Heart as Wide as the Sky

Bari Lynn Hein

When Chidamber and I started planning our wedding, the priest who was to conduct the ceremony asked us to talk about how we’d met. My response was one that my fiancé had heard many times, yet he rewarded me with an appreciative squint of his cinnamon-colored eyes: “He took hold of my heart.”
    “Can you be more specific?” the priest said.

    “She is being specific,” Chidamber said. “I’m a cardiothoracic surgeon.”
    “A brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon,” I added.

    He had to have been brilliant in order to do what he did, which was open up my chest and insert a ring around my mitral valve – my floppy valve, I used to call it. He explained all this to me in recovery, but an anesthesiologist saw to it that I would have little memory of that discussion. I do recall giggling a lot because I was so relieved that the long-anticipated surgery was over and being distracted by my surgeon’s thick, dark hair. And lovely long lashes. And nice arms. My attention kept drifting to a fine spread of chest hair peeking out the V of his pale blue scrubs.

    “I don’t know how you do it,” I said to him, about six months after we’d started dating. He’d been half an hour late meeting up with me and another couple at a restaurant, having encountered complications in extracting a vein from a man’s leg and grafting it to an artery in his heart.

    “If you’ve ever held a beating heart in your hands, I think you’d understand,” he said, cupping his hands together. “This little muscle, weighing less than a pound, is nothing short of a miracle. It controls every organ, every cell, every system in your body.”

    Pete, seated beside me, shuddered, while his wife Abby said, “I get it.” Of course she got it. She was a trauma surgeon at the same hospital where Chidamber worked.

    A year later, when Abby called to inform me that Leonard Ayer was working in a library thirty-five miles from my home, I cried. It didn’t take much to set me off in those days: old voicemail messages, old emails, a musky scent lingering in the fibers of Chidamber’s gray sweatshirt. In this case, I was driven to tears by the discovery of Leonard Ayer’s accessibility, combined with the fact that Chidamber loved to be surrounded by books.

    I figured the most likely time to find Mr. Ayer would be on a weekday, midafternoon, and mapped out my route to the library strategically. If I got off the highway at exit ten and back on at eleven, I would avoid passing a mangled guardrail between the two. If I turned left instead of right at exit sixteen and took a more circuitous route along the backroads, I wouldn’t have to see the restaurant where Chidamber had proposed to me. 

    Along a monotonous stretch of green signs and concrete sound barriers, I kept myself occupied imagining and reimagining my encounter with Leonard Ayer. In every scenario he remained unformed in my mind, of indeterminate size, age and race, yet on his obscured features I saw a range of emotions playing out: first shock, then perhaps a flicker of pain, then warmth and connection. I would apologize for coming without calling; what I had to tell him couldn’t be said over the phone. He would say, “No, no, I’m happy you came.” He would open his arms and embrace me. We would go somewhere private, perhaps into one of those glass-enclosed study rooms that every library has, or maybe he’d take me to a nearby café and insist on buying me coffee. We would talk for hours. We would become lifelong friends.

    I was so engrossed in the reverie that I forgot to exit at ten, but thankfully caught only a glint of a guardrail and a glimpse of yellow flowers in my rearview mirror. Traffic moved well until I got off at exit sixteen and met up with a succession of school bus drivers swinging out stop signs and setting aglow flashing red lights. I guess if Chidamber and I had been given the opportunity to have children, I would’ve been better prepared to avoid this stretch of road at the end of a school day. It occurred to me, as I slowed and stopped for the seventh time and watched yet another swarm of kids cover the curb, that the library would probably be crowded at this hour.

    When I finally reached my destination, I was not surprised to find the parking lot nearly full. Two cars were jockeying for the only space close to the entryway, so I worked my way to the less-congested top of the lot, shut off my engine and hyperventilated for a while.

    “It’ll be okay,” I mumbled out loud. I repeated this twice more before I felt ready to climb out.

    A woman straddled by a pair of toddlers slowed my pace along the sidewalk and I convinced myself that this was a good thing, that I needed this time to compose myself. The building I was approaching was two stories high and about twice as wide as my neighborhood library, which I hadn’t visited in months. I used to go with Chidamber once in a while for lack of something better to do but preferred to read novels on my phone or tablet.

    When I passed through the glass doors, a musty aroma caught me off guard, turned the memory of accompanying my fiancé to the library from one that had been inconsequential to something special. What I wouldn’t have given, at that moment, to have Chidamber by my side, double-checking a written-out list of titles, promising he’d fill his list quickly and then take me to dinner.

