BooksBarbecue
Back The Surrogate Save as PDF
Chapters (65)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. Part One
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Twenty-Four
  29. Twenty-Five
  30. Twenty-Six
  31. Twenty-Seven
  32. Twenty-Eight
  33. Twenty-Nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-One
  36. Thirty-Two
  37. Thirty-Three
  38. Part Two
  39. Thirty-Four
  40. Thirty-Five
  41. Thirty-Six
  42. Thirty-Seven
  43. Thirty-Eight
  44. Thirty-Nine
  45. Forty
  46. Forty-One
  47. Forty-Two
  48. Forty-Three
  49. Forty-Four
  50. Forty-Five
  51. Forty-Six
  52. Forty-Seven
  53. Forty-Eight
  54. Forty-Nine
  55. Fifty
  56. Fifty-One
  57. Part Three
  58. Fifty-Two
  59. Fifty-Three
  60. Fifty-Four
  61. Fifty-Five
  62. Fifty-Six
  63. Acknowledgments
  64. About the Author
  65. About the Publisher

The nurse came in and covered me with a clean sheet and two heavy blankets, warmed and toasty, like they’d just come out of the dryer. She pulled them up to my neck. Heaven. I closed my eyes and, despite the fluorescent lights, felt the earth pulling me down. I felt I could sleep here for a long time.

Once I fell asleep in the back of Digger’s pickup. During the summer after I’d graduated from high school (and Digger had almost finished), we went for a drive. He had a different truck back then, his first of several. He’d fix each one up and sell it for a better one, like what he wanted to do with flipping houses. That first truck was a Ford in turquoise blue. It had rust on the wheel wells and a mismatched dirty white tailgate. He worked on it every chance he got, every day after school. He replaced parts by scouring the junkyard for what he needed, a rearview mirror, a latch for the glove box, a heat fan mechanism, even a new seat cushion. He took the thing apart and put it back together. It was his.

And one warm day, he took me on a drive to a wide-open field. We didn’t have a plan, just followed roads he hadn’t been on before, turning here and there, following dandelions. Finally, he drove off the pavement onto a gravel road and then into the field, where he parked amid the wilderness. When he switched off the ignition, he turned to me and smiled. We took our lunches to the flatbed, where he had a mattress and a few boxes on their way to somewhere. We leaned against the boxes and stretched out our legs while we ate our sandwiches. I remember the sound of our paper bags crunching, birdcalls we tried to identify, and green flies buzzing by, but no people. Just us, under the hot sun.

And after we were full and roasted, we made love in the sweltering heat, then we slid down onto the warm mattress and slept, as if the sun and the sex had hypnotized us. It was delicious. When we eventually woke, our bodies were stiff, and I forgot where I was. The flatbed looked foreign to me, like I’d been kidnapped or drugged. We laughed when we remembered we were safe. My skin was dry and tight, probably burned, but I loved it. We kissed and kissed and finally woke ourselves up, woke up enough to go home.

That was the same kind of heavy pull I felt in the hospital bed, that feeling of not knowing where I was, exactly, but that I could, without doing anything at all, go somewhere deep and far away.

Forty-Three

Ruth

MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2002

Night