Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

He slips Max into the high chair beside Robert and makes a point of not looking at me. Astrid walks in with a tray of toast and fruit and bagels. “Nicholas!” she says, as if last night never happened. “You’ll stay for breakfast?”

Nicholas glares at me. “You already have company,” he says.

I stand up and watch Max bang the edge of Robert’s plate with a sterling-silver spoon. Max has Nicholas’s aristocratic face but most definitely my eyes. You can see it in his restlessness. He’s always looking at the one place he cannot see. You can tell he will be a fighter.

Max sees me and smiles, and it makes his whole body glow. “I was just going,” I say. With a quick look at Robert, I walk out the door, leaving my overnight bag behind.

The volunteer lounge at Mass General is little more than a closet, tucked behind the ambulatory care waiting rooms. While I am waiting for Harriet Miles, the secretary, to find me an application form, I stare over her shoulder at the hall and wait to catch a glimpse of Nicholas.

I do not want to do this, but I see no other choice. If I’m going to make Nicholas change his mind about a divorce, I have to show him what he’ll be missing. I can’t do that when the only way I see him is by chance or in passing at his parents’, so I’ll have to spend all my time where he does-at the hospital. Unfortunately, I’m not qualified for most of the positions that would throw me together with him, so I try to convince myself that I’ve wanted to volunteer at the hospital all along but haven’t had the time. Still, I know this isn’t true. I hate the sight of blood; I don’t like that antiseptic cloud of illness that you always smell in a hospital’s halls. I wouldn’t be here if I could think of any other way to cross Nicholas’s path several times a day.

Harriet Miles is about four feet ten inches tall and almost as wide. She has to step on a little stool, fashioned in the shape of a strawberry, to reach the top drawer of the filing cabinet. “We don’t have as many adult volunteers as we’d like,” she says. “Most of the kids rotate through for a year or so just to beef up their college applications.” She closes her eyes and stuffs her hand into a stack of papers and comes up with the right one. “Ah,” she says, “success.”

She settles back on her chair, which I could swear has a booster seat on it, but I am too embarrassed to lean over and check. “Now, Paige, have you had any medical training or been a volunteer at another hospital?”

“No,” I say, hoping this won’t keep them from accepting me.

“That’s not a problem,” Harriet says smoothly. “You’ll attend one of our orientation sessions, and you can start working right after that-”

“No,” I stammer. “I have to start today.” When Harriet stares at me, unnerved, I settle into the chair and clench my hands at my sides. Careful, I think. Say what she wants to hear. “I mean, I really want to start today. I’ll do anything. It doesn’t have to involve medical stuff.”

Harriet licks the tip of her pencil and begins to fill in my application form. She doesn’t blink when I give my last name, but then again, I suppose there are a lot of Prescotts in Boston. I give Robert and Astrid’s address instead of my own, and just for kicks I fake my birth date, making myself three years older. I tell her I can work six days a week, and she looks at me as if I am a saint.

“I can put you in admitting,” she says, frowning at a schedule on the wall. “You won’t be able to do paperwork, but you can shuttle the patients up to their rooms in wheelchairs.” She taps the pencil on the blotter. “Or you can work the book cart,” she suggests, “on the patient floors.”

Neither of which, I realize, will place me where I need to go. “I have a request,” I say. “I’d like to be near Dr. Prescott, the cardiac surgeon.”

Harriet laughs and pats my hand. “Yes, he’s a favorite, isn’t he? Those eyes! I think he’s the reason for half the graffiti in the candy stripers’ bathroom. Everyone wants to be near Dr. Prescott.”

“You don’t understand,” I say. “He’s my husband.”

Harriet scans the application sheet and points to my last name. “So he is,” she says.

I lick my lips and lean forward. I offer a quick, silent prayer that in this war between Nicholas and myself, no one else will be hurt. Then I smile and lie as I never have before. “You know, his hours are pretty awful. We never get a chance to see each other.” I wink at Harriet conspiratorially. “I thought I’d do this as a kind of anniversary present. Try to be near him and all. I figured if I could get assigned close to him every day, kind of be his personal volunteer, he’d be happier, and then he’d be a better surgeon, and then everyone would win.”

“What a romantic idea.” Harriet sighs. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the other doctors’ wives came in as volunteers?”

I give her a steady, sober look. I have never been on a conversational basis with those women, but if that is my penance I will swear to carry it out on penalty of death. Today I’d promise Harriet Miles the moon. “I’ll do everything I can,” I say.

Even as she smiles at me, Harriet Miles’s eyes are melting. “I wish I was crazy in love,” she says, and she picks up the telephone to dial an inside number. “Let’s see what we can do.”

Astrid finds me sitting in the backyard under a peach tree, drawing. “What is it?” she asks, and I tell her I don’t know. Right now it is just a collection of lines and curves; it will eventually form into something I recognize. I’m drawing because it is therapeutic. Nicholas almost didn’t notice me today-even after I had helped wheel the stretcher with his recovering patient from surgical ICU to a semiprivate room, followed him with the book cart as he made his rounds, and stood behind him in the lunch line at the cafeteria. When he did finally recognize me as I refilled a water pitcher in the room of the patient he’d be operating on tomorrow, it was only because he had knocked against me and spilled water all over the front of my pale-pink volunteer pinafore. “I’m so sorry,” he said, glancing at the stains on my lap and my chest. Then he looked at my face. Terrified, I didn’t say a word. And although I expected Nicholas to storm out of the room and call for the chief of staff, he only raised his eyebrows and laughed.

“Sometimes I just draw,” I say to Astrid, hoping that’s enough of an explanation.

“Sometimes I just shoot,” she says. I look up, startled. “A camera,” she adds. She leans against the trunk of a tree and turns her face to the sun. I take in the firm set of her chin, the silver sweep of hair, the courage that hovers about her like expensive perfume. I wonder if there is anything in the world that Astrid Prescott would not be able to do if she set her mind to it.

“It would have been nice to have an artist in the family earlier,” she says. “I always felt honor bound to pass along my talents.” She laughs. “The photographic ones, anyway.” She opens her eyes and smiles at me. “Nicholas was a nightmare with a camera. He never got the hang of f-stops, and he routinely overexposed his prints. He had the skill for photography, but he never had the patience.”

“My mother was an artist,” I blurt out, and then I freeze, my hand paused inches above my sketch pad. My first volunteered personal admission. Astrid moves closer to me, knowing that this unexpected chink in my armor is the first step toward getting inside. “She was a good artist,” I say as carelessly as I can manage, thinking of the mural of horses in Chicago and then in Carolina. “But she fancied herself a writer instead.”