Harvesting the Heart (5 page)

_Nicholas

Nicholas
Prescott was born a miracle. After ten years of trying to conceive a
child, his parents were finally given a son. And if his parents were
a little older than the parents of most of the boys he went to school
with, well, he never noticed. As if to make up for all the other
children they'd never had, Robert and Astrid Prescott indulged
Nicholas's every whim. After a while he didn't even need to verbalize
his wishes; his parents began to guess what it was that a boy of six
or twelve or twenty should have, and it was provided. So he had grown
up with season tickets to the Celtics, with a purebred chocolate Lab
named Scout, with virtually guaranteed admission to Exeter and
Harvard. In fact, it wasn't until Nicholas was a freshman at Harvard
that he began to notice that the way he had been brought up was not
the norm. Another young man might have taken the opportunity then to
see the third world, or to volunteer for the Peace Corps, but that
wouldn't have been Nicholas. It wasn't

that
he was disinterested or callous; he was just used to being a certain
type of person. Nicholas Prescott had always received the world on a
silver platter from his parents, and in return he gave them what was
expected: the very model of a son.

Nicholas
had been ranked first in his class forever. He had dated a stream of
beautiful, blue-blooded Wellesley girls from the time he was sixteen
and realized they found him attractive. He knew how to be charming
and how to be influential. He had been telling people he was going to
be a doctor like his father since he was seven, so medical school was
a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. He graduated from Harvard in 1979
and deferred his admission to the medical school. First he traveled
around Europe, enjoying liaisons with light-boned Parisian women who
smoked cigarettes laced with mint. Then he returned home and, at the
urging of his old college crew coach, trained for the Olympic rowing
trials with other hopefuls on Princeton's Lake Carnegie. He
rowed seventh seat in the eight-man shell that represented the United
States. His parents had a brunch for their friends one Sunday
morning, drinking Bloody Marys and watching, on television, their son
stroke his way to a silver medal.

It
was a combination of things, then, that made Nicholas Prescott, age
twenty-eight, wake up repeatedly in the middle of the night, sweating
and shaking. He'd disentangle himself from Rachel, his
girlfriend—also a medical student and possibly the smartest
woman he'd ever known—and walk naked to the window that
overlooked a courtyard below his apartment. Glowing in the blue
shadow of the full moon, he'd listen to the fading sprint of traffic
in Harvard Square and hold his hands suspended in front of him until
the trembling stopped. And he knew, even if he didn't care to admit
it, what lay behind his nightmares: Nicholas had spent nearly three
decades evading failure, and he realized he was living on
borrowed time.

Nicholas
did not believe in God—he was too much a man of science—but
he did think there was someone or something keeping track of his
successes, and he knew that good fortune couldn't last forever. He
found himself thinking more and more of his freshman roommate in
college, a thin boy named Raj, who had got a C+ on a literature paper
and jumped from the roof of Widener, breaking his neck. What was it
Nicholas's father used to say?
Life
turns on a dime.

Several
times a week he drove across the river to Mercy, the diner off JFK
Street, because he liked the anonymity. There were always other
students there, but they tended to be in less exacting disciplines:
philosophy, art history, English. Until tonight, he didn't realize
anyone even knew his name. But the black guy, the owner, did,
and so did that slip of a waitress who had been stuck in the corner
of his mind for the past two weeks.

She
thought he hadn't noticed her, but you couldn't survive at Harvard
Med for three years without honing your powers of observation.
She thought she was being discreet, but Nicholas could feel the heat
of her stare at the collar of his shirt; the way she lingered over
the water pitcher when she refilled his glass. And he was used to
women staring at him, so this should not have rattled him. But this
one was just a kid. She'd said eighteen, but he couldn't believe it.
Even if she looked young for her age, she couldn't be a day over
fifteen.

She
wasn't his type. She was small and she had skinny knees and, for
God's sake, she had red hair. But she didn't wear makeup, and even
without it her eyes were huge and blue. Bedroom eyes, that's what
women said about him, and he realized it applied to this waitress
too.

Nicholas
knew he had a ton of work to do and shouldn't have gone to Mercy
tonight, but he'd missed dinner at the hospital and had been thinking
of his favorite apple turnover the whole ride back from Boston on the
T. He'd also been thinking of the waitress. And he was wondering
about Rosita Gonzalez and whether she'd got home all right. He was in
Emergency this month, and a little after four o'clock, a Hispanic
girl—Rosita—had been brought in, bleeding all over, a
miscarriage. When he saw her history he had been shocked: thirteen
years old. He had done a D&C and held her hand afterward as long
as he could, listening to her murmur, over and over,
Mi
hija, mi hija.

And
then this other girl, this waitress, had drawn a picture of him that
was absolutely amazing. Anyone would be able to copy his features,
but she had got something other than that. His patrician bearing, the
tired lines of his mouth. Most important, there, shining back from
his own eyes, was the fear. And in the corner, that kid— it had
made a chill run down his spine. After all, she had no way of knowing
that Nicholas, as a child, would climb the trees in his parents'
backyard, hoping to rope in the sun and always believing that it was
within his power to do so.

He
had stared at the picture and caught the casual way she accepted
his compliment, and suddenly he realized that even if he had not been
Nicholas Prescott, even if he had worked the swing shift at the
doughnut shop or hauled trash for a living, it was quite possible
that this girl would still have drawn his portrait and still have
known more about him than he cared to admit. It was the first time in
his life that Nicholas had met someone who was surprised by what she
saw in him; who did not know his reputation; who would have been
happy with a dollar bill, or a smile, whatever he was able to spare.

