Harvesting the Heart Read Online Free PDF

of person. Nicholas Prescott had always received the world on a
silver platter from his parents, and in return he gave them what was
expected: the very model of a son.
    Nicholas
had been ranked first in his class forever. He had dated a stream of
beautiful, blue-blooded Wellesley girls from the time he was sixteen
and realized they found him attractive. He knew how to be charming
and how to be influential. He had been telling people he was going to
be a doctor like his father since he was seven, so medical school was
a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. He graduated from Harvard in 1979
and deferred his admission to the medical school. First he traveled
around Europe, enjoying liaisons with light-boned Parisian women who
smoked cigarettes laced with mint. Then he returned home and, at the
urging of his old college crew coach, trained for the Olympic rowing
trials with other hopefuls on Princeton's Lake Carnegie. He
rowed seventh seat in the eight-man shell that represented the United
States. His parents had a brunch for their friends one Sunday
morning, drinking Bloody Marys and watching, on television, their son
stroke his way to a silver medal.
    It
was a combination of things, then, that made Nicholas Prescott, age
twenty-eight, wake up repeatedly in the middle of the night, sweating
and shaking. He'd disentangle himself from Rachel, his
girlfriend—also a medical student and possibly the smartest
woman he'd ever known—and walk naked to the window that
overlooked a courtyard below his apartment. Glowing in the blue
shadow of the full moon, he'd listen to the fading sprint of traffic
in Harvard Square and hold his hands suspended in front of him until
the trembling stopped. And he knew, even if he didn't care to admit
it, what lay behind his nightmares: Nicholas had spent nearly three
decades evading failure, and he realized he was living on
borrowed time.
    Nicholas
did not believe in God—he was too much a man of science—but
he did think there was someone or something keeping track of his
successes, and he knew that good fortune couldn't last forever. He
found himself thinking more and more of his freshman roommate in
college, a thin boy named Raj, who had got a C+ on a literature paper
and jumped from the roof of Widener, breaking his neck. What was it
Nicholas's father used to say? Life
turns on a dime.
    Several
times a week he drove across the river to Mercy, the diner off JFK
Street, because he liked the anonymity. There were always other
students there, but they tended to be in less exacting disciplines:
philosophy, art history, English. Until tonight, he didn't realize
anyone even knew his name. But the black guy, the owner, did,
and so did that slip of a waitress who had been stuck in the corner
of his mind for the past two weeks.
    She
thought he hadn't noticed her, but you couldn't survive at Harvard
Med for three years without honing your powers of observation.
She thought she was being discreet, but Nicholas could feel the heat
of her stare at the collar of his shirt; the way she lingered over
the water pitcher when she refilled his glass. And he was used to
women staring at him, so this should not have rattled him. But this
one was just a kid. She'd said eighteen, but he couldn't believe it.
Even if she looked young for her age, she couldn't be a day over
fifteen.
    She
wasn't his type. She was small and she had skinny knees and, for
God's sake, she had red hair. But she didn't wear makeup, and even
without it her eyes were huge and blue. Bedroom eyes, that's what
women said about him, and he realized it applied to this waitress
too.
    Nicholas
knew he had a ton of work to do and shouldn't have gone to Mercy
tonight, but he'd missed dinner at the hospital and had been thinking
of his favorite apple turnover the whole ride back from Boston on the
T. He'd also been thinking of the waitress. And he was wondering
about Rosita Gonzalez and whether she'd got home all right. He was in
Emergency