A Change of Heart

by Sonali Dev

  For the first time since he’d moved into this room, he started his day without his face hanging over the toilet.

  He showered and shaved and put himself together with as much care as he had used to assemble Mr. Potato Head as a child. Basically, anything went anywhere. When he stepped out the door he realized that it was only seven in the morning. The clinic wouldn’t open for business for another two hours. He headed down anyway.

  * * *

  A woman, thin and tanned and dressed like she was off to brunch with royalty, was waiting outside the clinic door, clutching the elbow of a little boy who was pressing a washcloth to his knee. It was soaked through with blood.

  “Doctor?” The woman raised her impressively arched brows at his name tag and waited for an answer to a question Nikhil hadn’t heard.

  He punched the code into the alarm panel and smiled at the boy. He had to be no more than five years old. Not only had she made him walk here on that knee, she was using that bracelet-filled hand to keep a safe distance between him and her logo-emblazoned white pants.

  Nikhil lifted the child up and carried him into the clinic. He put him in a chair and squatted in front of him. “Do you mind if I take a look?” he asked the boy, trying his best to ignore Mommy-White-Pants.

  The boy, like all children, didn’t feel the same way. He looked to his mother for an answer. Then nodded when she nodded.

  “Alex was running down the stairs when I told him not to.” She glared at the boy, and his lip trembled in response.

  Nikhil lifted the washcloth from the tiny knee and checked out the cut that went clean across the bony kneecap but wasn’t deep enough to warrant stitches. His relief at not having to sew up the child’s knee was ridiculous. But he had a hard enough time suturing adult skin with his shaking fingers, there was no way he was taking a chance on the child’s knee.

  If he had needed stitches, Nikhil would have had to call one of the nurse practitioners and face those pity-filled glances that were bandied about when he couldn’t perform the basic procedures he was paid to perform.

  “He needs some antiseptic and a bandage and he’ll be good as new. Just make sure he stays off it today.”

  “Stay off it?” Mommy Dearest adjusted the rhinestone-studded shades perched atop her head. “But today is a shore-fun day and we’ve purchased our land excursion already.”

  Nikhil handed Alex a tissue, but when the boy continued to stare at the gauze Nikhil was pressing to his bleeding knee, Nikhil reached out and wiped the tears off his cheek himself.

  “Who’s your friend?” Nikhil pointed at the action figure peeking from the child’s pocket.

  The child’s mood lifted. “He’s Tony Stark!”

  Of course he was.

  Jen had loved Robert Downey, Jr.

  Sometimes even more than I love you. But only because he has your hair, Spikey.

  “Doc?” She was giving him the “What the hell is wrong with you?” look again. She must have asked him a question that he hadn’t heard, again.

  Her hand was on the boy’s shoulder. Suddenly, she was a model of motherly concern.

  Nikhil got up and went to the supply closet and retrieved some gauze and bandages. The boy looked terrified, but he didn’t sidle up to his mother or make any effort to draw comfort from her.

  Nikhil’s own mother was the very embodiment of comfort, her motherliness so over the top she had a way of mothering the heck out of any child who came into her sphere. Maybe it was her or maybe it was all the orphans he’d treated over the years, but despite his awareness that he didn’t know this woman at all, the fact that she stood so stiff and tall next to the crumpled boy made him want to break things.

  Jen had never wanted to be a mother and she’d always been honest about it. She had believed she would be terrible at it. But he’d watched her treat kids, seen her goof around with them, seen her bleed at their pain. She had been so wrong.

  He cut out a piece of tape and handed it to the boy. “You know how Tony presses Arc Reactors into his chest and it makes him Iron Man?” He made a thick pad out of gauze and cut it into a perfect circle like an Arc Reactor. Then he squeezed some antibacterial ointment on it. “Bandages are just like that. When I put it on you’ll have a super knee and when I take it off the boo-boo will be gone.”

