Harvesting the Heart (13 page)

It
was the first time that I realized my mother had a second life, one
that had nothing at all to do with my father. What I had always
assumed was spirituality was really just the side effect of the
energy that hovered around her like a magnetic field. I discovered
that when my mother wasn't bending to someone else's whims, she could
be a completely different person.

We
walked for blocks and blocks, coming closer to the lake, I knew, by
the way the wind hung in the air. It became unseasonably warm as we
walked, reaching into the high seventies, maybe even eighty. She let
go of my hand as we came to the white walls of the Lincoln Park Zoo,
which prided itself on its natural habitats. Instead of keeping the
animals locked in, they cleverly kept the people out. There were few
fences or concrete barriers. What kept the giraffes penned was a
wide-holed grate that their legs would have slipped through; what
kept the zebras in were gulleys too wide to leap. My mother smiled at
me. "You'll love it here," she said, making me wonder if
she came often, and if so, whom she brought instead of me.

We
were drawn to the polar bear exhibit simply because of the water. The
free-form rocks and ledges were painted the cool blue of the Arctic,
and the bears stretched in the sun, too warm in their winter fur.
They slapped their paws at the water, which, my mother said, was just
thirty-three degrees. There were two females and a cub. I wondered
what the relationship was.

My
mother waited until the cub couldn't take the heat anymore, and then
she pulled me down a few shadowed steps to the underwater viewing
lounge, where you could see into the underwater tank through a window
of thick plexiglass. The cub swam right toward us, sticking its nose
against the plastic. "Look, Paige!" my mother said. "It's
kissing you!" She held me up to the window so that I could get a
closer look at the sad brown eyes and the slippery whiskers. "Don't
you wish you could be in there?" my mother said, putting me down
and dabbing at my forehead with the hem of her skirt. When I did not
answer her, she began to walk back up into the heat, still talking
quietly to herself. I followed her; what else could I do? "There
are many places," I heard her whisper, "I'd like to be."

Then
she got an inspiration. She found the nearest totem pole directional
sign and dragged me toward the elephants. African and Indian, they
were two different breeds but similar enough to live in the same zoo
space. They had wide bald foreheads and paper-thin ears, and their
skin was folded and soft and spread with wrinkles, like the saggy,
mapped neck of the old black woman who came to clean Saint
Christopher's. The elephants shook their heads and swatted at gnats
with their trunks. They followed each other from one end of their
habitat to the other, stopping at trees and examining them as if
they'd never seen them before. I looked at them and wondered what it
would be like to have one eye on each side of my body. I didn't know
if I'd like not being able to see things head-on.

A
moat separated us from the elephants. My mother sat down on the hot
concrete and pulled off her high heels. She was not wearing
stockings. She hiked up her dress and waded into the knee-high water.
"It's lovely," she said, sighing. "But don't you come
in, Paige. Really, I shouldn't be doing this. Really, I could get in
trouble." She splashed me with the water, little bits of grass
and dead flies sticking to the white lace collar of my dress. She
sashayed and stomped and once almost lost her footing on the smooth
bottom. She sang tunes from Broadway shows, but she made up her own
lyrics, silly things about firm pachyderms and the wonder of Dumbo.
When the zoo guard came up slowly, unsure of how to confront a grown
woman in the elephant moat, my mother laughed and waved him away. She
stepped out of the water with the grace of an angel and sat down on
the concrete again. She pulled on her pumps, and when she stood,
there was a dark oval on the ground where her damp bottom had been.
She told me with the serious demeanor she'd used to tell me the
Golden Rule that sometimes one had to take chances.

Several
times that day I found myself looking at my mother with a strange
tangle of feelings. I had no doubt that when my father called, she
would tell him we'd been at Saint Christopher's and that it had been
just as it always was. I loved being part of a conspiracy. At one
point I even wondered if the girlfriend I'd been seeing night after
night in my dreams was really just my own mother. I thought of how
convenient and wonderful that might be.

We
sat on a low bench beside a lady who was selling a cloud of banana
balloons. My mother had been reading my thoughts. "Today,"
she said, "today let's say I'm not your mother. Today I'll just
be May. Just your friend May." And of course I didn't argue,
because this was what I had been
hoping
anyway,
and besides, she wasn't
acting
like
my mother, at least not the one I knew. We told the man cleaning out
the ape cage our white lie, and although he did not look up from his
work, one large, ruddy gorilla came forward and stared at us, a very
human exhaustion in her eyes, which seemed to say,
Yes,
I believe you.

The
last place we visited in the Lincoln Park Zoo was the penguin and
seabird house. It was dark and smelled of herring and was fully
enclosed. It sat partially under the ground to maintain its cool
temperature. The viewing area was a twisty hallway with windows
exposing penguins behind thick glass. They were striking in
their formal wear, and they tap-danced like society men on floes of
white ice. "Your father," May said, "looked no
different than that at our wedding." She leaned in close to the
glass. "In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to pick one groom from the
next. They're all the same, you know." And I said I did, even
though I had no idea what she was talking about.

