Harvesting the Heart (48 page)

With
his hand still touching the warm metal of the door handle, he turned
back to face his mother. She and Max were standing in the doorway,
dwarfed by the enormity of the house behind them. Meeting his mother
had been fairly simple after all the tentative phone conversations.
But in all that time, Robert Prescott hadn't even been mentioned.
Nicholas had no idea if his father would be thrilled to see the child
who would carry on his name, or if he would disown Max as
effortlessly as he had disowned his son. He had no idea what his
father was like anymore. "What will Dad say?" he whispered.

His
mother could not possibly have heard him at such a distance, but she
seemed to understand his question. "I imagine," she said,
stepping into a neat square of the brilliant afternoon, "he'll
say, 'Hello, Max.' "

Nothing
could have surprised Nicholas more than the scene that met him when
he arrived at his parents' close to midnight to pick up the baby.
Filling the parlor was a tumbled clutter of educational toys, a
Porta-Crib, a playpen, a baby swing. A big green quilt with a
dinosaur head sewn on to its corner was spread across the floor. A
panda mobile replaced the trailing spider plant that had hung over
the piano. Stacked on the piano, beside the foam pad Nicholas had
placed there earlier for diapering, was the largest vat of A&D
ointment Nicholas had ever seen and a carton of Pampers. And in
the middle of it all was Nicholas's father—taller than he
remembered and thinner too, with a shock of now-white hair—asleep
on the spindled sofa, with Max curled over his chest.

Nicholas
drew in his breath. He had anticipated many things about this first
meeting with his father: awkward silence, condescension, maybe
even a shred of hate. But Nicholas had not expected his father to be
so old.

He
stepped back quietly to close the door to the room, but his foot
tripped over a jangling terry-cloth ball. His father's eyes opened,
bright and alert. Robert Prescott did not sit up, knowing that would
wake Max. But he did not tear his gaze away from his son.

Nicholas
waited for his father to say something—anything. He remembered
the first time he'd lost a crew race in high school, after a
three-year winning streak. There had been seven other rowers in the
boat, and Nicholas had known that the six-man wasn't pulling hard
during the power tens. In no way was it Nicholas's fault the race was
lost. But he had taken it that way, and when he met his father after
the race, he had hung his head, waiting for the accusations. His
father had said nothing, nothing at all, and Nicholas had always
believed that stung more than any words his father could have
uttered. "Dad," Nicholas said quietly, "how's he
been?"

Not
How
have
you
been,
not
What
have I missed in your life.
Nicholas
figured that if he kept the conversation limited to Max, the ache
that rounded the bottom of his stomach might go away. He clenched his
fists behind his back and looked into his father's eyes. There were
shadows there that Nicholas could not read, but there were also
promises.
Too
much has happened; I will not bring it up,
Robert
seemed to say.
And
neither will you.

"You've
done well," Robert said, stroking Max's hunched shoulders.
Nicholas raised his eyebrows. "We never stopped asking
questions about you, Nicholas," he said gently. "We
always kept tabs."

Nicholas
remembered Fogerty's tight-lipped grin when he saw him enter the
hospital today at noon without Max. "Oh," he had bellowed
past Nicholas in the hall.
"Si
sic omnia!"
Then
he had come up to Nicholas, paternally gripping his shoulders with a
strong arm. "I take it, Dr. Prescott," Fogerty said, "that
you are once again of sound mind in sound body and that we won't have
a repeat of that ridiculous debacle." Fogerty lowered his voice.
"You are my protege, Nicholas," he said. "Don't tuck
up a sure thing."

Nicholas's
father was well known in the Boston medical community; it
wouldn't have been hard for him to track his son's quick rise in the
cardiothoracic hierarchy at Mass General. Still, it unnerved
Nicholas. He wondered what his father had asked. He wondered whom he
had approached and who had been willing to answer.

Nicholas
cleared his throat. "Was he good?" he repeated, gesturing
toward Max.

"Ask
your mother," Robert said. "She's in her darkroom."

Nicholas
walked down the corridor to the Blue Room, where the circular
black-curtained entrance to his mother's workplace was. He had just
parted the first curtain when he felt the warm brush of his mother's
fingers. He jumped back.

"Oh,
Nicholas," Astrid said, pressing her hand to her throat. "I
think I scared you as much as you scared me." She was carrying
two fresh prints, still smelling faintly of fixer. She waved them,
one in each hand, helping them to dry.

