Harvesting the Heart Read online

  Nicholas pulled on his jacket and wandered toward his car in the parking garage, wondering if he'd ever be given a bypass to do again. He searched his memory to find something he'd overlooked, a torn capillary or an additional blockage, something Fogerty smugly hadn't mentioned after the operation that day, something that might have saved the guy. He pictured the still amber eyes of Serena LeBeauf's youngest son, mirrors of what her own used to be like. He thought about the Navajo Hand Trembler and wondered what potions and blessings and magic decrees might fall between the cracks of common knowledge.

  When he turned the key in the apartment door, Paige was sitting on the floor of the living room, stringing cranberries on black thread. The television had been moved to make room for an enormous blue spruce, thick at the middle, which swelled across half of the little room. "We don't really have any ornaments," she said, and then she looked up and saw him.

  Nicholas had not gone straight home. He'd headed into Cambridge, to a seedy bar, where he'd had six straight shots of Jack Daniel's and two Heinekens. He'd bought a bottle of J & B from the bartender and driven home with it by his side, swilling at the stoplights, almost hoping he'd get caught.

  "Oh, Nicholas," Paige said. She came to stand in front of him, and she put her arms around him. Her hands were sticky with tar, and he wondered how she'd managed to get that enormous thing into the wobbly tree stand all by herself. Nicholas stared down at her white face, the thin brass hoops dangling from her earlobes. He hadn't even known it was near Christmas.

  He seemed to fall forward at the same moment Paige put her arms around him. Staggering under his weight, she helped him sit on the floor, knocking over the bowl of cranberries. Nicholas crushed some as he sat, grinding them into the cheap yellow throw rug, a stain that looked suspiciously like blood. Paige knelt beside him, moving her fingers through his hair, telling him softly it was all right. "You can't save them all," she whispered.

  Nicholas gazed up at her. He saw, swimming, the planes of an angel's face, the spirit of a lion. He wanted to make it all go away, everything else, to just cling to Paige until the days ran into each other. He dropped the bottle of J & B and watched it roll with a shudder under the fragrant skirt of Paige's naked Christmas tree. He pulled his wife toward him. "No," he said. He breathed in the quiet clean of her as though it were oxygen. "I can't."

  chapter 7

  Paige

  When Nicholas was dressed in a tuxedo, I would have done anything he asked. It was not just the sleek line of his shoulders or the striking contrast of his hair against a snowy shirt; it was his presence. Nicholas should have been born wearing a tuxedo. He could carry it off--the status, the nobility. He commanded attention. If this were his everyday uniform, instead of the simple white coat or scrubs of a senior surgical fellow, he'd probably have been the head of Mass General by now.

  Nicholas leaned over me and kissed my shoulder. "Hello," he said. "I think I knew you in a different life."

  "You did," I said, smiling at him in the mirror. I slipped the clasp onto one of my earrings. "Before you were a doctor." I had not seen Nicholas--really seen him--in a long time. Hours of surgery and rounds, plus hospital committee meetings and politically necessary dinners with superiors, kept him away. He had slept on call at the

  hospital last night, and he'd had a triple bypass and an emergency surgery during the day, so he hadn't had time to phone. I hadn't been sure he'd remember the fund-raising dinner. I'd dressed and gone downstairs, watching the clock move closer to six, and as usual I waited in silence, impatient for Nicholas to get home.

  I hated our house. It was a little place with a nice yard in a very prestigious pocket of Cambridge--one with an awful lot of lawyers and doctors. When we first saw the neighborhood, I had laughed and said the streets must be paved with old money, which Nicholas did not find very funny. Despite everything, I knew that in his heart Nicholas still felt rich. He'd been wealthy too long to change now. And according to Nicholas, if you were rich--or if you wanted to be--you lived a certain way.

  Which meant that we'd taken out a large mortgage in spite of the fact that we had tremendous loans from medical school to repay. Nicholas's parents had never come back groveling, as I knew he'd hoped they would. Once, they had sent a polite Christmas card, but Nicholas never filled me in on the details and I didn't know if he was protecting my feelings or his own. But in spite of the Prescotts, we were working our way back into the black. With Nicholas's salary--a finally respectable $38,000--we had started to make a dent in the interest we owed. I wanted to save a little just in case, but Nicholas insisted that we were going to have more than we needed. All I had wanted was a little apartment, but Nicholas kept talking about building equity. And so we bought a house beyond our means, one that Nicholas believed would be his ticket toward becoming chief of cardiothoracic surgery.

  Nicholas was never at the house, and he probably knew when we bought the place that he wouldn't be, but he insisted on having it decorated a certain way. We had almost no furniture, because we couldn't afford it, but Nicholas said it just made the place look Scandinavian. The entire house was the color of skin. Not beige and not pink, but that strange pale in-between. The wall-to-wall carpeting matched the wallpaper, which matched the shelving and the track of recessed lighting. The only exception was the kitchen, which was painted a color called Barely White. I don't know who the decorator thought she was kidding; it most certainly was white--white tiles, white Corian counters, white marble floor, white pickled wood. "White is in," Nicholas had told me. He'd seen white leather couches and white carpets like spilled foam all over the mansions of doctors he worked with. I gave in. After all, Nicholas knew about this kind of life; I didn't. I didn't mention how dirty I felt sitting in my own living room; or how I stuck out like a sore thumb. I didn't tell him how I thought the kitchen was just crying out to be colored in, and how sometimes, while chopping carrots and celery in that seamless room, I wished for an accident--some splash of blood or stripe of grime that would let me know I'd left my mark.

  I was wearing red to the hospital benefit, and both Nicholas and I seemed starkly drawn against the fading beige lines of the bedroom. "You should wear red more often," he said, running his hand over the bare curve of my shoulder.

  "The nuns used to tell us never to wear red," I said absentmind-edly. "Red attracts boys."

  Nicholas laughed. "Let's go," he said, pulling my hand. "Fogerty's going to be counting every minute I'm late."

  I didn't care about Alistair Fogerty, Nicholas's attending physician and, according to Nicholas, the son of God himself. I didn't care about missing the sumptuous shrimp fountain at the cocktail hour. If the choice had been mine, I wouldn't have gone. I didn't like mingling with the surgeons and their wives. I had nothing to contribute, so I didn't see why I had to be there at all. "Paige," Nicholas said, "come on. You look fine." When I married Nicholas, I truly believed--like a fool--that I had him and he had me and it was plenty. Maybe it would have been if Nicholas didn't move in the circles he did. The better Nicholas became at his job, the more I was confronted with people and situations I didn't understand: jacket-and-tie dinners at someone's home; drunk divorcees leaving hotel keys in Nicholas's tuxedo pockets; prying questions about the background I'd worked so hard to forget. I was not nearly as smart as these people, not nearly as savvy; I never got their jokes. I went, I mingled, because of Nicholas, but he knew as well as I did that we had been kidding ourselves, that I would never fit in.

  When we had been married for a couple of years, I tried to do something about it. I applied to Harvard's Extension School and signed up for two night courses. I picked architecture for me and intro to lit for Nicholas. I figured that if I knew Hemingway from Chaucer and Byron, I'd be able to follow the subtle artsy references that Nicholas's friends batted across dinner conversations like Ping-Pong balls. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't stay on my feet all day at Mercy and have dinner ready for Nicholas and still have time to read about