Harvest (16 page)

The boy was sitting up in bed, fussing with a TV remote. If not for the Red Sox cap on his head, Abby might not have recognized Josh O"Day, so transformed was his appearance by the rosy flush of health. At his first glimpse of Vivian, he grinned hugely.

"Hey, Dr. Chao!" he whooped. "Geez, I wondered if you were ever coming to see me."

"I did come by," saidVivian. "Twice. But you were always asleep." She shook her head in mock disgust. "Typical lazy teenager."

They both laughed. There was a brief silence.Then, almost shyly, Josh opened his arms for a hug.

For a moment Vivian didn't move. It was as if she didn't know how to respond. Then she suddenly snapped free of some invisible restraint, and stepped towards him. The embrace was brief and clumsy. Vivian seemed almost relieved when it was over.

"So how are you?" she asked.

"Real good. Hey, didja see?" He pointed to the TV. "My dad brought me all those baseball tapes. But we can't figure out how to hook up the VCR. You know how to do it?"

"I'd probably blow up the TV."

"And you're a doctor?"

"OK. Next time you need surgery, buster, you call a TV repairman." She nodded towards Abby. "You remember Dr. DiMatteo, don't you?"

Josh looked uncertainly at Abby. "I think so. I mean . . ." He shrugged. "I forgot some things, you know? Things that happened last week. It's almost like I got dumb or something."

"That's nothing to worry about," said Vivian. "When your heart stops, Josh, you don't get enough blood to your brain. You can forget a few things." She touched his shoulder. It was not the sort of thing Vivian Chao would normally do. But there she was, actually making contact. "At least you didn't forget me," she said. And added with a laugh, "Though you may have tried."

Josh looked down at the bedspread. "Dr. Chao," he said softly, "I don't ever want to forget you."

Neither one spoke for a moment. They seemed frozen by embarrassment in that awkward pose, Vivian's hand on the boy's shoulder. The boy looking downward, his face hidden under the bill of his cap.

Abby had to turn away and focus on something else. The trophies. They were all there, all the ribbons and plaques, arranged on the nightstand. No longer an altar to a dying boy, but a celebration of life. Of rebirth.

There was a knock on the door and a woman called out: "Joshie?"

"Hey, mom," said Josh.

The door swung open and the room was invaded by parents and siblings and aunts and uncles, sweeping in with them a forest of helium balloons and the smell of McDonald's fries. They swarmed around the bed, assaulted Josh with hugs and kisses and exclamations of Look at him.t He looks so good. Doesn't he look good? Josh bore it all with an expression of sheepish delight. He didn't seem to notice that Vivian had slipped away from his bedside, to make room for the noisy army of O"Days.

"Josh, honey, we brought Uncle Harry from Newbury. He knows all about VCR's. He can hook it up, can't you, Harry?"

"Oh, sure. I do all my neighbours' VCR's."

"Did you bring the right wires, Harry? You sure you got all the wires you need?"

"You think I'd forget the wires?"

"Look, Josh. Three extra-large orders of fries. It's OK, isn't it? Dr. Tarasoft didn't say you couldn't have fries?"

"mom, we forgot the camera! I was gonna take a picture of Josh's scar."

"You don't want a picture of his scar."

"My teacher said it'd be cool."

"Your teacher's too old to use words like cool. No pictures of scars. That's an invasion of privacy."

"Hey Josh, you need any help eating those fries?"

"So Harry, you think you can hook it up?"

"Gee, I don't know. This is a pretty old TV..."

Vivian had managed at last to sidle around to where Abby was standing. There was another knock on the door, and a fresh spurt of relatives pushed into the room, with more cries of He looks so good.t Doesn't he look good? Through the crowd of O"Days, Abby caught a fleeting glimpse of Josh. He was looking their way. He gave them a helpless smile, a wave.

Quietly Abby andVivian left the room. They stood in the hallway, listening to the voices beyond the door. AndVivian said, "So, Abby. To the question of was it worth it?, that's your answer."

At the nurses' station, they asked to speak to Dr. IvanTarasoff. The ward clerk suggested they look in the surgeons' lounge. That's exactly where Abby and Vivian found him, sipping coffee and scribbling in his charts. With his drooping glasses and tweed jacket, Dr. Tarasoft looked more like some puttering English gentleman than the renowned cardiac surgeon.

"We just saw Josh," said Vivian.

Tarasoft looked up from his coffee-splattered notes. "And what do you think, Dr. Chao?"

