The Nearness of You

by Amanda Eyre Ward

  Suzette sank into Alberto’s metal desk chair. He lit another cigarette, raised his eyebrows.

  Hyland’s voice echoed on the phone line. “I’m flying up to New York,” he said. “Though what I’m going to do there, I don’t know.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Suzette. “Eloise is looking for Dorrie? In New York?”

  “Yup,” said Hyland.

  “How did they lose her?” said Suzette, anger rising in her chest.

  “She said she was going to the bathroom. She turned her phone off, and then…who knows?”

  “How long ago was this?” said Suzette.

  “Sometime this morning.”

  Suzette put her head in her hands. “New York,” said Suzette. “I took her there once, when she was six.”

  “I know,” said Hyland.

  “For her birthday.”

  “Yes.”

  Suzette could see Eloise as a six-year-old vividly, her black curls in pigtails. She’d worn a red coat with wooden toggles and matching red boots. They’d visited the Plaza, had tea and scones in the Palm Court. Eloise had wanted to ride the elevators “like the real Eloise in the books.” They’d gone to a marionette show in Central Park. For a few days, Suzette had dreamed of relocating to New York, but eventually, the subways and constant fear of losing sight of Eloise wore her down. She returned to Houston with a new appreciation of her clean, dim garage with its automatic door and direct access from the car to the kitchen. In Houston, she had her own, fenced backyard with a sandbox, swing set, and no strangers.

  “Jesus,” said Suzette.

  Alberto cleared his throat.

  “I think I know where Dorrie is,” said Suzette, admitting to her husband for the first time that she searched for Dorrie, once a year or so, after too much wine. “I mean, I think she might have changed her name. Taken her mother's maiden name, Black. What I’m saying…” Suzette stopped, cleared her throat, then continued. “What I’m saying is that someone named Dorothy Black lives in Hyannis, Massachusetts. It could be her. I found the name on a property record.”

  There was a silence that sounded like wind along the line, and then Hyland said, softly, “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “She’s a cashier at Walgreens,” said Hyland.

  “Really? Oh.”

  Hyland exhaled heavily. “I thought of Black, too. And when I had that project in Boston, I drove to the address. I followed her to work. And we were right. It’s her.”

  “How does she…” said Suzette. “Is she…?”

  “I never talked to her. She stopped at McDonald’s. Remember how she’d always drink Diet Coke?”

  “No,” said Suzette. “I don’t remember that.”

  “She liked sweet things in general,” said Hyland. “Like tiramisu. I took her out, after the insemination. For dessert. I know it sounds kind of strange.”

  “I don’t think it sounds strange,” said Suzette. She closed her eyes and pictured Hyland, his eyes red, the way they became when he was worried. Even though she was on the other side of the world, Suzette had a small bottle of Visine in her makeup bag, in case Hyland needed it. She had a roll of strawberry Tums, for Eloise’s stomachaches.

  Alberto sighed, made himself known. Suzette didn’t look up.

  “You should call her,” said Suzette. She picked up one of Alberto’s pencils, stabbed herself in the thumb with its point.

  “I told you, she turned off her phone.” After a pause, Hyland said, “Oh, you mean Dorrie.”

  “Yes. In case Eloise ends up there. If we could find Dorrie on the Internet, I’m sure Eloise can.”

  “Eloise doesn’t know her name.”

  “I guess not, but who knows?” said Suzette.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Hyland. “I don’t want to call Dorrie.”

  “Do you want me to?” said Suzette.

  “No,” said Hyland. “I’ll do it. And really, Suze, you should just sit tight. I can keep you posted. I can handle things on this end.”

  “No,” said Suzette. “I’m coming home.” Her stomach clenched at the thought. How had “home” become a place she was desperate to escape? How had her joyful, pigtailed daughter—with a smile that lit up Manhattan—become a sullen stranger? Suzette couldn’t have tried any harder! And even now, and always, she would fly across the world to locate Eloise, to make her well.

  “Please, Suzette,” said Alberto, leaning across his desk. “It’s time to operate.”

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

  “I know,” said Suzette.

  “Suzette?” said Alberto, standing and moving to the door. “Let’s go now, OK?”

