“What could you have done? The father disappeared without a trace. We went straight to the police. We gave him up. Relax, chérie. Everything will work out. You’ll see. Don’t be such a pessimist.”
“I’m not a pessimist!” she insisted. “I’m a realist. I can’t help but see all the possibilities.”
“Of what can go wrong.” He turned to her: the turquoise eyes that had bewitched her 22 years ago were now ringed with deep shadows accentuated by his sunken cheeks. The grayish pallor of his skin frightened her. He seemed so close to death she could barely look at him. He knew how to slice right through her pretense and expose her fears.
“Nancy, you don’t have to do this,” he said.
“Don’t be an idiot! Of course I’m doing this.”
“You have a way with words.”
“I’m sorry. But you know I feel absolutely positive about the surgery. I just have dreams of some poor couple showing up at our door one day demanding their child.”
“All kinds of records are being checked. All the reports of missing children in the EU. Who knows who or what the mother was, what happened to her. And the father might just have been a sick person, or a desperate person, or a very bad person.”
“No, Jean. I don’t think he was bad. If you could have seen the way he behaved with the boy: he was so good with him.”
“He left him.”
“I know. But I can’t imagine Pierre having been abused.” She shook her head with conviction.
“Well, he was lucky you were on that train. Or maybe he was looking for you — the right person to take care of his son or whatever Pierre might have been to him. You believe in all that fate stuff. I don’t. However you view it, you were a treasure the man came upon: a gift in exchange for a gift — an angel. Stop playing both sides of the tennis court and turn off your brain. You’re driving me crazy.”
“I’m done,” she said. “And I’m hungry.” Her surgery was scheduled for early morning, and she couldn’t have anything in her stomach for eight hours beforehand. She never ate at this hour, yet the thought of not being able to made her aware of her empty stomach. Jean-Georges, on the other hand, who wasn’t scheduled until late afternoon, had just finished a large meal and now sipped chamomile tea.
She got off the bed, walked around to his side, and picked up the mug of tea from the nightstand. Wrapping her hands around it, she lifted it to her forehead and held it there.
“I think you missed your mouth,” he said.
“I have a headache. The heat helps.”
“Maybe you should see a doctor first thing in the morning.”
“Funny.”
His frail hand floated upward, and he patted her stomach.
“Don’t.” She waved him away, spilling some of the tea. “I don’t like it when you do that. I feel like you’re consoling my barren womb. You aren’t the only one with a dysfunction.”
His hand dropped onto the bed.
“Would you like something else to eat?” She felt bad about snapping at him.
“No. I’m not hungry. Remember the first time we slept together, in Aix, in my parents’ bed when they went to the seashore, and I got up afterward and made you a croque monsieur, and you were disappointed? ‘It’s just a grilled cheese sandwich fried in egg,’ you said.”
“I wasn’t disappointed. It was delicious. I just thought it was going to be more exotic. It was my first week in France. Remember how hot it was in that flat way up on the fourth floor? We were so sweaty and thirsty.”
“Your first week?” he said. “Did we do it so soon?”
“You know we did.”
“Do you regret it?”
“The sandwich or the sex?”
“Having spent your junior year in France. Having met me. Having become a couple so quickly.”
“How could I? I was drunk in love from the minute you pronounced my name.”
“You just wanted a French boyfriend — an upperclassman — so you could learn to speak French better.”
“Do you regret it? You were young for a man to give up other women.”
“I’d love a cigarette right now. That’s the only thing you made me give up that I miss. Do you want a man or a woman to get your kidney?”
Nancy hadn’t even thought about who was going to receive her kidney; she hadn’t thought much about any of the members of the swap, since they were forbidden to know anything about each another. She was in this for her husband’s sake, and she viewed the others as a collective means to an end — Jean-Georges’ cure.
“I guess it doesn’t matter — as long as it isn’t a Republican,” she said, then giggled.
“You know what I’d really like now even more than a cigarette?”
“What?”
“To make love.”
They both knew the impossibility of that, given his weak state. They had not made love in months.
“I knew you were sex crazed the day you cupped my derriere when you walked behind me into the registrar’s office in Aix,” she told him.
He was looking up at her now, studying her face as though trying to see something he’d never found before.
“Here we go!” He used that expression to confirm that something was true. “That is the day I saw you with your long black hair and eyes and I didn’t think you were an American at all. I thought you were from Malta or Tunisia, or a Gypsy from southern Spain, you had such a mysterious air about you. You walked past me and it was like being brushed by a field of strawberries, you smelled so good. I knew right then that I must have you.”
“Ere we go,” she said, imitating his accent. “Sometimes I think I shouldn’t have made you come to the States. Maybe we would have been happier if we had stayed in France.”
“Ohlala, you take credit for everything, don’t you? It was my decision too.”
“But you miss being there.”
“I would miss the States if we left. I’m just a malcontent.”
“C’est vrai,” she said.
“You know there’s something romantic about having the surgery here,” he said.
“You find Richmond romantic?”
