The Fourth Hand Read Online Free PDF

effect on women that a drunken, jet-lagged mother and her scarcely less damaged daughter felt their arms ache. They were actual y reaching out to him as he fel .
    Patrick Wal ingford initiated nothing, yet he inspired sexual unrest and unnatural longing—even as he was caught in the act of feeding a lion his left hand. He was a magnet to women of al ages and types; even lying unconscious, he was a danger to the female sex.
    As often happens in families, the daughter said aloud what the mother had also observed but was keeping to herself.
    “Look at the lionesses,” the daughter said. Not one lioness had touched his hand. There was a measure of longing in the sadness in their eyes; even after Wal ingford fainted, the lionesses continued to watch him. It almost seemed that the lionesses were smitten, too.

CHAPTER TWO
    The Former Midfielder
    T HE BOSTON TEAMwas headed by Dr. Nicholas M.
    Zajac, a hand surgeon with Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates—the leading center for hand care in Massachusetts. Dr. Zajac was also an assistant clinical professor of surgery at Harvard. It was his idea to initiate a search for potential hand donors and recipients on the Internet (www.needahand.com).
    Dr. Zajac was a half-generation older than Patrick Wal ingford. That both Deerfield and Amherst were al -
    boys’ institutions when he’d attended them is insufficient explanation for the single-sex attitude that accompanied his presence as strongly as his bad choice in aftershave.
    No one from his Deerfield days, or from his four years at Amherst, remembered him. He’d played varsity lacrosse, in both prep school and col ege—he was actual y a starter—
    but not even his coaches remembered him. It is exceedingly rare to remain that anonymous on athletic teams; yet Nick Zajac had spent his youth and young manhood in an uncannily unmemorable but successful pursuit of excel ence, with no friends and not one sexual experience. In medical school, another med student, with whom the future Dr. Zajac shared a female cadaver, would forever remember him for his outraged shock at the sight of the body. “That she was long dead wasn’t the problem,” the lab partner would recal . “What got to Nick was that the cadaver was a woman, clearly his first.”
    Another first would be Zajac’s wife. He was one of those overgrateful men who married the first woman who had sex with him. Both he and his wife would regret it.
    The female cadaver had something to do with Dr. Zajac’s decision to specialize in hands. According to the former lab partner, the cadaver’s hands were the only parts of her that Zajac could stand to examine.
    Clearly we need to know more about Dr. Zajac. His thinness was compulsive; he couldn’t be thin enough. A marathoner, a bird-watcher, a seed-eater—a habit he had acquired from his observation of finches—the doctor was preternatural y drawn to birds and to people who were famous. He became a hand surgeon to the stars.
    Mostly they were sports stars, injured athletes, such as the Boston Red Sox pitcher with a torn anterior radio-ulnar ligament on his throwing hand. The pitcher was later traded to the Toronto Blue Jays for two infielders who never panned out and a designated hitter whose principal talent was hitting his wife. Zajac operated on the designated hitter, too. In attempting to lock herself in the car, the slugger’s wife had shut the car door on his hand—the most extensive damage occurring to the second proximal phalanx and the third metacarpal.
    A surprising number of sports-star injuries happened away from the field or the court or the ice—like that goalie for the Boston Bruins, since retired, who slashed his superficial transverse ligament, left hand, by gripping a wineglass too tightly against his wedding ring. And there was that frequently penalized linebacker for the New England Patriots who severed a digital artery and some digital nerves by trying to open an oyster with a Swiss Army