    I breathed in the scent of books for a moment more, then took my place at the end of a long queue, bent in half by a pair of pedestals supporting a ratty red rope. As I neared a counter behind which two women were loudly and enthusiastically working, my attention was drawn to a wall from which dangled a chain of pink and red construction paper hearts trimmed with lace doilies. It was late January and I was being subjected to regular reminders of the approach of Valentine’s Day.

Eventually, one of the librarians summoned me to the counter. She regarded my empty arms and waited.

    “Hi, excuse me. Can you tell me if Leonard Ayer is working today?” I finally said.

I almost hoped she’d say no, that the thirty-five miles I’d traveled and nine school buses I’d waited behind and interminable five minutes I’d stood in line had been in vain. 

“D’you know if Lenny’s here today?” my librarian asked her colleague.

“Saw him earlier.”

     My librarian lowered her chin and assessed me over the red frames of her glasses. “You might try YA. That’s where he usually is.”

    “YA?”

    She grimaced and motioned forward the mother and child who’d been standing behind me. “Young adult,” she said with a sigh.

    I stepped aside to allow a small girl to set a stack of picture books onto the counter. “Could you please tell me what he looks like?”

    The two librarians looked at one another and raised their eyebrows. “You can’t miss him,” the woman with the glasses said, after a beat. “He’s the only guard on duty.” She reached down beneath the counter and for an instant I figured she was pushing a button to signal trouble to the only guard on duty: A strange woman is standing at the counter asking questions about you, Lenny. Then she withdrew her hand to set a receipt onto the counter and called out, “Next in line, please.” 

    I’d clearly overstayed my welcome. 

    I made my way over to a wide winding staircase and ascended slowly, my heart thumping exponentially harder as I alit on each step. Midway up, I came across the young adult section, which was little more than a nook abutting the staircase. Two teens were curled up in beanbag chairs, talking to one another, while a third was perusing the bookshelves. No guard. No need for a guard.

    I continued upward. Maybe Mr. Ayer was taking a bathroom break or – again, I was paradoxically hopeful – he’d gone home for the day. If not, if the meeting were to take place, he would feel ambushed; there was no getting around that. He would resent the invasion of his privacy, leaving me to explain my connection to the hospital where my fiancé had worked.

    Near the top I stopped. Four people – among them the mother and child whom I’d already inconvenienced at the counter downstairs – stepped around me and continued up. More people were making their ascent and like detritus being swept to shore, I was carried to the second landing.

    The upper level was even more crowded than I’d imagined and, compared to the library near home (or any library, for that matter), noisier. Children and teens outnumbered adults by about three to one. I believe a saw a paper airplane soar from one bookcase to another, but I couldn’t swear to it. At the center of the cacophony were six to eight tables strewn with backpacks and open laptops and swinging arms and rollicking heads. 

    It quickly became clear to me that Leonard Ayer had come up here to maintain some sense of order, whether at the direction of a supervisor or of his own volition. I saw two options before me – one: walk from table to table looking for a man of indeterminate size, age and race, dressed in a guard’s uniform, and interrupt him from his work, or two: turn around, hurry down the winding staircase, out the glass doors, up to the top of the lot and into my car. Perhaps, if I had chosen the latter, I would’ve been better off. I would’ve been able to hold onto my fantasy of hugs and coffee and intimate conversation.

    Unfortunately, my feet brought me closer to the tables and there wasn’t much I could do to stop them. Past the history and anthropology bookcases I walked, past world geography and travel, to the center of the second floor.

    Each chair of the first table held a kid of high-school age, mostly male, mostly quiet, mostly staring at computer screens. Behind them were kids I figured to be middle-schoolers, louder and less focused but not necessarily rambunctious.

    The occupants of the third table turned away from me before I could see their faces, distracted by an argument escalating at the fourth table. A man’s voice and a girl’s voice alternately rose and fell in volume, both quivering with the same fury. A woman who’d been standing at the art history stacks re-shelved a book and skittered to the steps.

    I walked toward the commotion, certain that this was where I’d find the man I had come to see. My first view of Leonard Ayer was of a wide back covered in the sort of navy cloth I’d expect to find on a guard’s uniform, a shiny black belt, a head of close-cropped gray hair. An audience of gangly girls had started to chime in, cellphones held aloft, calling out words of encouragement to the object of the guard’s anger. 

