Harvesting the Heart Read online

  Suddenly I really believe that if I stick it out long enough, Nicholas will understand. It's just a matter of time, and I have a lot of that on my hands. "I'm a volunteer at the hospital now," I tell my mother proudly. "I work wherever Nicholas works. I'm closer than his shadow."

  My mother pauses, as if she is considering this. "Stranger things have happened," she says.

  Max wakes up screaming, his legs bent close to his chest. When I rub his stomach, it only makes him scream harder. I think that maybe he needs to burp, but that doesn't seem to be the problem. Finally, I walk around with him perched on my shoulder, pressing his belly flush against me. "What's wrong?" Astrid says, her head at the nursery doorway.

  "I don't know," I say, and to my surprise, uttering those words doesn't throw me into a panic. Somehow I know I will figure it out. "It might be gas."

  Max squeezes up his face and turns red, the way he does when he's trying to go to the bathroom. "Ah," I say. "Are you leaving me a present?" I wait until he looks as if he's finished, and then I pull down his sweatpants to change his diaper. There is nothing inside, nothing at all. "You fooled me," I say, and he smiles.

  I rediaper him and sit him on the floor with a Busy Box, rolling and turning the knobs until he catches on and follows. From time to time he screws up his face again. He seems to be constipated. "Maybe we'll have prunes for breakfast," I say. "That ought to make you feel better."

  Max plays quietly with me for a few minutes, and then I notice that he isn't really paying attention. He's staring off into space, and the curiosity that flames the blue in his eyes seems to have dulled. He sways a little, as if he's going to fall. I frown, tickle him, and wait for him to respond. It takes a second or two longer than usual, but eventually he comes back to me.

  He's not himself, I think, although I cannot put my finger on what the problem really is. I figure I will watch him closely. I tenderly rub his chunky forearms, feeling a satisfied flutter in my chest. I know my own son, I think proudly. I know him well enough to catch the subtle changes.

  "I'm sorry I haven't called," I tell my father. "Things have been a little crazy."

  My father laughs. "I had thirteen years with you, lass. I think your mother deserves three months."

  I had written my father postcards from North Carolina, just as 1 had written Max. I'd told him about Donegal, about the rye rolling over the hills. I told him everything I could on a three-and-a-half-by-five-and-a-half-inch card, without mentioning my mother.

  "Rumor has it," my father says, "you've been sleepin' with the enemy." I jump, thinking he means Nicholas, and then I realize he is talking about living at the Prescotts'.

  I glance at the Faberge' egg on the mantel, the Civil War Sharps carbine rifle hanging over the fireplace. "Necessity makes strange bedfellows," I say.

  I wind the telephone cord around my ankles, trying to find a safe route for conversation. But there is little I have to say, and so much I want to. I take a deep breath. "Speaking of rumors," I say, "I hear Mom called."

  "Aye."

  My mouth drops open. "That's it? 'Aye'? Twenty-one years go by, and that's all you have to say?"

  "I was expectin' it," my father says. "I figured if you had the fortune to find her, sooner or later she'd return the favor."

  "The favor?" I shake my head. "I thought you wanted nothing to do with her. I thought you said it was too late."

  For a moment my father is silent. "Paige," he says finally, "how did you find her to be?"

  I close my eyes and sink back on the leather couch. I want to choose my words very carefully. I imagine my mother the way she would have wanted me to: seated on Donegal, galloping him across a field faster than a lie can spread. "She wasn't what I expected," I say proudly.

  My father laughs. "May never was."

  "She thinks she's going to see you someday," I add.

  "Does she now," my father answers, but his thoughts seem very far away. I wonder if he is seeing her the way he did the first time he met her, dressed in her halter top and carrying her practice suitcase. I wonder if he can remember the tremor in his voice when he asked her to marry him, or the flash across her eyes as she said yes, or even the ache in his throat when he knew she was gone from his life.

  It may be my imagination, but for the breadth of a moment everything in the room seems to sharpen in focus. The contrasting colors in the Oriental carpet become more striking; the towering windows reflect a devil's glare. It makes me question if, all this time, I haven't really been seeing clearly.

  "Dad," I whisper, "I want to go back."

  "God help me, Paige," my father says. "Don't I know it."

  Elliot Saget is pleased with my gallery at Mass General. He is so convinced that it is going to win some kind of humanitarian Best of Boston award that he promises me the stars on a silver platter. "Well, actually," I say, "I'd rather watch Nicholas in surgery."

  I have never seen Nicholas truly doing his job. Yes, I have seen him with his patients, drawing them out of their fear and being more understanding with them than he has been with his own family. But I want to see what all the training is for; what his hands are so skilled at. Elliot frowns at me when I ask. "You may not like it very much," he says. "Lots of blood and battle scars."

  But I stand my ground. "I'm much tougher than I look," I say.

  And so this morning there will be no picture of Nicholas's patient tacked to his door. Instead I sit alone in the gallery above the operating suite and wait for Nicholas to enter the room. There are already seven other people: anesthesiologists, nurses, residents, someone sitting beside a complicated machine with coils and tubes. The patient, lying naked on the table, is painted a strange shade of orange.

  Nicholas enters, still stretching the gloves on his hands, and all the heads in the room turn toward him. I stand up. There is an audio monitor in the gallery, so I can hear Nicholas's low voice, rustling behind his paper mask, greeting everyone. He checks beneath the sterile drapes and watches as a tube is set in the patient's throat. He says something to a nearby doctor, youngish-looking, his hair in a neat ponytail. The young doctor nods and begins to make an incision in the patient's leg.

  All of the doctors wear weird glasses on their heads, which they flip down to cover their eyes when they bend over the patient. It makes me smile: I keep expecting this to be some kind of joke costume, with googly eyeballs popping out on springs. Nicholas stands to the side while two doctors work over the patient's leg. I cannot see very well what they are doing, but they take different instruments from a cloth-covered tray, things that look like nail scissors and eyebrow tweezers.

  They pull a long purple spaghetti string from the leg, and when I realize it is a vein, I feel the bile rise in my throat. I have to sit down. The vein is placed in a jar filled with clear fluid, and the doctors working on the leg begin to sew with needles so small they seem invisible. One of them takes two pieces of metal from a machine and touches the leg, and I can swear I smell human flesh burning.

  Then Nicholas moves to the center of the patient. He reaches for a knife--no, a scalpel--and traces a thin line down the orange area of the patient's chest. Almost immediately the skin is stained with dark blood. Then he does something I cannot believe: he pulls a saw out of nowhere--an actual saw, like a Black & Decker--and begins to slice through the breastbone. I think I can see chips of bone, although I can't believe Nicholas would let that happen. When I think I am surely going to faint, Nicholas hands the saw to another doctor and spreads the chest open, holding it in place with a metal device.

  I don't know what I was expecting--maybe a red valentine heart. But what lies in the center of this cavity once the blood is mopped away looks like a yellow wall. Nicholas picks a pair of scissors off a tray, bends low toward the chest, and fiddles around with his hands. He takes two tubes that come from that complicated machine and attaches them to places I cannot quite see. Then he picks up a different pair of scissors and looks at the yellow wall. He begins to snip at it. He peel