Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

“No, no, no,” my mother interrupted. “Tell me what Nicholas is like. ”

I closed my eyes, but nothing came clearly to mind. I seemed to be seeing my life with him through shadows, and even after eight years I could barely hear the patterns of his voice or feel the touch of his hands on me. I tried to picture those hands, their long, surgeon’s fingers, but couldn’t even imagine them holding the base of a stethoscope. I felt a hollow pit in the base of my chest, where I knew these memories should be, but it was as if I had married someone a long time ago and hadn’t kept contact since. “I really don’t know what Nicholas is like,” I said. I could feel my mother’s eyes on me, so I tried to explain. “He’s just a different man these days; he works extremely hard, and that’s important, you know, but because of that I don’t get to see him all that much. A lot of the time when I do see him I’m not at my best-I’m at a fund-raising dinner table and he’s sitting beside a Radcliffe girl making comparisons, or I’ve been up half the night with Max and I look like the wild woman of Borneo.”

“And that’s why you left,” my mother finished for me.

I sat up abruptly. “That’s not why I left,” I said. “I left because of you.”

It was a what came first, the chicken or the egg dilemma. I had left because I needed time to catch my breath and get my bearings and start with a clean slate. But obviously, this tendency had been bred into me. Hadn’t I known all along I would grow up to be just like my mother? Hadn’t I worried about this very thing happening when I was pregnant with Max-and with my other baby? I still believed these events were all linked together. I could honestly say that my mother was the reason I’d run away, but I wasn’t sure if she had been the cause or the consequence of my actions.

My mother crawled into her sleeping bag. “Even if that was true,” she said, “you should have waited until Max was older.”

I rolled away from her. The scent of the pine trees on the ridge behind us was so overwhelming I was suddenly dizzy. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black,” I murmured.

From behind me came my mother’s voice. “When you were born, they were just starting to let men in the delivery room, but your father didn’t want any part of it. He actually wanted me to give birth at home, like his mother had, but I vetoed that. So he took me to the hospital, and I begged him not to leave me. Told him I couldn’t go through with it. I was all alone for twelve hours, until you decided to make your appearance. It was another hour until they let him in to see you and me together-it took that long for the nurses to comb my hair and give me my makeup so I’d look like I hadn’t been doing anything at all for the past day.” My mother was so close I could feel her breath against my ear. “When your father came in and saw you, he stroked your cheek and said, ‘Now, May, now that you’ve got her, where’s the sacrifice?’ And do you know what I told him? I looked at him and I said, ‘Me.’ ”

My heart constricted as I remembered staring at Max and wondering how he could possibly have come from inside me and what I could do to make him go back. “You resented me,” I said.

“I was terrified of you,” my mother said. “I didn’t know what I’d do if you didn’t like me.”

I remembered that the year I was enrolled in Bible preschool my mother had bought me a special coat for Easter, as pink as the inside lip of a lily. I had bothered her and begged and pleaded to wear it to school after Easter. “Just once,” I had cried, and finally she let me. But it rained on the way home from school, and I was afraid she’d be angry if the coat got wet, so I took it off and stuffed it into a little ball. The neighbor’s daughter, who walked me home every day because she was nine years old and responsible, helped me jam the coat inside my Snoopy book bag. “You little fool,” my mother had said when my friend left me at the door, “you’re going to catch pneumonia.” I had run up to my room and thrown myself on the bed, angry that I had disappointed her yet again.

But then again, this was the woman who let me take a bus across downtown Chicago when I was five because she thought I was trustworthy. She had tinted clear gelatin with blue food coloring because that was my favorite color. She taught me how to dance the Stroll and how to hang from the monkey bars with my hem tucked a certain way so thoulñ€†at my skirt didn’t fall up over my head. She had given me my first crayons and coloring book, and had held me when I messed up, assuring me that the lines were for people with no imagination. She had turned herself into someone who was larger than life; someone whose gestures I practiced at night in the bathroom; someone I wanted to be when I grew up.

The night closed around us like a choked throat, suffocating the twitched sounds of the squirrels and the whistling grass. “You weren’t all that bad as a mother,” I said.

“Maybe,” my mother whispered. “Maybe not.”

For the first time in years, Nicholas’s gloved hands shook as he made the incision in the patient’s chest. A neat red line of blood spilled into the hollow left by the scalpel, and Nicholas swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. Anything but this, he thought to himself: climbing Everest, memorizing a dictionary, fighting a war from the front line. Anything had to be easier than doing a quadruple bypass on Alistair Fogerty himself.

He did not have to look under the sterile drapes to know the face connected with the hideously swabbed orange body. Every muscle and line had been etched into his mind; after all, he’d spent eight years absorbing Fogerty’s insults and rallying to meet his boundless expectations. And now the man’s life was in his hands.

Nicholas picked up the saw and switched it to life. It vibrated in the circle of his hands as he touched it to the sternum, carving through the bone. He spread the ribs and he checked the solution in which the leg veins, already harvested, were floating. He imagined Alistair Fogerty standing in the background of the operating suite, his presence hovering at Nicholas’s neck like the stale breath of a dragon. Nicholas looked up at his assisting resident. “I think we’re all set,” he said, watching his words puff out his blue paper mask as if they had meaning or substance.

Robert Prescott was on his hands and knees on the Aubusson rug, rubbing Perrier into a round yellow spot that was part vomit and part sweet potatoes. Now that Max could sit up by himself-at least for a few minutes-he was more likely to spit up whatever he’d last eaten or drunk.

Robert had tried using his baby-sitting time to go over patient files for the next morning, but Max had a habit of pulling them off the couch and wrinkling the papers into his palms. He had gummed one manila binder so thoroughly it fell apart in Robert’s hands.

“Ah,” he said, sitting back on his heels to survey his work. “I don’t think it looks any different from the rosettes.” He frowned at his grandson. “You haven’t done any more of that, have you?”

Max squealed to be picked up-that was his latest thing, that and a razz sound that sprayed everything within three feet. Robert thought he had lifted his arms too, but that might have been wishful thinking. According to Dr. Spock, whom he’d been rereadingon. t‡ in between patients, that didn’t come until the sixth month.

“Let’s see,” he said, holding Max like a football under his arm. He looked around the little parlor, redecorated as a substitute nursery/ playroom, and found what he had been looking for, an old stethoscope. Max liked to suck on the rubber tubes and to hold the cold metal base against his gums, swollen from teething. Robert stood up and passed the toy to Max, but Max dropped it and puckered his lips, getting ready to cry. “Drastic measures,” he said, wheeling Max in a circle over his head. He switched on a Sesame Street cassette he’d bought at the bookstore and started to do a jaunty tango over the clutter of toys on the floor. Max laughed-a wonderful sound, really, Robert thought-every time they whipped around at the corner.