Right Here, Right Now

On risking everything for love

From a dreamless, ink black sleep, as if from the bottom of a well, I’m dimly aware of something clattering to life next to me, buzzing across my nightstand. Insistent. A thought arises: That’s somebody’s pager, a different person who must’ve left it here. 

There’s a slow dawning that I am this person. That I am a person. Tones and static come through the pager’s tinny speaker. A male dispatcher’s voice: “Dutchess 911 to [fire department name], priority 1, difficulty breathing, [location]... ”

I’m on my feet before fully waking, then down the stairs, stepping into my EMS pants and boots, jacket on, radio slung over my shoulder, out the door in just over a minute.

Ninety minutes later, the call’s over, and I’m back in our driveway. The dogs don’t stir. They somehow recognize my signature sounds, I think, my specific way of opening the back door. It’s possible they’re simply the world’s laziest watchdogs, but I imagine that if someone else was at the door, they’d be going apeshit, keeping everyone safe.

I walk past the kids’ rooms, then ease back into our bedroom, the sleeping shape of Emma on the left of our bed in the semi-dark. I make a neat little pile: EMS pants and shirt folded just in front of my nightstand, pager back in its place, then slide back under the duvet.

No matter the length of the call, Emma always mumbles sweetly in her half-sleep, “That was a long one. Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” I say. I lie awake in the dark as her breathing slowly deepens.

I remember a 3am call for a lift assist, this sweet elderly woman who keeps apologizing for calling 911. She’s in her bathroom in a pink nightgown, seated on the floor with her back against the shower door.

“I’m sorry to trouble you, dear,” she says. “Sometimes this silly knee just gives out on me.”

“It’s no trouble at all,” I tell her. “I’m glad you called us.” 

My partner and I help her up and over to the couch, then check her vitals, which are fine. We walk her back to bed, and pull her flower print comforter back over her. She nods toward a black-and-white photo in a silver frame on her nightstand. There she is, young and beautiful in a lace wedding dress, beaming, what looks to be her husband next to her in a dark suit with a military-style crewcut.

“That’s William,” she says. “We were married over sixty years, until he passed last June. I miss him every minute.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say. We talk about him and their life together. She asks if I’m married, and I say yes, almost twenty years now. She asks if we have kids, and I say yes, two teens.

“Hold them all close,” the woman says. “Cherish them.”

I recall a night back in Brooklyn, Emma and I simmering in the aftermath of our first proper argument. We fumed in silence, going to bed after some angry, wordless toothbrushing. She turned away from me in the dark, the silhouette of her back rising and falling less than a foot away. Just reach out to her, I thought. All you have to do is put an arm around her, and everything will be okay.

I couldn’t move. The atmosphere pressed down on me with infinite weight, holding me in place. I felt sure: I will lose her. I stayed awake like that, drenched with a sense of hopelessness, until Emma’s breathing deepened, and my own breath eventually followed.

A few years later, when our daughter was born, I couldn’t bear when she and Emma were out driving somewhere, imagining our baby girl in her carseat, with Emma’s nervous driving. It’s true what they say: it feels like going around with your heart outside your body. This drove me back into therapy.

“What if something happens to them?” I asked the therapist.

“It might,” she said, nodding slowly. “Anything can happen at any time.” 

I’d wanted a different, easier answer. My previous therapist in the city would have smiled warmly and helped me to see that everything’s okay. “What is it that’s actually wrong or missing right now?” she would say.

Both of them are 100% right, of course. The early days of being in a relationship, and of being a dad, were surges of all-encompassing love, punctuated by the occasional panicked recognition of loss. How do I love, despite loss, I wondered? I worried over this like heads, then tails. Flip, flip, flip.

All these years later, love feels not just tinged, but fully colored with loss. I love you, and I know at any moment, we may lose each other. One side of the coin is never without the other. 

Again and again, I’m caught up in self-absorption, needless worry, entranced by stories. Then something awakens me, a thrum that pulls me up and out of walking slumber. This insistent pang of loss. Here they are, in front of me, these people I love. My son spooning in mouthfuls of yogurt at the kitchen island, Emma pouring her tea, my daughter mixing watercolors to capture last night’s aurora sky. It’s all right here, vibrating with everything, and I remember: Cherish them. Cherish this.

I feel this love/loss coin in my hand, both heads and tails pressing into my flesh. Like I’m reaching out for them in the dark, through a weighty atmosphere, across an imaginary divide, finding them right there, next to me, breathing in, breathing out.

Cover image aurora watercolor by Evie Tourtelot