Home Again

The masked nurse gave her a wry look. “He’s not very happy about all this. Physically his new heart is a winner. His body is reacting as well as can be expected to the meds.”

“I’ll sit with him for a while. Go ahead and take a break.”

When the nurse was gone, Madelaine pulled up a chair and sat beside his bed. Reaching out, she gently took hold of his hand. “So, Angel, you’re not playing well with others.”

He lay there, unresponsive, his breathing slow and steady and unaided by machine.

She couldn’t help but think of the other day, when he’d gone ballistic after surgery. She’d seen the fear in his eyes, the dawning horror as he felt the rhythmic beating of the new heart. The realization that someone had died to give him the chance at life.

Not someone, she thought. Francis.

What would Angel say if he knew the truth?

She frowned. She hadn’t known Angel in years—maybe she never really had—but she knew him well enough to know that he would throw the mother of all tantrums if he knew what she had done. What she had authorized.

He wouldn’t know how to grieve for something like this. In fairness, she knew that no one would. He would be plagued with regret and self-loathing. He would wonder if Francis was really dead before the surgery, or if Madelaine and her team had done the unforgivable.

She knew she could make

the argument to anyone that Angel shouldn’t know the truth—that it would hinder his recovery, that donor confidentiality could only be breached after massive discussion with the bereavement counselor, that it was best all the way around to keep Angel in the dark. It was standard policy to keep the donor’s identity confidential.

But there was so much more here than just standard hospital procedure.

She was afraid to tell him the truth, afraid of the look that would cross his eyes, afraid of the words he would say to her. Words that, once said, could never be unsaid.

Because she also knew another truth. She didn’t know when it had come to her, when it had become a part of her, but sometime in the last few weeks, Angel had crept under her skin again. It was his spirit—that great, larger-than-life spirit that dared the world to take him on. She’d fallen in love with it as a young girl, and she found that even as an adult, there was something almost magical about his strength of personality, his defiant will to forge his own path.

So unlike her own watered-down, Milquetoast will.

When she looked at him, even now, when he lay at death’s door, she saw a shooting star of a man.

Behind her, the door opened. She turned just as Chris walked into the room. His eyes squinted in a smile above the mask. “How’s our patient?”

Madelaine smiled. “Better than most. He’s reacting well to the meds.”

Chris pulled up a chair and sat down. He took a second to flip through the charts, then dropped them back into the sleeve at the foot of the bed. He looked up at Madelaine. “What are you going to do?”

She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I’m going to remove myself as his cardiologist. After the … decision to donate, I don’t have much choice.”

“You could bring it up before the ethics committee—it’s kind of a gray area.”

She shook her head. “I’ll bring Marcus Sarandon in. He’ll do a great job”

Chris looked at Angel. “What will you tell him?”

She sighed. “I don’t know.”

Like all funerals, it was unbearable.

The funeral home was a palatial white brick building, complete with pillars and manicured lawns and young trees that would someday age into hundred-year-old oaks and give the new construction an air of old-fashioned elegance. It was, like so many of its kind, an edifice carefully contrived to evoke a common American fiction—the perfect family home, a sprawling southern mansion that harkened back to another time, when one generation turned into another and then another, when the circle of life was accepted and understood. You could almost imagine a small, well-tended family graveyard out back, its perimeter hemmed by white picket fence lines.

But of course, that was the greatest fiction of all. Behind the building lay acres and acres of green lawn, lawn that dipped and swelled and evened out in places like a golf course. Maple and alder trees dotted the various hillsides, spilling their multicolored leaves across the grassy quilt.

Madelaine and Lina stood side by side among the throng of grieving strangers. One by one the cars arrived, parking in an endless row along the driveway and down on the side of the road. People dressed in somber black clothing spilled from the cars, gathering together, murmuring among themselves. Women dabbed at their eyes and told stories of Father Francis. Men shook their heads and stared at the ground, patting their wives’ and mothers’ shoulders.

The mourners walked in a steady black line up the walkway toward the grave-site portion of the service. She recognized several faces—friends of Francis’s from the nursing home.

She watched them file past her, seeing her own grief reflected in many eyes. Each face reminded her of Francis, made her realize how many lives he had touched, how much difference he had made in this world. He’d been gone for two days, and already it felt like a lifetime.