Harvesting the Heart (73 page)

Paige
tears her gaze away from the doorway where Max and the doctor have
disappeared. She grabs Jack Rourke's lapels. "Tell
me,"
she
shouts. "Tell me in normal words."

Nicholas
puts his arm around Paige's shoulders and lets her bury her face
against his chest. He whispers to her and tells her what she wants to
know. "It's his small intestine, they think," Nicholas
says. "It kind of telescopes into itself. If they don't take
care of it, it ruptures."

"And
Max dies," Paige whispers.

"Only
if they can't fix it," Nicholas says, "but they can. They
always can."

Paige
looks up to him, trusting him. "Always?" she repeats.

Nicholas
knows better than to give false hope, but he puts on his strongest
smile. "Always," he says.

He
sits across from her in the pediatric waiting room, watching healthy
doddering toddlers fight each other for toys and crawl all over a big
blue plastic ladder and slide. Paige goes up to ask about Max, but
none of the nurses have been given any information; two don't even
know his name. When Jack Rourke comes in hours later, Nicholas
jumps to his feet and has to restrain himself from throwing his
colleague against the wall. "Where is my son?" he says,
biting off each word.

Jack
looks from Nicholas to Paige and back to Nicholas. "We're
prepping him," he says. "Emergency surgery."

Nicholas
has never sat in Mass General's surgical waiting room. It is dingy
and gray, with red cubes of seats that are stained with coffee and
tears. Nicholas would rather be anywhere else.

Paige
is chewing the Styrofoam edge of a coffee cup. Nicholas has not seen
her take a sip yet, and she's been holding it for a half hour. She
stares straight ahead at the doors that lead to the operating suites,
as if she expects an answer, a magical ticker-tape billboard.

Nicholas
had wanted to be in the operating room, but it was against medical
ethics. He was too close to the situation, and honestly he didn't
know how he would react. He would renounce his salary and his title,
just to get back the detachment about surgery that he had only
yesterday. What had Paige said after the bypass? He was
incredible.
Good
at
fixing.
And
yet he couldn't do a damn thing to help Max.

When
Nicholas was standing over a bypass patient whom he hardly knew, it
was very easy to put life and death into black-and-white terms. When
a patient died on the table, he was upset but he did not take it
personally. He couldn't. Doctors learn early that death is only a
part of life. But parents shouldn't have to.

What
are the chances of a six-month-old making it through intestinal
surgery? Nicholas racks his brain, but he can't come up with the
statistics. He does not even know the doctor operating in there. He's
never heard of the damn guy. It strikes Nicholas that he and every
other surgeon live a lie: The surgeon is not God, he is not
omnipotent. He cannot create life at all; he can only keep it going.
And even that is touch and go.

Nicholas
stares at Paige.
She
has done what I can never do,
Nicholas
thinks.
She
has given birth.

Paige
has put down the Styrofoam cup and suddenly stands. "I'm going
to get some more coffee," she announces. "Do you need
anything?"

Nicholas
stares at her. "You haven't touched the coffee you just bought."

Paige
crosses her arms and rakes her fingernails into her skin, leaving raw
red lines that she doesn't notice at all. "It's cold," she
says, "way too cold."

A
collection of nurses walks by. They are dressed in simple white
uniforms but wear felt ears in their hair, and their faces are made
up with whiskers and fur. They stop to talk to the devil. He is some
kind of physician, a red cape whirling over his blue scrubs. He has a
forked tail and a shiny goatee and a hot chili pepper clipped to his
stethoscope. Paige looks at Nicholas, and for a second Nicholas's
mind goes blank. Then he remembers that it is Halloween. "Some
of the people dress up," he explains. "It cheers up the
kids in pediatrics."
Like
Max,
he
thinks, but he does not say it.

Paige
tries to smile, but only half her mouth turns up. "Well,"
she says. "Coffee." But she doesn't move. Then, like the
demolition of a building, she begins to crumble from the top down.
Her head sinks and then her shoulders droop and her face sags into
her hands. By the time her knees give way beneath her, Nicholas is
standing, ready to catch her before she falls. He settles her into
one of the stiff canvas seats. "This is all my fault," she
says.

"This
isn't your fault," Nicholas says. "This could have happened
to any kid."

Paige
doesn't seem to have heard him. "It was the best way to get
even," she whispers, "but He should have hurt me instead."

"Who?"
Nicholas says, irritated. Maybe there
is
someone
responsible. Maybe there
is
someone
he can blame. "Who are you talking about?"

Paige
looks at him as if he is crazy. "God," she says.

When
he had changed Max's diaper and seen the blood, he didn't even stop
to think. He bundled Max in a blanket and ran out the door without a
diaper bag, without his wallet. But he hadn't driven straight to the
hospital; he'd gone to his parents'. Instinctively, he had come for
Paige. When it came right down to it, it didn't matter why Paige had
left him, it didn't matter why she had returned. It didn't matter
that for eight years she'd kept a secret from him he felt he had
every right to know. What mattered was that she was Max's mother.
That was their truth, and that was their starting point to reconnect.
At the very least, they had that connection. They would
always
have
that connection.