"I
saw Dad," Nicholas said.

"And?"

Nicholas
smiled. "And nothing."

Astrid
laid the two prints on a nearby table. "Yes," she said,
scanning them with her critical eyes, "it's amazing how several
years can soften even the hardest heads." She stood up and
groaned, kneading her hands into the small of her back. "Well,
my grandson was as good as gold," she said. "You noticed we
went shopping? A wonderful baby store in Newton, and then I
had
to
go to F. A. O. Schwarz. Max didn't cry the whole time. Really rose to
the occasion."

Nicholas
tried to imagine his son sitting quietly in his infant seat, watching
the rush of colors fly past a car window, and stretching his arms
toward the panorama of toys at F. A. O. Schwarz. But in his
experience, Max had never gone more than an hour without pitching a
fit. "Maybe it's me," he murmured.

"Did
you say something?" Astrid said.

Nicholas
pinched the bridge of his nose. It had not been an easy day: a
quadruple bypass, and then he got word that his last heart transplant
patient had rejected the organ. He had a valve
replacement
at
seven the next morning; if he was lucky—if Max was cooperative
—he could get about five hours of sleep.

"I
took some pictures of Max," Nicholas heard his mother say.
"Quite a good little subject—he likes the flash of the
light meter. Here." She thrust one of the photographs toward
Nicholas.

He
had never understood how his mother did it. He was too impatient for
photography. He relied on an autofocus camera, and he could usually
get a person's image without cutting off the top of the head. But his
mother not only recorded a moment; she also stole its soul. Max's
downy blue-black hair capped his head. One hand was held out in front
of him, reaching toward the camera, and the other was draped across
the gray plastic edge of his infant seat, devil-may-care. But it was
his eyes that really made the picture. They were wide and amused, as
if someone had just told him he was going to have to stay in this
world for a good deal longer.

Nicholas
was impressed. He had seen his mother capture the pain of grieving
military widows, the horror of maimed Romanian orphans, even the
rapture and calm piety of the Pope. But this time she had done
something truly amazing: she had taken Nicholas's own son and trapped
him in time, so that at least here he would never grow up. "You're
so damn good," he murmured.

Astrid
laughed. "That's what they tell me."

Something
twitched at the back of Nicholas's mind. He had been just as
impressed by Paige, by her haunted drawings and the secrets that
spilled out of her like prophecies she couldn't seem to control.
Paige, like his mother, did not just capture an image. Paige drew
directly from the heart.

"What
is it?" Astrid asked. "You're a million miles away."

"It's
nothing," Nicholas said. What had happened to Paige's art stuff?
He hadn't been able to move three feet in the apartment without
tripping over a spray fixative or crushing a box of charcoal. But
Paige hadn't really drawn in years. He had once complained because
she'd hung her sketches over the curtain rod of the shower while the
fixative was drying. He remembered watching her from behind, when she
didn't know he was there, marveling as her fingers flew over the
smooth vanilla paper to coax images out of hiding.

Astrid
held out the other photo she had carried from her darkroom.
"Thought you might like this too," she said. She passed him
a candid portrait, and for a moment the dim light in the room caught
only the white glare of the damp photographic paper. Then he
realized he was staring at Paige.

She
was sitting at a table, looking at something off to the left. It was
a black-and-white, but Nicholas could clearly see the color of her
hair. When he envisioned Cambridge, he pictured it as the shade of
Paige's hair—deep and rich, the red of generations.

"How
did you get this?" he whispered. Paige's hair was shorter here,
just to her shoulders, not long as it had been when she'd met Astrid
years before. This was a recent photo.

"I
saw her once in Boston, and I couldn't resist. I took it with a
telephoto lens. She never saw me." Astrid moved closer to
Nicholas and touched her finger to the top of the photograph. "Max
has her eyes."

Nicholas
did not know why he hadn't noticed it before; it was so obvious. It
wasn't the shape or the color as much as the demeanor. Like Max,
Paige was looking at something Nicholas could not see. Like Max, her
expression was one of blameless surprise, as if she had just been
told she was going to have to stay for a while longer.

"Yes,"
Astrid said, pulling the photo of Max to sit beside the one of Paige.
"Definitely his mother's eyes."

Nicholas
tucked the picture of Paige behind the one of Max. "Let's hope,"
he said, "that's all he inherits from her."