    Of her, I could only make out a slender arm and fingertips decorated with lavender polish gripping the rim of the table. In an instant, I saw the girl’s hand release the table as the security guard grabbed her and pulled her out of her chair. 

    He spun her around, bringing her fully into my view – her eyes wide and frightened, her lips parted and motionless. The guard threw her to the ground. Threw her. As I recount this I still can’t believe he did that to someone who barely reached his shoulders and was easily half his weight.

    Her friends reacted, some with taunts of “Oh, we got that,” and, “Everyone’ll see that now,” others with pleas to stop it and let go of her.

    My hands were clenched into fists as I approached him. I was close enough now to read the name embossed on a silver tag on his chest: L. Ayer. His eyes were almost the same cinnamon brown as Chidamber’s, which alarmed me and disoriented me and, for a moment, threatened to unravel the rage that had been holding me together.

    As he straightened he noticed the many cellphones pointed in his direction. He took a few steps backward.

    The girl brushed herself off and stood up; her friends immediately surrounded her. Ayer seized on an opportunity to escape infamy. He walked swiftly toward the steps and so did I.

    Perhaps I was looking for an escape of my own, or maybe I needed an outlet for my anger, which was still gathering weight and momentum, like a snowball rolling down a hill.

Leonard Ayer had proven himself unworthy of Chidamber’s heart. 

     I proceeded to stun myself by calling out a variation on a speech I’d been rehearsing for over a week: “I came here to see you, Mr. Ayer. I want you to know about the man whose heart you are carrying in your chest.”

Leonard Ayer stopped halfway down the steps and turned around. The young adult section had emptied out and, as if seeking refuge, he stepped inside.

I continued to speak as I descended toward him, my tone antagonistic; the encounter was not at all as I’d imagined it. “He was a good man. He was a surgeon, a brilliant surgeon. He had parents who loved him, siblings and friends who loved him, a fiancé who….” I stopped. I swallowed. I thought perhaps I should abandon my plans to say the next piece, but I’d come this far and if he wanted to, Leonard Ayer could’ve found out the name of his donor just as easily as I’d found the names of all the recipients of my fiancé’s organs. “His name was Chidamber, which means ‘heart as wide as the sky.’ So that’s how big your heart is now. That’s what you have to carry around inside you.”

    I’d managed to corner him against a display of dystopian books for teens. We stood a few feet apart, facing one another, both breathing heavily. He spread his fingers over his chest and I did the same. Perhaps he was thinking, as I was, about the scars we wore beneath our shirts from Chidamber having saved us.

    I waited for him to unleash on me as I’d unleashed on him. How dare I accost him in this way! How dare I invade his privacy and seek him out! He was panting and it did not escape me that the heart beating wildly in his chest had sometimes beat wildly inside the chest of the love of my life. He drew in his breath, dropped his hand and said in a soft, unsteady voice, “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am.”

    I took three steps away from the dystopian book display, looked at my shoes, and then did what I’d come close to doing all along: I fled.

    I ran down the steps and past the checkout counter, my attention fixed on the glass doors. In front of the library, I stepped off the curb and hurried around a family of four inching their way up the sidewalk. I didn’t sit and hyperventilate in my car; I started it up and sped away. I drove the most direct route to the highway, allowing my gaze to linger on the restaurant where Chidamber had proposed to me.

    I had said yes to him right away. I had loved him from the beginning – his kindness, his generous spirit, the way he made me laugh and the way he made me want to be a better person. I loved him from the beginning and I love him still.

    I got off the highway at exit ten and merged back on in the opposite direction. When I reached the spot where Chidamber had taken his final breath, I pulled over and turned on my hazard lights. 

    Sometime in the past three months and sixteen days, the mangled guardrail had been replaced with a new one. I’d driven by too quickly to have observed this on my way to the library. In setting up the new guardrail, workers had slightly displaced a makeshift memorial that some of Chidamber’s friends had erected, a white post holding a wreath of plastic sunflowers. My eyes circled the wreath, created three months and ten days ago by people who loved him, by people whose hearts he had touched in one way or another.

When Chidamber operated on me, nearly two years ago, he knew nothing about me, other than what he’d ascertained from a couple of pre-op appointments. When he held my heart in his hands he probably didn’t even look at my face, focusing instead on an open chest cavity, a floppy mitral valve he had committed to repair. When he held my heart in his hands, he could not have known that it would become his. Nor could he have known that his would become mine.