  It was a pathetically stretched-out analogy, but the boy smiled. The mother looked at her watch.

  “You can even go on your shore-fun excursion.” Nikhil dabbed the area with some Betadine.

  “Oh, no no. Alex isn’t going, it’s a grown-up excursion.” She winked at Nikhil. “Alex is going to have fun at Camp Camel Caravan, aren’t you, Al-bun?”

  Al-bun gave a distracted smile, his entire focus on what Nikhil was doing to his knee.

  “In that case, his battery pack is going to work even better. Maybe Dr. Nic can come and check up on him after lunch?”

  The boy smiled.

  “Okay, here it comes.” He placed the gauze over the cut and pressed the tape over it. The boy didn’t wince. Nikhil patted his head. “No running today. Maybe just video games?”

  “For real?” The boy couldn’t believe his luck.

  “Perfect!” Mommy smiled at her watch.

  She was going to make the shore excursion after all. Yay!

  By the time Nikhil had her sign the paperwork and walked them out, his anger levels were nuclear. She was probably a decent-enough mother. He was fully aware that the sadness and anger overwhelming him had nothing to do with her. All the things he was angry about had nothing to do with her.

  What he really needed to do was call his mother. It had been months since he’d seen his parents. They came by and met him in Miami every few months. But he hadn’t gone home in two years.

  The kind of relationship his mother and Jen had had made him feel like such an outsider sometimes. No matter where in the world Jen was, she had called Aie every week. For the past two years, Aie had diligently continued those weekly calls in the face of his inability to do anything more than answer her most basic questions and then hang up.

  Now that he was already at the clinic he should have checked out some charts or taken inventory or something. But he had never been early to work on the ship, so he had no idea what to do with himself.

  He’d gone to the clinic in the Himalayas straight out of med school and then into the MSF right after that. In both those positions he had never been faced with a moment that didn’t beg to be filled with at least three things that were already past critical. Sitting around in the clinic until it opened was not an option unless he wanted to return to his room and hit the Jack early.

  He shut the clinic door behind him and walked to the slatted wooden bench outside.

  He could have sworn the bench was empty when he sat down, but when he looked up Jess was sitting next to him.

  “Good morning,” she said in a tone that sounded as if she were saying, “Take a deep breath, the world is still spinning.” Then she held out a brown paper bag and a cup of coffee.

  He took the bag from her and peeked inside. It was full of miniature muffins. Lemon poppy seed. The smell kicked off that ever-present nauseated feeling. They used to be one of his favorite things. And practically the only thing Jen ever baked. She had let Aie teach her how to make them and had perfected Aie’s recipe to a point of being a gastronomical piece of art. Amazingly, no matter which corner of the world they lived in, poppy seeds were always available. Poppy seeds, of all things, were a universal equalizer. As were lemon, flour, sugar, and butter.

  “Morning,” he said, curbing the urge to return the bag to her and stuffed a muffin into his mouth. It was like dry sponge. He worked to hold it down, but he was going to need help from the coffee in her hand.

  “I wasn’t sure how you took your coffee. It’s black but I have cream and sugar in the bag.”

  “Thanks. Black’s fine.” He took a sip and let the bitter brew wash down the glop and make an unsavory tumble in his belly. “She told yo
u which muffins I like but not how I take my coffee?”

  “I told you I can’t control what she wants to say.” She offered him another muffin, but he shook his head and tried not to bring up the one that was struggling to see daylight again.

  “Aren’t you going ashore?” he asked, mostly because he couldn’t bring himself to respond with, “Why don’t we just forget everything else and you tell me every word Jen’s ever said to you and then repeat it again.”

  “No. Are you?” She folded her hands in her lap.

  “Nope, I’m working. Clinic opens in an hour.” And he never went ashore. Solid land was too much of a reminder of permanent unchangeable things.

  She looked confused. “Didn’t you just see that little boy?”

  So she had been here awhile.

