A Permanent Member of the Family (4 page)

“So where's Bud?” Harold asked, looking around the room.

“Getting a stepladder from the garage. To put up the star.”

“Say, by the way, congratulations.”

“For . . . ?”

She wasn't looking at him and was about to step away in the direction of a red-faced couple in matching ski jackets who had just come through the door—summer people, he noticed, up for the holidays to ski at Whiteface and go to parties.

“I heard you got a new baby,” Harold said. “Adopted a baby. Congratulations.”

“He's fabulous! So handsome, and so smart! Oh, there's Bud!” she said, as tall, blond, smiling Bud Lincoln eased his stepladder through the crowd that had gathered around the Christmas tree. He opened the ladder legs and climbed the first three steps awkwardly, carrying in one hand a large, gold-plated, five-pointed star and in the other a plastic cup half filled with eggnog. Sheila left Harold's side and made her way to the ladder, grabbed its sides and steadied it for her husband. A couple of people nearest the tree shouted for Bud to be careful and laughed. Bud laughed back and told them not to worry, he had everything under control.

Harold set his can of beer down on a side table and found himself edging away from the crowd, backing toward the sliding glass door, and then he was standing outside on the deck, coatless, shivering from the cold, watching Bud slowly reach with the star in hand toward the spindly top of the tree. He lifted the star over the last few limbs and hooked it properly in place, turned and raised his arms in triumph. Everyone applauded. Sheila let go of the ladder and clapped with them.

At that moment, to Harold, she looked very happy. She was proud of her husband, of her fabulous, handsome, smart new baby, of her beautiful house. Proud of her life. There was a light emanating from her face that Harold had never seen before.

It occurred to him that he had left the room and stepped out to the deck because he hoped that Bud would fall from the ladder and the goddamned overloaded Christmas tree would come crashing down with him. He might have broken a leg or an arm. He would have been humiliated. Harold had wanted it to happen, had even expected it. It would have been the perfect ending to his story of betrayal and abandonment, especially if he'd been able to watch it from a safe distance, out here on the deck alone.

It was dark now, except for the cold light of the moon blanketing the snow-covered slope below. Harold knew that no one inside the bright, warm living room could see him out here. He wore only a flannel shirt and fleece vest against the December night. His breath drifted from his mouth like smoke, and he wished he'd grabbed his parka when he left the living room, but there was no way he could retrieve it now without people noticing that he was leaving the party early. People would think that he wasn't over her, that he hadn't moved on in his life, that he was angry at Bud and angry at Sheila, too. And jealous, maybe envious, of their new house and their adopted African baby.

He walked to the north corner of the house, where the deck continued past an adjacent room, a den or maybe a guest bedroom. Like the living room, it was lined with floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors. When he got there he saw the crib and an overflowing toy chest and animal pictures on the wall and knew that it was the new baby's room. He recognized the babysitter sitting in a rocking chair with an open schoolbook in her lap; she was one of the architect Nils Luderoski's two teenaged daughters, he wasn't sure which. Luderoski must have designed the house, Harold thought. Luderoski was expensive. Harold had never been hired to work on a building he'd designed. The blueprints probably had the word
Nursery
written on this room from the start.

The glass door was unlocked, and when he slid it open he startled the girl. She looked up wide-eyed, then recognized him and cautiously said hi.

“Your dad design this house?” he said and smiled, closing the door behind him, as if finishing the tour.

She nodded yes and put a finger against her lips and tilted her head toward the crib.

He crossed the room to the crib and looked down, expecting the baby to be asleep, but he was wide awake, on his back, looking intently up at a brightly colored mobile suspended from a metal arm clamped to the headboard. He didn't seem at all interested in the man staring down at him. Harold had never seen an African baby before except on television. Sheila was right, her new baby was very handsome. Harold reached down and slid his hands under the baby's body and lifted him gently from the crib.

The Luderoski girl said, “Better not do that, Mr. Bilodeau.” She put her book on the side table and stood up and walked toward him, her hands extended to take the baby from him. “Mrs. Lincoln wants him to sleep. He has trouble falling asleep.”

They were singing Christmas carols in the living room now. He could hear the slow, muted strains of thirty or forty adults singing “Little Town of Bethlehem.” Holding the baby close to his chest, he turned away from the girl and moved toward the glass door. “What's his name?”

“They're calling him Menelik. The name he had in the orphanage. In Ethiopia,” she said. “Better give him to me now, Mr. Bilodeau.”

