Harvesting the Heart

varnished door and rub my fingers over the recessed letters of Nicholas’s name. I would have liked to be here for that, and even as I think this, I am wondering what the circumstances were. I see Alistair Fogerty, pants pillowed around his ankles, in a compromising position with a nurse in the supply closet. Maybe he is sick, or even dead. What else would make that pompous old goat give up his position?

The twitch of the doorknob startles me. I turn to the bulletin board and pretend to be engrossed in an article about endorphins. Nicholas walks padiv?€†st without noticing me. He has taken off his jacket and is wearing his white lab coat. He stops at an empty circular desk near the elevator bank and riffles through a clipboard’s papers.

When he disappears behind the doors of the elevator, I panic. This is a big hospital, and the chances of my finding him again are next to nothing. But I must have followed him here for a reason, whatever it might be, and I’m not ready to give up yet. I press my fingers to my temples, thinking of Sherlock Holmes and Nancy Drew, of clues. How did Nicholas spend his day? Where would a doctor be likely to go? I try to run through my mind snippets of conversation we’ve had when he mentioned places in the hospital, even specific floors. Nicholas could have gone to the patient rooms, the laboratory, the lockers. Or he could be headed where a cardiac surgeon should be headed.

“Excuse me,” I say quietly to a janitor emptying a trash container.

“No hablo ingles. ”The man shrugs.

I try again. “Operation,” I say. “I’m looking for the operations.”

“Si, operacion.” The man makes a jagged line across his stomach. He bobs his head, smiling.

I shake my head and try to remember the Sesame Street Spanish I’d heard when I turned it on for Max. “Uno,” I say, holding my hand close to the floor. I move it up an inch. “Dos.” I move it again. “Tres, cuatro… operation?”

The man claps his hands. “Si, si, operacion.” He holds up three fingers. “Tres,” he says.

“Gracias,” I murmur, and I jam my finger repeatedly into the elevator call button, as if this might make it come faster.

Sure enough, the operating rooms are on three, and as the elevator doors part I get a glimpse of Nicholas rushing by, now in his blue scrubs. Everything on him is covered, except for his face, but I would have been able to spot him from a distance simply by the stately manner of his walk. He looks over my head at a wall clock, then he disappears behind a double panel of doors.

“If you’re a relative,” a voice says behind me, “you’ll have to go to the waiting room.” I turn to see a pretty, petite nurse in a crisp white uniform. “Only patients are allowed in here,” she says.

“Oh,” I say. “I must have gotten lost.” I give a quick smile and then ask her if Dr. Prescott has arrived yet.

Nodding, she takes my elbow, as if she knows this is a ploy and wants me out immediately. “Dr. Prescott is always ten minutes early,” she says. “We set our watches by him.” She stands beside the elevator with me. “I’ll tell him you were here,” she says. “I’m sure he’ll come to see you when the operation is over.”

“No!” I say, a little too loud. “You don’t have to tell him anything.” For the past half hour, I’ve had the upper hand. I’m where I want to be, and Nicholas doesn’t know. I like being anonymous and' w?€† watching him. After all, I’ve never really seen him work, and maybe this is part of the reason I felt compelled to follow him to the hospital. Another hour or two, and I’ll come into the open. But not now, not yet. I’m still learning.

I look at the nurse, considering a string of different excuses. I knot my hands together in front of me. “I… I don’t want him to be distracted.”

“Of course,” she says, and she propels me into the yawning mouth of the elevator.

When Nicholas comes back up to his office, he is still wearing scrubs, but they are dark with sweat, pressed against his back and under his arms. He unlocks his door and leaves it open, and I creep from my hiding spot behind a row of sleeping wheelchairs to sit on the floor beside the doorway. “Mrs. Rosenstein,” Nicholas is saying, “this is Dr. Prescott.”

