Harvesting the Heart (42 page)

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,
7"
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.

There
was no one in the volunteer lounge. Nicholas ran his fingers over the
page of signed-in volunteers, but found nothing to indicate that one
of them was watching a baby. Then, propped in the corner, he saw his
diaper bag.

Nicholas
sagged against the wall, flooded with relief. "How do I find out
what candy stripers are on what rotations?" The girl looked at
him blankly. "Where do you all work?"

The
girl shrugged. "Check the front of the book," she said,
flipping to the sign-in page. He saw a list of volunteers,
organized by the day they worked and their staff assignments. There
were at least thirty volunteers in the hospital at that moment.
Nicholas pinched the bridge of his nose. He could not do this. He
just could not do this.

He
left the volunteer lounge with the diaper bag on his shoulder and for
the first time noticed a secretary sitting at the makeshift desk
outside. "Dr. Prescott," she said, smiling up at him.

He
did not question how she knew his name; many people at the hospital
had heard about the wunderkind of cardiac surgery. "Have you
seen a baby?" he said.

The
woman pointed down the hall. "Dawn had him, last I saw. She took
him to the cafeteria. They didn't need her so badly in ambulatory
care today."

Nicholas
heard Max's laughter before he saw him. Beyond the thick line of
residents and nurses and sullen hospital visitors waiting to be
served, he spotted his son's spiky black hair through hazy red cubes
of jello. When he reached the table where a candy striper was
bouncing Max on her knee, he dropped the diaper bag. The girl was
feeding his three-month-old son an ice cream bar.

"What
the hell do you think you're doing?" he yelled, grabbing his son
away. Max reached his hand toward the ice cream, but then realized
his father had returned and burrowed his sticky face into the neck of
Nicholas's scrubs.

"You
must be Dr. Prescott," the girl said, unruffled. "I'm Dawn.
I've been with Max since noon." She opened the diaper bag and
held up the one bottle Nicholas had brought to the hospital, now bone
dry. "He finished this at ten this morning, you know," she
chided. "I had to take him to the milk bank."

Nicholas
had a fleeting image of Holsteins, wearing pearls and cat's-eye
glasses, acting as tellers and counting out cash. "The milk
bank," he repeated, and then he remembered. In the preemie
pediatric ward, new mothers pumped their own milk for strangers'
babies born too early.

He
assessed the girl again. She was smart enough to find food for Max;
hell, she had even known he was hungry, which
he
couldn't
tell for sure. He sat down across from her at the table, and she
folded the remains of the ice cream sandwich into a napkin. "He
liked it," she said defensively. "A little bit can't hurt
him, not once he's hit three months."

Nicholas
stared at her. "How do you know these things?" he asked.
Dawn looked at him as if he were crazy. Nicholas leaned forward
conspiratorially. "How much do you make for candy striping?"

"Money?
We don't make money. That's why we're called volunteers."

Nicholas
grabbed her hand. "If you come back tomorrow, I'll pay you. Four
bucks an hour, if you'll watch Max."

"I
don't candy-stripe on Thursdays. Only on Mondays and Wednesdays. I
have band on Thursdays."

"Surely,"
Nicholas said, "you have friends."

Dawn
stood up and shied away from the two of them. Nicholas held his hand
out in the air as if that might stop her. He wondered what he looked
like through her eyes: a weary, mussed surgeon,

sweaty
and wild-eyed, who probably wasn't even holding his baby the right
way. He wondered what
was
the
right way.

For
a second, Nicholas thought he was going to lose control. He saw
himself breaking down, his face in his hands, sobbing. He saw Max
rolling to the floor and striking his head on the beveled edge of the
chair. He saw his career destroyed, all his colleagues turning their
heads away in embarrassment. His only salvation was the girl in front
of him, an angel half his age. "Please," he murmured to
Dawn. "You don't understand what it's like."

