Harvesting the Heart Read online

  I had been in love in Chicago, and I knew the consequences. After all that had happened with Jake, I was not planning to be in love again, maybe not ever. I didn't consider it strange that at eighteen some soft part of me seemed broken for good. Maybe this is why when I watched Nicholas I never thought to draw him. The artist in me did not immediately register the natural lines of him as a man: the symmetry of his square jaw or the sun shifting through his hair, throwing off different and subtler shades of black.

  I watched him the night of the first Chicken Doodle Soup Special, as Lionel had insisted on calling it. Doris, who had been working with me since the lunch rush, had left early, so I was by myself, refilling salt shakers, when Nicholas came in. It was 11:00 p.m., just before closing, and he sat at one of my tables. And suddenly I knew what it was about this man. I remembered Sister Agnes at Pope Pius High School, rapping a ruler against a dusty blackboard as she waited for me to think up a sentence for a spelling word I did not know. The word was grandeur, e before u. I had stood and hopped from foot to foot and listened to the popular girls snicker as I remained silent. I could not come up with the sentence, and Sister accused me of scribbling in the margins of my notebook again, although that was not it at all. But looking at Nicholas, at the way he held his spoon and the tilt of his head, I understood that grandeur was not nobility or dignity, as I'd been taught. It was the ability to be comfortable in the world; to make it look as if it all came so easily. Grandeur was what Nicholas had, what I did not have, what I now knew I would never forget.

  Inspired, I ran to the counter and began to draw Nicholas. I drew not just the perfect match of his features but also his ease and his flow. Just as Nicholas was digging in his pockets for a tip, I finished and stepped back to view the picture. What I saw was someone beautiful, perhaps someone more beautiful than I had ever seen in my life, someone whom others pointed to and whispered about. Plain as day, in the straight brows, the high forehead, and the strong chin, I could see that this was someone who was meant to lead others.

  Lionel and Leroy came into the main area of the diner, carrying leftovers, which they brought home to their kids. "You know what to do," Lionel said to me, waving as he pushed his way out the door. "See you, Nick," he called.

  Very quietly, under his breath, he said, "Nicholas."

  I stepped up behind him, still holding my portrait. "Did you say something?" I asked.

  "Nicholas," he repeated, clearing his throat. "I don't like 'Nick.' "

  "Oh," I said. "Did you want anything else?"

  Nicholas glanced around him, as if he was just noticing he was the only customer in the diner and that the sun had gone down hours before. "I guess you're trying to close up," he said. He stretched out one leg on the banquette and turned the corners of his mouth up in a smile. "Hey," he said, "how old are you anyway?"

  "Old enough," I snapped, and I moved closer to clear his plate. I leaned forward, still clutching the menu with his picture, and that's when he grabbed my wrist.

  "That's me," he said, surprised. "Hey, let me see."

  I tried to pull away. I didn't really care if he looked at the portrait, but the feeling of his hand against my wrist was paralyzing me. I could feel the pulse of his thumb and the ridges of his fingertips.

  I knew by the way he touched me that he had recognized something in what I'd drawn. I peered down at the paper to see what I had done this time. At one edge of the picture I'd sketched centuries of kings, with high jeweled crowns and endless ermine robes. At the other edge I had drawn a gnarled, blossoming tree. In its uppermost branches was a thin boy, and in his hand he held the sun.

  "You're good," he said. Nicholas nodded to the seat across from him. "If you aren't keeping your other customers waiting," he said, smiling, "why don't you join me?"

  I found out that he was in his third year of medical school and

  that he was at the top of his class and in the middle of his rotations. He was planning to be a cardiac surgeon. He slept only four hours a

  night; the rest of the time he was at the hospital or studying. He thought I didn't look a day over fifteen.

  In turn, I told him the truth. I said I was from Chicago and that I had gone to parochial school and would have gone to RISD if I hadn't run away from home. That was all I said about that, and he didn't press me. I told him about the nights I had slept in the T station, waking in the mornings to the roar of the subway. I told him I could balance four coffee cups and saucers on one arm and that I could say I love you in ten languages. Mimi notenka kudenko, I said in Swahili, just to prove it. I told him I did not really know my own mother, something I had never admitted to my closest friends.

  But I did not tell him about my abortion.

  It was well past one in the morning when Nicholas stood up to leave. He took the portrait I'd drawn and tossed it lightly on the Formica

  counter. "Are you going to hang it up?" he asked, pointing

  to the others.

  "If you'd like," I said. I took my black marker out and looked at

  his image. For a moment, a thought came to me: This is what you've been waiting for. "Nicholas,"

  I said softly, writing his name across the top.

  "Nicholas,"

  he echoed, and then he laughed. He put his arm around my shoulders, and we stood like that, touching at the sides, for a moment. Then he stepped away. He was still stroking the side of my neck. "Did

  you know," he said, pressing a spot with his thumb, "that

  if you push hard enough here, you can knock someone unconscious?"

  And then he bent down and touched his lips to where his thumb had

  been, kissing the spot so lightly I might have imagined it. He walked out the door before I even noticed him moving, but I heard the sleigh bells tap against the steamed window glass. I stood there, swaying, and I wondered how I could be letting this happen again.

  chapter 2

  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.

&nbs
p; 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 l
eaned 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.

  His day off happened to fall on the Fourth of July, and Nicholas planned the outing carefully--dinner at a famous steakhouse north of Boston, followed by fireworks on the banks of the Charles.