hair.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “It was the hurricane,” said Jayne. She looked over her shoulder, nervous (I guessed) that her mother would appear.

  “What?”

  “It’s empty, my house,” she said, insistently. “Since the hurricane.”

  “The hurricane?”

  “We evacuated,” said Jayne impatiently. “FEMA sent us here.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t…”

  “Can you take me, too?” said Jayne. Her bangs were overgrown, and fell in front of her eyes. She shoved them aside. “I need to go home,” she said. “I don’t want to be here anymore. I have some money.”

  Again, I recognized something in her face—a recklessness born of desperation. She had her hand on the door handle.

  “Please,” she said. I had never heard a more anguished word.

  Almost reflexively, I unlocked the car. Jayne got in the back and locked her door, as if someone might pursue her. She handed me a piece of paper with an address. “Don’t you need to get anything?” I said. “A bag, clothes?”

  “I need to go,” she said. “I only need to go.”

  I started the ignition.

  —

  We drove out of the city in silence. The road shimmered with heat. My eyes welled with tears, and Jayne reached from the backseat and touched my hair. “It’s going to be OK,” she said. “I’ll take care of you, and you’ll take care of me.”

  I laughed, incredulous.

  “That’s how it goes,” said Jayne, with an innocence that broke my heart clean through. “You belong with the one who takes care of you. Right?”

  My instinct was to dismiss her. But in a deep place inside me (maybe it was your voice, already), I wanted to believe that this childish statement could be true.

  17

  Suzette

  Suzette drove toward New Orleans. When she peered into the rearview mirror, she saw a stranger. A wreck. She looked scared.

  This terror was familiar. Her childhood had been spent in an adrenaline-fueled haze of worried anticipation, trying to ward off problems before anyone found out about them. The farm where they lived was far from neighbors, which was both good and bad. On the good side, no one could hear Suzette’s mother when she went on one of her tirades. On the bad side, they were on their own.

  Suzette’s mother and father had bought the farm together, hoping to make a life “off the grid.” They pickled preserves, planted vegetables, and raised chickens. Pictures from that time made it look pretty nice, idyllic, even after Suzette was born.

  Maybe her mother went crazy before her father died or maybe after. From Suzette’s earliest memories, her mother was erratic and paranoid. There were plots against them. They were under siege. The phone had to be ripped from the wall. The radio was a two-way spying system.

  Blakesie had wiretaps inside him that had to be cut out with a kitchen knife.

  After a teacher took notice of Suzette’s too-small shoes and too-long hair, visiting the farm to introduce herself and “just say hello,” Suzette was no longer allowed to go to school. She wrote her own books. She studied Where There Is No Doctor, just in case.

  There wasn’t enough to eat. The chickens died. Suzette’s mother was a city girl playing farmer’s wife. She’d started with an inheritance, but eventually it ran out.

  The last winter at the farm—Suzette’s eighth—was the worst. Her mother told the social worker she was homeschooling Suzette, but unless ranting and raving counted as education, she was lying. Suzette sure did know a lot about government conspiracy theories, however, and also about the gold standard.

  As Suzette drove east on I-10, reaching the end of Texas and crossing into Louisiana, she tried to force her brain back to the present. But memory kept washing over her. The last winter, she’d been so cold she got frostbite in three of her toes: they’d been amputated when she was finally taken away. Her mother by the hearth, her face like taffy in Suzette’s fevered recollections. The way a neighbor had called the fire department after smelling smoke, and the fireman’s reaction when he’d found Suzette, curled up in her room, in the midst of a house on fire, starved to almost gone. “Oh, Christ,” he’d said. “Oh my God, there’s a kid in here!” He’d turned back to Suzette. “It’s going to be OK now, little one,” he had said, gathering her up, but his expression—horrified, shocked—belied his words.

  Suzette remembered looking out the back of the police car as they drove her away. There was her mother, in front of the flames, a heavy blanket over her shoulders. Her mother was screaming at Suzette. It was hard to understand her, but Suzette could just make it out: I did all this for you.