"I think you do good work. The kid looks fantastic."

"He has a little post-code amnesia. Otherwise, he's bounced back the way kids always do. He'll be out of here in a week. If the nurses don't kick him out sooner."Tarasoff closed the chart and looked at Vivian. His smile faded. "I have a very big bone to pick with you, Doctor."

"Me?"

"You know what I'm talking about. That other transplant patient at Bayside. When you shipped us the boy, you didn't tell me the whole story. Then I find out the heart was already assigned."

"It wasn't. There was a directed donation consent."

"Obtained through a certain amount of subterfuge." He frowned over his glasses at Abby. "Your administrator, Mr Parr, told me all the details. So did MrVoss's attorney."

Vivian and Abby glanced at each other.

"His attorney?" said Vivian.

"That's right." Tarasoff's gaze shifted back to Vivian. "Were you trying to get me sued?"

'! was trying to save the boy."

"You withheld information."

"And now he's alive and well."

"I'm only going to say it once. Don't ever do anything like this again."

Vivian seemed about to reply, but then thought better of it. Instead she gave a solemn nod. It was her deferential Asian act, eyes downcast, head dipping in a faint bow.

Tarasoft didn't buy it. He regarded her with a look of mild vexation. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. Turning back to his charts, he said: "I should have expelled you from Harvard. When I had the chance."

"Ready about. Hard a lee!" Mark yelled, and shoved the tiller.

The bow of Gimme Shelter turned into the wind, sails crackling, ropes lashing the deck. Raj Mohandas scurried across to the starboard winch and began cranking the jib sheet. With a loud whap, the sail filled, and Gimme Shelterheeled to starboard, sending off a clatter of soft drink cans in the cabin below.

"Upwind rail, Abby!" Mark yelled. "Get to the upwind rail!" Abby scrambled across the deck to the port side, where she clung to the lifeline and offered up another fervent vow of never again. What was it about men and their boats? she wondered. What was it about the sea that made them yell?

They were all yelling, all four of them, Mark and Mohandas and Mohandas's eighteen-year-old son Hank, and Pete Jaegly, a third-year resident. Yelling about sheets that needed tightening and spinnaker poles and wasted wind puffs. They were yelling about Archer's boat, Red Eye, which was gaining on them. And, every so often, they would yell at Abby. She actually had a role in this race, a role known politely as ballast. Dead weight. A job that could be performed by sandbags. Abby was a sandbag with legs. They'd yell and she'd run across to the opposite rail where, with some regularity, she'd throw up. The men weren't throwing up. They were too busy scampering around in their expensive boat shoes and yelling. "Coming up on the mark! One more tack. Ready about!" Mohandas and Jaegly resumed their frantic deck dance. "Hard a lee!"

Gimme Shelter turned through the wind and heeled to port. Abby scrambled to the other side. Sails flapped, ropes thrashed.

Mohandas cranked the winch, the muscles on his brown arm rippling with each turn of the handle.

"She's coming up on us!" Hank called.

Behind them, Red Eye had gained another half-boat-length. They could hear Archer yelling at hid/s crew, exhorting them to come up, come up.t Gimme Shelter rounded the buoy and started her downwind course. Jaegly struggled with the spinnaker pole. Hank pulled down the jib.

Abby was throwing up over the side.

"Shit, he's right on our tail!" yelled Mark. "Get the fucking spinnaker up! Go, go, go!"

Jaegly and Hank hoisted the spinnaker. The wind filled it with a thunderous whomp and Gimme Shelter suddenly surged ahead. "That's it, Baby!" Mark whooped. "Baby, baby, here we go!"

"Look," said Jaegly, pointing aft. "What the bell's happening?"

Abby managed to raise her head and look back, towards Archer's boat.

Red Eye was no longer in pursuit. It had turned around near the buoy and was now heading back to port.

"They've started their motor," said Mark. "Think they're conceding defeat?"

"Archer? Not a chance."

"So why're they going back?"

"I guess we'd better find out. Get the spinnaker down." Mark started the engine. "We're heading back too."

Thank you, God.t thought Abby.

Her nausea was already subsiding by the time they morored into the marina. Red Eye was tied up at the dock and her crew was busy folding up sails and coiling ropes.

"Ahoy Red Eye!" yelled Mark as they glided past. "What's going on?"

Archer waved his cellular phone. "Got a call from Marllee! She told us to come in. It's something serious. She's waiting for us in the yacht club."