He
pictured, for the space of a heartbeat, what his life might have been
like if he had been born someone else. His father knew, but it was
not something they'd ever discuss, so Nicholas was left to
speculate. What if he lived in the Deep South, say, and worked
on a factory assembly line and watched the sun set every night over
the muck of the bayou from a creaking porch swing? Without intending
to be vain, he wondered what it would be like to walk down a street
without attracting attention. He would have traded it all—the
trust fund and the privilege and the connections—for five
minutes out of the spotlight. Not with his parents, not even with
Rachel, had he ever been given the luxury of forgetting himself. When
he laughed it was never too loud. When he smiled he could measure the
effect on the people around him. Even when he relaxed, kicking off
his shoes and stretching out on the couch, he was always a little bit
guarded, as if he might be required to justify his leisure time. He
rationalized that people always wanted what they did not have, but he
still would have liked to try it: a row house, a patched armchair, a
girl who could hold the world in her eyes and who bought his white
shirts at five-and-dimes and who loved him not because he was
Nicholas Prescott but because he was himself.

He
did not know what made him kiss the waitress before he left. He had
breathed in the smell of her neck, still milky and powdered, like a
child's. Hours later, when he let himself into his room and saw
Rachel wrapped like a mummy in his sheets, he undressed and curled
himself around her. As he cupped Rachel's breast and watched her
fingers wrap around his wrist, he was still thinking of that other
kiss and wondering why he never had asked for her name.

"Hi,"
Nicholas said. She swung open the door to Mercy and propped it with a
stone. She flipped over the Closed sign with a natural grace.

"You
may not want to come in," she said. "The AC's broken."
She lifted her hair off the back of her neck, fanning herself, as if
to emphasize the point.

"I
don't want to come in," Nicholas said. "I've got to get to
the hospital. But I didn't know your name." He stood and stepped
forward. "I wanted," he said, "to know your
name."

"Paige,"
she said quietly. She twisted her fingers as if she did not know what
to make of her hands. "Paige O'Toole."

"Paige,"
Nicholas repeated. "Well." He smiled and stepped off into
the street. He tried to read the
Globe
at
the T station but kept losing his place, because, it seemed, the wind
in the underground tunnel was singing her name.

While
she was closing up that night, Paige told him about her name. It had
originally been her father's idea, a good Irish name from the
homeland. Her mother had been dead set against it. A daughter named
Paige, she believed, would be cursed by her name, always having to do
someone else's bidding. But her husband told her to sleep on it, and
when she did she dreamed of the name's homonym. Maybe, after all,
naming her daughter Paige would give her a beautiful blank
slate: a starting point upon which she could write her own ticket.
And so in the end she was christened.

Then
Paige told Nicholas that the conversation about the history of her
name was one of only seven conversations with her mother that she
could remember in their entirety. And Nicholas, without thinking
about it, pulled her onto his lap and held her. He listened to her
heartbeats, between his own.

Early
the year before, Nicholas had made the decision to specialize in
cardiac surgery. He had watched a heart transplant from an
observation lounge above, like God, as senior surgeons took a
thick knotted muscle from a Playmate cooler and set it in the mopped
raw cavity of the recipient's ribs. They connected arteries and veins
and made tiny sutures, and all the while this heart was already
healing itself. When it began to beat, pumping blood and oxygen and
second chances into the shadow of a man, Nicholas realized he had
tears in his eyes. That might have been enough to move him toward
heart surgery, but he had also visited with the patient a week later,
when the organ had been labeled a successful match. He had sat on the
edge of the bed while Mr. Lomazzi, a sixty-year-old widower who now
had the heart of a sixteen-year-old girl, talked baseball and thanked
God. Before Nicholas left, Mr. Lomazzi had leaned forward and said,
"I'm not the same, you know. I think like her. I look at flowers
longer, and I know off the top of my head poems I never read, and
sometimes I wonder if I'm ever going to fall in love." He had
grasped Nicholas's hand, and Nicholas was shocked by the gentle
strength and the warm rush of blood in the fingertips. "I ain't
complaining," Lomazzi said. "I just ain't sure who's
got control." And Nicholas had murmured a goodbye and decided
right then that he'd specialize in cardiac surgery. Perhaps he'd
always known that the truth of a person lies in the heart.

Which
made him question, as he held Paige, what had prompted him to do so
and what part of him, exactly, was in control.

On
his first free day for the month of July, Nicholas asked Paige out on
a date. He told himself it wasn't really a date; it was more like a
big brother taking a little sister out to see the town. They had
spent time together the week before, going first to see Hurst pitch a
Red Sox game, then walking through the Common and riding on a swan
boat. It was the first time in the twenty-eight years Nicholas had
lived in Boston that he had been on a swan boat, but he did not tell
that to Paige. He watched the sun flame through her hair and turn her
cheeks pink and laughed when she ate the hot dog without the roll,
and he tried to convince himself that he was not falling in love.

It
didn't surprise Nicholas that Paige wanted to spend time with him—at
the risk of seeming arrogant, Nicholas was used to that kind of
thing; any doctor was a magnet for single women. The surprise was
that he wanted to spend time with
her.
It
had come to the point of obsession for Nicholas. He loved that she
walked barefoot through the streets of Cambridge at dusk, when the
pavement cooled. He loved that she chased ice cream trucks down the
block and sang out loud with their carnival jingles. He loved that
she acted so much like a kid, maybe because he'd forgotten the way it
was done.