  For a long time, the fire was all she remembered, her brain mercifully blocking out the rest. But as the years passed, it all came back, piece by piece, as if the entirety at once would slay her. She’d grown up in adequate foster homes, gaining entrance to Columbia by sheer force of will. Her mother was committed to a mental hospital, paid for by Medicaid. When they’d saved enough, Hyland and Suzette moved her to a better facility. Suzette sent toffee at Christmas and a bouquet of flowers on her birthday.

  Becoming a surgeon had given Suzette’s life structure and meaning. A surgeon can never be lost. The best ones—the pioneers—were making up procedures as they went, creating what they needed to solve the problems in front of them, like Lewis and Clark on the Oregon Trail.

  There was Michael DeBakey, who, as the famous story went, bought Dacron at the store when the clerk told him they were out of nylon. He then went home, grabbed his wife’s sewing machine, and began making artificial arterial patches and tubes, which he went ahead and implanted in his patients. Successfully! (Though he and his colleagues rarely kept note of the failures, of course, so who knew?)

  Suzette had just missed the golden age—the first artificial heart, the first bypass, the evolution of the heart-lung machine—still, every time she scrubbed in, she felt as if she were entering a new continent, armed and ready to conquer whatever lay ahead.

  But now, away from the crises of patients whom she cared for but did not love, she was as fearful as she’d been as a child—and as unsure about how to fix things, how to make everything right.

  Suzette drove into the city where her plan ended. To an outsider (and Suzette often thought this way—how “an outsider” might view her, though who this “outsider” was remained a mystery—most likely it was her mother, which was something Suzette should probably explore in psychotherapy, but wasn’t going to), Suzette was a woman nearing forty who needed a shower. To an outsider, she was ineffectual, a catastrophe. In the hospital, she had status: she was listened to, and her instructions were the final word. But here, in a city she’d visited only a few times for medical conferences, all bets were off.

  18

  Dorrie

  The landscape grew more washed-out, more desolate, the closer we came to the address the girl named Jayne had scrawled on the sheet of paper. In the backseat, she was silent, peering out the window with an apprehensive expression. At one point, I said, “Jayne?”

  She didn’t answer, didn’t even look
up. It was as if she’d decided that if she ignored my query, it would go away. But I felt as if I should try to draw her out, if only to make sense of what we were doing.

  “At the motel…was that your mother?” I asked.

  Jayne closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. Fair enough. I was happy to be quiet, too. We were two battered ships in a storm, glad to have a port to steer toward. For the moment, it was enough.

  Jayne’s old neighborhood appeared to be completely abandoned. It felt like we were driving through a postapocalyptic film set: rusted-out cars, a child’s empty jungle gym, sagging ranch houses with some front doors wide open. It was utterly silent, and I was unnerved. We had been the only car on the road for over half an hour.

  Galveston, my childhood home, is such a vibrant place. Have you ever visited? There are festivals, the streets thronged with parades and loud music. At all hours, there are people out and about—filling up restaurants, claiming chairs on the beach, wandering the narrow streets in search of souvenirs. And there’s the island light: the streetlamps in the historic district, the otherworldly glow of the Moody Gardens pyramids. At the beach, the sun glitters atop the waves all day, then turns them ruby red at sunset, luminous deep gray at night.

  In contrast, the sky along the road to Jayne’s house was completely flat, a cloudless tarp stretched above us. The hiss of my car wheels on deserted Chevron Avenue seemed a soundtrack of sadness.

  Twenty-one Chevron Avenue was a small, bandage-colored home surrounded by a peeling picket fence. I parked the Mazda in a driveway riven with deep cracks. As soon as I turned off the car, a swampy heat descended, bringing with it a sewagey odor. I had read that some flooded homes had been completely submerged in filthy water for days. Eventually, the water had receded, leaving reeking structures to rot in the merciless Louisiana temperatures. Unless, of course, a penniless pregnant teenager and her skittish sidekick arrived to recolonize. And here we were.