“It’s my first time here, therefore it’s an unknown full of possibilities. Besides, five weeks alone with you and no interruptions is very romantic. I’m going to bring you a croque monsieur when it’s over.”
“And just how are you going to manage that?”
“You’ll see. I’ll manage.” He laughed. “I’m very resourceful.”
“We should get some rest. We have to be at the hospital at the crack of dawn.” Nancy found herself as excited as a bride on the night of her wedding. “Do you need anything else before I go to my room?”
“Yes. My goodnight kiss.”
She bent over and softly kissed him on the lips. She had imagined them cold and hard, but to her relief, they were soft and warm.
“Promise me you won’t ever be sorry that we adopted Pierre, if something happens to me,” she begged. “I can’t help it, but that’s the only thing that terrifies me right now. As far as doing this, I’ve never been surer. I must sound awful asking this of you right now.”
“You sound like a mother, that’s what you sound like.”
“Promise me you won’t regret it.”
He squeezed her hand as hard as he could, but the weakness of his grip only reinforced her determination to undergo the surgery.
“Je ne regret rien, ma chérie,” he whispered. He closed his eyes. “There is one more thing I’d like.”
“What is it?”
“Stay here tonight. In my bed.”
“You’ll be able to sleep? It’s smaller than our bed at home.”
“It’s the only way I will.”
She went to the other side, slipped under the covers, and snuggled up to him until their
bodies were perfectly fitted. She rested her head against his shoulder; he lifted his foot and crossed it over hers.
***
In the morning, Nancy was euphoric about what she was going to do. While they waited for the taxi, she went out to the pool to feed Lucky: she wanted the duck to be there when she returned from the hospital and wished she knew someone she could ask to care for it. As she approached the pool, plastic bag of bread chunks in hand, she was heartened to see that a mottled brown female had joined the drake; she named her Mrs. Lucky. As a couple, they were much more apt to survive.
***
The hospital, normally quiet on a Saturday, was abuzz with excitement, all energy focused on the transplants. Though the staff had performed multiple procedures before, it was the first time a 12-way had happened, and all dozen participants were assembled in a holding area, curtains drawn around each gurney.
It reminded Nancy of how, when she was four years old having her tonsils removed, they had pinned white cloths around the heads of the children in the ward to cover their hair, placed each child on a gurney, and, one by one, taken them up for surgery. She could recall being strapped down and wheeled through the halls, into an elevator, and into a small green operating room, where her doctor’s face peered down at her, a round mirror fastened onto a headband. An ether mask was placed over her face; she saw spirals — then blackness. She had been the last to be taken to surgery, and had felt lonely, singled out, scared.
But this morning she was the first to go, right after a young woman drew blood samples and then, with a black marker, made a picture of an angel on her wrist. But she wasn’t wheeled into this operating room. In fact, she was told to hop off the gurney and walk.
As she passed the 11 cubicles, terrycloth socks with rubber-gripping soles protecting her feet against the cold linoleum, she could hear the candidates murmuring, and she wanted to pull open each curtain, see their faces, and carry them like a teddy bear into the OR.
“Don’t touch anything blue!” they warned her as she stepped into a room so high-tech it resembled a science-fiction spacecraft. They strapped her onto a tablelike contraption. With arms outstretched, immobilized like Christ on the cross, this sacrificial lamb gladly surrendered.
***
A grilled cheese sandwich was waiting on Nancy’s bedside tray when she awoke, only the bread was hard and the cheese rubbery from having sat so long. She couldn’t tell if it was dusk or dawn.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said, “but your husband gave us strict orders to have it here when you opened your eyes, so we couldn’t time it just right. You’ve been awake and out for hours. He wanted us to find a French bistro and order something called a cock masseuse, but this was the best we could do. It’s from the cafeteria.”
“Can I see him?”
“If you can get out of bed and into this wheelchair parked outside the door.”
The nurse took Nancy for a ride to the ICU, where she was startled to see tubes emerging from every part of Jean-Georges. His hands rested on top of the thin white blanket. He barely opened his eyes when Nancy was wheeled to his bedside.
“Hi,” she said.
He forced a smile. She raised a finger and touched the corresponding one of his that held the clothespin-shaped blood oxygen monitor. Looking like the two inebriated lovers in a painting above their mantel at home, their heads slumped and they immediately fell asleep.
***
It didn’t take long for the secrecy surrounding the Swap Twelve to begin to unravel. They could be spotted by the way they walked, the black angel on the wrists of some, and by the curiosity in the eyes of those who longed to know which one had been responsible for extending their lives. As the anticipation built, the staff realized that something had to be done, and a meeting was arranged — a multiple blind date of sorts, where partners and recipients and doctors and nurses came together in one room. It was a thanksgiving, a jubilant revelation, a family reunion because from individual concern, a family had been born. There was cake and music, tears and gratitude, hugging and kissing for everyone but Nancy, who, feeling like a high school girl who had been stood up on prom night, couldn’t find her recipient, and who, for the first time, was desperate to see and talk to this person within whom part of her now resided.
