Harvesting the Heart Read online

  "Close enough." She patted his shoulder and pointed to the picture of Nicholas. "Daddy. Daddy."

  Robert Prescott straightened abruptly and slammed his head on the underside of the table. "Shit," he said, and Astrid poked him with an elbow.

  "Your language," she snapped. "That's not the first word I want to hear from him." She picked up the portrait of Paige she had shot from a distance, the one Nicholas had balked at the first day he'd left

  Max. "This is your mommy," she said, running her fingertips over Paige's delicate features. "Mommy." "Muh," Max said.

  Astrid turned to Robert, her mouth wide. "You did hear that, didn't you? Muh?"

  Robert nodded. "It could have been gas."

  Astrid scooped the baby into her arms and kissed the folds of his neck. "You, my love, are a genius. Don't listen to your dotty old grandfather."

  "Nicholas would pitch a fit if he knew you were showing him Paige's picture, you know," Robert said. He stood and straightened, rubbing the small of his back. "I'm too damn old for this," he said. "Nicholas should have had Max ten years ago, when I could really enjoy him." He held out his arms for Max, so that Astrid could pull herself up. She gathered together the photos. "Max isn't all yours, Astrid," he said. "You really should get Nicholas's go-ahead."

  Astrid pulled the baby back into her arms. Max pressed his lips to her neck and made razzing sounds. She slid him into the high chair that sat at the head of the table. "If we'd always done what Nicholas wanted," she said, "he'd have been a teenage vegetarian with a crew cut who bungee-jumped from hot-air balloons."

  Robert opened two jars of baby food, pear-pineapple and plums, and sniffed at them to see which might taste better. "You have a point," he said.

  Nicholas had planned to do the entire operation, with the exception of the vein harvest, from start to finish, out of deference to Alistair. He knew that if the positions were reversed, he would want it that way. But by the time he had threaded the ribs with wire, he was unsteady on his feet. He had been concentrating too hard too long. The placement of the veins had been perfect. The sutures he'd made around Alistair's heart were microscopically minute. He just couldn't do any more.

  "You can close," he said, nodding to the resident who had been assisting him. "And you'd better do the best goddamned job of your surgical career." He regretted the words as soon as he'd said them, seeing the slight tremor in the girl's fingers. He leaned down below the sterile drapes that hid Alistair's face. There was a lot he had planned to say, but just seeing him there with the life temporarily drained out of him reminded Nicholas too much of his own mortality. He held his wrist against Alistair's cheek, careful not to mark him with his own blood. He felt the tingle coming back to Fogerty's skin as the unobstructed heart began to do its work again. Satisfied, he left the room with all the dignity Fogerty had told him he would one day command.

  Robert didn't like it when Astrid took Max into the darkroom. "Too many wires," he said, "too many toxic chemicals. God only knows what gets into his system in there." But Astrid wasn't stupid. Max couldn't crawl yet, so there was no danger of his getting into the stop bath or the fixer. She didn't do any developing when he was around; she just scanned contact sheets for the prints she'd make later. If she placed him just right, on a big striped beach towel, he was perfectly content to play with his chunky plastic shapes and the electronic ball that made farm animal noises.

  "Once upon a time," Astrid said, telling the story over her shoulder, "there was a girl named Cinderella, who hadn't lived the most charmed life but had the good fortune to meet a man who had. The kind of man, by the way, you're going to grow up to be." She leaned down and handed him a rubber triangle he'd inadvertently tossed away. "You're going to open doors for girls and pay for their dinners and do all the chivalrous things men used to do before they slacked off under the excuse of equal rights."

  Astrid circled a tiny square with her red grease pen. "This one's good," she murmured. "Anyway, Max, as I was saying . . . oh, yes, Cinderella. Well, someone else will probably tell you the story at a later date, so I'm just going to skip ahead a little. You see, a book doesn't always end at the final page." She squatted down until she was sitting across from Max, and then she took his hands in her own, kissing the tips of his stubby wet fingers.

  "Cinderella had liked the idea of living in a castle, and she was actually rather good at being a princess until one day she started to think about what she might be doing if she hadn't gotten married to the handsome prince. All her old friends were kicking up their heels at banquet halls and entering Pillsbury Bake-Offs and dating Chippendale's dancers. So she took one of the royal horses and traveled to the far ends of the earth, taking photographs with this camera she'd gotten from a peddler in exchange for her crown."

  The baby hiccuped, and Astrid pulled him to a standing position. "No, really," she said, "it wasn't a rip-off. After all, it was a Nikon. Meanwhile, the prince was doing everything he could to get her out of his mind, because he was the laughingstock of the royal community for not being able to keep a leash on his wife. He went hunting three times a day and organized a croquet tournament and even took up taxidermy, but staying busy all the time still couldn't occupy his thoughts. So--"

  Max waddled forward, supported by Astrid's hands, just as Nicholas appeared at the darkroom's curtain. "I don't like when you take him in here," he said, reaching for Max. "What if you turn your back?"

  "I don't," Astrid said. "How was your surgery?"

  Nicholas hoisted Max onto his shoulder and smelled his bottom. "Jeez," he said. "When did Grandma change you last?"

  Standing, Astrid frowned at her son and plucked Max off his shoulder. "It only takes him a minute," she said, walking past Nicholas from her darkroom into the muted light of the Blue Room.

  "The surgery was fine," Nicholas said, picking at a tray of olives and cocktail onions that Imelda had set out for Astrid hours before. "I'm just here to check in because I know I'll be late. I want to be there when Fogerty wakes up." He stuffed three olives into his mouth and spit the pimentos into a napkin. "And what was that trash you were telling Max?"

  "Fairy tales," Astrid said, unsnapping Max's outfit and pulling free the tapes of the diaper. "You remember them, I'm sure." She swabbed Max's backside and handed Nicholas the dirty bundle to dispose of. "They all have happy endings."

  When Alistair Fogerty awoke from a groggy sleep in surgical ICU, the first words he uttered were, "Get Prescott."

  Nicholas was paged. Since he had been expecting this summons, he was at Fogerty's bedside in minutes. "You bastard," Alistair said to him, straining to shift his weight. "What have you done to me?"

  Nicholas grinned at him. "A very tidy quadruple bypass," he said. "Some of my best work."

  "Then how come I feel like I have an eighteen-wheeler on my chest?" Fogerty tossed against the pillows. "God," he said. "I've been listening to patients tell me that for years, and I never really believed them. Maybe we should all go through open heart, like psychiatrists have to be analyzed. A humbling experience."

  His eyes began to close, and Nicholas stood up. Joan Fogerty was waiting at the door. He crossed to speak to her, to tell her that all the preliminary signs were very good. She had been crying; Nicholas could tell by the raccoon rings of mascara under her eyes. She sat beside her husband and spoke softly, words Nicholas could not hear.

  "Nicholas," Fogerty whispered, his voice barely audible above the steady blip of the cardiac monitor. "Take care of my patients, and don't fuck with my desk."

  Nicholas smiled and walked out of the room. He took several steps down the hall before he realized what Alistair had been telling him: that he was now the acting chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Mass General. Without realizing it, he took the elevator to the floor where Fogerty's office was located, and he turned the unlocked door. Nothing had changed. The files were still piled high, their coded edges bright like confetti. The sun fell across the forbidding swivel chair, and Nicholas was almost certa