Harvesting the Heart

mammary arteries, intubate. The patient does not seem to be listening. He is staring at Nicholas with his mouth slightly open, as if Nicholas is Jesus Himself.

Nicholas asks the man if he has any questions. “Yes,” the patient says hesitantly. “Will I know you tomorrow?”

“You might,” Nicholas says, “but you’re going to be groggy by the time you see me. I’ll check in when you’re up in the afternoon.”

“Dr. Prescott,” the patient says, “in case I’m too doped up to tell you-thanks.”

I do not hear Nicholas respond to the patient, so I don’t have time to retreat before he comes out the door. He barrels into me, apologizes, and then notices whom he has r1em?€†un into. With a narrowed look, he grabs my upper arm and starts to pull me down the hall. “Julie,” he says to the resident who has been in the room with him, “I’ll see you after you round.” Then he curses through his clenched teeth and drags me into a tiny room off the side of the hall, where patients can get ice chips and orange juice. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

My breath catches in my throat, and for the life of me I cannot answer. Nicholas squeezes my arm so hard that I know he is leaving behind a bruise. “I-I-”

“You what?” Nicholas seethes.

“I didn’t mean to bother you,” I say. “I just want to talk to you.” I start to tremble and wonder what I will say if Nicholas takes me up on my offer.

“If you don’t get the hell out of here,” Nicholas says, “I’ll have security throw you out on your ass.” He releases my arm as if he’s been touching a leper. “I told you not to come back,” he says. “What else do I have to do to show you I mean it?”

I lift my chin and pretend I haven’t heard anything he’s said. “Congratulations,” I say, “on your promotion.”

Nicholas stares at me. “You’re crazy,” he says, and then he walks down the hall without turning back.

I watch him until his white coat is a blur against a distant wall. I wonder why he cannot see the similarity between me and his patients, whom he keeps from dying of broken hearts.

At the Prescotts’ Brookline mansion, I sit for seven minutes in the car. I let my breath heat up the interior and wonder if there is an etiquette for begging mercy. Finally, driven by an image of Max, I push myself up the slate path and rap on the door with the heavy brass lion knocker. I am expecting Imelda, the short, plump maid, but instead Astrid herself-and my son-opens the door.

I’m immediately struck by the contrast between Astrid and my own mother. There are the simple things- Ascrid’s silk and pearls as compared to my mother’s flannel shirts and chaps; Astrid’s antiques set against my mother’s stables. Astrid thrives on her fame; my mother goes to great lengths to protect her identity. But on the other hand, Astrid and my mother are both strong; they are both proud to a fault. They have both fought the system that bound them, and recreated themselves. And from the look of things, Astrid-like my mother-is beginning to admit to her mistakes.

Astrid doesn’t say anything. She looks at me-no, actually she looks into me, as if she is sizing me up for the best lighting and direction and angle. Max is balanced on her hip. He watches me with eyes that the color blue must have been named for. His hair is matted with sweat on the side of his head, and a crinkled line from a sheet is imprinted on his cheek.

Max has changed so much in just three months.

Max is the image of Nicholas.

He figures out that I am a stranger, and he burrows his face in Astrid’s blouse, rubbing his nose back and forth on the ribbing.

Astrid makes no move to give him to me, but she also doesn’t shut the door in my face. To make sure of this, I take a tiny step forward. “Astrid,” I say, and then I shake my head. “Mom.”

As if the word has triggered a memory, which I know is impossible, Max lifts his face. He tilts his head, as his grandmother did at first, and then he reaches out one balled fist. “Mama,” he says, and the fingers of the fist open one by one like a flower, stretching and coming to rest on my cheek.

His touch-it’s not what I’ve expected, what I’ve dreamed. It is warm and dry and gentle and brushes like a lover. My tears slip down between his fingers, and he pulls his hand away. He puts it back into his mouth, drinking in my sorrow, my regrets.

Astrid Prescott hands Max to me so that his arms wrap around my neck and his warm, solid form presses the length of my chest. “Paige,” she says, not at all surprised to see me. She steps back so that I can enter her home. “Whatever took you so long?”

chapter 34

Nicholas

Paige has single-handedly ruined Nicholas’s day. Nicholas knows he has nothing else to complain about-his surgery went well enough; his patients are bearing up-but discovering Paige tripping along at his heels has unnerved him. It is a public hospital, and she has every right to be inside it; his threat about calling security was only that-a threat. Seeing her outside his patient’s door rattled him, and he never gets rattled at the hospital. For several minutes after he walked away from her, he had felt his pulse jumping irregularly, as if he’d received a shock to the system.

At least she wouldn’t find Max. She hadn’t followed him to the hospital; surely he would have noticed. She must have showed up later. Which meant that she didn’t know Max was at his parents’, and never, never would she guess that Nicholas had swallowed his pride and in fact was starting to enjoy having Robert and Astrid Prescott back in his life. On the outside chance that Paige did go over there, well, his mother certainly wouldn’t let her in, not after all the pain she’d caused to Astrid’s own son.

Nicholas stops at his office to pick up his suit jacket before heading home. In spite of the name on the door and the fact that he has his own secretary, it is still really Alistair’s place. The art on the walls is not what Nicholas would have picked; the nautical paraphernalia like that sextant and the brass captain’s wheel are not his style. He would like a forest-green office with fox-and-hound prints, a banker’s shaded lamp on his desk, an overstuffed cranberry damask couch. Anything but the pale white and beige that predominate in his house-which Paige, with her predilection for color, has always hated and which, all of a sudden, Nicholas is starting to see that he doesn’t like himself.

Nicholas rests his hand on the brass wheel. Maybe one day. He is doing a good job as chief of cardiac sit;chanc liurgery; he knows that. Saget has as much as told him that if Alistair decides to cut back his schedule or retire completely, the position is Nicholas’s for keeps. It is a dubious honor. Nicholas has wanted it for so long that he has slipped into the schedule naturally, joining the proper hospital committees and giving lectures to the residents and visiting surgeons. But all the extra hours and the grueling pressure to succeed keep him apart from Max and from Paige.

Nicholas shakes his head. He wants to be apart from Paige. He doesn’t need her anymore; he wants her to choke on a taste of her own medicine. Setting his jaw, he pulls together the files he needs to review before tomorrow and locks his office door behind him.

At eight o’clock, there isn’t much traffic on Storrow Drive, and Nicholas makes it to his parents’ house in fifteen minutes. He lets himself in and steps into the hall. “Hello,” he calls, listening to his echo in the cupola above. “Where are you guys?”

He wanders into the parlor, which is primarily a playroom now, but no one is there. He peeks into the library, where his father usually spends the evenings, but the room is dark and cool. Nicholas starts up the stairs, his feet falling onto the worn track of the Oriental runner. “Hello,” he says again, and then he hears Max giggle.

When Max laughs, it rumbles out of his belly, and it overcomes him so thoroughly that by the time the sound bubbles up through his throat, his little shoulders are shaking and his smile is like the sun. Nicholas loves the sound, just as much as he hates Max’s piercing crabby whine. He follows the giggle around the hall and into one of the extra bedrooms, the one that Astrid has redecorated into a gingham nursery. Just outside, Nicholas drops to his