by Sally Mandel
He tried to track down the exact moment of abdication. His memory fastened again on the dining room scene, and he took a deep breath. This time he would think it through instead of fleeing the images as fast as his cerebral circuitry would take him.
It was his fault. That was the crux of the matter. It was Walter’s fault that Sharlie lay there waiting for the ghouls to cut her open and stick some dripping hunk of meat into her chest…
At that moment Diller appeared in the doorway, his expression solemn and weary. Walter sat staring up at the surgeon, and it appeared to him that the doctor spoke directly to him, the brilliant eyes piercing Walter’s face with accusation.
“I think we’d better face some facts here.”
Walter watched Margaret and Brian snap to attention.
“She’s losing ground very quickly, and there’s no donor. I have to tell you I think we’ve got one more day. If that. I’m sorry.” He stood there for a long moment, the shadows in his face lending him the aura of a tragic figure from some ancient drama—the noble god brought down by hubris, still dignified in defeat. Except that the golden hair seemed slightly stringy, as if it could use a washing.
Diller left the room, and suddenly Walter started to choke and shudder. The tears came flooding down his face, spilling onto his clenched hands and splashing in puddles on the floor. He looked at Margaret’s blurry image through the water, and his words came out in twisted, heaving bursts of sound.
“I’m sorry … she … Sharlie’s … all my fault …”
Then Margaret was beside him, holding his hands. He put his arms around her, and they clung together, rocking back and forth.
Two hours later Margaret followed Diller into his office, ignoring the irritation on his face when he swung around to find her standing behind him. She’d waited for him to finish surgery, terrified that at any moment she’d be summoned to Sharlie’s room for the last time. She wasn’t about to waste one precious second explaining her way into his inner sanctum.
“No word, Mrs. Converse,” he said. “I assure you, I’ll let you know the moment—”
Margaret felt her own heart knocking inside her chest and wondered quickly if that was how Sharlie’s felt, hammering away in a perpetual state of agitation. “Doctor Diller, I want this conversation to be absolutely confidential. Now and always.”
He nodded. He’d always pegged Margaret Converse as one of those cold, eastern bitches with no ass and no sex. He looked at her with interest now, noting the flushed face, the urgent quaver in her voice. He motioned for her to sit. Her hands trembled as she gripped the arms of her chair.
“I don’t know if there’s a precedent. I don’t suppose so …” she began.
He nodded again, curious now, encouraging her to go on.
“Is there any way, I mean … I don’t care if it’s legal or not, Walter could always fix it later. I want to be my daughter’s donor.”
Well, here it is, Diller thought. He’d seen it on a dozen faces before, during the long, gruesome wait for a stranger to die in just the proper manner. He’d seen the guilt in faces that needed to make the gesture but never quite forced out the words. But this woman’s fear, he could see, was only that he might turn her down.
“You’re not serious,” he said to her, knowing full well that she was.
Margaret looked at him silently.
“You’re asking me to commit murder.”
“No,” she shook her head vehemently. “I realize that’s impossible, and I don’t want to jeopardize your career. All I ask is … well, guidance, in my own …”
“Suicide.”
“I prefer to think of it as a gift. But I want her to get the maximum benefit from my heart. I would hate to … well, go through with it and bequeath her a damaged one.”
The woman is crazy, Diller thought. Look at her sitting there as though she’s discussing a birthday present for her kid—a new pair of earrings or something.
“Mrs. Converse, the strain …”
“No!” she interrupted him fiercely. “I mean to do this with or without your assistance. I’ll find a way on my own if I have to. I’ve read what I could find, which isn’t much, but I do know my tissue type is more likely to be compatible with hers than somebody outside the family.” She crossed her arms against her stomach as if it hurt her. “The thing is, I don’t like pain. I never have had much tolerance, not like my daughter. I’m not a brave person, Doctor Diller, and I was hoping … well, I didn’t want it to be undignified. I don’t want to be crying or screaming or any such thing.”
Diller stared at her incredulously. He wanted to get on the phone with Elizabeth Rosen right now and find out what she had to say about this woman, but just then his intercom buzzed. He picked up the receiver.
His eyes flickered up at Margaret’s face, but he quickly looked away from her intent gaze. His voice was noncommittal. “How soon? … No, get a commercial airline. Fogelsohn will tell you how to arrange it … They’ll give you a ballpark on the tissue match … No, not soon enough. Push it. We’re in trouble … Thanks, Harve.” He hung up the phone and faced Margaret in silence.
“A donor for Sharlie?” she asked.
He nodded. “Possibly. We won’t know until we get the complete work-up, but the preliminary tests from New York are encouraging.”
Margaret took a deep breath, then murmured, “New York … Sharlie would like that.”
Diller smiled for the first time. “Come all the way out to California so you can find yourself a heart from Queens.”
“Is it someone … young?” Margaret asked tentatively. Then, before he could answer, she cut in, “No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know anything about it.”
“Mrs. Converse, please don’t get your hopes up. Not until there’s a lot more information. More often than not, these things are blind alleys.”