Harold held the baby in the crook of his right arm. With his free hand he grabbed the blanket from the end of the crib. He carefully wrapped it around the baby, leaving only his shining face exposed. As if he were used to being held by strangers, the baby stared up at the man, unafraid and incurious.

“Hello, Menelik,” the man said.

From behind him, her voice rising in fear, the girl said, “He needs to go back in his crib.”

Harold slid the outer door open, and cold air and darkness rushed into the room.

“What are you doing?” the girl said. Moving quickly, she placed herself between Harold and the open door and grabbed the baby away from him. “You better go back outside,” she said. She stood facing him with the baby in her arms, and he stepped around her onto the deck, and she drew the door shut behind him. He heard the click of the lock.

He walked slowly around to the front of the house, opened the door there, and entered the living room as if he had never left it. No one seemed to notice his return any more than they had noticed his departure. They were all standing around the beautifully decorated Christmas tree singing “Silent Night.”

He walked over to the bar and asked the girl with the tattoo for another beer. She flashed him a smile and fished a can of Pabst from the cooler and passed it to him. She wished him a merry Christmas.

He said, “Same to you.” He took a slow sip of the cold beer. “I forgot to bring something for the tree.”

She said, “That's okay. They got more than enough.”

“Tell me your name,” Harold said. “I know it, but I forgot.”

TRANSPLANT

The crushed gravel footpath wound uphill from the parking lot through a grove of poplar trees. From the passenger's seat of the van, Howard spotted the monument at the top of the hill—a head-high granite pylon that marked the site of a Puritan massacre of a band of Narragansett Indians. He made out the slender figure of a woman standing next to the pylon. She wore jeans and a bright yellow nylon poncho with the hood up. He turned to the woman in the driver's seat and said, “I don't know, Betty. It's farther than I usually walk, you know.”

“Can't turn back now,” she said. She reached across him and opened his door and handed his cane to him. “It's not so far. She's waiting for you.”

“Maybe you could go up and bring her down here instead.”

“Maybe you could pretend she doesn't exist and go sit on the porch at the house like an invalid and watch the sun set over the harbor. You need the exercise, Howard. Besides, you set this up. This is your deal.”

“No, it's Dr. Horowitz's deal,” he said. He grabbed his cane and eased himself from the van. The whole thing is crazy, he thought. I
am
an invalid. I need to be left alone. This woman shouldn't bring her troubles to me, I've got enough of my own. He stood unsteadily for a few seconds, then squared his shoulders and slowly made his way up the path toward the woman in the yellow poncho.

 

T
HIS WAS NOT HOW
he had expected the day to play out. Around ten that morning Betty had entered his bedroom without knocking, as usual, and had drawn back the curtains and let sunlight flood the room. From his bed Howard saw the sloping meadow below and then the harbor and the long, low peninsula on the far side, the white steeple of the church and the colonial-era waterside houses and docks of the fishing village, and his irritation, as usual, passed.

“Let's check the vitals,” Betty said. “See if you're ready for a walk in the park today. Doctor's orders.” She pushed up his pajama sleeve and began taking his blood pressure. She was an abrupt, pink, square-faced woman with graying, straw-colored hair cut in a pageboy with Prince Valiant bangs. Her hair looked ridiculous to Howard. She was in her mid-forties, a few years younger than he. After some initial difficulty, they had become friends. Her short, athletic body was attractive, but in a masculine way that was not sexy to him, and he was glad of that. Relieved, is more like it.

Betty treated him as if he were an adolescent boy, but he felt like a very old man locked in an even older man's body. He liked her crisp, no-nonsense personality and her bark of a laugh when he resisted her attempts to get him up and moving or make him follow his strict diet, drink eight glasses of water a day, walk in the house without a cane. A certain degree of irritation gave him pleasure. Her refusal to treat him the way he felt, along with the daily sight of the harbor and the marina and town on the other side of it, cheered him. Very little else cheered him, however.

“You got a phone call to make,” she said and stuck the thermometer under his tongue. “Dr. Anthea Horowitz wants to talk to you. What kind of name is that anyhow, Anthea? She's Jewish, right?” She pulled out the thermometer, checked it and shook it down. “Ninety-seven point nine. BP is one thirty over seventy-eight. You're still functional, Howard.”

“I don't know, Scandinavian, maybe. Could be Jewish, I guess. How many times have you asked me about her name, anyhow? You got a problem with Jewish women doctors? Give me the damned phone,” he said.

