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 He‘€† 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.”
chapter 41
Max hadn’t gone to sleep easily last night, although that wasn’t cause in itself for alarm. It was the way he kept waking up every half hour, screaming as if he were being tortured, fat clear tears rolling down his face. Nothing helped. But then Nicholas had gone to change the diaper, and he’d almost passed out at the sight of so much jellied blood.
Paige trembles beside him. She grabbed his hand the minute Max was brought into the emergency room, and she hasn’t let go since. Nicholas can feel the pressure of her nails cutting into his skin, and he is grateful. He needs the pain to remind him that this isn’t a nightmare after all.
Max’s regular pediatrician, Jack Rourke, gives Nicholas a warm smile and steps into the examination room. Nicholas watches the heads of the two doctors pressed together in consultation over the kicking feet of his son. He clenches his fists, powerless. He wants to be in there. He should be in there.
Finally, Jack steps out into the pediatric waiting room. It is now morning, and the staff nurses are starting to arrive, pulling out a box of Big Bird Band-Aids and sunny smiley-face stickers for the day’s patients. Nicholas knew Jack when they were at Harvard Med together, but he hasn’t really kept in touch, and suddenly he is furious at himself. He should have been having lunch with him at least once a week; he should have talked to him about Max’s health before anything like this ever happened; he should have caught it on his own.
“Nicholas,” Jack says, watching his colleague pick up Max and sit him upright. “I have a good idea of what it might be.”
Paige leanwas
Jack ignores her questions, which infuriates Nicholas. Paige is the baby’s mother, for Christ’s sake, and she’s worried as hell, and that isn’t the way to treat her. He is about to open up his mouth, when John Dorset carries Max past them. Max, seeing Paige, reaches out his arms and starts to cry.
A sound comes out of Paige’s throat, a cross between a keen and a wail, but she doesn’t take the baby. “We’re going to do a sono gram,” Jack says to Nicholas, Nicholas only. “And if I can verify the mass-I think it’s sausage- shaped, right at the small bowel-we’ll do a barium enema. That might reduce the intussusception, but it depends on the severity of the lesion.”
Paige tears her gaze away from the doorway where Max and the doctor have disappeared. She grabs Jack Rourke’s lapels. “Tell
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, Nich olas 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
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