His voice makes my stomach flip. “I’m calling to let you know that the procedure went well. We did four grafts, as expected, and he came off the bypass machine nicely. Everything is going just fine, and he should be waking up in a few hours.” I listen to the calm currents running under his words and wonder if he uses that tone to put Max to sleep. I remember Nicholas telling me about making postoperative phone calls when he was a beginning resident. “I never say ‘How are you,’ because I know damn well how they are. How else could you be if you’ve been sitting next to the phone for six hours, waiting to hear if your husband is alive or dead?”

I lose Nicholas for a little while after that, because he meets with some residents and fellows in a small room where there is nowhere for me to hide. I am impressed. He hasn’t stopped yet. Everywhere he goes in the hospital, people know his name, and nurses fall over each other to hand him charts and schedules before he even thinks to ask. I wonder if that is because he is a surgeon or because he is Nicholas.

When I see Nicholas again, he is with a younger man, probably a resident, walking through the halls of surgical ICU. I knew he’d make a swing through here, even if he was planning to head to other floors first, because he’d have to check on that morning’s patient. His name is Oliver Rosenstein, and he is sleeping peacefully, breathing in time with the steady beats of the heart monitor. “We make patients sicker than they are when they come to us,” Nicholas is saying to the resident. “We elect to make them sicker in hopes that they’ll be better in the long run. That’s part of why you’re put up on a pedestal. If you trust your car to a mechanic, you look for someone who’s good. If you trust your life to a surgeon, you look for someone who’s God.” The resident laughs and looks up at Nicholas, and it is clear that he thinks Nicholas is as mythic as they come.

Just as I am wondering why I have never seen Nicholas work during the eight years we’ve been married, he is paged over the loudspeaker. He murmurs something to the resident and bolts up the nearest staircase. The resident leaves Oliver Rosenstein’s room and walks off in the other direction. Because I don’t know where to go, I stay where I am, at the open doorway to the room.

“Uhh,” I hear, and Oliver Rosenstein stirs.

I bite my lower lip, not certain what to do, when a nurse breezes past me into the room. She leans close to Oliver and adjusts several tubes and wires and catheters. “You’re doing fine,” she soothes, and then she pats his yellow, veined hand. “I’m going to page your doctor for you.” She leaves as briskly as she entered, and because of that I am the only person who hears Oliver Rosenstein’s first postsurgical words. “It isn’t easy,” he says, barely audible, “not easy to go through this… It’s real, real hard.” He rolls his head from side to side, as if he is looking for something, and then he sees me and smiles. “Ellie,” he says, his voice a rough sandpaper snap. He clearly thinks I am someone else. “I’m here, kine ahora,” he says. “For a WASP, that Prescott is a mensch.”

It is another hour before I find Nicholas again, and that is only by accident. I am wandering around the post-op floor, when Nicholas blusters out of the elevator. He is reading a file and eating a Hostess cupcake. A nurse laughs at him as he passes the central desk. “You gonna be the next cardiac surgeon around these parts with blocked arteries,” she scolds, and Nicholas tosses her the second cupcake, still packaged.

“If you don’t tell anyone,” he says, “this is yours.”

I marvel at this man, whom everyone seems to know, who seems so controlled and so calm. Nicholas, who could not tell you where I keep the peanut butter in his own kitchen, is completely in his element at this hospital. It hits like an unexpected slap: This is really Nicholas’s home. These people are really Nicholas’s family. This doctor, whom everyone seems to need for a signature or a quiet word or an answer, does not need anyone else, especially me.

Nicholas stuffs the chart he has been reading into the box glued to the door of room 445. He enters and smiles at a young resident in a white coat, her hands jammed in her pockets. “Dr. Adams tells me you’re all set for tomorrow,” he says to the patient, pulling up a chair next to the bed. I scoot to the other side of the doorway so that I can peek in, unseen. The patient is a man about my father’s age, with the same round face and faraway look in his eyes. “Let me tell you what we’re going to do, since I don’t think you’re going to remember much of it,” Nicholas says.

I cannot really hear him, but little drifts of dialogue float out to me, words like oxygenation,