Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

We sat on a low bench beside a lady who was selling a cloud of banana balloons. My mother had been reading my thoughts. “Today,” she said, “today let’s say I’m not your mother. Today I’ll just be May. Just your friend May.” And of course I didn’t argue, because this was what I had been hoping anyway, and besides, she wasn’t acting like my mother, at least not the one I knew. We told the man cleaning out the ape cage our white lie, and although he did not look up from his work, one large, ruddy gorilla came forward and stared at us, a very human exhaustion in her eyes, which seemed to say, Yes, I believe you.

The last place we visited in the Lincoln Park Zoo was the penguin and seabird house. It was dark and smelled of herring and was fully enclosed. It sat partially under the ground to maintain its cool temperature. The viewing area was a twisty hallway with windows exposing penguins behind thick glass. They were striking in their formal wear, and they tap-danced like society men on floes of white ice. “Your father,” May said, “looked no different than that at our wedding.” She leaned in close to the glass. “In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to pick one groom from the next. They’re all the same, you know.” And I said I did, even though I had no idea what she was talking about.

I left her staring at a penguin that had slipped into the water belly-up to do rolling, slow-motion calisthenics. I disappeared around a bend, pulled toward the other half of the house, where the puffins were. I didn’t know what a puffin was, but I liked the way the word sounded: soft and squashed and a little bit bruised, the way your lips looked after you’d eaten wild blackberries. It was a long, narrow walkway, and my eyes had not adjusted to the lack of light. I took very tiny steps, because I did not know where I was going, and I held my hands in front of me like a blind man. I walked for what felt like hours, but I could not find those puffins, or the sliver of silver daylight near the door, or even the places where I had already been. My heart swelled up into my throat. I knew the way you know these things that I was going to scream or to cry or to sink to my knees and become invikid become isible forever. For some reason I was not surprised when, in total darkness, my fingers found the comforting shape of May, who turned back into my mother, and she wrapped her arms around me. I never understood how she wound up in front of me, since I’d left her with the penguins and I hadn’t seen her pass. My mother’s hair fell like a dark curtain over my eyes and tickled my nose. Her breath echoed against my cheek. Black shadows wrapped around us like an artificial night, but my mother’s voice seemed solid, like something I could grab for support. “I thought I’d never find you,” my mother said, words I held on to and breathed like a litany for the rest of my life.

Nicholas was having a hell of a week. One of his patients had died on the table during a gallbladder removal. He’d had to tell a thirty-six-year-old woman that the tumor in her breast was malignant. Today his surgical rotation had changed; he was back in cardiothoracic, which meant a whole new list of patients and treatments. He’d been at the hospital since five in the morning and had missed lunch because of afternoon conferences; he still hadn’t written up notes on his rounds; and if all that wasn’t enough of a bitch, he was the resident on call and would be for thirty-six hours.

He’d been summoned to the emergency room with one of his interns-a third-year Harvard student named Gary who was green around the gills and reminded Nicholas nothing of himself. Gary had cleaned and quickly prepped the patient, a forty-year-old woman with superficial head and face wounds that were bleeding profusely. She had been assaulted, most likely by her husband. Nicholas let Gary continue, supervising his actions, his touches. As Gary sewed up the lacerations on her face, the patient began to scream. “Fuck you,” she yelled. “Don’t you touch my face.” Gary’s hands began to shake, and finally Nicholas swore under his breath and told Gary to get the hell out. He finished the job himself, as the woman cursed him out from beneath the sterile drapes. “Goddamned fucking pig asshole,” she shouted. “Get the fuck away from me.”

Nicholas found Gary sitting on a stained cube sofa in one of Mass General’s emergency room lounges. He’d drawn his knees up and was doubled over like a fetus. When he saw Nicholas coming toward him, he jumped to his feet, and Nicholas sighed. Gary was terrified of Nicholas; of doing anything wrong; of, really, being the surgeon he hoped to be. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I shouldn’t have let her get to me.”

“No,” Nicholas said evenly, “you shouldn’t have.” He thought of telling Gary everything that had gone wrong for himself today. See, he’d say, all that, and I’m still standing up, doing my job. Sometimes you just have to keep pushing, he’d say. But in the end he did not say anything to his intern. Gary would figure it out eventually, and Nicholas didn’t really want to recount his own failures to a subordinate. He turned away from Gary, a dismissal, feeling every bit the arrogant son of a bitch that he was reputed to be.

For years now, Nicholas had not gauged time by its usual measures. Months and days meant little; hours were things you logged onto a patient’s fact sheet. He saw his life passing in blocks, in places where he spent his days and in medical specialties where he filled his mind with details. At first, at Harvard, he’d counted off thmerhe spyoue semesters by their courses: histology, neurophysiology, anatomy, pathology. His last two years of rotations had run together, experiences blending at the edges. Sometimes he’d be remembering an orthopedic patient at the Brigham, but he’d picture the decor of the orthopedic floor at Massachusetts General. He’d started his rotations with internal medicine; then came a month of psychiatry, eight weeks of general surgery, a month of radiology, twelve weeks of obstetrics/gynecology and pediatrics, and so on. He had forgotten about seasons for a while, shuttling from discipline to discipline and hospital to hospital like a foster child.

He’d decided on cardiac surgery-a long haul. The match had placed him at his first-choice hospital, Mass General. It was a large place, impersonal and disorganized and unfriendly. In cardiothoracic surgery, the attendings were a brilliant group of men and women. They were opinionated and impulsive; they wore pristine white lab coats over their cool, efficient demeanors. Nicholas loved it. Even during his postgraduate year one, he’d observe the easy motions of general surgery, waiting to be rotated back to the cardiac unit, where he’d marvel at Alistair Fogerty performing open-heart operations. Nicholas would stand for six hours at a time, listening to the thin ring of metal instruments on trays and the rustle of his own breath against his blue mask, watching life being put on hold and then recalled.

“Nicholas.” At the sound of his name, he turned to see Kim Westin, a pretty woman who’d been in his graduating class and was now in her third year of residency in internal medicine. “How’s it going?” She came closer and squeezed his arm, propelling him down the hall in the direction he’d been walking.

“Hey,” Nicholas said. “You don’t have anything to eat, do you?”

Kim shook her head. “No, and I’ve got to run up to five, but I wanted to see you. Serena’s back.”

Serena was a patient they’d shared during their final year of rotations at Harvard. She was thirty-nine and she was black and she had AIDS-which, four years earlier, had still been rare. She’d come and gone in the hospital over the years, but Kim, in internal medicine, had more contact with her than Nicholas. Nicholas did not ask Kim what Serena’s status was. “I’ll go by,” he said. “What’s the room?”