Harvesting the Heart Read online

  Nicholas jumped away, and I looked into his eyes. They were ringed gray, surprised and hurt. For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking, Well, good.

  Dr. Thayer blustered into the room, her scrubs flying untied behind her. "So you couldn't wait another month, Paige, eh?"

  She squatted down in front of me, and I was vaguely aware of her fingers probing and flattening and stretching. I wanted to tell her I could wait, that I had been willing to wait the rest of my life rather than actually face this child, but suddenly that was not the truth. Suddenly I just wanted to be free of the throbbing weight, the splitting pain.

  Nicholas braced one of my legs and Noreen braced the other while I pushed. I felt for sure I would crack in two. Noreen held a mirror between my legs. "Here's the head, Paige," she said. "Do you want to feel it?"

  She took my hand and stretched it downward, but I pulled away. "I want you to get it out of me," I cried.

  I pushed and pushed, knowing all the blood in my body was flooding my face, burning behind my eyes and my cheeks. Finally, I sank back against the raised table. "I can't," I whimpered. "I really can't do this."

  Nicholas leaned close to me to whisper something, but what I heard was the muffled conversation between Noreen and Dr. Thayer.

  Something about a special care team, about the baby not coming fast enough now. Then I remembered the books I had read when I was first pregnant. The lungs. At the end of the eighth month, the lungs have just finished development.

  Even if he ever got here, my baby might not be able to breathe.

  "One more time," Dr. Thayer said, and I struggled up and bore down with all the energy I could summon. Quite clearly I could feel the nose, a tiny pointed nose, pressed against the tight seal of my own flesh. Get out, I thought, and Dr. Thayer smiled up at me. "We've got the head," she said.

  After that it all came easily: the shoulders and the thick purple umbilical cord, the long skinny creature that lay, howling, between my legs. It was a boy. In spite of what I knew, I had hoped till this last moment that I would be having a girl. For some reason it still came as a shock. I stared at him, unfolded, wondering how he had ever fit inside. Doctors took him away from me, and Nicholas, who was one of them, followed.

  It was at least a half hour before I got to touch my son. His lungs were pronounced perfect. He was thin but healthy. He had the familiar newborn features: flattened Indian face, dark rat hair, obsidian eyes. His toes curled under, plump like early peas. On his belly was a red birthmark that looked like a funky scribbling of the number twenty-two. "Must be the stamp of the guy who inspected him," Nicholas said.

  Nicholas kissed my forehead, staring at me with his wide-sky eyes, making me regret what I'd said before. "Four hours," he said. "How considerate of you to finish all the hard work in time for me to do my morning rotations."

  "Well, you know," I said, "we aim to please."

  Nicholas touched the baby's open palm, and the fingers curled together like a daisy at sunset. "Four hours is damn fast for a first delivery," he said.

  The question died on my lips: Was this my first? Staring into the demanding face of this son, I thought that maybe, right now, it didn't matter.

  Nearby, Dr. Thayer was completing the medical record. "Last name, Prescott," she verified. "Have you picked a first name?"

  I thought of my mother, May O'Toole, and wondered if she knew in her corner of the world that she had a grandchild. I wondered if the baby might have her eyes, her smile, or her sorrow.

  I turned my face up to Nicholas. "Max," I said. "His name is Max."

  Nicholas went to Mass General to round his patients, and I was left alone with my baby. I held him awkwardly in my arms as he screamed and thrashed and kicked. I felt beaten from the inside; I couldn't move very well, and I wondered if I was the best person for Max right then.

  When I turned on the TV above the bed, Max quieted down. Together we listened to the wind shake the walls of the hospital as the reporters described a world that was falling apart.

  At one point I found Max looking up at me, as if he'd seen the face before but couldn't place it. I inspected him, his wrinkled neck and blotchy cheeks, the bruised color of his eyes. I did not know how this child could possibly have come out of me. I kept waiting to feel that surge of mother love that was supposed to come naturally, the bond that meant nothing could keep me from my baby. But I was looking at a stranger. My throat seemed to swell up with a pain more raw than childbirth, and I recognized it immediately: I just wasn't ready. I could love him, but I had expected another month to prepare. I needed time. And that was the one thing I would not have. "You should know," I whispered, "I don't think I'll be very good at this." He placed his fist against my heart. "You have the upper hand," I told him. "I'm more afraid of you than you are of me."

  At Brigham and Women's, one of the options for new mothers was partial rooming-in. The baby could stay with you all day, and at night when you were ready to go to sleep, a nurse would roll the

  cabinet over the fridge, into the never-used ice bucket that held her forbidden packs of cigarettes. My father did not know she smoked--

  I realized this even though I was a baby, since she went to great pains to hide the cigarettes and she acted guilty when she lit one and she sprayed the air with cinnamon freshener after she'd flushed the ashes and the butt down the toilet. I don't know why she hid her smoking from him; maybe, like most other things, it was a game for her to play.

  She pulled one from the wrinkled pack and lit it, drawing in deeply. When she exhaled she stared at me, sitting on the linoleum with my blocks and my favorite doll. It was a cloth one, with practice snaps and zippers and buttons, strategically placed through ten wrappings of bright cotton clothes. I could do everything but the shoelaces.

  Cigarette ashes dropped on my doll. I looked up and saw a perfect red ring left by my mother's lipstick, just above the V of her fingers.

  "Two weeks," she said, nodding at the orange tree. "That

  thing'll be dead in two weeks." She stubbed the cigarette out in the sink and sighed, and then she pulled me up by the hands. "See here, Paige-boy," she said, using her pet name for me. She

  settled me on her hip. "I'm no good at taking care of things,"

  she whispered confidentially, and then she began to hum.

  "Supercalifragilisticexpiali-docious," she sang, whirling

  me around and around in a fast, stomping polka. I giggled as we flushed the evidence away. I wondered just how much I knew about my mother that my father never would have guessed.

  The wheels of the bassinet throbbed in my head, and I knew Max was coming long before the night nurse arrived. He was screaming. "Hard to believe they were worried about his lungs," she said, holding him out to me. For a moment I did not reach for him. I stared angrily at this greedy thing, who had twice in one night taken me away from all I had left of my mother.

  chapter 14

  Paige

  evenings at the Flanagans', clapping along as Jake's father sang old Gaelic songs and the littlest children hopped and jigged. I was accepted at RISD, and Jake took me out to dinner to celebrate. Later that night, when we wrapped the heat of our bodies around each other like a blanket, Jake told me he would wait for me through college, or grad school, or the rest of my life.

  In May I came down with the flu. It was strange, because the bug had passed around the school in early January, but I had all the same symptoms. I was weak and chilled, and I could not keep anything down. Jake brought me heather he'd picked from the side of the road and sculptures he made with wire and old Coke cans at work. "You look like hell," he said, and he leaned down to kiss me.

  "Don't," I warned him. "You'll catch it."

  Jake had smiled. "Me?" he said. "I'm invincible."

  On the fifth morning I had the flu, I stumbled into the bathroom to throw up, and I heard my father walking by the door. He paused, and then he went down the stairs. I looked into the mirror for the first tim