"OK. Meet you at the bar," said Mark. He looked at his own crew. "Let's tie up. We'll have a drink and take her back out again."

"You'll have to do it without your ballast," said Abby. "I'm jumping ship."

Mark glanced at her in surprise. "Already?"

"Didn't you see me hanging over the side? ! wasn't admiring the scenery."

"Poor Abby ! I'll make it up to you, OK? Promise. Champagne. Flowers. Restaurant of your choice."

"Just get me off this goddamn boat."

Laughing, he steered towards the dock. "Aye aye, first mate." As Gimme Shelter glided alongside the visitor's dock, Mohandas and Hank stepped onto the pier and tied fast the bow and stern lines. Abby was off the boat in a flash. Even the dock seemed to be swaying.

"Just leave her rigged," said Mark. "Until we find out what's up with Archer."

"He's probably got the party started already," said Mohandas. Oh Lord, Abby thought as she and Mark walked up the pier, his arm slung possessively around her shoulder. More boat talk coming up. Tanned men standing around with their gin and tonics and their polo shirts and their booming laughter.

They went inside the club, stepping from sunlight into shadow. The first thing she noticed was the silence. She saw Marilee standing at the bar with a drink in her hand. Saw Archer sitting by himself at a table, no drink, just a paper coaster in front of him. Red Eye's crew was gathered around the bar, no one moving, no one saying a thing. The only sound in the room was the clatter of ice cubes in Marilee's glass as she lifted the drink to her lips, took a sip, and set it back down again on the counter.

Mark said, "Is something wrong?"

Marilee looked up and blinked, as if noticing Mark for the first time. Then she looked back down at the counter. At her drink.

"They found Aaron," she said.

It was the grinding of the Stryker bone saw that usually did it; that or the smell. This one smelled pretty bad.

Homicide Detective Bernard Katzka glanced across the autopsy table and saw that the stench had gotten to Lundquist. His younger partner was turned partially away from the table, gloved hand cupped over his nose and mouth, his movie-star good looks twisted into a squint of nausea. Lundquist had not yet developed the stomach for autopsies; most cops never did. While the cutting open of dead bodies was not Katzka's favourite spectator sport, over the years he had trained himself to view the procedure as an intellectual exercise, to focus not on the humanity of the victim but on the purely organic nature of death. He had seen bodies cooked in fires, bodies scraped off the pavement after twenty-storey free falls, bodies shot or stabbed or both, bodies gnawed by rodents. Except for the children, which always upset him, one body was like any other on the table, a specimen stripped, examined, and catalogued. To view them any other way was to invite nightmares.

Bernard Katzka was forty-four years old and a widower. Three years ago, he had watched his wife die of cancer. Katzka had already lived his worst nightmare.

He focused impassively on the body now being autopsied. The corpse was a fifty-four-year-old white male, married with two college-aged children, a cardiologist by profession. His identity had been confirmed by fingerprints as well as visual ID by the widow. The experience must have been profoundly upsetting to her. Viewing the corpse of a loved one is difficult enough. When that loved one has been hanging by the neck for two days in a warm and unventilated room, the sight would be truly horrifying.

The widow, he'd been told, had fainted dead away on the morgue floor.

And no wonder, thought Katzka, looking down at the corpse of Aaron Levi. The face was a bloodless white; its arterial supply had been cut off by the pressure of the leather belt looped around the neck. The protruding tongue was a scaly black, its mucous surface dried out by two days' exposure to air. The eyelids were only partially closed. The slitted openings revealed scleral haemorrhages which had turned the whites of the eyes a frightening blood-red. Below the neck, where the belt had imprinted its ligature mark, the skin showed the classic pattern of dependent pooling, a bruise-like discoloration of the lower legs and arms as well as pinpoint haemorrhages, called Tardieu spots, where vessels had ruptured. All of this was consistent with death by hanging. The only visible injury, aside from the ligature marks around the neck, was a coin-shaped bruise on the left shoulder.

Dr. Rowbotham and his assistant, both gowned, gloved, and wearing protective goggles, completed the thoraco-abdominal incision. It was shaped in aY, two diagonal incisions starting at the shoulders and joining at the lower end of the sternum, then a vertical slice down the abdomen to the pubic bone. Rowbotham had served thirty-two years with the ME's office, and very little seemed to surprise or excite him. If anything, he looked slightly bored as he cut into the body. He was dictating in his usual monotone as his foot clicked on and off the recording pedal. Now he lifted off the triangular shield of rib and breastbone and exposed the pleural cavity.