Harvesting the Heart (21 page)

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 Pres-cotts 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.

"Wake
up, Sleeping Beauty," one of the residents whispered into
Nicholas's ear. "You've got a heart to connect."

Nicholas
jumped, hitting his head on the low roof of the helicopter, and
reached for the Playmate cooler. He shook the image of his father
from his mind and waited for a surgeon's reserve of energy to come
from his gut, pulse into his arms and his legs, and spring to the
balls of his feet.

Fogerty
was waiting in the operating suite. As Nicholas came through the
double doors, scrubbed and gowned, Fogerty began to open Alamonto's
chest. Nicholas listened to the whir of the saw slicing through
bone as he prepared the heart for its new placement. He turned to
face the patient, and that was when he stopped.

Nicholas
had done more than enough surgeries in his seven years as a resident
to know the procedure cold. Incisions, opening the chest, dissecting
and suturing arteries—all these had become second nature.

But
Nicholas was used to seeing a patient with wrinkled skin, with age
spots. Under the orange antiseptic, Paul Alamonto's chest was smooth,
firm, and resilient. "Unnatural," Nicholas whispered.

Fogerty's
eyes slid to him above the blue mask. "Did you say something,
Dr. Prescott?"

Nicholas
swallowed and shook his head. "No," he said. "Nothing."
He clamped an artery and followed Fogerty's instructions.

When
the heart had been dissected, Fogerty lifted it out and nodded to
Nicholas, who placed the heart of the thirty-two-year-old woman in
Paul Alamonto's chest. It was a good fit, a near match, according to
the tissue analyses done by computer. It remained to be seen what
Paul Alamonto's body would do with it. Nicholas felt the muscle,
still cold, slipping from his fingers. He mopped as Fogerty attached
the new heart just where the old one had been.

Nicholas
held his breath when Fogerty took the new heart in his hand, kneading
it warm and willing it to beat. And when it did, a four-chamber
rhythm, Nicholas found himself blinking in time with the blood. In,
up, over, out. In, up, over, out. He looked across the patient at
Fogerty, who he knew was smiling beneath his mask. "Close,
please, Doctor," Fogerty said, and he left the operating room.

Nicholas
threaded the ribs with wire, sutured the skin with tiny stitches. He
had a fleeting thought of Paige, who made him sew loose buttons on
his own shirts, saying he was better at it by trade. He exhaled
slowly and thanked the residents and the operating room nurses.

When
he moved into the scrub room and peeled off his gloves, Fogerty was
standing with his back to him at the far side of the room. He did not
turn as Nicholas jerked off his paper cap and turned on the faucet.
"You're right about cases like that, Nicholas," Fogerty
said quietly. "We
are
playing
God." He tossed a paper towel into a receptacle, still facing
away from Nicholas. "At any rate, when they're that young, we're
fixing what God did wrong."

Nicholas
wanted to ask Alistair Fogerty many things: how he'd known what
Nicholas was thinking, how come he'd sutured a certain artery when it
would have been easier to cauterize it, why after so many years he
still believed in God. But Fogerty turned around to face him, his
eyes sharp and blue, as splintered as crystal. "Seven o'clock,
then, at your place?"

Nicholas
stared for a moment, dumbfounded, and then remembered that he
was giving his first dinner party for his "associates"—
Alistair Fogerty, as well as the heads of pediatrics, cardiology, and
urology. "Seven," he said. He wondered what time it was
now; how long it would take him to change gears. "Of course."

Nicholas
had been having nightmares again. They weren't the same ones he'd had
when he was in medical school, but they were every bit as disturbing,
and Nicholas believed they stemmed from the same source, that old
fear of failure.

He
was being chased through a heavy, wet rain forest whose ivy vines
dripped blood. He could feel his lungs near bursting; he pulled his
legs high from the spongy ground. He did not have time to look back,
could only brush the branches from his face as they lacerated his
forehead and his cheeks. In the background was the banshee howl of a
jackal.

The
dream always started with Nicholas running; he never knew what it was
he was running from. But sometime during the sheer physical
concentration of sprinting, of balancing and dodging thick trees,
he'd realize that he was no longer being chased. All of a sudden he
was running
toward
something,
just as faceless and forbidding as his pursuer had been. He gasped;
he grabbed at a stitch in his side, but he couldn't move quickly
enough. Hot butterflies slapped against his neck and leaves striped
his shoulders as he tried to move faster. Finally, he hurled himself
against a sandstone altar, carved with the leers of naked pagan gods.
Panting, Nicholas slid to his knees in front of the altar, and
beneath his fingers it turned into a man, a person made of warm skin
and twisted bone. He looked up and saw his own face, older and broken
and blind.

He
always woke up screaming; he always woke up in Paige's arms. Last
night when he had become fully conscious of his surroundings, she had
been hovering over him with a damp washcloth, wiping his sweaty neck
and chest. "Sssh," she said. "It's me."

Nicholas
let a choked sound escape from his throat and pulled Paige to him.
"Was it the same?" she asked, her words muffled against his
shoulder.

Nicholas
nodded. "I couldn't see," he said. "I don't know what
I was running from."

Paige
ran her cool fingers up and down his arm. It was in these moments,
when his defenses were down, that he would cling to her and think of
her as the one constant in his life and let himself give in
completely. Sometimes when he reached for her after the nightmares,
he would grasp her arms so tightly he left bruises. But he never told
her the end of the dream. He couldn't. Whenever he had tried, he'd
started shaking so badly he couldn't finish.

Paige
wrapped her arms around him, and he leaned into her, still warm and
soft with sleep. "Tell me what I can do for you," she
whispered.

"Hold
me," Nicholas said, knowing she would; knowing, with the
unswerving faith of a child at Christmastime, that she would never
let go.

Paige
hadn't wanted to tell anyone she was pregnant. In fact, if Nicholas
hadn't known better, he would have thought she was avoiding the
inevitable. She didn't run out to buy maternity clothes; they really
didn't have the extra money, she said. In spite of Nicholas's urging,
when she called her father she did not tell him the news. "Nicholas,"
she had told him, "one out of every three pregnancies ends in
miscarriage. Let's just wait and see."