Harvesting the Heart

planned. His mother was supposed to have been so overwhelmed with gratitude to see Max that she wouldn’t ask these questions, that she would beg to watch her grandson for the day, the week, whatever. His mother was not supposed to make him think about Paige, was not supposed to take her goddamned side. “Forget it,” he said. “We’re going. I thought you’d be able to understand what I was getting at.”

Astrid blocked his exit. “Don’t be an idiot, Nicholas,” she said. “I know exactly what you’re getting at. I didn’t say Paige was right for leaving, I just said I’d considered it a couple of times myself. Now give me that gorgeous child and go fix hearts.”

Nicholas blinked. His mother pulled the baby out of his arms. He hadn’t told her his plan; hadn’t even mentioned that he needed her to baby-sit while he worked. Astrid, who had started to carry Max back to the parlor, turned around and stared at Nicholas. “I’m your mother,” she said by way of explanation. “I know how you think.”

Nicholas closed the top of the baby grand piano and spread out the plastic foam pad from the diaper bag, forming a makeshift changing table. “I use A &D on him,” he said to Astrid. “It keeps him from getting diaper rash, and powder dries out his skin.” He explained when Max ate, how much he took, the best way to keep him from spitting strained green beans back in your face. He brought in Max’s car seat/carrier and said it would work for a nap. He said that if Max decided to sleep at all, it would be between two and four.

He left Astrid his beeper number in case of emergency. She and Max walked him to the door. “Don’t worry,” she said, touching Nicholas’s sleeve. “I’ve done it before. And I did a damn good job.” She reached up to kiss Nicholas on the cheek, remembering the change in course her life had taken on the day her once-little son was able to look her in the eye.

Nicholas set off down the slate path, unencumbered. He did not turn back to wave to Max or even bother to kiss him goodbye. He rolled the muscles bunched in his shoulders from the cutting straps of the diaper bag and the uneven weight of an eighteen-pound baby. He was amazed at how much he knew about Max, how much he’d been able to tell his mother about the routii›mA€†ne. He began to whistle and was so proud of his accomplishments that he didn’t even think about Robert Prescott until he reached his car.

With his hand still touching the warm metal of the door handle, he turned back to face his mother. She and Max were standing in the doorway, dwarfed by the enormity of the house behind them. Meeting his mother had been fairly simple after all the tentative phone conversations. But in all that time, Robert Prescott hadn’t even been mentioned. Nicholas had no idea if his father would be thrilled to see the child who would carry on his name, or if he would disown Max as effortlessly as he had disowned his son. He had no idea what his father was like anymore. “What will Dad say?” he whispered.

His mother could not possibly have heard him at such a distance, but she seemed to understand his question. “I imagine,” she said, stepping into a neat square of the brilliant afternoon, “he’ll say, ‘Hello, Max.’ ”

Nothing could have surprised Nicholas more than the scene that met him when he arrived at his parents’ close to midnight to pick up the baby. Filling the parlor was a tumbled clutter of educational toys, a Porta-Crib, a playpen, a baby swing. A big green quilt with a dinosaur head sewn on to its corner was spread across the floor. A panda mobile replaced the trailing spider plant that had hung over the piano. Stacked on the piano, beside the foam pad Nicholas had placed there earlier for diapering, was the largest vat of A &D ointment Nicholas had ever seen and a carton of Pampers. And in the middle of it all was Nicholas’s father-taller than he remembered and thinner too, with a shock of now-white hair-asleep on the spindled sofa, with Max curled over his chest.

Nicholas drew in his breath. He had anticipated many things about this first meeting with his father: awkward silence, condescension, maybe even a shred of hate. But Nicholas had not expected his father to be so old.

He stepped back quietly to close the door to the room, but his foot tripped over a jangling terry-cloth ball. His father’s eyes opened, bright and alert. Robert Prescott did not sit up, knowing that would wake Max. But he did not tear his gaze away from his son.

