Harvesting the Heart (20 page)

My
father was so proud of me that he'd taken two entire
thirty-six-picture rolls of film. He did not question me when I said
I'd be celebrating with Priscilla's family after the service and that
I'd stay over at her house. Priscilla had told her mother she'd be
with me. I moved across the cooling pavement like an angel. I
thought,
Hail
Mary full of grace,
and
I repeated this to myself over and over as if that might knock sense
into me.

When
we got to the church, Father Draher was standing by the tall marble
statue of the Blessed Mother, waiting. I took the wreath of flowers
that Priscilla had been carrying, and I stepped forward to crown
Mary. I expected a miracle, and I watched the statue's face the
entire time, hoping to see the features of my own mother. But my
fingers slipped over Mary as I offered the wreath, and her pale-blue
cheek stayed as cold and forbidding as hate.

Priscilla
and I were picked up by Calvin in a red Chevy convertible on the
corner of Clinton and Madison. In the front seat with him was another
person, a boy with thick straight hair the color of chestnuts
and smiling island-green eyes. He jumped out of the car and held the
door open, bowing to Priscilla and to me. "Your chariot,"
he said, and that might have been when I fell in love.

Dinner
turned out to be Burger King, and what amazed me most was not that
the guys offered to pay but that they ordered an enormous amount
of food, much more than I could even think of consuming.
Jake—that was the name of my date—had two chocolate
shakes, three Whoppers, a chicken sandwich, large fries. Calvin had
even more. We ate in the car at a drive-in theater, under a moon that
seemed to rest on the top of the screen.

Priscilla
and I went to the bathroom together. "What do you think?"
she asked.

"I
don't know," I told her, which was the truth. Jake seemed all
right, but we'd barely said more than hello.

"Just
goes to show you," Priscilla said. "That Ouija board knew a
thing or two."

"It
said I'd go out with a Seth," I pointed out.

"Jake,
Seth," Priscilla said. "They're both four letters."

By
the time we returned to the car it had become dark. Calvin waited
until Priscilla and I sat down, and then he hit the button that
raised the roof of the convertible. It sealed itself with a faint
sucking sound, covering us like a mouth. Calvin turned around to Jake
and me in the back seat, and all I could see was the white gleam of
his teeth. "Don't you all do anything I wouldn't do," he
said, and he settled his arm around Priscilla like a vise.

I
could not tell you what the movie was that night. I clasped my hands
between my knees and watched my legs tremble. I listened to the
sounds of Calvin and Priscilla, skin slipping against skin in the
front seat. Once I peeked and there she was, swooning and batting her
lashes and whispering breathlessly just as we had practiced.

Jake
kept three inches between us. "So, Paige," he said quietly,
"what do you usually do?"

"Not
that," I blurted out, which made him laugh. I pulled myself
farther away, laying my cheek against the steamed glass of the
window. "I shouldn't be here," I whispered.

Jake's
hand moved across the seat, slowly, so I could watch it. I grasped
it, and that was when I realized how much I had needed the support.

We
began to talk then, our voices blocking out the moans and echoes
coming from the front seat. I told him I was only fourteen. That we
went to parochial school and that I had been the May Queen just hours
before. "Come on, baby," Calvin said, and I heard the tug
of a zipper.

"How
did you ever get together with someone like Priscilla?" Jake
asked, and I told him I didn't know. Calvin and Priscilla shifted,
blocking my view of the screen. Jake inched closer to the window.
"Move over here," he said, and he offered the shelter of
his arm. He kept his eyes on me as I hung back, like prey at the
brink of a neatly laid trap. "It's okay," he said.

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

Nicholas

Nicholas
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-mache"
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.