Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

LaMyrna Ratchet, the nurse on duty in orthopedics, twisted a strawberry-blond curl around her finger. “I don’t know, Dr. Prescott,” she said. “I could get in a shitload of trouble for this.”

Nicholas gave her his most winning smile. He was watching the heavy clock above her head, which said that even if he left right now he’d be fifteen minutes late to surgery. “I’m trusting you with my son, LaMyrna,” he said. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a patient waiting. I’ll bet you can figure something out.”

LaMyrna chewed on a fingernail and finally reached out for Max, who grabbed at her Coke-bottle glasses and her stringy hair. “He doesn’t cry, does he?” she called after Nicholas, who was running down the hall.

“Oh, no,” Nicholas yelled over his shoulder. “Not a bit.”

Nicholas had arrived at the hospital at five in the morning, a half hour earlier than usual. He’d actually had the pleasure of waking up his son, who had awakened him three times during the night to drink and to be changed. Max, still half asleep, had fussed the whole time Nicholas tried to jam him into a fuzzy yellow playsuit. “Yeah, well,” he’d said, “how do you like it?”

Nicholas had expected to put Max in whatever sort of staff day care the hospital had, but there was no damn program on site. If Nicholas wanted to use Mass General’s child care facility, he’d have to drive to fucking Charlestown, and-as if that weren’t inconvenient enough-it didn’t open until 6:30 A.M., when Nicholas would already be scrubbing for surgery. He’d asked the OR nurses to watch Max, but they had looked at him as though he had two heads. They couldn’t, they said, not when at least six times a day there was no one behind the desk because of short staffing. They suggested the general patient floors, but the only nurses on the early shift were bleary from being up all night, and Nicholas didn’t quite trust them. So he’d headed up to the orthopedics floor, and he’d found LaMyrna, a homely girl with a good heart whom he remembered from his internship.

“Dr. Prescott,” he heard, and he whipped around. He’d missed the door to the operating suite, that’s how exhausted he was. The nurse held the swinging door for him. He turned on the steaming water in the industrial sinks, scouring under his fingernails until the pads of his fingers were pink and raw. When he pushed his way backward into the operating suite, he saw that everyone else had been waiting.

Fogerty leaned closer to the unconscious patient. “Mr. Brennan,” he said, “it seems Dr. Prescott has decided to grace us with his presence after all.” He turned toward Nicholas and then toward the door. “What,” he said, “no stroller? No Porta-Crib?”

Nicholas pushed him out of the way. “Just when did you develop a sense of humor, Alistair?” he said. He turned to the head OR nurse. “Prep him.”

He was tired and sweating and badly needed a shower, but the only thing in his mind when he finished surgery was Max. He knew he needed to round his patients; he hadn’t a clue about his schedule for tomorrow. He rode up five flights in the cool green elevator. Maybe he’d go home today, and Paige would be there, and this would have been a lousy nightmare.

LaMyrna Ratchet was nowhere to be found. Nicholas stuck his head into the back room at the nurses’ station, but no one seemed to know whether she was still on duty. Nicholas began to peer into different patient rooms. He poked through a bouquet of balloons because he thought he saw a short white skirt, but LaMyrna was not in the room. The patient, a woman of about fifty, clung to Nicholas’s arm. “No more blood,” she cried. “Don’t let them take no more blood.”

LaMyrna was not in any of the patient rooms. Nicholas even checked the women’s staff bathroom, startling a couple of nurses and a female resident, but LaMyrna was not at the sink. He ducked down, peering at the shoes in the stalls. He called her name.

Finally, he went back to the nurses’ station in the center of the orthopedic floor. “Look,” he said, “this nurse has disappeared, and she’s taken my baby.”

An unfamiliar nurse handed him a pink telephone message note that had been folded like a Chinese football. “Why didn’t you say so?” the woman said.

Dr. Prescott, the note read, I had to leave because my shift was over and they told me you were still in OR so I left Mike with the people in the volunteer lounge. LaMyrna.

Mike?

Nicholas couldn’t even remember where the volunteer lounge was. They had built it sometime during his residency; it was a general meeting area with lockers and a sign-in sheet for the candy stripers and older hospital volunteers. He asked for directions at the hospital’s front desk. “I can take you,” a girl said. “I’m on my way there.”

She was no older than sixteen and wore a jeans jacket with an airbrushed rendering of Nirvana on the back. She carried a He €†small Eddie Bauer refrigerated cold-pack, and her peppermint-stick uniform protruded from a plain white tote bag. She saw Nicholas staring at the bag. “I wouldn’t be caught dead leaving school in it,” she said, and she cracked a gum bubble, loud.

There was no one in the volunteer lounge. Nicholas ran his fingers over the page of signed-in volunteers, but found nothing to indicate that one of them was watching a baby. Then, propped in the corner, he saw his diaper bag.

Nicholas sagged against the wall, flooded with relief. “How do I find out what candy stripers are on what rotations?” The girl looked at him blankly. “Where do you all work?”

The girl shrugged. “Check the front of the book,” she said, flipping to the sign-in page. He saw a list of volunteers, organized by the day they worked and their staff assignments. There were at least thirty volunteers in the hospital at that moment. Nicholas pinched the bridge of his nose. He could not do this. He just could not do this.

He left the volunteer lounge with the diaper bag on his shoulder and for the first time noticed a secretary sitting at the makeshift desk outside. “Dr. Prescott,” she said, smiling up at him.

He did not question how she knew his name; many people at the hospital had heard about the wunderkind of cardiac surgery. “Have you seen a baby?” he said.

The woman pointed down the hall. “Dawn had him, last I saw. She took him to the cafeteria. They didn’t need her so badly in ambulatory care today.”

Nicholas heard Max’s laughter before he saw him. Beyond the thick line of residents and nurses and sullen hospital visitors waiting to be served, he spotted his son’s spiky black hair through hazy red cubes of jello. When he reached the table where a candy striper was bouncing Max on her knee, he dropped the diaper bag. The girl was feeding his three-month-old son an ice cream bar.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he yelled, grabbing his son away. Max reached his hand toward the ice cream, but then realized his father had returned and burrowed his sticky face into the neck of Nicholas’s scrubs.

“You must be Dr. Prescott,” the girl said, unruffled. “I’m Dawn. I’ve been with Max since noon.” She opened the diaper bag and held up the one bottle Nicholas had brought to the hospital, now bone dry. “He finished this at ten this morning, you know,” she chided. “I had to take him to the milk bank.”

Nicholas had a fleeting image of Holsteins, wearing pearls and cat’s-eye glasses, acting as tellers and counting out cash. “The milk bank,” he repeated, and then he remembered. In the preemie pediatric ward, new mothers pumped their own milk for strangers’ babies born too early.