Nicholas waited for his father to say something-anything. He remembered the first time he’d lost a crew race in high school, after a three-year winning streak. There had been seven other rowers in the boat, and Nicholas had known that the six-man wasn’t pulling hard during the power tens. In no way was it Nicholas’s fault the race was lost. But he had taken it that way, and when he met his father after the race, he had hung his head, waiting for the accusations. His father had said nothing, nothing at all, and Nicholas had always believed that stung more than any words his father could have uttered. “Dad,” Nicholas said quietly, “how’s he been?”

Not How have you been, not What have I missed in your life. Nicholas figured that if he kept the conversation limited to Max, the ache that rounded the bottom of his stomach might go away. He clenched his fists behind his back and looked into his father’s eyes. There were shadows there that Nicholas could not read, but there were also promises. Too much has happened; I will not bring it up, Robert seemed to say. And nt='A€†either will you.

“You’ve done well,” Robert said, stroking Max’s hunched shoulders. Nicholas raised his eyebrows. “We never stopped asking questions about you, Nicholas,” he said gently. “We always kept tabs.”

Nicholas remembered Fogerty’s tight-lipped grin when he saw him enter the hospital today at noon without Max. “Oh,” he had bellowed past Nicholas in the hall. “Si sic omnia!” Then he had come up to Nicholas, paternally gripping his shoulders with a strong arm. “I take it, Dr. Prescott,” Fogerty said, “that you are once again of sound mind in sound body and that we won’t have a repeat of that ridiculous debacle.” Fogerty lowered his voice. “You are my protege, Nicholas,” he said. “Don’t fuck up a sure thing.”

Nicholas’s father was well known in the Boston medical community; it wouldn’t have been hard for him to track his son’s quick rise in the cardiothoracic hierarchy at Mass General. Still, it unnerved Nicholas. He wondered what his father had asked. He wondered whom he had approached and who had been willing to answer.

Nicholas cleared his throat. “Was he good?” he repeated, gesturing toward Max.

“Ask your mother,” Robert said. “She’s in her darkroom.”

Nicholas walked down the corridor to the Blue Room, where the circular black-curtained entrance to his mother’s workplace was. He had just parted the first curtain when he felt the warm brush of his mother’s fingers. He jumped back.

“Oh, Nicholas,” Astrid said, pressing her hand to her throat. “I think I scared you as much as you scared me.” She was carrying two fresh prints, still smelling faintly of fixer. She waved them, one in each hand, helping them to dry.

“I saw Dad,” Nicholas said.

“And?”

Nicholas smiled. “And nothing.”

Astrid laid the two prints on a nearby table. “Yes,” she said, scanning them with her critical eyes, “it’s amazing how several years can soften even the hardest heads.” She stood up and groaned, kneading her hands into the small of her back. “Well, my grandson was as good as gold,” she said. “You noticed we went shopping? A wonderful baby store in Newton, and then I had to go to F. A. O. Schwarz. Max didn’t cry the whole time. Really rose to the occasion.”

Nicholas tried to imagine his son sitting quietly in his infant seat, watching the rush of colors fly past a car window, and stretching his arms toward the panorama of toys at F. A. O. Schwarz. But in his experience, Max had never gone more than an hour without pitching a fit. “Maybe it’s me,” he murmured.

“Did you say something?” Astrid said.

Nicholas pinched the bridge of his nose. It had not been an easy day: a quadruple bypass, and then he got word that his last heart transplant patient had rejected the organ. He had a val›

“I took some pictures of Max,” Nicholas heard his mother say. “Quite a good little subject-he likes the flash of the light meter. Here.” She thrust one of the photographs toward Nicholas.

He had never understood how his mother did it. He was too impatient for photography. He relied on an autofocus camera, and he could usually get a person’s image without cutting off the top of the head. But his mother not only recorded a moment; she also stole its soul. Max’s downy blue-black hair capped his head. One hand was held out in front of him, reaching toward the camera, and the other was draped across the gray plastic edge of his infant seat, devil-may-care. But it was his eyes that really made the picture. They were wide and amused, as if someone had just told him he was going to have to stay in this world for a good deal longer.