Harvesting the Heart Read online

  Nicholas and his father parked the car on a side street and got on the Green Line of the T. When the trolley swung to the left, Nicholas's shoulder grazed his father's arm. His father smelled faintly of laundry detergent and ammonia, smells Nicholas had come to associate with the hospital, just as he connected the pungent film-developing chemicals and the hazy red lights of the darkroom with his mother. He stared at his father's brow, the fine gray hair at his temple, the line of his jaw, and the swell of his Adam's apple. He let his eyes slide down to his father's jade polo shirt, the knot of blue veins in the hollow of his elbow, the hands that had healed so many. His father was not wearing his wedding ring.

  "Dad," Nicholas said, "you're missing your ring."

  Robert Prescott turned away from his son. "Yes," he said, "I am."

  Hearing his father speak those words, Nicholas felt the swell of nausea at the base of his throat ease. His father knew he was missing the ring. It wasn't on purpose. Certainly it was a mistake.

  They slid into their wide wooden seats minutes before the game began. "Let me sit on the other side," Nicholas said, his view blocked by a thick man with an Afro. "That's our seat too, isn't it?"

  "It's taken," Robert Prescott said, and as if the words had conjured her, a woman appeared.

  She was tall, and she had long yellow hair held back by a piece of red ribbon. She was wearing a sundress that gapped at the sides, so that as she sat down, Nicholas could see the swell of a breast. She leaned over and kissed his father on the cheek; he rested his arm across the back of her chair.

  Nicholas tried to watch the game, tried to concentrate as the Sox came from behind to crush the Oakland A's. Yaz, his favorite player, hit a homer over the Green Monster, and he opened his mouth to cheer with the crowd, but nothing came out. Then a foul ball tipped off by one of the A's batters flew directly toward the section where Nicholas was sitting. He felt his fingers twitch in his glove, and he stood, balancing on the wooden chair, to catch it as it passed. He turned, stretched his arm overhead, and saw his father bent close to the woman, his lips grazing the edge of her ear.

  Shocked, Nicholas remained standing on his chair even when the rest of the crowd sat down. He watched his father caress someone who was not his mother. Finally, Robert Prescott looked up and caught Nicholas's eye. "Good God," he said, straightening. He did not hold out his hand to help Nicholas down; he did not even introduce him to the woman. He turned to her and without saying a word seemed to communicate a million things at once, which to Nicholas seemed much worse than actually speaking.

  Until that moment, Nicholas had believed that his father was the most amazing man in the world. He was famous, having been quoted in the Globe several times. He commanded respect--didn't his patients sometimes send things after operations, like candy or cards or even once those three goslings? His father had known the answers to all the questions Nicholas could come up with: why the sky was blue, what made Coke fizz, why crows perched on electrical wires didn't get electrocuted, how come people on the South Pole didn't just fall off. Every day of his life he had wanted to be exactly like his father, but now he found himself praying for a miracle. He wanted someone to get coshed in the head with a stray ball, knocked unconscious, so that the manager of Fenway would call over the loudspeaker, "Is there a doctor in the house?" and then his father could come to the rescue. He wanted to see his father bent over the still body, loosening the collar and running his hands over the places where there were pulses. He wanted to see his father be a hero.

  They left at the top of the seventh, and Nicholas sat in the seat behind his father on the T. When they pulled into the driveway of the big brick house, Nicholas jumped out of the car and ran into the forest that bordered the backyard, climbing the nearest oak tree faster than he ever had in his life. He heard his mother say, "Where's Nicholas?" her voice carrying like bells on the wind. He heard her say, "You bastard."

  His father did not come in to dinner that night, and in spite of his mother's warm hands and bright china smiles, Nicholas did not want to eat. "Nicholas," his mother said, "you wouldn't want to leave here, would you? You'd want to be here with me." She said it as a statement, not a question, and that made Nicholas angry until he looked at her face. His mother--the one who taught him that Prescotts don't cry--held her chin up, keeping back the tears that glazed her eyes like a porcelain doll's.

  "I don't know," Nicholas said, and he went to bed still hungry. He huddled under the cool sheets of his bed, shaking. Hours later, in the background, came the muffled splits and growls that he knew were the makings of an argument. This time it was about him. He knew more than anything that he did not want to grow up to be like his father, but he was afraid of growing up without him. He swore that never again would he let anyone make him feel the way he felt right now--as if he was being forced to choose, as if his heart was being pulled in two. He stared out the window to see the white moon, but its face was the same as that of the baseball lady, her cheek smooth and white, her ear marked by the brush of his own father's lips.

  "Wake up, Sleeping Beauty," one of the residents whispered into Nicholas's ear. "You've got a heart to connect."

  Nicholas jumped, hitting his head on the low roof of the helicopter, and reached for the Playmate cooler. He shook the image of his father from his mind and waited for a surgeon's reserve of energy to come from his gut, pulse into his arms and his legs, and spring to the balls of his feet.

  Fogerty was waiting in the operating suite. As Nicholas came through the double doors, scrubbed and gowned, Fogerty began to open Alamonto's chest. Nicholas listened to the whir of the saw slicing through bone as he prepared the heart for its new placement. He turned to face the patient, and that was when he stopped.

  Nicholas had done more than enough surgeries in his seven years as a resident to know the procedure cold. Incisions, opening the chest, dissecting and suturing arteries--all these had become second nature.

  But Nicholas was used to seeing a patient with wrinkled skin, with age spots. Under the orange antiseptic, Paul Alamonto's chest was smooth, firm, and resilient. "Unnatural," Nicholas whispered.

  Fogerty's eyes slid to him above the blue mask. "Did you say something, Dr. Prescott?"

  Nicholas swallowed and shook his head. "No," he said. "Nothing." He clamped an artery and followed Fogerty's instructions.

  When the heart had been dissected, Fogerty lifted it out and nodded to Nicholas, who placed the heart of the thirty-two-year-old woman in Paul Alamonto's chest. It was a good fit, a near match, according to the tissue analyses done by computer. It remained to be seen what Paul Alamonto's body would do with it. Nicholas felt the muscle, still cold, slipping from his fingers. He mopped as Fogerty attached the new heart just where the old one had been.

  Nicholas held his breath when Fogerty took the new heart in his hand, kneading it warm and willing it to beat. And when it did, a four-chamber rhythm, Nicholas found himself blinking in time with the blood. In, up, over, out. In, up, over, out. He looked across the patient at Fogerty, who he knew was smiling beneath his mask. "Close, please, Doctor," Fogerty said, and he left the operating room.

  Nicholas threaded the ribs with wire, sutured the skin with tiny stitches. He had a fleeting thought of Paige, who made him sew loose buttons on his own shirts, saying he was better at it by trade. He exhaled slowly and thanked the residents and the operating room nurses.

  When he moved into the scrub room and peeled off his gloves, Fogerty was standing with his back to him at the far side of the room. He did not turn as Nicholas jerked off his paper cap and turned on the faucet. "You're right about cases like that, Nicholas," Fogerty said quietly. "We are playing God." He tossed a paper towel into a receptacle, still facing away from Nicholas. "At any rate, when they're that young, we're fixing what God did wrong."

  Nicholas wanted to ask Alistair Fogerty many things: how he'd known what Nicholas was thinking, how come he'd sutured a certain artery when it would have been easier to cauterize it, why