Harvesting the Heart (39 page)

I seemed to know so much about mothers in the abstract. I remembered when I had learned during a social studies unit in fifth grade that baby monkeys, given the choice, picked terry-cloth figures to cling to, rather than wire ones. Once, in a doctor's waiting room, I had read of coyotes, who howl if their cubs get lost, knowing they will find their way home by the signal. I wondered if Max would be able to find safety in my voice. I wondered if after all these years I'd be able to pick out my mother's.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a familiar priest heading toward the altar. I did not want to be recognized and shamed into penance. I ducked my head and pushed past him in the aisle, shivering as my shoulder caught the strength of his faith.

I drove away from Saint Christopher's to the place where I knew I'd have to go before I left to find my mother. Even as I approached the Mobil station, I could see him from a distance. Jake was handing a credit card back to a buttoned-down lawyer type, taking care not to brush his blackened hand against his customer's. The man drove away in his Fiat, leaving a space for me.

Jake did not move as I pulled my car up beside the unleaded tank and got out. “Hello,” I said. He clenched and then unclenched his fingers. He was wearing a wedding band, and this made my stomach burn, even though I was wearing one too. It was all right for me to go on, but I somehow had expected Jake to be just the way he had been when I left.

I swallowed and put on my brightest smile. “Well,” I said, “I can tell you're overwhelmed to see me.”

Jake spoke then, his voice running and low as I had remembered it. “I didn't know you were back,” he said.

“I didn't know I was coming.” I took a step away from him, shielding my eyes from the sun. The façade of the garage had been updated with fresh paint and a sign that said, “Jake Flanagan, Proprietor.” I turned back to Jake.

“He died,” Jake said quietly, “three years ago.”

The air between us was humming, but I kept my distance. “I'm sorry,” I said. “No one told me.”

Jake looked at the car, which was dusty from its long drive. “How much do you want?” he said, lifting the nozzle from its cradle.

I stared at him blankly. He unscrewed the cap. “Oh, the car,” I said. “Fill it.”

Jake nodded and started the pump. He leaned against the hot metal door, and I watched his hands, restrained in their strength. Grease had settled into the creases in his palms, the way it used to. “What are you doing now?” he asked. “Still drawing?”

I smiled at the ground. “I'm an escape artist,” I said.

“Like Houdini?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but the knots and cuffs are stronger.”

Jake didn't look at me when the pump switched off. He held out his hand, and I gave him my credit card.

I had expected the familiar physical jolt that had always flared between us when our fingers touched. But nothing happened. Nothing at all. I wasn't looking for passion, and I knew I wasn't in love with Jake. I was married to Nicholas. I was where I was supposed to be. But somehow I expected there to be a little something left from before. I looked into Jake's face, and his aqua eyes were cool and reserved. Yes, he seemed to be saying,
between us, it is over.

When he came back a minute later, he asked if I'd come into the office for a moment. My heart caught; maybe he was going to say something to me or let down his guard. But he took me to the machine that validated credit cards. My American Express card had been rejected. “That's impossible,” I murmured, and I handed him a Visa. “Try this.”

The same thing happened. Without asking Jake's permission, I picked up the telephone and dialed the emergency 800 number on the back of my credit card. The operator informed me that Nicholas Prescott had voided his old Visa card and that a new one, with a new number, was being sent to his address. I put the receiver down on the counter and shook my head. “My husband,” I said. “He just cut me off.”

I mentally ran through the amount of cash I had left, the chances of my checks being accepted out-of-state. What if I didn't have enough to find my mother? What if I
could
find her but then was too broke to get to her? Suddenly Jake's arm was around my shoulders. He led me to a worn orange plastic window seat. “I'm gonna move your car,” he said. “I'll be right back.” I closed my eyes and slipped into the familiar feeling. This time, I told myself, Jake would be able to rescue me.

When he came back he sat beside me. There was gray in his hair now, just at the temples, and it still hung over his eyes and curled at the edges of his ears. He lifted my chin, and in his touch I felt that easy camaraderie I had felt when I was his favorite little sister. “So, Paige O'Toole,” he said, “what brings you back to Chicago?”

As he drew the outline I filled in with chiseled images and stories the past eight years of my life. I had just told him about Max falling off the couch and getting a nosebleed, when the glass door jingled and a young woman came in. She had dark, exotic skin and eyes that tilted up. She was wearing a tie-died cotton jumper, and she carried a big bag of Fritos in her left hand. “Dinner!” she sang, and then she saw Jake sitting with me. “Oh.” She smiled. “I can wait out back.”

Jake stood and wiped his hands on his jeans. He put his arm around the woman's shoulders. “Paige,” he said, “this is my wife, Ellen.”

Ellen's dark eyes opened wider at the sound of my name. I waited a second, expecting a flare of jealousy to streak her smile. But she just took a step forward and held out her hand. “After all these years of hearing about you, it's nice to finally meet you,” she said, and I could see it in her gaze—she was being honest. She slipped her arm around Jake's waist and squeezed lightly, hooking her thumb into the belt loop of his jeans. “How about I leave the Fritos,” she said. “I'll catch up with you at home.” And as easily as she'd interrupted, she disappeared.

When she left the small glass business office, taking with her the halo of energy that hovered around her, the air seemed to be sucked away as well. “Ellen and I have been married for five years,” Jake said, staring after her. “She knows about everything. We can't—” His voice tripped, and then he started again. “We haven't been able to have any kids yet.” I turned away; I did not trust myself to meet his eyes. “I love her,” he said softly, watching her drive onto Franklin.

“I know.”

