Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

“Perhaps the past seven years haven’t clarified my position at the hospital for you,” Fogerty said. “I’m the head of cardiothoracic, not day care.”

“Alistair-”

“Nicholas,” Fogerty said, “this is your problem. Good night.” And he hung up the phone.

Nicholas stared at the receiver in his hand in disbelief. He had less than twelve hours to find a baby-sitter. “Shit,” he said, rummaging through the kitchen drawers. He tried to find an address book of Paige’s, but there seemed to be nothing around. Finally, tucked against the microwave, he found a thin black binder. He opened it and riffled through the pages, alphabetically thumb-indexed. He looked for unfamiliar female names, friends of Paige’s he might prevail upon. But there were only three numbers: Dr. Thayer, the obstetrician; Dr. Rourke, the pediatrician; and Nicholas’s beeper number. It was as if Paige didn’t know anyone else.

Max began to cry, and Nicholas realized he hadn’t changed the baby’s diaper since Paige disappeared. He carried him into the nursery, holding him away from his chest as if he might get soiled. Nich olas pulled at the crotch of the playsuit until the snaps all freed themselves, and then he untaped the disposable diaper. He went to reach for another and was holding it in the air, trying to determine if the little Mickey and Donald faces went in the front or the back, when he felt something warm strike him. A thin arc of urine jetted from between Max’s kicking legs and soaked Nicholas’s neck and collar.

“God damn you,” Nicholas said, looking squarely at his son but speaking to Paige. He loosely tacked on the new diaper and left the playsuit to hang free, unwilling to bother with the snaps. “We’re going to feed you,” Nicholas said, “and then you’re going to sleep.”

Nicholas didn’t realize until he reached the kitchen that Max’s primary source of food was hundreds of miles away. He seemed to remember Paige mentioning formula. He put Max into the high chair wedged into a corner of the kitchen and pulled cereals, pasta, and canned fruit from the cabinets in an effort to find the Enfamil.

It was a powdered mix. He knew something should be sterilized, but there wasn’t time for that now. Max was starting to cry, and without even checking him, Nicholas put the water up to boil and found three empty plastic bottles that he assumed were clean. He read the back of the Enfamil bucket. One scoop for every two ounces. Surely in this kitchen he could find a measuring cup.

He looked under the sink and over the refrigerator. Finally, under a collection of spatulas and slotted spoons he found one. He tapped his foot impatiently, willing the teakettle to whistle. When it did he poured eight kedá€r tounces of water into each bottle and added four scoops of powder. He did not know that a baby Max’s age could not finish an eight-ounce bottle in one sitting. All that Nicholas cared about was getting Max fed, getting Max to go to sleep, and then crawling into bed himself.

Tomorrow he’d find a way to keep Max at the hospital with him. If he showed up at the OR with a baby on his shoulder, someone would give him a hand. He couldn’t think about it now. His head was pounding, and he was so dizzy he could barely stand.

He stashed two bottles in the refrigerator and took the third to Max. Except he couldn’t find Max. He’d left him in the high chair, but suddenly he was gone. “Max,” Nicholas called. “Where’d you go, buddy?” He walked out of the kitchen and ran up the stairs, so wiped out he half expected his son to be standing at the bathroom sink, shaving, or in the nursery getting dressed for a date. Then he heard the cries.

It had never occurred to him that Max couldn’t sit up well enough to go into a high chair. What the hell was the thing doing in the kitchen, then? Max had slipped down in the seat until his head was wedged under the plastic tray. Nicholas tugged at the tray, unsure which latch would release it, and finally pulled hard enough to dislodge the whole front section. He tossed it across the room. As soon as he picked up his son, the baby quieted, but Nicholas couldn’t help noticing the red welted pattern pressed into Max’s cheek by the screws and grooves of the high chair.

“I only left him for half a second,” Nicholas muttered, and in the back of his mind he heard Paige’s soft, clear words: That’s all it takes. Nicholas hiked the baby higher on his shoulder, hearing Max’s muffled sigh. He thought about the nosebleed and the way Paige’s voice shook when she told Nicholas about it. Half a second.

He took the baby into the bedroom and fed him the bottle in the dark. Max fell asleep almost immediately. When Nicholas realized that the baby’s lips had stopped moving, he pulled away the bottle and adjusted Max so that he was cradled in his arms. Nicholas knew that if he stood up to bring Max to his crib, he’d wake up. He had a vision of Paige nursing Max in bed and falling asleep. You don’t want him to get used to sleeping here, he’d told her. You don’t want to create bad habits. And she’d stumble into the nursery, holding her breath so the baby wouldn’t wake.

Nicholas unbuttoned his shirt with one hand and settled a pillow under the arm that held Max. He closed his eyes. He was bone tired; he felt worse after taking care of Max than he did after performing open-heart surgery. There were similarities: both required quick thinking, both required intense concentration. But he was good at one, and as for the other, well, he didn’t have a clue.

This was all Paige’s fault. If it was her idea of some stupid little lesson, she wasn’t going to get away with it. Nicholas didn’t care if he never saw Paige again. Not after she’d pulled this stunt.

Out of nowhere, he remembered being eleven years old, his lip split by a bully in a playground fight. He had lain on the ground until the other kids left, but he would not let them see him cry. Later, when he’d told his parents about it, his mother had held her hand against his cheek and abyá€He smiled at him.

He would not let Paige see him cry, or complain, or be in any way inconvenienced. Two could play the same game. And he’d do what he did to that bully-he’d ignored him so completely in the days following the fight that other children began to follow Nicholas’s lead, and in the end the boy had come to Nicholas and apologized, hoping he’d win back his friends.

Of course, that was a kids’ competition. This was his life. What Paige had done was somewhere beyond forgiveness.

Nicholas expected to toss and turn, racked by black thoughts of his wife. But he was asleep before he reached the pillow. He did not remember, the next morning, how quickly sleep had come. He did not remember the dream he had of his first Christmas with Paige, when she’d given him the children’s game Operation! and they’d played for hours. He did not remember the coldest part of the night, when out of pure instinct Nicholas had pulled his son closer and given him his heat.

My mother’s clothes didn’t fit. They were too long in the waist and tight at the chest. They were made for someone taller and thinner. When my father brought up the old trunk filled with my mother’s things, I had held each musty scrap of silk and cotton as if I were touching her own hand. I pulled on a yellow halter top and seersucker walking shorts, and then I peeked into the mirror. Reflected back was the same face I’d always seen. This surprised me. By now my mother and I had grown so similar in my mind, I believed in some ways I had become her.

When I came back down to the kitchen, my father was sitting at the table. “This is all I have, Paige,” he said, holding up the wedding photo I knew so well. It had sat on the night table beside my father’s bed my whole life. In it, my father was looking at my mother, holding her hand tightly. My mother was smiling, but her eyes betrayed her. I had spent years looking at that photo, trying to figure out what my mother’s eyes reminded me of. When I was fifteen, it had come to me. A raccoon trapped by headlights, the minute before the car strikes.