Harvesting the Heart (66 page)

He leaves the portrait on the desk, on top of the scrawled sheets of assets he is supposed to be preparing for Oakie Peterborough. He has added nothing since the day he met the lawyer for lunch, a week ago. He keeps thinking that he must call to set up a consultation, but he forgets to mention it to his secretary and he is too busy to do it himself.

The operation this morning is a routine bypass, which Nicholas thinks he could do with his eyes closed. He walks briskly to the locker room, although he is not in a hurry; he changes into the soft laundered blue scrubs. He pulls on paper booties and a paper cap and winds a mask around his neck. Then he takes a deep breath and goes to scrub, thinking about the business of fixing hearts.

It's strange being the chief of cardiac surgery. When he enters the operating suite the patient is already prepped and the easy conversation between the residents and the nurses and the anesthesiologist comes to a dead halt. “Good morning, Dr. Prescott,” someone says finally, and Nicholas can't even tell who it is because of the stupid masks. He wishes he knew what to do to put them all at ease, but he hasn't had enough experience at it. As a surgical fellow, he spent so much time clawing his way to the top, he never bothered to consider whom he was crawling over to get there. Patients are one thing: Nicholas believes that if someone is going to trust you with his life and shell out $31,000 for five hours' work, he or she deserves to be listened to and laughed with. He has even sat on the edges of beds and held his patients' hands while they prayed. But doctors are a different breed. They are so busy looking behind them for an encroaching Brutus that everyone becomes a potential threat. Especially a superior like Nicholas: with one written criticism, he has the power to end a career. Nicholas wishes he could look over the blue edge of a mask just once and see a pair of smiling eyes. He wishes Marie, the stout, serious OR nurse, would put a whoopee cushion under the patient, or set rubber vomit on the instrument tray, or play some other practical joke. He wonders what would happen if he walked in and said, “Have you heard the one about the rabbi, the priest, and the call girl?”

Nicholas speaks softly as the patient is intubated, and then he directs a resident, a man his own age, to harvest the leg vein. His hands move by themselves, making the incision and opening the ribs, dissecting out the aorta and the vena cava for the bypass machine, sewing up and cauterizing blood vessels that are accidentally cut.

When the heart has been stopped—an action that never loses its effect for Nicholas, who holds his breath as if his own body has been affected—Nicholas peers through magnifying spectacles and begins to cut away the diseased coronary arteries. He sews on the leg vein, turned backward, to bypass the obstructions. At one point, when a blood vessel begins spurting blood all over Nicholas and his first assistant, Nicholas curses. The anesthesiologist looks up, because he's never seen Dr. Prescott—the famous Dr. Prescott—lose his cool. But even as he does so, Nicholas's hands are flying quickly, clamping the vessel as the other doctor sews it up.

When it is all over and Nicholas steps back to let his assistant close, he does not feel as if five hours have passed. He never does. He is not a religious man, but he leans against the tiled wall and beneath his blue mask he whispers a prayer of thanks to God. In spite of the fact that he knows he is skilled, that his expertise comes from years of training and practice, Nicholas cannot help but believe a little bit of luck has been thrown in, that someone is looking out for him.

That's when he sees the angel. In the observation gallery is the figure of a woman, her hands pressed to the window, her cheek flush against the glass. She is wearing something loose that falls to her calves and that glows in the reflected fluorescent light of the operating suite. Nicholas cannot help himself; he takes a step forward and lifts his hand a fraction of an inch as if he might touch her. He cannot see her eyes, but somehow he knows this is only an apparition. The angel glides away and disappears into the dark background of the gallery. Nicholas knows that even if he has never seen her before, she has always been with him, watching over his surgeries. He wishes, harder than he has ever wished for anything in his life, that he could see her face.

After such a spiritual morning, it is a letdown for Nicholas to find Paige in all his patients' rooms when he is doing afternoon rounds. Today she has pulled her hair away from her face in a braid that hangs down to her shoulder blades and moves like a thick switch when she leans over to refill a water pitcher or to plump pillows. She's not wearing makeup, she rarely does, and she looks about as old as a candy striper.

Nicholas flips over the metal cover of Mrs. McCrory's chart. The patient is a woman in her late fifties who had a valve replacement done three days ago and is almost ready to go home. He skims a finger across the vitals recorded by one of the interns. “I think we're getting ready to kick you out of here,” he says, grinning down at her.

Mrs. McCrory beams and grabs Paige's hand, which is the nearest one. Paige, startled, gasps and almost overturns a vase of peonies. “Take it easy,” Nicholas says dryly. “I don't have room in my agenda for an unscheduled heart attack.”

At this unexpected attention, Paige turns. Mrs. McCrory eyes her critically. “He doesn't bite, dear,” she says.

“I know,” Paige murmurs. “He's my husband.”

Mrs. McCrory claps her hands together, thrilled by this news. Nicholas mutters something unintelligible, amazed at how easily Paige can ruin his good mood. “Don't you have somewhere else to be?” he says.

“No,” Paige says. “I'm supposed to go wherever you go. It's my job.”

Nicholas tosses the chart down on Mrs. McCrory's bed. “That is
not
a volunteer's assignment. I've been here long enough to know the standard rounds, Paige. Ambulatory, patient transport, admitting. Volunteers are never assigned to doctors.”

Paige shrugs, but it looks more like a shiver. “They made an exception.”

For the first time in minutes, Nicholas remembers Mrs. McCrory. “Excuse us,” he says, grabbing Paige's upper arm and dragging her out of the room.

“Oh, stay!” Mrs. McCrory exclaims after them. “You're better than Burns and Allen.”