Dawn
held her arms out for Max and tugged the diaper bag onto her thin
shoulder. She put her hand on the back of Nicholas's neck. The hand
was gloriously cool, like a waterfall, and gentle as a breath. "Five
bucks," she said, "and I'll see what I can do."

^chapter
23

Paige

_I
f
Jake hadn't been with me, I would have run from Eddie Savoy's without
ever going inside. His office was thirty miles outside Chicago, in
the heartland of the country. The building was little more than a
brown weathered shack attached to a chicken farm. The stench of
droppings was overpowering, and there were feathers stuck to the
wheels of my car when I got out. "Are you sure?" I asked
Jake. "You know this guy?"

Eddie
Savoy burst out of the door at that point, knocking it off its
hinges. "Flan-man!" he yelled, wrapping Jake in a bear hug.
They broke away and did some funny handshake that looked like two
birds mating.

Jake
introduced me to Eddie Savoy. "Paige," he said, "me
and Eddie were in the war together." "The war," I
repeated.

"The
Gulf War," Eddie said proudly. His voice was as rough as a
grindstone.

I
turned to Jake. The Gulf War? He had been in the army? The sun
slanted off his cheekbones and lightened his eyes so that they
appeared transparent. I wondered how much more about Jake Flanagan
I had missed.

When
I told Jake about leaving Nicholas and Max, and then about wanting to
find my mother, I'd expected him to be surprised —maybe even
angry, since I'd been telling him all those years that my mother had
died. But Jake just smiled at me. "Well," he said, "it's
about time." I could tell by the brush of his hands that he had
known all along. He told me he had a friend who might be able to
help, and then he asked one of his mechanics to watch the station.

Eddie
Savoy was a private investigator. He'd been getting started in the
business, working as a lackey for another detective, and then he'd
joined the army when the war broke out in the Persian Gulf. When he
came back he felt he'd had enough of taking orders; he started his
own agency.

He
led us into a small room that looked as if it had been a meat storage
refrigerator in a different life. We sat on the floor on tasseled
Indian cushions, and Eddie sat across from us, behind a low parsons
bench. "Hate chairs," he explained. "They do things to
my back."

He
was not much older than Jake, but his hair was completely white. It
had been shaved in a crew cut and stood away from his scalp as if
each individual piece was very frightened. He had no mustache
but the beginnings of a beard, which also seemed to stick straight
out from his chin. He reminded me of a tennis ball. "So you
haven't seen your ma for twenty years," he said, tugging the old
wedding photo from my hand.

"No,"
I said, "and I've never tried to find her before." I leaned
closer. "Do I have a chance?"

Eddie
leaned back and pulled a cigarette out of his sleeve. He struck a
match against his low desk and drew in deeply. When he spoke, his
words came out in smoke. "Your mother," he said to me, "did
not disappear off the face of the earth."

Eddie
told me it was all in the numbers. You couldn't escape your numbers,
not for that long a time. Social Security, Registry of Motor
Vehicles, school records, work records. Even if people intentionally
changed their identity, eventually they'd collect a pension or
welfare, or file taxes, and the numbers would lead you to them. Eddie
told me how the previous week he'd found in half a day the kid a
mother gave up for adoption.

"What
if she's changed her Social Security number?" I said. "What
if her name isn't May anymore?"

Eddie
smirked. "If you change your Social Security number, it's
recorded as being changed. And the address and age of the person
changing the number is listed too. You can't just walk in and get
someone else's, either. So if your mother is using someone else's
number—say her own mom's—we'll still be able to find
her."

Eddie
took down the family history that I knew. He was particularly
concerned about genetic illnesses, because he had just wrapped up a
missing persons case that involved diabetes. "This woman's whole
family has the sugar," he says, "so I chase her for three
years and I know she's in Maine, but I can't get the exact location.
And then I figure she's about the age all her relatives start dying.
So I call up every hospital in Maine and see what patients have the
sugar. Sure enough, there she is, getting her last rites."