If
Max was all right.

Nicholas
looks at Paige, crying softly into her hands, and knows that there
are many things that depend on the success of this operation.
"Hey," he says. "Hey, Paige. Honey. Let me get you
that coffee."

He
walks down the hall, passing goblins and hoboes and Raggedy Anns, and
he whistles to keep out the roaring sound of the silence.

They
should have come out to report on the progress. It has been so long
that the sun has gone down. Nicholas doesn't notice until he goes
outside to stretch his legs. On the street he hears the catcalls of
trick-or-treaters and steps on crushed jewel-colored candy. This
hospital is like an artificial world. Walk inside and lose all
track of time, all sense of reality.

Paige
appears at the door. She waves her hands frantically, as if she is
drowning. "Come inside," she mouths against the glass.

She
grabs at Nicholas's arm when he gets through the doorway. "Dr.
Cahill said it went okay," she says, searching his face for
answers. "That's good, isn't it? He wouldn't hold anything back
from me?"

Nicholas
narrows his eyes, wondering where the hell Cahill could have gone so
fast. Then he sees him writing notes at the nurses' station around
the corner. He runs down the hall and spins the surgeon around by the
shoulder. Nicholas does not say a word.

"I
think Max is going to be fine," Cahill says. "We tried to
manually manipulate the intestines, but we wound up having to do an
actual resection of the bowel. The next twenty-four hours will be
critical, as expected for such a young child. But I'd say the
prognosis is excellent."

Nicholas
nods. "He's in recovery?"

"For
a while. I'll check him in ICU, and if all is well we'll move him up
to pediatrics." Cahill shrugs, as if this case is just like any
other. "You might want to get some sleep, Dr. Prescott. The baby
is sedated; he's going to sleep for a while. You, on the other hand,
look like hell."

Nicholas
runs a hand through his hair and rubs his palm over his unshaven jaw.
He wonders who bothered to call off his surgery this morning; he
forgot it entirely. He is so tired that time is passing in strange
chunks. Cahill disappears, and suddenly Paige is standing beside him.
"Can we go?" she asks. "I want to see him."

That
is what shocks Nicholas into clarity. "You don't want to go,"
he says. He has seen babies in the recovery room, stitches snaked
over half their swollen bodies, their eyelids blue and transparent.

Somehow
they always look like victims. "Wait awhile," Nicholas
urges. "We'll go up as soon as he's in pediatrics."

Paige
pulls away from Nicholas's grasp and stands squarely in front of him,
eyes flashing. "You listen to me," she says, her voice hard
and low. "I've waited an entire day to find out if my son was
going to live or die. I don't care if he's still bleeding all over
the place. You get me to him, Nicholas. He needs to know that I'm
here."

Nicholas
opens his mouth to say that Max, unconscious, will not know if she is
in the recovery room or in Peoria. But he stops himself. He's never
been unconscious, so what does he know? "Come with me," he
says. "They usually don't let you in, but I think I can pull
strings."

As
they make their way to the recovery room, a string of children in
pajamas parades through the hall, wearing papier-mache masks of foxes
and geisha girls and Batman. They are led by a nurse whom Nicholas
has seen once before; he thinks she baby-sat for Max what seems like
years ago. They are singing "Camptown Races," and when they
see Paige and Nicholas they break out of their line and puddle in a
crowd around them. "Trick or treat," they chant, "trick
or treat. Give me something good to eat."

Paige
looks to Nicholas, who shakes his head. She stuffs her hands into the
pockets of her jeans and turns them inside out to reveal an unshelled
pecan, three nickels, and a ball of lint. She picks up each object as
if it is coated in gold and presses the treasures one by one into the
palms of the waiting children. They frown at her, disappointed.

"Let's
go," Nicholas says, pushing her through the tangle of costumed
kids. He goes the back way, coming from the service elevator, and
walks straight to the nurses' station. It is empty, but Nicholas
steps behind the desk as if it is his right and flips through a
chart. He turns to tell Paige where Max is, but she has already moved
away.

He
finds her standing in the recovery room, partially obscured by the
thin white curtains. She is absolutely rigid as she stares into the
oval hospital crib that holds Max.

Nothing
could have prepared Nicholas for this. Underneath the

sterile
plastic dome, Max is lying perfectly still on his back, arms pointed
over his head. An IV needle stabs into him. A thick white bandage
covers his stomach and chest, stopping at his penis, which is
blanketed with gauze but not restricted by a diaper. A nasogastric
tube feeds into a mask that covers his mouth and nose. His chest
rises and falls almost imperceptibly. His hair looks obscenely black
against the alabaster of his skin.