She passed him the telephone. “Don't forget your morning meds,” she said and pointed to the glass of water and plastic cup of pills on the bedside table. “Breakfast in fifteen, mister. More like brunch, actually,” she noted and headed for the kitchen.

 

S
INCE HE'D LEFT THE HOSPITAL,
every morning had been the same. He knew at once where he was and why, but couldn't remember exactly how he had got there. It wasn't the painkillers—he'd been off them for five weeks almost. It had to be the residue of the anesthesia. They say it takes a month for every hour you're anesthetized before you're normal, and he'd been knocked out for eight and a half hours. He did the math again: it was mid-May; the operation had been January sixth; he wouldn't be clear of the effects of the anesthesia until September.

There were still large blank patches in his memory that shifted locale daily, unpredictably. Every morning when he woke, he remembered suddenly something that the day before he'd been unable to recall—his cell phone number or the name of his daily newspaper. Then an hour or two later he'd notice a batch of new blanks—he couldn't remember the brand of car he owned, his social security number, the name of the mysterious, leafy green vegetable in the refrigerator. The patch over his move in March from the hospital to his ex-mother-in-law's summer house had stayed, however, week after week, month after month. He had no memory of the actual event. That worried him.

Howard knew the facts. He had been told them by his ex-wife, Janice, and her mother, and by his surgeon, Dr. Horowitz, and his nurse, Betty O'Hara, and could pass that information on to anyone who wanted to know why he was living alone in a seaside summer cottage on Cohasset Harbor. The explanation was simple. He couldn't return to his own house in Troy, New York, because he had undergone the transplant in Boston and had to stay nearby, monitored by Dr. Horowitz and her staff, while recovering from the surgery. Betty tested his blood daily and drove him to Boston weekly to be examined for telltale signs of rejection or infection. His insurance, although it covered Betty's salary, wouldn't pay for an apartment or house in the area. And he was currently unemployed—he had been a publisher's representative, basically a traveling salesman for the northeast region, a job he was no longer capable of holding. He had fallen on hard times, as he liked to say. Luckily, drawing from some half-filled well of residual affection, his ex-wife had talked her mother into giving him the use of her summer house. He knew all that, although he couldn't remember actually moving in, taking up residence.

He had no problem remembering Dr. Horowitz's office number, however. In the last year, while waiting for an available heart, he had called her office hundreds of times, and dozens of times since the surgery. He sat up in bed and dialed and told the receptionist that he was returning a call from Dr. Horowitz. A few seconds later, she came on the line.

“Howard?”

“Yes. Hello.”

“How are you feeling this week, Howard?” She sounded tentative to him, less assured than usual. Not a good sign.

“Okay, I guess. No complaints. Why, anything wrong with my tests?”

“No, no, no. Everything's hunky-dory. I'm sorry to bother you. I'm not bothering you, am I? Can you talk?”

“Yeah, sure. What's up, Doc?” If she could say everything was hunky-dory, he could call her Doc.

“Howard, I'm passing on a request. Not a usual request, but one I have to honor. You understand.”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“The wife . . . the widow of the man who donated your heart . . . ?”

“My heart.”

“Yes. She wants to meet you.”

They were both silent for a moment. “Christ. She wants to meet me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I haven't given her your contact information. I can't do that without your permission. I only agreed to convey her request. That's all.”

“Why, though? Why does she want to meet me? I don't think . . . I'm not sure I can handle that.”

“I understand, Howard. I know you've been depressed. That's not unusual. I can prescribe something for it, you know.”

“It's not like the heart's adopted and she's the birth mother.”

“It's up to you. It's not all that uncommon, you know.”

“What, being depressed after a heart transplant?”

“That, too. But, no, the donor wanting to meet the recipient.”

“She's not the donor,” he said. All he knew about his heart before it became his was that it had belonged to a twenty-six-year-old man who had died of head injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident. The man, a roofer in New Bedford, had been married, the father of a very young child. And a nonsmoker, Dr. Horowitz had assured him. Howard placed his right hand onto his heart and felt its sturdy beat. It's my heart, damn it! It belongs to Howard Blume, not some poor kid who fell off his motorcycle, hit his head on a curb and died.

He said, “I've got to think about it.”

“Of course. She says she'll meet you anywhere you want. She's young, barely twenty-two, and I take it she's alone in the world. Except for her baby boy. My guess is she still hasn't accepted the death of her husband, hasn't found closure. It's not unusual.”