Margaret nodded and rose stiffly. She held out her hand to Diller, and he took it. She remembered thinking it was a very soft, almost feminine hand … but of course he must protect them carefully.
“If the donor doesn’t work out—” she began, but he interrupted quickly.
“We’ll face that if we have to. For the moment, let’s just forget our conversation.”
They stared at each other, both thinking how impossible that would be. Then Margaret headed for the door, back straight, legs moving in perfectly controlled strides, not one step the slightest fraction longer than the last.
Brian had walked quietly out of the waiting room, closing the door on Walter and Margaret as they clung together. He moved automatically, like a sleepwalker, down the hallway to Sharlie’s room, then sat down next to her bed.
He held the lifeless, clammy hand and stared at the mask on the pillow. He remembered his pleasure in watching her face change, feelings and dreams playing over her mouth and eyes like an assortment of clouds passing across the sky—white, fluffy, mischievous clouds; gray, sad, rainy clouds; and now and then just clear open sky and shining, sparkling sunshine. He had delighted in the rippling reflections of her moods and sometimes called her, teasingly, the Woman of a Thousand Faces. Sharlie responded by comparing herself to Lon Chaney, exasperated by the inability to conceal her feelings. And besides, she protested, how was she supposed to maintain an aura of mystery in their relationship if he could read her face like the menu in a fastfood restaurant?
He liked to sneak looks at her while she was watching television, how her face would take on the expression of whoever filled the screen. She protested that this only happened when she identified with a particularly compelling character, but there were times he pointed out to her she seemed to find that lady very compelling—the one in the advertisement there for underarm deodorant or toilet paper. She would stick out her tongue, throw a pillow in his direction, and pull her hair over her face so he couldn’t watch.
But now the features were expressionless, a wax form belonging to some stranger. He had lost her so many tim
es already, and once more they’d told him sorrowfully that she wasn’t going to make it, not unless something awful happened to somebody else very soon, and even then …
Brian closed his eyes, asked his vague God for forgiveness, and prayed fervently for someone to crash into a tree outside the hospital and die a quick, painless death, brain instantly crushed and heart beautifully, perfectly intact.
Chapter 31
Sharlie was lying very still inside her body, listening to the hum. It was all darkness, there were no voices, no faces, no colors, just a black, suffocating, hot cloud. Again she tried to open her mouth, but there was no connection left between her will and her ability to exercise it. No speech. No possibility of communicating to the humming place that what she wanted now was to die. It wasn’t pain exactly. More a sensation of drowning in heat, of being buried alive under a ton of boiling earth, like the citizens of Pompeii. Away, far above her, through the seething molten clay, the faint buzz of life went on, but her relationship to it seemed a feeble thread, about to snap under the weight of all that lava. Being even minimally conscious in the airless grave made her frantic, and she screamed, Brian! She howled through the oppressive layers, Brian! Help me die!
But she was powerless to move her mouth, and her screams melted unheard into the hot darkness inside her head.
“How long will we have to wait?” Margaret asked Dr. Diller. Her voice sounded calm, but she was gripping Walter’s hand so hard that he finally uncurled her fingers and showed her the bright-red crescents she’d left in his flesh with her nails.
“Less than twenty-four hours,” Diller replied.
The three of them sat lined up as usual in the chairs in front of Diller’s desk. Brian felt alert and relaxed now that something was happening. He’d passed through the last few days like a shell-shock victim, his eyes vague and expressionless, his mind blank. It was as if his central nervous system had been overloaded with stimuli and finally short-circuited. The sensation, or rather the lack of sensation, made him wonder if he’d been so completely burned-out by the merciless waves of fear and hope and dread and loss, that nothing could possibly rouse him anymore. But now word had arrived from New York about a gunshot victim—brain death had occurred, but his heart was strong. It only remained to obtain permission from his mother to use his organs for transplantation. She wanted to speak with her minister first, but Diller had been assured that she was receptive.
“We need somebody in New York to take responsibility for getting the guy out here,” Diller said.
“The whole guy?” Brian asked.
Diller nodded. “We can’t keep the heart alive anywhere else except inside the donor.”
“What about Dr. Parkiss?” asked Margaret.
“In Minneapolis for a convention.”
“Figures,” Walter said.
“How about Mary MacDonald?” Brian asked.
Diller looked at Brian thoughtfully.
“But she’s only a nurse,” Margaret protested. “Shouldn’t it be somebody with a little more training?”
Walter said, “There isn’t anybody more competent than MacDonald. I don’t give a damn about training.”
Brian said, “Think she’d do it? She runs the show on Eleven.”
Diller picked up his phone and buzzed the secretary they’d provided for him during his “sabbatical.” While they waited, Diller crossed his elegant hands on his desk and spoke quietly to them. “There’s a lot that can go wrong between New York and the operating room.”
They all stared back at him with stubborn faith in their faces. Diller thought, They think I’m Jesus Christ. He felt the headache begin to pulse behind his right eye. “I have very little control over what transpires at that end,” he continued. “How they get the donor shipped, what condition he’s in when he gets here. We’ll do as many tests as possible beforehand. They can do blood work-ups, we can have tissue samples flown ahead for matching. But it’s a long trip, and the equipment isn’t foolproof.”