I
left her staring at a penguin that had slipped into the water
belly-up to do rolling, slow-motion calisthenics. I disappeared
around a bend, pulled toward the other half of the house, where the
puffins were. I didn't know what a puffin was, but I liked the way
the word sounded: soft and squashed and a little bit bruised, the way
your lips looked after you'd eaten wild blackberries. It was a long,
narrow walkway, and my eyes had not adjusted to the lack of
light. I took very tiny steps, because I did not know where I was
going, and I held my hands in front of me like a blind man. I walked
for what felt like hours, but I could not find those puffins, or the
sliver of silver daylight near the door, or even the places where I
had already been. My heart swelled up into my throat. I knew the way
you know these things that I was going to scream or to cry or to sink
to my knees and become invisible forever. For some reason I was not
surprised when, in total darkness, my fingers found the comforting
shape of May, who

turned
back into my mother, and she wrapped her arms around me. I never
understood how she wound up in front of me, since I'd left her with
the penguins and I hadn't seen her pass. My mother's hair fell like a
dark curtain over my eyes and tickled my nose. Her breath echoed
against my cheek. Black shadows wrapped around us like an artificial
night, but my mother's voice seemed solid, like something I could
grab for support. "I thought I'd never find you," my mother
said, words I held on to and breathed like a litany for the rest of
my life.

^chapter
6

_Nicholas

had
been assaulted, most likely by her husband. Nicholas let Gary
continue, supervising his actions, his touches. As Gary sewed up the
lacerations on her face, the patient began to scream. "Fuck
you," she yelled. "Don't you touch my face." Gary's
hands began to shake, and finally Nicholas swore under his breath and
told Gary to get the hell out. He finished the job himself, as the
woman cursed him out from beneath the sterile drapes. "Goddamned
fucking pig asshole," she shouted. "Get the fuck away from
me."

Nicholas
found Gary sitting on a stained cube sofa in one of Mass General's
emergency room lounges. He'd drawn his knees up and was doubled over
like a fetus. When he saw Nicholas coming toward him, he jumped to
his feet, and Nicholas sighed. Gary was terrified of Nicholas; of
doing anything wrong; of, really, being the surgeon he hoped to be.
"I'm sorry," he murmured. "I shouldn't have let her
get to me."

"No,"
Nicholas said evenly, "you shouldn't have." He thought of
telling Gary everything that had gone wrong for himself today. See,
he'd say, all
that,
and
I'm still standing up, doing my job. Sometimes you just have to keep
pushing, he'd say. But in the end he did not say anything to his
intern. Gary would figure it out eventually, and Nicholas didn't
really want to recount his own failures to a subordinate. He
turned away from Gary, a dismissal, feeling every bit the arrogant
son of a bitch that he was reputed to be.

For
years now, Nicholas had not gauged time by its usual measures.
Months and days meant little; hours were things you logged onto a
patient's fact sheet. He saw his life passing in blocks, in places
where he spent his days and in medical specialties where he filled
his mind with details. At first, at Harvard, he'd counted off the
semesters by their courses: histology, neurophysiology, anatomy,
pathology. His last two years of rotations had run together,
experiences blending at the edges. Sometimes he'd be remembering an
orthopedic patient at the Brigham, but he'd picture the decor of the
orthopedic floor at Massachusetts General. He'd started his rotations
with internal medicine; then came a month of psychiatry, eight
weeks of general surgery, a month of radiology, twelve weeks of
obstetrics/gynecology and pediatrics, and so on. He had forgotten
about seasons for a while, shuttling from discipline to discipline
and hospital to hospital like a foster child.

He'd
decided on cardiac surgery—a long haul. The match had placed
him at his first-choice hospital, Mass General. It was a large place,
impersonal and disorganized and unfriendly. In cardiothoracic
surgery, the attendings were a brilliant group of men and women. They
were opinionated and impulsive; they wore pristine white lab coats
over their cool, efficient demeanors. Nicholas loved it. Even during
his postgraduate year one, he'd observe the easy motions of general
surgery, waiting to be rotated back to the cardiac unit, where he'd
marvel at Alistair Fogerty performing open-heart operations. Nicholas
would stand for six hours at a time, listening to the thin ring of
metal instruments on trays and the rustle of his own breath against
his blue mask, watching life being put on hold and then recalled.

"Nicholas."
At the sound of his name, he turned to see Kim Westin, a pretty woman
who'd been in his graduating class and was now in her third year of
residency in internal medicine. "How's it going?" She came
closer and squeezed his arm, propelling him down the hall in the
direction he'd been walking.

"Hey,"
Nicholas said. "You don't have anything to eat, do you?"

Kim
shook her head. "No, and I've got to run up to five, but I
wanted to see you. Serena's back."

Serena
was a patient they'd shared during their final year of rotations
at Harvard. She was thirty-nine and she was black and she had
AIDS—which, four years earlier, had still been rare. She'd come
and gone in the hospital over the years, but Kim, in internal
medicine, had more contact with her than Nicholas. Nicholas did
not ask Kim what Serena's status was. "I'll go by," he
said. "What's the room?"