Harvesting the Heart (72 page)
Read Harvesting the Heart Online
Authors: Jodi Picoult
Tags: #Women - United States, #Family Life, #General, #Literary, #Mystery fiction, #Fiction, #Domestic fiction, #Women
Mrs.
McCrory beams and grabs Paige's hand, which is the nearest one.
Paige, startled, gasps and almost overturns a vase of peonies. "Take
it easy," Nicholas says dryly. "I don't have room in my
agenda for an unscheduled heart attack."
At
this unexpected attention, Paige turns. Mrs. McCrory eyes her
critically. "He doesn't bite, dear," she says.
"I
know," Paige murmurs. "He's my husband."
Mrs.
McCrory claps her hands together, thrilled by this news. Nicholas
mutters something unintelligible, amazed at how easily Paige can ruin
his good mood. "Don't you have somewhere else to be?" he
says.
"No,"
Paige says. "I'm supposed to go wherever you go. It's my job."
Nicholas
tosses the chart down on Mrs. McCrory's bed. "That is
not
a
volunteer's assignment. I've been here long enough to know the
standard rounds, Paige. Ambulatory, patient transport, admitting.
Volunteers are never assigned to doctors."
Paige
shrugs, but it looks more like a shiver. "They made an
exception."
For
the first time in minutes, Nicholas remembers Mrs. McCrory. "Excuse
us," he says, grabbing Paige's upper arm and dragging her out of
the room.
"Oh,
stay!" Mrs. McCrory exclaims after them. "You're better
than Burns and Allen."
Reaching
the hallway, Nicholas leans against the wall and releases
Paige.
He wanted to yell and to complain, but suddenly he can't remember
what he was going to say. He wonders if the whole hospital is
laughing at him. "Thank God they don't let you in surgery,"
he says.
"They
did. I watched you today." Paige touches his sleeve gently. "Dr.
Saget arranged it for me, and I was in the observation room. Oh,
Nicholas, it's incredible to be able to do that."
Nicholas
does not know what makes him more angry: the fact that Saget let
Paige watch him doing surgery without his consent, or the fact that
his imagined angel was really just his wife. "It's my job,"
he snaps. "I do it every day." He looks at Paige, and that
expression is back in her eyes—the one that probably made him
fall in love with her. Like his patients, Paige is seeing him as
someone who is flawless. But he has a sense that unlike them, she
would have been just as impressed if she'd watched him mopping the
hospital's halls.
The
thought chafes around his neck. Nicholas pulls at his collar and
thinks about going right back to his office and calling Oakie
Peterborough and getting this over. "Well," Paige says
softly, "I wish I were that good at fixing things."
Nicholas
turns and walks down the hall to see another patient, a transplant
recipient from last week. When he is half inside the room, he glances
around, to find Paige at the door.
"I'll
change
the damn water," he says. "Just get out of here."
Her
hands are braced on either side of the doorway, and her hair is
working its way out of her braid. Her volunteer uniform, two sizes
too big, billows around her waist, falls to her shins. "I wanted
to tell you," she says, "I think Max is getting sick."
Nicholas
laughs, but it comes out as a snort. "Of course," he says,
"you're an expert."
Paige
lowers her voice and peeks into the hallway to make sure no one is
around. "He's constipated," she says, "and he spit up
twice today."
Nicholas
smirks. "Did you give him creamed spinach?" Paige nods.
"He's allergic."
"But
there aren't any welts," Paige says, "and anyway it's more
than that. He's been crabby, and, well, Nicholas, he just isn't
himself."
Nicholas
shakes his head at her and takes a step into the patient's room. As
much as he doesn't want to admit it, when he sees Paige standing in
the doorway, arms outstretched as if she is being crucified, she
looks very much like an angel. "He's not himself," Nicholas
repeats. "How the hell would you know?"
chapter
40
Paige
When
Astrid hands Max over to Nicholas that night, something still
is wrong. He has been crying on and off all day. "I wouldn't
worry," Astrid says to me. "He's been a colicky baby."
But it is not his crying that bothers me. It's the way the fight has
gone out of his eyes.
I
stand on the staircase while Nicholas takes Max. He hoists the
diaper bag and some favorite toys over his free arm. He ignores me
until he reaches the door, about to leave. "You might want to
get a good lawyer," he says. "I'm meeting with mine
tomorrow."
My
knees give out under me, and I stumble against the banister. I feel
as if I have been swiftly punched. It isn't his words that hurt so
much; it is knowing that I have been too late. I can run in circles
until I drop, but I cannot change the course of my life.
Astrid
calls out to me as I pull myself up the stairs to my room, but I do
not listen. I think about phoning my father, but he'll only
lecture
me on God's will, and that won't give me any comfort. What if I don't
happen to like God's will? What if I want to keep the end from
coming?
I
do what I always do when I am in pain; I draw. I pick up my sketch
pad and I draw image after image on the same page until it is nothing
more than a dismal black knot. I flip the page and do this all over
again, and I keep on doing this until little by little some of the
rage leaves my body, seeping through my fingertips onto the page.
When I no longer feel I am being eaten alive from the inside, I put
down my charcoal and I decide to start over.