Walter broke in, “We won’t hold you responsible for screwups. Except the ones in OR.”
Foxy bastard, Diller thought, giving Walter a forced smile. “I’ll share with you the one fact I’m sure of, and that’s if they get the donor here, and if we have a match and the heart’s in good shape and your daughter is still alive, then there’s not going to be any slipup in the operating room. I’ll make it work.”
Brian resisted the impulse to say, “With a little help from Jason Lewis, Super-surgeon.” But Walter and Margaret gazed at Diller with desperately hopeful faces. Diller wearily accepted his habitual burden of irrational, unquestioning trust. Even in the suspicious face of Walter Converse the ferocious need was evident—to believe in the performance of a miracle.
Chapter 32
Mary MacDonald went straight to Jason Lewis’s office and asked him if she could observe the operation. She had felt torn about it, thinking it might be the first time she’d humiliate herself by passing out in OR, but the idea of just sitting around wringing her hands with the relatives cinched it.
Lewis impressed her. Like most of the personnel at Saint Joseph’s, Mary had followed the progress of the first heart transplant operations, somehow breaking away to watch the press briefings on the lounge television. Lewis was a distinguished-looking man, tall, with a full head of prematurely pure-white hair. He spoke dispassionately about his patients, answering the reporters’ eager questions with calm detachment But the third transplant was performed on a ten-year-old boy. It had been a particularly risky case—the desperate search for a suitable heart had produced only that of a middle-aged man whose tissue type was less than ideally matched. When it became apparent that the child was rejecting his new heart, Lewis had stood in front of the microphones and detailed in his quiet voice the circumstances of the boy’s imminent death. The great surgeon let the tears roll down his cheeks without shame or apology as he talked, and Mary, when she spoke with him now, kept seeing his face as it was then, all wet and shiny in the glare of the television lights.
Mary’s admiration was reciprocated. Lewis was impressed by the efficiency with which the donor was delivered to California, and correctly gave Mary the credit. He told her in his soft voice that he would be honored to have her observe.
The operating room looked like a very clean garage. There was an atmosphere of controlled chaos as the technicians bustled about, setting up their equipment. Machines hummed and clanked and ticked, and the nurses made nervous jokes. There hadn’t been a heart transplant in nearly three months, and everyone was excited. Diller would assist, of course.
Mary watched the two men scrub together and listened with a wry smile as Diller complained about the ever-present reporters downstairs. Then she entered OR to watch the assistants prepare Sharlie, remembering, as she stood transfixed, the first time she had assisted in open-heart surgery—how, after the initial incision, the breastbone was opened with a saw and the ribs were separated with rib retractors. Mary had thought then that OR seemed like a body shop. This morning she listened to the hoarse buzz of the saw and swallowed hard, reminding herself that this was Sharlie’s only chance.
Diller and Lewis entered now, and the team stood hushed as the men stared down into Sharlie’s open incision.
“Holy God,” Lewis said. “How’d you keep her alive?”
Diller shook his head at the pale, flabby heart, so enlarged it seemed to bulge out of the chest cavity.
“Let’s get that thing out of there,” Lewis said softly, and began to free Sharlie’s heart.
Soon she lay on the table, chest cavity empty, her life supported only by the electronic wizardry of the heart-lung machine.
Lewis said, “All right,” and his nurse opened the door to the adjoining operating room. Mary caught a quick glimpse of a body, swathed in sheets, on the table.
Within seconds the nurse reappeared, carrying a stainless steel basin. Mary averted her eyes and found herself suddenly w
hispering a Hail Mary. After all the years of assisting in surgery, the impulse surprised her. She fought to remind herself that she was observing a medical procedure, that the object in the shiny basin was merely a hunk of human muscle, not some evil offering for a black-magic ceremony. Diller and Lewis, masked and solemn, were really just technicians, not satanic priests performing a mysterious, dark ritual.
As the surgeons began the tedious process of attaching vena cava to vena cava, aorta to aorta, of the hooking up of coronary arteries, Mary relaxed, responding to the comfortable familiarity of surgical activity. She shook her head, chiding herself for her foolish notions.
It was nearly two hours before Diller and Lewis finished off their minute sewing and straightened up to stretch cramped muscles. The healthy heart seemed tiny inside Sharlie’s chest, a fist clenching and unclenching within a vast empty hole. They all watched it in silence, delaying the moment when the new organ must be severed from the heart-lung machine. Finally Lewis murmured, “Okay, let’s go.”
Someone switched off the machine. The first second seemed like a long, long time, but suddenly the little fist pulsed, then relaxed, then pulsed again. A jubilant shout rose up from the surgical team, and Mary laughed out loud. Lewis handed his instruments to his scrub nurse and left the room abruptly. Diller remained behind to close the incision and asked casually if the news people were still hanging around outside. He wouldn’t mind having a quick word with them.
The scrub nurse looked at Mary over her mask, and the two women smiled at each other with their eyes.
Chapter 33