Jake squatted down on the floor in front of me. He picked up my left hand and rubbed his thumb over my wedding band, leaving a stripe of grease that he did not try to erase. “Tell me why he cut off your charge cards,” he said.

I tilted back my head and thought about the days when Jake would be getting ready for a date with another girl; all the nights I had eaten with his family and pretended that I really belonged and spun such complicated tales about my mother's death that I sometimes wrote them down just to keep track. I remembered Terence Flanagan's buckled grin as he pinched his wife's backside while she served the potatoes. I remembered Jake coming to me after midnight, to dance in the moonlit kitchen. I thought of Jake's arms around me as he carried me to my bedroom, still bleeding from the loss of a life. I thought of his face coming in and out of my pain; of the impossible ties he cut to say goodbye. “I've run away,” I whispered to Jake, “again.”

chapter
22

“
T
his is the deal,” Nicholas said, juggling Max on his hip and the diaper bag on his shoulder. “I'll pay you whatever you ask. I'll do everything in my power to get you off the next two graveyard shifts. But you've got to watch my kid.”

LaMyrna Ratchet, the nurse on duty in orthopedics, twisted a strawberry-blond curl around her finger. “I don't know, Dr. Prescott,” she said. “I could get in a shitload of trouble for this.”

Nicholas gave her his most winning smile. He was watching the heavy clock above her head, which said that even if he left right now he'd be fifteen minutes late to surgery. “I'm trusting you with my son, LaMyrna,” he said. “I've got to go. I've got a patient waiting. I'll bet you can figure something out.”

LaMyrna chewed on a fingernail and finally reached out for Max, who grabbed at her Coke-bottle glasses and her stringy hair. “He doesn't cry, does he?” she called after Nicholas, who was running down the hall.

“Oh, no,” Nicholas yelled over his shoulder. “Not a bit.”

Nicholas had arrived at the hospital at five in the morning, a half hour earlier than usual. He'd actually had the pleasure of waking up his son, who had awakened him three times during the night to drink and to be changed. Max, still half asleep, had fussed the whole time Nicholas tried to jam him into a fuzzy yellow playsuit. “Yeah, well,” he'd said, “how do
you
like it?”

Nicholas had expected to put Max in whatever sort of staff day care the hospital had, but there
was
no damn program on site. If Nicholas wanted to use Mass General's child care facility, he'd have to drive to fucking
Charlestown,
and—as if that weren't inconvenient enough—it didn't open until 6:30 A.M., when Nicholas would already be scrubbing for surgery. He'd asked the OR nurses to watch Max, but they had looked at him as though he had two heads. They couldn't, they said, not when at least six times a day there was no one behind the desk because of short staffing. They suggested the general patient floors, but the only nurses on the early shift were bleary from being up all night, and Nicholas didn't quite trust them. So he'd headed up to the orthopedics floor, and he'd found LaMyrna, a homely girl with a good heart whom he remembered from his internship.

“Dr. Prescott,” he heard, and he whipped around. He'd missed the door to the operating suite, that's how exhausted he was. The nurse held the swinging door for him. He turned on the steaming water in the industrial sinks, scouring under his fingernails until the pads of his fingers were pink and raw. When he pushed his way backward into the operating suite, he saw that everyone else had been waiting.

Fogerty leaned closer to the unconscious patient. “Mr. Brennan,” he said, “it seems Dr. Prescott has decided to grace us with his presence after all.” He turned toward Nicholas and then toward the door. “What,” he said, “no stroller? No Porta-Crib?”

Nicholas pushed him out of the way. “Just when did you develop a sense of humor, Alistair?” he said. He turned to the head OR nurse. “Prep him.”

He was tired and sweating and badly needed a shower, but the only thing in his mind when he finished surgery was Max. He knew he needed to round his patients; he hadn't a clue about his schedule for tomorrow. He rode up five flights in the cool green elevator. Maybe he'd go home today, and Paige would be there, and this would have been a lousy nightmare.

LaMyrna Ratchet was nowhere to be found. Nicholas stuck his head into the back room at the nurses' station, but no one seemed to know whether she was still on duty. Nicholas began to peer into different patient rooms. He poked through a bouquet of balloons because he thought he saw a short white skirt, but LaMyrna was not in the room. The patient, a woman of about fifty, clung to Nicholas's arm. “No more blood,” she cried. “Don't let them take no more blood.”

LaMyrna was not in any of the patient rooms. Nicholas even checked the women's staff bathroom, startling a couple of nurses and a female resident, but LaMyrna was not at the sink. He ducked down, peering at the shoes in the stalls. He called her name.

Finally, he went back to the nurses' station in the center of the orthopedic floor. “Look,” he said, “this nurse has disappeared, and she's taken my baby.”

An unfamiliar nurse handed him a pink telephone message note that had been folded like a Chinese football. “Why didn't you say so?” the woman said.

Dr. Prescott,
the note read,
I had to leave because my shift was over and they told me you were still in OR so I left Mike with the people in the volunteer lounge. LaMyrna.

Mike?

Nicholas couldn't even remember where the volunteer lounge was. They had built it sometime during his residency; it was a general meeting area with lockers and a sign-in sheet for the candy stripers and older hospital volunteers. He asked for directions at the hospital's front desk. “I can take you,” a girl said. “I'm on my way there.”

She was no older than sixteen and wore a jeans jacket with an airbrushed rendering of Nirvana on the back. She carried a small Eddie Bauer refrigerated cold-pack, and her peppermint-stick uniform protruded from a plain white tote bag. She saw Nicholas staring at the bag. “I wouldn't be caught dead leaving school in it,” she said, and she cracked a gum bubble, loud.