This
time I draw in pastels. I rarely use them because I'm a lefty and
they get all over the side of my hand and make me look strangely
bruised. But right now I want color, and that is the only way I can
think of getting it. I find that I am drawing Cuchulainn's mother,
Dechtire, which seems natural after thinking of my father and the
whims of the gods. Her long sapphire robes mist around her sandaled
feet, and her hair flies behind her in a sleek arc. I draw her
suspended in midair, somewhere between heaven and earth. One arm
reaches down to a man silhouetted against the ground, one arm reaches
up toward Lugh, the powerful god who carries the sun.
I
make her fingers brush those of her husband below, and as I do it I
get a physical jolt. Then I lengthen her other arm, seeing her torso
twist and stretch on the page as she reaches into the sky. It takes
all the effort in my fingers to make Dechtire's hand touch the sun
god's, and when it does I begin to draw furiously, obliterating
Dechtire's porcelain face and the solid body of her husband and the
bronze arm of Lugh. I draw flames that cover all the characters,
erupting in fiery sparks and bursting across the sky and the
earth. I draw a blaze that feeds on itself, that shimmers and flares
and sucks away all the air. Even as I cannot breathe anymore, I see
that my picture has turned into a holocaust, an inferno. I throw the
scorching pastels across the room, red and yellow and orange and
sienna. I stare sadly at the ruined image of Dechtire, amazed that I
have never before seen the obvious: when you play with fire, you are
likely to get burned.
I
fall asleep fitfully that night, and when I wake, sleet is rattling
against
the window. I sit up in bed and try to remember what has awakened me,
and I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I know what is
coming. It is like that feeling I used to have about Jake, when we
were so closely connected that I could sense when he stepped into his
home at night, when he thought of my name, when he needed to see me.
I
jump out of bed and pull on the pants and shirt I wore yesterday. I
don't even think to find socks, tying up my sneakers over bare feet.
I gather my hair into a tangled ponytail and secure it with the
rubber band from a bag of gummy fish. Then I pull my jacket off the
doorknob and run downstairs.
When
I open the door, Nicholas stands before me, assaulted by the ice and
the rain. Just beyond him, in the yellow interior light of his car, I
can see Max, oddly silent, his mouth in a raw red circle of pain.
Nicholas is already closing the door behind me and pulling me into
the storm. "He's sick," Nicholas says. "Let's go."
chapter
4
1
Nicholas
He
watches the hands of people he does not know poke and prod at his
son's body. John Dorset, the resident pediatrician on call last
night, stands over Max now. Every time his fingers brush Max's
abdomen, the baby shrieks in pain and curls into a ball. It reminds
Nicholas of the sea anemones he played with on Caribbean beaches as
a child, the ones that folded around his finger at the slightest
touch.
Max
hadn't gone to sleep easily last night, although that wasn't cause
in itself for alarm. It was the way he kept waking up every half
hour, screaming as if he were being tortured, fat clear tears
rolling down his face. Nothing helped. But then Nicholas had gone to
change the diaper, and he'd almost passed out at the sight of so
much jellied blood.
Paige
trembles beside him. She grabbed his hand the minute Max was brought
into the emergency room, and she hasn't let go since.
Nicholas
can feel the pressure of her nails cutting into his skin, and he is
grateful. He needs the pain to remind him that this isn't a nightmare
after all.
Max's
regular pediatrician, Jack Rourke, gives Nicholas a warm smile and
steps into the examination room. Nicholas watches the heads of the
two doctors pressed together in consultation over the kicking feet of
his son. He clenches his fists, powerless. He wants to be in there.
He should be in there.
Finally,
Jack steps out into the pediatric waiting room. It is now morning,
and the staff nurses are starting to arrive, pulling out a box of Big
Bird Band-Aids and sunny smiley-face stickers for the day's patients.
Nicholas knew Jack when they were at Harvard Med together, but
he hasn't really kept in touch, and suddenly he is furious at
himself. He should have been having lunch with him at least once a
week; he should have talked to him about Max's health before
anything like this ever happened; he should have caught it on
his own.
He
should have caught it.
That
is what bothers Nicholas more than anything else—how can he
call himself a physician and not notice something as obvious as an
abdominal mass? How can he have missed the symptoms?
"Nicholas,"
Jack says, watching his colleague pick up Max and sit him upright. "I
have a good idea of what it might be."
Paige
leans forward and catches at the sleeve of Jack's white coat. Her
touch is light and insubstantial, like a sprite's. "Is Max all
right?" she asks, and then she swallows back her tears. "Is
he going to be all right?"
Jack
ignores her questions, which infuriates Nicholas. Paige is the baby's
mother, for Christ's sake, and she's worried as hell, and that isn't
the way to treat her. He is about to open up his mouth, when John
Dorset carries Max past them. Max, seeing Paige, reaches out his arms
and starts to cry.
A
sound comes out of Paige's throat, a cross between a keen and a wail,
but she doesn't take the baby. "We're going to do a sonogram,"
Jack says to Nicholas, Nicholas only. "And if I can verify the
mass—I think it's sausage-shaped, right at the small
bowel—we'll do a barium enema. That might reduce the
intussusception, but it depends on the severity of the lesion."