The Nearness of You

by Amanda Eyre Ward

  “She’s real sick,” said Patsy, dropping a duffel bag and backing down the front steps. “You need to take her to the hospital.”

  “This is Eloise?” said Hyland. “Oh my God, this is Eloise?”

  “You can call her what you want,” said Patsy. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Hyland, get the car,” said Suzette.

  “I’m going,” said Hyland, running back into the house toward the garage.

  “Please leave Dorothy alone,” said Patsy. “That’s all I ask. She’ll sign whatever papers you need.”

  Suzette looked up. The child must have been sick for months; the fact that Dorrie had waited so long to treat her made Suzette want to lash out. But she took a breath. “Tell Dorrie she’s going to be OK,” said Suzette. “I’ll take care of her. I promise.”

  Patsy nodded. “I’ll tell her,” she said.

  “I promise,” said Suzette. She lifted the girl, so light, and held her close. “You’re going to be OK,” she whispered. “I’ve got you, baby. I’m never going to let you go.”

  Part Three

  Fifteen years later

  1

  Eloise

  When I was sixteen, I decided to find my mother. My real mother, the one who was related to me by blood and not just by using her connections to get me into some fancy New England boarding school where she “sincerely hoped I would get my act together.” Sincerely! You’ve got to love Suzette for her vocabulary. It’s not a joke—she really said that, standing next to my dad (biological and literal) in the kitchen in Houston, Texas, a place where—true enough—I had pretty much messed things up.

  “Your grades have been going steadily down,” said Suzette. “Three Ds this semester, Eloise! And then the pills…” She stopped, then rubbed her eyes and said, “We sincerely hope you will get your act together.”

  Sometimes, when she was strict, I could see what she must be like in surgery, wielding knives or whatever. It was freaky. At home, she was usually in her pajamas doing bills. “We love you, sweetheart,” she said. “This is a new chance. A fresh start.”

  A fresh start! I was living in an eighties after-school special.

  “Dad,” I said, leaning against the counter, making my eyes go soft. “You’re sending me away?”

  “Oh, Eloise,” he said. He’d already told me that on the East Coast it was normal to go to boarding school. It was an opportunity. He’d gone to boarding school himself, though not the same one. Even being the daughter of the famous Dr. Suzette Kendall couldn’t get me into a top-tier school. Not with three Ds.

  My dad was enthused. The day before, he’d unearthed old photo albums, pointed to snaps of himself in a blazer and tie. Dorm pranks! Ice hockey! Late-night talks in bunk beds! Why, he’d once ridden a sled down the stairs in Pharis Hall!

  I’d seen all the movies. I wasn’t buying it.

  But in the kitchen, when I was expecting more saccharine tales from his youth, my dad, instead, sighed and looked at Suzette. She blinked fast, which meant she was about to cry (again). “We both just think this is best,” said my dad.

  Something in me started to crack. And to stop the breaking, I ran into my room and shut the door tight. Out of desperation, I opened the medicine cabinet in my bathroom. Everybody always talked about feeling better after a beer, or schnapps, or Oxy. I’d never tried any of it.

  But there in front of me was the bottle of cough syrup I’d used for last summer’s cold. I remembered Fitz Hunter telling me about “robo-tripping.” I unscrewed the cap and took a big sip. I held the viscous liquid in my mouth for a few seconds, daring myself to swallow. When I did, the medicine was fire in my throat. And then nothing. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. My fat nose. My limp hair. I had nice eyelashes, but that was it. First my best friend, Jenni, had ditched me to be popular, and now my parents were sending me away. I took another sip, and another. I was entirely alone in the world.

  What about your real mother?

  The thought came to me as if there was a person with my voice speaking in my ear. (Was this robo-tripping? Fitz had talked about things slowing down around him, and then seeing a parade of animated elephants.)

  What about my real mother? The person whose genes I shared. I’d always wondered about her—what she looked like, if she missed me, if her voice would sound familiar. Was it being apart from her that made me feel so lost?