Then Nancy was led to a room to meet Maggie, still too weak to join the party. And only then did Nancy experience the rush that came with understanding fully what she had done for this fragile woman with red hair and freckles and green eyes, the wife of a pleasant-looking man and mother of a teenage daughter, who both nearly crushed Nancy — their angel — with gratitude, until all four broke down and cried.
“Thank you,” Maggie said sobbing.
Nancy took Maggie’s hand and, the way a mother examines her newborn, passed her thumb over each of Maggie’s slender fingers, observed the upward curve of her nose, the thinness of her dry parted lips. At last she knew how it felt to have given birth — to have given life.
***
When reporters, photographers, and TV crews came to cover the amazing feat, Nancy pretended she was sleeping to avoid being interviewed, fearing that word would reach the French adoption authorities. Relieved when she and Jean-Georges returned to the seclusion of the apartment, she was thrilled to see that not only had Mr. and Mrs. Lucky survived, but there were now 13 ducklings with them. Nancy had never known a duck to have had so many young; she swore they symbolized the 12 members of the swap plus Pierre. She fed them every day — her most ambitious physical exercise — and hoped the weather would not get too warm and bring big hairy humans and noisy kids with inflated alligators and beach balls to run the family out of town.
“I can’t cook,” she told Jean-Georges. “There’s no dishwasher.”
“Since when is that a prerequisite for cooking?” He sat in the armchair, feet up on a hassock. The color of the living had already returned to his face.
“I once heard that a woman poached fish in her dishwasher,” Nancy said. “She wrapped it in foil and put it through the wash cycle. She just left out the soap.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am. But I wouldn’t do it. I was insinuating that I can’t cook because I don’t want to wash the dishes. I can’t stand at the sink too long.”
“We can use paper.”
“Don’t get pushy because you’re feeling better. Maybe next week. Right now we’re still on the soup-and-sandwich plan.”
As soon as Jean-Georges was up to it, he and Nancy went down to the pool. They hobbled over to two chaise lounges where, with blankets pulled up to their chins, they read books like a privileged couple of another era crossing the ocean on some luxury steamship.
Thus they went about their adventure of recovery until, healthy enough to make the plane ride home, they packed to leave. They had survived; the adoption was still in progress; they had taken an incredible gamble on all fronts and they had won big-time.
Nancy went out to feed the ducks for the last time, taking extra bread to last them a while. She wished she could leave a dozen loaves and dig them their own private pond, with a shelter and soft hay to sleep on. She wished she could take them home and show them to Pierre, and to her parents and cousins and aunts and uncles.
Approaching the pool in the dark, Nancy confirmed what she thought she had seen from a distance: one of the ducklings was floating motionless in the water. Mrs. Lucky was alone by the pool wall, emitting what Nancy interpreted as a mourning whine, and Nancy knew that something bad was about to happen.
***
The hospital staff didn’t wait until Nancy was home and surrounded by her family to call her about Maggie’s death. Why would they? They had come to know her well, this proud woman who preferred not to be coddled by nurses and orderlies and aides. The news numbed her like a whole-body epidural. Her perfectly good kidney was not good enough to save her recipient, who had suffered a heart attack. Ma
ggie and her perfectly good kidney were dead.
What a waste! What a fucking waste of a life! she wanted to yell.
“I’m so sorry, Nancy,” Jean-Georges said from his bed.
There was no consoling her. She went into the bathroom and scrubbed away the faint traces of the angel she’d been trying to preserve. Most of it had worn off weeks ago, yet she saw it as distinctly as on the day it had been drawn. She felt Maggie’s warm hand, the husband and daughter’s embrace, the swelling of her own heart with pride. What a waste! she wanted to scream, not caring whether they heard her in the next apartment or in Paris. What a fucking waste! She wanted to sob, but the sorrow was so great nothing came — just a dull aching moan for the delicate woman with the freckled face and the red hair.
***
It’s Indian summer in New England, when the lassitude of hot weather lingers into fall and teases one with the notion that it might stay forever. But it never does, Nancy muses as she and Jean-Georges ride to the airport. They are headed to Nice to claim their son and bring him back home.
Nancy observes Jean-Georges, tanned from a summer of rest, sports jacket over his arm, briskly walking through the terminal in a rejuvenated body. He has more energy than she has ever seen in him. He boards the plane with the presence of a diplomat. He chats in French with the flight attendants. He has already assumed his European persona as he prepares to reenter his homeland. Somewhere in midair, he will leave America behind.
She feels no difference within her own body; she functions no better or worse than she did. But every now and then her thoughts turn to Maggie, and she remembers she’s lost something. It comes in a little wave. It might be instigated by something she’s read or heard. I have only one kidney, she thinks to herself. But then it goes away.
“Did you charge the battery in the video camera?” Barbara asked Lenny as she pulled a lavender silk blouse over her head, careful not to mess her makeup or muss her recently highlighted hair.
Thieves Never Steal in the Rain Page 6