Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

He had to snap and unsnap the terry-che ¡€oo loth sleeper three times before he got it right. His hands were too big to secure the little silver circles, and there always seemed to be one snap he’d missed. Finally, he picked Max up and hung him upside down from his shoulder, just grasping his feet. If Paige could see me, Nicholas thought, she’d murder me. But Max became quiet. Nicholas paraded around the nursery in a circle, holding his son upside down. He felt sorry for the kid. All of a sudden, without warning, he was thrown into a world where nothing seemed familiar. Not much different from his parents.

He carried Max down to the living room, settling him on the couch in a nest of stuffed pillows. The baby had Nicholas’s eyes. After the first day, the dark black had given way to cool sky blue, startling against the red oval of his face. Other than that, Nicholas couldn’t tell. It remained too early to see whom Max would take after.

Max’s glazed eyes roamed blindly over Nicholas’s face, seeming for a moment to come into focus. He started to cry again.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Nicholas muttered, picking the baby up and starting to walk. He bounced Max on his shoulder as he moved. He sang Motown. He twirled around and around, very fast, and he tried hanging the baby upside down again. But Max would not stop crying.

Nicholas couldn’t get away from the sound. It pounded behind his eyes, over his ears. He wanted to put the baby down and run. He was just thinking about it when Paige came downstairs, groggy but resigned, like a prisoner on death row. “I think he’s hungry,” Nicholas said. “I couldn’t make him stop.”

“I know,” Paige said. “I heard.” She took the baby from Nicholas and rocked him back and forth. Nicholas’s shoulders throbbed with relief, as if a huge weight had been removed. Max quieted a little, his crying now a soft, grating whine. “He just ate,” Paige said. She went to sit on the couch and flipped the television on. “Nickelodeon,” she said to nobody. “Max seems to like Nickelodeon.”

Nicholas slipped into the bedroom and set off the test button on his beeper. The soft chirps vibrated against his hip. He opened the door, to find Paige waiting. “I’ve got to go back to the hospital,” he lied. “Complications on a heart-lung transplant.”

Paige nodded. He pushed past her, fighting the urge to take her into his arms and say, Let’s get away. Just you and I, let’s go, and everything will be different. Instead he went into the bathroom, showering quickly and then changing his shirt, his pants, his socks.

When he left, Paige was sitting in the rocking chair in the nursery. She had her nightgown opened to her belly, still soft and round. Max’s mouth was clamped to her right breast. With every tug of his lips he seemed to be pulling in more and more of her. Nicholas’s gaze strayed to Paige’s face, which was turned to the window. Her eyes held the ragged edge of pain. “It hurts?” Nicholas asked.

“Yes.” Paige did not look at him. “That’s what they don’t tell you.”

Nicholas drove quickly to Mass General, weaving in and out of traffic. He opened all the windows in the car, and he turned on ge ¡€‹ least="least" in="in" image="image" his="his" he="He" ears,="ears," drown="drown" door.="door." cries="cries" at="At" as="as" able="able"›

When he passed the nurses’ station in the ER, Phoebe, who had known him for years, raised her eyebrows. “You’re not on call tonight, Dr. Prescott,” she said. “Did you miss me again?”

Nicholas smiled at her. “I can’t live without you, Phoebe,” he said. “Run away with me to Mexico.”

Phoebe laughed and opened a patient file. “Such words from a man with a new baby boy.”

Nicholas moved through the halls with the confidence people expected of him. He ran his fingers over the smooth aqua tiles lining the walls of the corridors, heading for the small room kept for the residents on call overnight. It was no more than a closet, but Nicholas welcomed the familiar smell of formaldehyde and antiseptic and blue woven cotton as if he had entered a palatial estate. His eyes swept the neat cot that filled up the room, and then he pulled back the covers. He turned off his beeper and set it on the floor below his head. He drew into his memory the only Lamaze class he had attended, the nurse’s low voice washing over the temples of the pregnant women: Imagine a long, cool white beach. Nicholas could see himself stretched out on the sand, under a feverish sun. He fell asleep to the music of an invented ocean, beating like a heart.

I woke up in a pool of my own milk. It had been thirty minutes since I put Max down, and in the other room he was already talking, those high little squeaks he made when he woke up happy. I heard the rattle and spin of the striped wheel on his Busy Box, the toy he didn’t recognize yet but kicked from time to time with his feet. Max’s gurgles began to get louder, insistent. “I’m coming,” I yelled through the adjoining wall. “Give me a minute.”

I stripped off Nicholas’s polo shirt-my own shirts were too tight across my chest-and changed my bra. I wedged soft flannel handkerchiefs into the cups, a trick of the trade I’d discovered after those disposable nursing pads kept bunching up or sticking to my skin. I did not bother putting on a new shirt. Max fed so often that sometimes I would walk around the house topless for hours at a time, my breasts becoming heavier and heavier as they replenished what Max had taken.

Max’s little bud mouth was already working on the air when I got to his crib. I lifted him out and unhooked the front of the bra, unsure whether it was the left or right side he’d fed on last, because the whole day just seemed to run together. As soon as I settled into the rocking chair, Max began drinking-long, strong draws of milk that sent vibrations from my breasts to my stomach to my groin. I counted off ten minutes on my watch and then switched him to the other side.

I was in a rush this morning because of my adventure. It was the first time I was going out with Max, just the two of us. Well, I had done it once before, but it had taken me an hour to get his diaper bag together and figure out how to strap his car soffto mye oeat into place, and by the time we got to the end of the block he was screaming so hard to be fed that I decided to just turn around and send Nicholas to the bank when he got home. So for six weeks I had been a prisoner in my own house, a slave to a twenty-one-inch tyrant who could not live without me.

For six weeks I had slept the hours Max dictated, kept him changed and dry as he demanded, let him drink from me. I gave Max so much of my time that I found myself praying for him to take a nap so that I would have those ten or fifteen minutes to myself, and then I’d just sit on the couch and take deep breaths and try to remember what I used to do to fill my days. I wondered how it could happen so quickly: once Max had been inside me, existing because of me, surviving from my bloodstream and my body; and now, by quick reversal, I had simply become part of him.

I put Max on his back in the playpen and watched him suck on the corner of a black-and-white geometric-print card. Yesterday a woman from La Leche had come to the house, sent by the hospital for a follow-up visit. I had let her in reluctantly, kicking toys and cloth burping diapers and old magazines under the furniture as I led the way. I wondered if she’d say something about the dust piled on the fireplace mantel, the overflowing trash bins, or the fact that we hadn’t fitted our outlets with safety plugs yet.

She didn’t comment on the house at all. She walked straight to Max’s playpen. “He’s beautiful,” she said, cooing at Max, but I wondered if she said that about all the babies she saw. I myself had once believed all babies were cute, but I knew that wasn’t true. In the hospital nursery, Max was the best-looking baby by far. For one thing, he looked like a little boy; there was no question. He had ebony hair, tufted and fine, and eyes that were cool and demanding. He was so much like Nicholas that sometimes I found myself staring at him, amazed.