  I would find her, that was what. If Jenni would rather be with all the pretty girls and football boys, and my dad and Suzette were packing me off, there was always my real mother. Maybe she’d want me. Maybe I could move in with her and start all over. I got into bed—it was true, I felt as if I was moving in slow motion—and was asleep within minutes.

  —

  A week later, I arrived at the Pringley School. Although it was still summer in Texas, in my new life it was autumn.

  2

  Suzette

  When Suzette entered the Heart Centre, Africa’s only free-of-charge hospital for cardiac surgery, Dr. Alberto Raid was kneeling in the hallway, talking to a young girl clad in a hospital gown. “Alberto,” said Suzette, her happiness at seeing her former classmate canceling out her jet lag.

  “Ah,” said Alberto, “Suzette. Bellissimo.” He rose and embraced her. “I cannot thank you enough,” he said, into her hair.

  “I’m glad I could help,” said Suzette.

  “As am I,” said Alberto. “Come, let me introduce you to Elizabeth.”

  The girl smiled shyly, hiding behind Alberto’s leg. “She wants to go home, but we are not ready to say goodbye, not yet,” said Alberto.

  “You’ll go back soon,” said Suzette. “Who is your friend, there?”

  The girl held out a stuffed bunny rabbit. “It’s a princess bunny,” she said.

  “Ah,” said Suzette. “I’m happy to meet you both.”

  —

  Alberto (whom Suzette had kissed, only once and drunkenly, after their American Board of Thoracic Surgery In-Training Exam) had devoted his life to repairing pediatric hearts damaged by rheumatic heart disease. Eloise had been treated with antibiotics before her heart had been affected, but many children in developing countries were not. Even after Eloise’s full recovery, Suzette had new appreciation for the Ross procedure, a complicated surgery during which a patient’s diseased aortic valve was removed and then replaced with the patient’s own pulmonary valve. Using a biological rather than an artificial valve had many advantages, most notably the fact that the patient would not have to take blood thinners, which made pregnancy inadvisable for female patients. In other words, giving a girl with a diseased heart a biological valve meant she might be able to grow up and have children of her own.

  At Alberto’s request, Suzette was planning to perform the first Ross procedure at the Heart Centre.

  “Rheumatic heart disease—it is the disease of poor people!” Alberto cried that evening, as he made Suzette pasta in his spare apartment. “And it is the right of every person—rich or poor—every human, to have basic medical care.”

  Suzette blew on her tea. This was nothing she didn’t already know and agree with. She wished it were morning—she was ready.

  “These children’s hearts, Suzette,” said Alberto. “They are compromised. It is not good. Valves for shit. They are shit hearts.”

  “I’ve seen the echoes,” said Suzette.

  “I try to repair but—” He threw his hands up. “I have to replace.”

  Suzette nodded. Until now, Alberto had used only mechanical valves, which required the children to stay on anticoagulants for the rest of their lives. For the three little girls in the group (chosen because they were the most dire cases), Suzette’s intervention would be life-changing. “I’ll do my best,” said Suzette.

  “I know. I know you will—I still can’t believe you are here!”

  “Of course I’m here,” said Suzette. “To tell you the truth, it was a good time to get the hell out of Dodge.”
/>   Alberto looked confused.

  “I mean leave,” said Suzette. “I needed a break from…my life.”

  “Tell me,” said Alberto, who had made the mistake of placing his annual fundraising call to Suzette a few days after they had taken Eloise to boarding school. Suzette had cried on the flight home from Massachusetts, Eloise’s angry voice ringing in her ears: You don’t want me! Nobody wants me! I wish I had never been born!

  Suzette knew that sending her daughter away was a mistake, and knew they couldn’t keep her at home. Something had gone awry, and although she parsed it in her mind constantly, Suzette wasn’t sure what she could have done differently. One night, when Eloise was three and still waking with night terrors, Suzette had collapsed in Hyland’s arms, convinced she was doing something wrong: too much attention, not enough, the wrong nanny…

  Hyland had held her and whispered the words she’d used as a mantra for the next thirteen years. “You just keep showing up,” Hyland had said. “You hold her. You stay close. That’s what it is.”