Reaching the hallway, Nicholas leans against the wall and releases Paige. He wanted to yell and to complain, but suddenly he can't remember what he was going to say. He wonders if the whole hospital is laughing at him. “Thank God they don't let you in surgery,” he says.

“They did. I watched you today.” Paige touches his sleeve gently. “Dr. Saget arranged it for me, and I was in the observation room. Oh, Nicholas, it's incredible to be able to do that.”

Nicholas does not know what makes him more angry: the fact that Saget let Paige watch him doing surgery without his consent, or the fact that his imagined angel was really just his wife. “It's my job,” he snaps. “I do it every day.” He looks at Paige, and that expression is back in her eyes—the one that probably made him fall in love with her. Like his patients, Paige is seeing him as someone who is flawless. But he has a sense that unlike them, she would have been just as impressed if she'd watched him mopping the hospital's halls.

The thought chafes around his neck. Nicholas pulls at his collar and thinks about going right back to his office and calling Oakie Peterborough and getting this over. “Well,” Paige says softly, “I wish
I
were that good at fixing things.”

Nicholas turns and walks down the hall to see another patient, a transplant recipient from last week. When he is half inside the room, he glances around, to find Paige at the door.
“I'll
change the damn water,” he says. “Just get out of here.”

Her hands are braced on either side of the doorway, and her hair is working its way out of her braid. Her volunteer uniform, two sizes too big, billows around her waist, falls to her shins. “I wanted to tell you,” she says, “I think Max is getting sick.”

Nicholas laughs, but it comes out as a snort. “Of course,” he says, “you're an expert.”

Paige lowers her voice and peeks into the hallway to make sure no one is around. “He's constipated,” she says, “and he spit up twice today.”

Nicholas smirks. “Did you give him creamed spinach?” Paige nods. “He's allergic.”

“But there aren't any welts,” Paige says, “and anyway it's more than that. He's been crabby, and, well, Nicholas, he just isn't himself.”

Nicholas shakes his head at her and takes a step into the patient's room. As much as he doesn't want to admit it, when he sees Paige standing in the doorway, arms outstretched as if she is being crucified, she looks very much like an angel. “He's not himself,” Nicholas repeats. “How the hell would you know?”

chapter
40

W
hen Astrid hands Max over to Nicholas that night, something still is wrong. He has been crying on and off all day. “I wouldn't worry,” Astrid says to me. “He's been a colicky baby.” But it is not his crying that bothers me. It's the way the fight has gone out of his eyes.

I stand on the staircase while Nicholas takes Max. He hoists the diaper bag and some favorite toys over his free arm. He ignores me until he reaches the door, about to leave. “You might want to get a good lawyer,” he says. “I'm meeting with mine tomorrow.”

My knees give out under me, and I stumble against the banister. I feel as if I have been swiftly punched. It isn't his words that hurt so much; it is knowing that I have been too late. I can run in circles until I drop, but I cannot change the course of my life.

Astrid calls out to me as I pull myself up the stairs to my room, but I do not listen. I think about phoning my father, but he'll only lecture me on God's will, and that won't give me any comfort. What if I don't happen to like God's will? What if I want to keep the end from coming?

I do what I always do when I am in pain; I draw. I pick up my sketch pad and I draw image after image on the same page until it is nothing more than a dismal black knot. I flip the page and do this all over again, and I keep on doing this until little by little some of the rage leaves my body, seeping through my fingertips onto the page. When I no longer feel I am being eaten alive from the inside, I put down my charcoal and I decide to start over.

This time I draw in pastels. I rarely use them because I'm a lefty and they get all over the side of my hand and make me look strangely bruised. But right now I want color, and that is the only way I can think of getting it. I find that I am drawing Cuchulainn's mother, Dechtire, which seems natural after thinking of my father and the whims of the gods. Her long sapphire robes mist around her sandaled feet, and her hair flies behind her in a sleek arc. I draw her suspended in midair, somewhere between heaven and earth. One arm reaches down to a man silhouetted against the ground, one arm reaches up toward Lugh, the powerful god who carries the sun.

I make her fingers brush those of her husband below, and as I do it I get a physical jolt. Then I lengthen her other arm, seeing her torso twist and stretch on the page as she reaches into the sky. It takes all the effort in my fingers to make Dechtire's hand touch the sun god's, and when it does I begin to draw furiously, obliterating Dechtire's porcelain face and the solid body of her husband and the bronze arm of Lugh. I draw flames that cover all the characters, erupting in fiery sparks and bursting across the sky and the earth. I draw a blaze that feeds on itself, that shimmers and flares and sucks away all the air. Even as I cannot breathe anymore, I see that my picture has turned into a holocaust, an inferno. I throw the scorching pastels across the room, red and yellow and orange and sienna. I stare sadly at the ruined image of Dechtire, amazed that I have never before seen the obvious: when you play with fire, you are likely to get burned.

I fall asleep fitfully that night, and when I wake, sleet is rattling against the window. I sit up in bed and try to remember what has awakened me, and I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I know what is coming. It is like that feeling I used to have about Jake, when we were so closely connected that I could sense when he stepped into his home at night, when he thought of my name, when he needed to see me.

I jump out of bed and pull on the pants and shirt I wore yesterday. I don't even think to find socks, tying up my sneakers over bare feet. I gather my hair into a tangled ponytail and secure it with the rubber band from a bag of gummy fish. Then I pull my jacket off the doorknob and run downstairs.

When I open the door, Nicholas stands before me, assaulted by the ice and the rain. Just beyond him, in the yellow interior light of his car, I can see Max, oddly silent, his mouth in a raw red circle of pain. Nicholas is already closing the door behind me and pulling me into the storm. “He's sick,” Nicholas says. “Let's go.”