“Closure. I don't know the meaning of the word,” he said. He was thinking of his divorce from Janice seven years ago, the end of a brief but perfect marriage—a marriage ruined by the affairs and dalliances that had resulted from his refusal to come in off the road and live and work close to home, maybe run a bookstore, turn himself into a domesticated man, a faithful husband because watched, a secure husband because watchful. But he'd spent twenty years on the road before falling in love with Janice, and after marrying her continued sleeping five nights a week away from home. Howard believed that he had married too late, when he was too old to change his ways. He was attractive to women, in spite of being a cold and selfish man, and he had betrayed Janice frequently, and finally Janice had betrayed him back and had fallen in love with one of her lovers, and now she was married to him and had two children with him, and that was that.

When a terrible thing happens, and it's your own damn fault, there's no closure, he thought. Whatever happened, you live with it. Alone, he had endured his three heart attacks and open-heart bypass surgery and a year later the steady deterioration of the organ itself. And now the transplant. All of it somehow the result of his having ruined his marriage to Janice, the one truly good thing that had befallen him. He believed that none of it, the heart attacks, the surgery, the transplant, would have happened if it hadn't been for the divorce. It was a superstition, he knew, but he couldn't let it go.

This young woman, though, had not caused her husband's accident, the terrible thing that had happened to her. It was her husband's fault. Maybe, for her, closure—whatever that meant—
was
possible. “I guess I owe her a lot, right? I mean, she's the one who made the decision to donate his organs.”

Dr. Horowitz asked where he would like to meet the woman. Her name was Penny McDonough, she said, from New Bedford, less than an hour's drive from his cottage on Cohasset Harbor.

“I don't want her to come here,” he said. “I'll ask Betty where's a good place nearby, someplace she can drive me to. I'll get back to you and set a time,” he said. “Tell her that I'm only good for a short visit.”

 

H
E NEARED THE MONUMENT
at the top of the hill, breathing hard, leaning heavily on his cane, his heart pounding: Whose heart was it, anyhow? Dear God, whose heart is inside me? It was not his own, but it was not someone else's, either. Until this moment Howard had managed not to ask that question. Now, since agreeing to meet this woman, he couldn't stop asking it, and he knew why he had avoided it for so long. There was no answer to the question. None. He was afraid that for the rest of his life he would not be able to say whose heart was keeping him alive.

He walked to the side of the monument where the woman in the yellow poncho stood waiting. She was very slender—fragile-seeming, almost childlike, with small hands and thin, bony wrists. Young enough to be his daughter, he thought. Instead of a woman's purse, she held a green cloth book bag. She had pale skin and large blue eyes and wore no makeup or jewelry that he could see. Short wisps of coppery hair crossed her forehead, and he remembered her name, Penny, and wondered what her real name was. Not Penelope. Probably something Irish, he thought.

“I'm Howard Blume,” he said. “I guess you're Penny? Mrs. McDonough, I mean.” He extended his right hand, and she gave him hers, cold and half the size of his.

“Yes. Thank you, Mr. Blume, for agreeing to meet with me.” She had a flattened South Shore accent. She looked directly at his eyes, but not into them, as if she had met him once long ago and was trying to remember where. “I'm sorry you had to walk all the way up here from the car,” she said. “I wasn't sure it was you, or I'd have come down.”

“That's okay. I needed the exercise.”

She made a tight-lipped smile. “Because of the surgery, yes. Are you all right? I mean . . .”

“Yes, I'm fine,” he said, cutting her off. “Listen, this is kind of uncomfortable for me. But I did want to be able to tell you how grateful I am for what you did. I don't know why you wanted to meet me, but that's why I wanted to meet you. To tell you . . . to thank you.”

“You don't have to thank me. It's what Steve, my husband, it's what he would have wanted.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I should thank him, too.” He paused for a moment. “He must've been a good guy. Thoughtful. Right?”

She drew her bag in front of her, as if about to open it. “Yes. I have a favor I'd like to ask you,” she said. “May I?”

“Yeah, sure. Why not?”

“I want to listen to your heart. Steve's heart.”

“Jesus! Listen to my heart? That's . . . I mean, isn't that a little . . . weird?”

“It would mean a lot to me. More than you can know. Please. Just once, just this one time.” She opened the bag and withdrew a black and silver stethoscope and extended it, as if it were an offering.

“I don't know. It feels a little creepy to me. You can understand that, can't you?” Howard looked down the hill toward the car. He didn't want Betty to see this. He didn't want anyone to see this. A few yards beyond the parking lot the narrow road followed the rock-strewn shore. A thickening bank of clouds had blotted out the sun, and an offshore wind had raised a chop in the blue-gray water.