  She thought of Angel, of the news crew, of Alberto and all his hard work. But the choice was simple. “I’ll be home as soon as I can,” she said.

  “Suzette!” said Alberto, shaking his head. “I can’t do the Ross procedure, Suzette.” He opened his hands, gathered them into fists. “I’ll have to give Angel an artificial valve. And I’ll have to tell her…”

  “I’m sorry,” said Suzette. “I am sorry, Alberto. But this is my daughter.”

  10

  Dorrie

  It was my day off and I was trying to concoct a slow-cooker dinner out of chicken thighs, some wan vegetables, and taco seasoning mix left over from Tuesday Taco Night. (Cheap boxed dinners became festive when given titles, I’d realized: Hooray, Hamburger Helper Night; Monday Mac and Cheese Celebration; Friday Night Frito Pies; et cetera.) It’s been hard to afford enough food, especially since I try to keep healthy options on hand. Jayne and I clip coupons and go to Costco once a week for the basics. We mark “three-for-one” days on the kitten calendar in the kitchen. (I love cats; Jayne’s allergic, so she gives me calendars and stuffed animals and mugs, even a sweatshirt embossed with a kitten. Yes, my dear one, I am a Walgreens cashier who wears a sweatshirt embossed with a kitten. As the kids say, Deal with it.)

  We watch Extreme Cheapskates marathons on the Learning Channel.

  Anyway, back to the story. I’d just found half a bag of egg noodles when my cellphone rang. The caller had a 713 area code. I stared at the phone. Your father and Suzette were the only people I knew in Houston, Texas.

  How could they possibly have found my unlisted cell number? I let the phone ring and ring, and then it stopped ringing. I stood in my kitchen, feeling numb. The phone chirped again—it was my boss, Marion. I answered.

  “Don’t even tell me he didn’t show!” I said, referring to Josh, the newest hire.

  “Dorrie?” said Marion, her voice sounding weird.

  “Marion?” I said. “Are you OK?”

  “Um, Dorrie?” said Marion. “I just got a call from the police? They need to talk to you about something. They said it’s urgent.”

  “The police?” I said, dropping the egg noodles, which scattered all over the linoleum flooring the landlord wouldn’t replace.

  “They asked for your home phone, so I gave it to them. I wasn’t thinking. I hope that’s OK?”

  “What is it?” I said, my knees buckling. “What did they want?”

  “There’s a missing girl in New York City. I don’t understand, but they sounded pretty worried.”

  “OK,” I said. “OK.”

  “If you need me to find someone to cover your shift, that’s workable,” said Marion, a steel-faced taskmaster who was not without empathy.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Yes, that would be good.” I said goodbye, took a breath, and dialed the Houston number.

  “Dorrie?” your father said, his voice the same. I was filled with so many emotions hearing him: my hope long since curdled to fear, my admiration for him burned into bitterness. My sorrow for how badly I had messed things up.

  “Why are you calling me?” I finally managed.

  “It’s Eloise,” said your father.

  “Eloise!” I said. “You named her Eloise.” I had called you Zelda for twenty months. I wonder if that name means anything to you.

 
“She’s run away,” said Hyland. “She’s looking for you.”

  “What?” I said.

  “She’s having trouble,” said Hyland. There was a pause, and then he said, in a very quiet voice, “She’s gotten in some trouble. With drugs. We’ve…And now she’s missing.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Neither do I,” said Hyland. “Neither do I, Dorrie.”

  “Drugs?” I said. You were only sixteen! When I thought of you (as I did most days), I’d imagined you willowy and sweet, dreaming of ponies (maybe having a pony), discovering The Secret Garden, and peering at stars through a telescope.

  “If you hear from her…if she contacts you…will you call me right away?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Where is she? Do you know?”

  “She was last seen in New York City.”

  “Can I help?” I asked, three words I’d never thought I’d utter to Hyland Kendall.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  I sat down heavily. “Oh, Hyland,” I said. The pain in his voice was raw. For a moment, we were both silent. Even after all this time, we were tied together. We’d created you, and now you were lost.

