We began to talk then, our voices blocking out the moans and echoes coming from the front seat. I told him I was only fourteen. That we went to parochial school and that I had been the May Queen just hours before. "›‹±urs befor“Come on, baby,” Calvin said, and I heard the tug of a zipper.
“How did you ever get together with someone like Priscilla?” Jake asked, and I told him I didn’t know. Calvin and Priscilla shifted, blocking my view of the screen. Jake inched closer to the window. “Move over here,” he said, and he offered the shelter of his arm. He kept his eyes on me as I hung back, like prey at the brink of a neatly laid trap. “It’s okay,” he said.
I rested my head against the soft pillow of his shoulder and breathed in the heavy smell of gasoline, oil, and shampoo. Priscilla and Calvin were loud; their sweating arms and legs made fart noises on the vinyl. “Jesus,” Jake said finally, crawling across me to lean into the front seat. I adjusted myself around him while he pulled the driver’s-side door handle. At the moment the door sprang free, I saw them in the flash of the moon. White spliced with black, Priscilla and Calvin were knotted at the waist. Calvin balanced himself above her on his arms, his shoulders straining. Priscilla’s breasts pointed at the night, pink and splotchy where they’d been roughened by stubble. She was looking directly at me, but she did not seem to see.
Jake pulled me out of the car and put his arm around my waist. He steered me to the front of the drive-in, before the lines of cars. We sat down on the damp grass, and I started to cry. “I’m sorry,” Jake said, although it hadn’t been his fault. “I wish you hadn’t seen that.”
“It’s okay,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
“You shouldn’t be hanging around with a girl like Priscilla,” he said. He wiped at my cheeks with his thumb. His nails were creased with tiny black lines where motor oil had seeped in.
“You don’t know anything about me,” I said, pulling back.
Jake held my wrists. “But I’d like to,” he said. He kissed my cheeks first, then my eyelids, then my temples. By the time he reached my mouth I was shaking. His lips were soft as a flower and just rubbed back and forth, quiet and slow. After all Priscilla and I had practiced, after all we had done, I had never considered this. This wasn’t even a kiss, but it made my chest and my thighs burn. I realized I had much to learn. As Jake’s lips grazed mine, I said what had been going through my mind: “No pressure?”
It was a question, and it was directed at him, but Jake didn’t take it the way I intended. He lifted his head and pulled me to his side, keeping me warm but not kissing me, not coming back to me. Over our heads, the actors were moving like dinosaurs, hollow and silent and thirty feet tall. “No pressure,” Jake said lightly, leaving me bothered and pounding, ashamed, wanting more.
chapter 9
Nicholas was going to harvest the heart. It had belonged to a thirty-two-year-old woman from Cos Cob, Connecticut, who had died hours before in a twenty-car pileup on Route 95. By tonight it would belong to Paul Cruz Alamonto, Fogerty’s patient, an eighteen-year-old kid who’d had the misfortune to be born with a bad heart. Nicholas looked afld myed out the window of the helicopter and pictured Paul Alamonto’s face: hooded gray eyes and thick jet hair, pulse twitching at the side of his neck. Here was a kid who had never run a mile, played quarterback, ridden a seven-alarm roller coaster. Here was a kid who-thanks to Nicholas and Fogerty and a jackknifed tractor-trailer on Route 95-was going to be given a renewed lease on life.
It would be Nicholas’s second heart transplant, although he was still just assisting Fogerty. The operation was complicated, and Fogerty was letting him do more than he let anyone else do, even if he thought Nicholas was still too green to be chief surgeon during the transplant. But Nicholas had been turning heads at Mass General for years now, moving swiftly under Fogerty’s tutelage from peer to near equal. He was the only cardiothoracic resident who acted as senior surgeon during routine procedures. Fogerty didn’t even stand around during his bypass operations anymore.
Other resident fellows passed Nicholas in the scrubbed white halls of the hospital and turned the other way, unwilling to be reminded of what they hadn’t yet achieved. Nicholas did not have many friends his age. He socialized with the directors of other departments at Mass General, men twenty years his senior, whose wives ran the Junior League. At thirty-six, he was for all practical purposes the associate director of cardiothoracic surgery at one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country. To have no friends, Nicholas reasoned, was a small sacrifice.
As the helicopter hovered over the tarmac on the roof of Saint Cecilia’s, Nicholas reached for the Playmate cooler. “Let’s go,” he said brusquely, turning to the two residents he’d brought with him. He stepped from the helicopter, checking his watch out of nervous habit. Shrugging into his leather bomber jacket, he shielded his face from the rain and ran into the hospital, where a nurse was waiting. “Hi,” he said, smiling. “I hear you have a heart for me.”
It took Nicholas and the assisting residents less than an hour to retrieve the organ. Nicholas set the Playmate between his ankles when the helicopter lifted into the muddy sky. He laid his head against the damp seat, listening to the residents sitting behind him. They were good surgeons, but their rotation in cardiothoracic wasn’t their favorite. If Nicholas recalled correctly, one of the doctors was leaning toward orthopedic surgery, the other toward general surgery. “Your call,” one said, shuffling a deck of playing cards.
“I don’t give a shit,” the other resident said, “just so long as we don’t play hearts.”
Nicholas clenched his fists instinctively. He turned his head to see out the window but found that the helicopter was wrapped in a thick gray cloud. “Goddamn,” he said, for no reason at all. He closed his eyes, hoping he’d dream of Paige.
He was seven, and his parents were thinking of divorce. That was the way they had put it when they sat Nicholas down in the library. Nothing to be alarmed about, they had said. But Nicholas knew of at least one kid in his school whose parents were divorced. His name was Eric, and he lived with his mother, and at Christmas, when the class had made papier-mâché giraffe ornaments, Eric had had to make two, for two different trees. Nicholas remembered that wchoÁbered thaell, especially the way Eric stayed late at the arts and crafts table when everyone else had gone to the gym to play kickball. Nicholas had been the last one leaving the room, but when he saw Eric’s eyes turned up to the door, he got permission to stay. Eric and Nicholas had painted both giraffes the same shade of blue and had talked about everything but Christmas.
“Then where,” Nicholas said, “will Daddy be for Christmas?”
The Prescotts looked at each other. It was July. Finally, Nicholas’s father spoke. “It’s just something we’re considering,” he said. “And no one said that I will be the one to leave. In fact,” Robert Prescott said, “no one may be leaving at all.”
Nicholas’s mother made a strange sound through her clamped lips and left the room. His father crouched down in front of him. “If we’re going to catch the opening pitch,” he said, “we’d better get going.”
Nicholas’s father had season tickets to the Red Sox-three seats -but the boy was rarely invited along. Usually his father took colleagues, from time to time even a long-standing patient. For years Nicholas had watched the games on Channel 38, waiting for the camera to span the crowd behind third base, hoping to catch a glimpse of his father. But so far that had never happened.