  “That’s what it is?” said Suzette, who had never known a functional mother or father.

  “That’s what it is,” Hyland said.

  It sounded simple, but “staying close” in application was an unwieldy and perhaps impossible directive. To Suzette, being a mother felt like wrestling with a nuanced octopus of need and desire from the moment Eloise woke to her interminable yet precious “tuck-ins” every night.

  Despite her demanding career, Suzette had been the Halloween party coordinator and the soccer “Snack Mom.” (Snack Mom! Just shoot me, she’d thought, after volunteering for that one. And that was before she got the emails about peanut allergies and gluten and lactose intolerances! To top it off, all the kids groaned when she pulled out bags of apples and clementines, and Eloise called her the Mean Snack Witch.)

  When Eloise was young, Suzette had even bought a minivan. A Honda Odyssey—the most ironic car name in the book: her only “odyssey” was to work, preschool pickup, and their house. The car so unnerved her that on the day Eloise aged out of her booster seat, Suzette left the van filled with Cheerios and juice boxes on a CarMax lot and drove away in a Volvo convertible, hitting ninety on the freeway before slowing down to a reasonable speed and returning home in time to relieve the Latvian nanny.

  Years passed, and then the OxyContin. OxyContin! Prescribed three years earlier, after Hyland’s root canal. It wasn’t until Suzette discovered the pill bottle in Eloise’s backpack that Eloise’s increasingly volatile moods and slipping grades made sense. How could Suzette not have noticed that her daughter needed help? It was her job—her most important job—to protect Eloise as her mother had not protected Suzette. And she had failed. Suzette hated herself for this failure. She was ashamed. By the time Hyland brought up the idea of boarding school, Suzette was ready to cave in. What did she know about parenting—wasn’t Eloise’s slide into drugs spectacular proof that Suzette was a bad mother?

  When Alberto called from Sudan, where the Heart Centre was located, Suzette was poised to make a change. “Staying close” sure as hell hadn’t worked. Halfway through her conversation with Alberto, Suzette had brought up the idea of attempting the Ross procedure in Sudan. “If you think it’s possible,” she’d said.

  Alberto had laughed. “I’ll handle the red tape,” he’d said. “Anything is possible, as you well know.”

  To be needed again in a straightforward way: it was worth the price of the last-minute plane ticket. Hyland had seemed utterly shocked when she told him, shaking his head and saying, “I always knew you were nuts.”

  —

  “I found pills in Eloise’s backpack,” Suzette told Alberto, winding pasta around her fork.

  “What pills?”

  When she told him, Alberto’s eyebrows shot up.

  “I know,” said Suzette. “And her grades are terrible. We’ve sent her to a strict boarding school in Massachusetts. In short, Alberto, I’m the worst mother in America.”

  Alberto exhaled and shook his head dramatically. “Suzette, you have always, always been so cruel to yourself.”

  “I guess,” said Suzette. She preferred to think of it as holding herself to high standards.

  “She’s sixteen?” asked Alberto.

  Suzette nodded.

  “And you and Hyland, how are…things?”

  “Fine. Good, I guess, considering the circumstances. We’re doing our best.”

  “And your lovemaking?”

  “Alberto! That is none of your business!” She punched his shoulder. Suzette and Hyland still turned to each other at night, still found solace in each other’s bodies. She was lucky, she knew. But even her happiness with Hyland had a flip side—had Eloise felt left out, somehow? Had their union caused her unhappiness? Everything unraveled in the same direction: why was Eloise so sad?

  “I was going to offer my services…” said Alberto.

  “Thank you, that won’t be necessary,” said Suzette, laughing. It felt wonderful to be with Alberto, who had known her for so long. (And who still flirted with her.)

  “At least you have a child,” said Alberto, who had known both love and lust, but never fatherhood.

  “All the kids who come here sick, who you send home well…” said Suzette.