  11

  Eloise

  One of the people blocking the gigantic gate between me and First Avenue freedom was a girl about my age. She wore clothes that were too big for her, jeans with a T-shirt. Her hair was kind of dirty, parted in the middle and falling lanky across her shoulders. Her skin was not great—marred by acne. What was she doing at Bellevue? The girl approached me slowly, as if she understood I was scared. “Hey, you need some help?” she said with surprising kindness. Her eyes were very blue.

  I looked down, nodded. I was nervous, but also disappointed and suddenly disoriented—my whole adventure had hinged on meeting my grandmother. All the bravado that had brought me here drained away, leaving me just plain old sad. “I thought my grandmother lived here,” I said, my voice embarrassingly teary and small.

  “No,” she replied. “No grandmothers in this place. No mothers either. Come on.” She walked past the men, shoving the gate open, turning back to make sure I was following. When we’d reached the street, she said, “Where you going now?”

  “The Museum of Natural History,” I managed.

  “Cool,” she said. “I went there with my school. You see the planetarium?”

  “No,” I said. She was walking fast, and I tried to keep up.

  “It’s cool,” she said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in school now?” I asked. I stammered, “I mean, isn’t it a school day?”

  “I don’t go anymore,” she said. “You?”

  “I’m not from here,” I said.

  She snorted. “Shocker,” she said.

  “How could you tell?”

  “Ha!” said the girl. “The shoes, maybe?”

  I looked down. My J.Crew leopard-print ballet flats—so fashion-forward at Pringley—did look pretty stupid in the city.

  “These are Jordans,” said the girl, lifting a foot. “They used to be my brother’s.”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah,” she said. “This was his shirt, too.”

  “And his pants?”

  “Girl! What are you talking about? These are my damn pants!”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s OK,” she said. “Actually, yeah. They were his pants.” The way she said were made me think he had died, rather than grown bigger. I almost asked, but for once I heeded my therapist’s advice to let sleeping dogs lie, a.k.a. don’t invite misery into your life unless you’re prepared to process it. Or unpack it. (Dr. Sue used a lot of ambiguous verbs.)

  “Thanks for helping me,” I said.

  “It’s nothing,” said the girl. “You looked like you’d seen a ghost or something.”

  “What were you doing there? At Bellevue?”

  “My dad goes there sometimes. But he wasn’t there today. I haven’t seen him in a while.” We reached a bus stop. “OK,” she said. “You can get the crosstown bus here. Then you take the C train to Eighty-first Street.” She peered at me. “Or maybe you want a taxi,” she said.

  I didn’t want to be alone again. “Can I…do you want lunch or something?” I said.

  “Are you paying?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  She shrugged. “Why not?” she said. “Hey, let’s get Indian.”

  “I love Indian,” I said. She led the way, stopping in an unassuming deli to grab two large beers, which we were able to buy (!!) and bring to lunch, like we were adults. I hit an ATM, withdrawing as much as I could because who knew what I was going to need?

  We ordered tons of cheap, fragrant dishes and that warm bread. We talked about nothing, really—movies (new James Bond, thumbs-up), music (new Taylor Swift, catchy but meaningless), clothes (she’d never heard of J.Crew; I’d never shopped on Canal Street). I went and bought two more tallboys (!!) and we finished those, too. It seemed like Fantasia (she told me this was her name, and though it clearly was not—who could really be named Fantasia?—I didn’t want to argue or make her feel bad. Maybe it was her name. What do I know? Let sleeping dogs lie, et cetera) had nowhere to be. We ate and drank and laughed. After I paid the bill, Fantasia said we should go to the planetarium together. “Then you can find your teachers and deal with all that,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sounds good.” We got two more tallboys (the guy at the minimart didn’t even comment!), drank them on a bench, then took a taxi to the museum. Fantasia told me sheepishly that she had never been in a taxi before.

  It wasn’t a Journey of a Lifetime, but it was nice. We ended up buzzed, sitting in the dark, watching a false but beautiful sky. I was sorry when the show ended. I almost didn’t go back to the Pringley bus. If she invites me to stay with her, I’ll say yes, I thought. But Fantasia just gave me an awkward handshake outside the Hayden Planetarium and said goodbye.

