Harvesting the Heart (20 page)

I rested my head against the soft pillow of his shoulder and breathed in the heavy smell of gasoline, oil, and shampoo. Priscilla and Calvin were loud; their sweating arms and legs made fart noises on the vinyl. “Jesus,” Jake said finally, crawling across me to lean into the front seat. I adjusted myself around him while he pulled the driver's-side door handle. At the moment the door sprang free, I saw them in the flash of the moon. White spliced with black, Priscilla and Calvin were knotted at the waist. Calvin balanced himself above her on his arms, his shoulders straining. Priscilla's breasts pointed at the night, pink and splotchy where they'd been roughened by stubble. She was looking directly at me, but she did not seem to see.

Jake pulled me out of the car and put his arm around my waist. He steered me to the front of the drive-in, before the lines of cars. We sat down on the damp grass, and I started to cry. “I'm sorry,” Jake said, although it hadn't been his fault. “I wish you hadn't seen that.”

“It's okay,” I said, even though it wasn't.

“You shouldn't be hanging around with a girl like Priscilla,” he said. He wiped at my cheeks with his thumb. His nails were creased with tiny black lines where motor oil had seeped in.

“You don't know anything about me,” I said, pulling back.

Jake held my wrists. “But I'd like to,” he said. He kissed my cheeks first, then my eyelids, then my temples. By the time he reached my mouth I was shaking. His lips were soft as a flower and just rubbed back and forth, quiet and slow. After all Priscilla and I had practiced, after all we had done, I had never considered this. This wasn't even a kiss, but it made my chest and my thighs burn. I realized I had much to learn. As Jake's lips grazed mine, I said what had been going through my mind: “No pressure?”

It was a question, and it was directed at him, but Jake didn't take it the way I intended. He lifted his head and pulled me to his side, keeping me warm but not kissing me, not coming back to me. Over our heads, the actors were moving like dinosaurs, hollow and silent and thirty feet tall. “No pressure,” Jake said lightly, leaving me bothered and pounding, ashamed, wanting more.

chapter
9

N
icholas was going to harvest the heart. It had belonged to a thirty-two-year-old woman from Cos Cob, Connecticut, who had died hours before in a twenty-car pileup on Route 95. By tonight it would belong to Paul Cruz Alamonto, Fogerty's patient, an eighteen-year-old kid who'd had the misfortune to be born with a bad heart. Nicholas looked out the window of the helicopter and pictured Paul Alamonto's face: hooded gray eyes and thick jet hair, pulse twitching at the side of his neck. Here was a kid who had never run a mile, played quarterback, ridden a seven-alarm roller coaster. Here was a kid who—thanks to Nicholas and Fogerty and a jackknifed tractor-trailer on Route 95—was going to be given a renewed lease on life.

It would be Nicholas's second heart transplant, although he was still just assisting Fogerty. The operation was complicated, and Fogerty was letting him do more than he let anyone else do, even if he thought Nicholas was still too green to be chief surgeon during the transplant. But Nicholas had been turning heads at Mass General for years now, moving swiftly under Fogerty's tutelage from peer to near equal. He was the only cardiothoracic resident who acted as senior surgeon during routine procedures. Fogerty didn't even stand around during his bypass operations anymore.

Other resident fellows passed Nicholas in the scrubbed white halls of the hospital and turned the other way, unwilling to be reminded of what they hadn't yet achieved. Nicholas did not have many friends his age. He socialized with the directors of other departments at Mass General, men twenty years his senior, whose wives ran the Junior League. At thirty-six, he was for all practical purposes the associate director of cardiothoracic surgery at one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country. To have no friends, Nicholas reasoned, was a small sacrifice.

As the helicopter hovered over the tarmac on the roof of Saint Cecilia's, Nicholas reached for the Playmate cooler. “Let's go,” he said brusquely, turning to the two residents he'd brought with him. He stepped from the helicopter, checking his watch out of nervous habit. Shrugging into his leather bomber jacket, he shielded his face from the rain and ran into the hospital, where a nurse was waiting. “Hi,” he said, smiling. “I hear you have a heart for me.”

It took Nicholas and the assisting residents less than an hour to retrieve the organ. Nicholas set the Playmate between his ankles when the helicopter lifted into the muddy sky. He laid his head against the damp seat, listening to the residents sitting behind him. They were good surgeons, but their rotation in cardiothoracic wasn't their favorite. If Nicholas recalled correctly, one of the doctors was leaning toward orthopedic surgery, the other toward general surgery. “Your call,” one said, shuffling a deck of playing cards.

“I don't give a shit,” the other resident said, “just so long as we don't play hearts.”

Nicholas clenched his fists instinctively. He turned his head to see out the window but found that the helicopter was wrapped in a thick gray cloud. “Goddamn,” he said, for no reason at all. He closed his eyes, hoping he'd dream of Paige.

He was seven, and his parents were thinking of divorce. That was the way they had put it when they sat Nicholas down in the library.
Nothing to be alarmed about,
they had said. But Nicholas knew of at least one kid in his school whose parents were divorced. His name was Eric, and he lived with his mother, and at Christmas, when the class had made papier-mâché giraffe ornaments, Eric had had to make two, for two different trees. Nicholas remembered that well, especially the way Eric stayed late at the arts and crafts table when everyone else had gone to the gym to play kickball. Nicholas had been the last one leaving the room, but when he saw Eric's eyes turned up to the door, he got permission to stay. Eric and Nicholas had painted both giraffes the same shade of blue and had talked about everything but Christmas.

“Then where,” Nicholas said, “will Daddy be for Christmas?”

The Prescotts looked at each other. It was July. Finally, Nicholas's father spoke. “It's just something we're considering,” he said. “And no one said that I will be the one to leave. In fact,” Robert Prescott said, “no one may be leaving at all.”

Nicholas's mother made a strange sound through her clamped lips and left the room. His father crouched down in front of him. “If we're going to catch the opening pitch,” he said, “we'd better get going.”

Nicholas's father had season tickets to the Red Sox—three seats —but the boy was rarely invited along. Usually his father took colleagues, from time to time even a long-standing patient. For years Nicholas had watched the games on Channel 38, waiting for the camera to span the crowd behind third base, hoping to catch a glimpse of his father. But so far that had never happened.

Nicholas was allowed to go to one or two games each season, and it was always the high point of his summer. He kept the dates marked on the calendar in his bedroom, and he'd cross off each day leading up to the game. The night before, he'd take out the wool Sox cap he'd been given two birthdays ago, and he'd tuck it neatly into his Little League glove. He was up at dawn, and although they wouldn't leave until noon, Nicholas was ready.

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.