  “It’s not the same,” said Alberto.

  Suzette nodded. He was right.

  “OK,” she said, changing the subject. “Tell me about my patient.”

  Alberto moved the patient folder to the center of the table. “Her name is Angel,” he said. “I should not have a favorite, but Angel is my favorite.”

  3

  Hyland

  For years, Hyland dreamed of his mother. He woke in a cold sweat, feeling like an idiot. Really? Really, after all these years, even now that he was a fifty-five-year-old man, a productive adult member of society, really, still, dreams of being held close, looking up at his mother?

  She had been gorgeous, Hyland’s mother, with mahogany hair (it brushed against his face when he sat in her lap) and eyes the greenish, muddy color of Roxbury Falls, where they swam on summer weekends. She was wonderful, he loved her so much, she was dead. But at some point, couldn’t his unconscious brain move on? He never dreamed of Suzette—she was too all-consuming in his waking hours to be relegated to the sepia-toned filmstrips of dreams.

  What was it he longed for? Because he woke filled with an aching need, one he couldn’t honestly place, except to think, I want my mommy. He’d lie in bed, his breath short. He touched his wife between her shoulder blades, put his face in the warm, open place underneath her jawbone. He breathed in the smell of her, impossible to describe, yet a scent that made him calmer.

  I want my mommy, he thought.

  He remembered his father only occasionally. His father had been a shadow presence, distant and irritable. He’d spent his evenings sequestered in their wood-paneled den, smoking and watching TV. Even a knock on the door to tell him that dinner was ready would be met with an exasperated sigh, one that said, “Jesus, what do you want now?”

  He’d wanted a real man for a father, but that was old news. Once in a while, before he was able to quit his job, Hyland had had a client who reminded him of his father—some rich guy with absolutely no idea that the monstrosity he was forcing Hyland to design would bring him none of the joy he was hoping for. The Versailles-like entrance hall, the cantilevered awnings over the pool bar, et cetera: a stage set for a midlife crisis. It had been Hyland’s job to nod and murmur appreciatively, to bring these people’s fevered visions to fruition.

  But that was long ago. On the day Suzette was named chief resident, she sent him a text: This is your last day at Glencoe & Associates. Congratulations, my love—and thank you. XXOO and XXX later, Your Happy Wife. He sat at his desk for a moment, letting the news wash over him, taking a final look at the view from his office. And then he picked up Eloise’s fourth-grade school picture and his favorite coffee mug, went to Frank’s office, and said (with
relish), “Frank? The time has come. I quit.”

  He ordered a prefab, modern shed on his way home that very day. As soon as it was set up in the backyard, he began spending mornings inside with his sketchbook. He brought out his easel, purchased paint and brushes. After school, Eloise joined him. They shared a plate of fruit or cookies, listened to their carefully cultivated playlist. Hyland helped Eloise with her homework (when he could—algebra was harder than he remembered). She was a moody girl, often reticent. When he hugged her, she didn’t always hug back. Small things bothered her deeply—she worried about animals being mistreated at the zoo, or an old lady she saw at the bus stop with a vacant stare. She wasn’t much for joking around. Hyland grew to appreciate their silent companionship.

  Before Eloise went off the rails, Hyland had been planning a trip to Paris. He wanted to take his family to the Musée de l’Orangerie, to stand between his daughter and his wife and gaze at Water Lilies. The first time he’d encountered Monet’s murals (it was a rainy day), he must have stood before them for an hour. A cliché? Fine, so be it. He appreciated beauty. It made him feel closer to his mother. Yes, always back to her.

  Once, coming downstairs and watching Eloise climb into her mother’s lap to watch some god-awful television show, he was struck dumb with yearning, jealous of his own daughter.

  But Hyland had been through years of analysis. He went back to the room he shared with Suzette, sat on the edge of their bed, pulled his knees to his chest, and allowed himself a short (and fairly manly) cry. He missed what he’d had, and what would never be again. That was just the way it was. Oh, his mother. Her glossy hair.