  After Fantasia left me on Central Park West, I bought a hot dog from a vendor in front of the museum. How I was still hungry, I had no idea. The hot dog, which I covered with ketchup, mustard, and sauerkraut, was just so awesome. I sat down on the museum steps. There were three middle-aged ladies eating burritos near me. There were umbrella-shaded carts selling gyros, pretzels, bagels, and “paletas” (some sort of Popsicle?). Across the street, I could see tons of green trees. People in jogging clothes and women pushing strollers veered into the arboreal area. “What’s that?” I asked the gaggle of burrito eaters.

  “What’s what?” said one of them. She was younger than Suzette, but wore an old-lady cardigan.

  “That,” I said, pointing to the trees.

  “It’s Central Park,” she said, squinting at me as if I were deranged.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. She smiled with a bit of pity. I stood and decided that instead of turning myself in, I’d go for a walk in Central Park.

  I really didn’t have a plan at this point. I didn’t have my real mother’s name, and Bellevue had turned out to be a dead end. I had messed up again. I felt the hole inside me growing bigger. The Tape Recorder of Doom had been right: I was alone.

  Suzette said I was smart, brilliant, creative. Obviously, she’d read some book about not complimenting shallow things like how your daughter looked. She read so many parenting manuals—I mean, I was like Hello? I’m right here, and you’re ignoring me to read about how to be with me! It was absurd. And now she was in Africa.

  I turned my phone on. No messages from Suzette or my dad. But there was the name of an NYC drug dealer, the one I’d been given by a Pringley pal. I sent the drug dealer a text asking if he was near Central Park.

  He responded within a few seconds that he could meet me at the zoo. He said to bring cash. I told him sure, posted an NYC selfie to lovepages, and turned my phone off again. I know, it’s weird to be on the run and posting snaps to lovepages, but the few likes my picture might gather would bring me a distracte
d, shallow happiness, and I was looking for all the happiness I could get. Besides, when my phone was off, I was pretty sure no one could trace me. It wasn’t exactly news that I was in New York City. Also, I didn’t think my dad and Suzette even knew about lovepages, much less how to view my profile.

  The drug dealer was waiting, as promised, by the sea lion pool. He was hot, with a dark look in his eyes that appealed to me, and blond hair in a ponytail. “You’re Eloise?” he said.

  “I’m Eloise.”

  “What can I do you for?” he said, smirking as if transposing two words counted as a witticism.

  I said, “What have you got?” and he laughed, pulled out a bottle of pills.

  “Let’s do it together,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “You heard of Special K?”

  “Like the K-hole?” I said. I had heard about this—again, from Fitz Hunter. When you took ketamine, a horse tranquilizer, you went down a “K-hole” in your mind where everything felt like it was OK. There were risks, Fitz had said: some people never came out of K-holes and had to be sent to an insane asylum for the rest of their lives. But otherwise, said Fitz, it was pretty fun. “You can watch your body from outside of your body” was how he put it.

  “Yup,” said the hot drug dealer. “Like the K-hole.”

  This was heavy stuff. I could hear Suzette’s voice in my ear, telling me to stop this, to walk out of the park and back to the museum. “No matter what you do, you’re my baby” was what she told me. But then they sent me away, like a defective toy or a puppy who couldn’t be trained. I knew I should flee this entire situation, but I wanted to stay. Anticipation ebbed at the edges of my dull sadness, a neon sea on cold sand. “I don’t know,” I said. “Let me think about it.”

  He nodded, lit a cigarette for himself and one for me. We sat by the edge of the pool, watching the greasy sea lions bob around. I wanted to stay in this moment, where anything was possible for me.

  12

  Suzette

  The flight from Khartoum to London took nine hours and fifty-five minutes. After a ginger ale and a chicken dinner, Suzette closed her eyes. She tried to send a telepathic message: I’m coming to find you, Eloise. I’m on my way. In a sense, this journey reminded Suzette of her insane all-night drive to New Orleans, seventeen years before. That journey, she could see now, had been misguided—but what else could she have done? Suzette rubbed her eyes, remembering again the night Patsy had brought Eloise to their door.