  “They just showed up. But it’s another hour before the clinic officially opens.”

  His daily dose of patients would start rolling in soon enough. Tummy aches, sunburns, and bruises, mostly. Every once in a while, someone showed up with something stuck in an aperture where it didn’t belong. Cruises made people gluttons, daredevils, and sexual adventurers. All three things made for patients he had no trouble treating.

  “Was the little boy okay?” She pointed her chin at the elevator the boy and his mother had taken.

  “He’s fine. Just a split knee and a mother who almost missed a shore excursion.”

  Her brows drew together in a frown. “His mother is going ashore? Who’s going to stay with him?”

  “They have day care on the ship.”

  Anger sparked in her eyes, and he noticed for the first time that they were brown, an array of shades all flecked together. Her lips pressed together in a livid hiss. “She’s leaving him all by himself when he’s hurt?”

  Nikhil shrugged. “It’s just a surface cut.”

  “Well, on the knee it’s just a cut. But he’s so little. He’s just a—” She cleared her throat, realizing that she’d shown too much, clamped her jaw shut, and arranged her face back into her usual meditative demeanor.

  “Who’s watching Joy right now? His dad?”

  Her spine straightened even more under her blacker-than-black sweatshirt. Other than that, she remained still as a lily pond on a windless night, not a ripple on the surface. But her stillness held no peace. Under all that calm he sensed an earthquake. He latched on to it. He had focused on nothing but himself for, well, for two years. Focusing on someone else was unexpectedly restful.

  She surprised him when she answered, an intense surge of emotion rolling under her whisper. “He’s staying with a friend.” If Nikhil didn’t have such an intimate relationship with pain, he might have missed the cold, hard blast of it in her eyes as she said it.

  “You miss him.”

  She pursed her lips as though she were trying not to tell him how stupid he was for stating something so obvious.

  “I’ve never left him alone before.” This time, her pain had an aching sweetness to it. A mother missing her baby, the combined force of those motherly memories mothers seemed to store beneath their surface tangible in every breath.

  He lifted his hand, meaning to pat hers, to do something comforting, but in the end his hand found its way to his own stubbly head, which he had forgotten to shave again. “You said he’s seven?”

  She nodded.

  “That is very young to be without his mommy.” He had meant to commiserate with her, but his words only intensified the pain she was trying so hard to hide.

  “It is. I need to go back to him.” Her jaw barely moved, but there it was again, that delicate slash of bone holding in an earthquake as it pushed to the surface.

  “Please,” those eyes said, in lieu of the words she was holding back. “Please help me get back to my baby.”

  “Do you have any idea where Jen could have hidden the evidence?” Before he could stop himself the words were out, answering her silent plea, and the stab of relief was the last thing he’d expected them to bring.

  * * *

  Jess couldn’t believe her ears. She felt like the runaway cart she was on had hit a slope. Yet again Joy had done what she hadn’t been able to manage on her own: unfrozen another crack in Nikhil’s heart.

  The urge to see her baby swelled so large and fast in her heart, she had to wrap her arms around herself to hold it in. She wanted to hold his face in her hands and kiss his butter-soft skin. She sank back into the wooden bench and squeezed herself, crushing the yearning into a ball and pushed it to the bottom of her belly, where it was starting to get crowded with all the crushed-up balls of regret, anger, and unexpectedly overwhelming guilt.

  “Where did you put all her things after you . . . after you cleaned out her flat?”

  Nikhil’s thumb went to work on his ring. Spinning the loose metal band around his bony finger. He had beautiful hands, this man. A surgeon’s hands. She was going to need them to dig through Jen’s things. But first, she had to help stop them from shaking like that all the time.

  Nothing. Nothing came out of him. He sucked in a breath a few times as if he was ready to answer, but then, nothing. His eyes were so raw it was as if he were in a trance. She pushed her voice into his silence. “Is her stuff here on the ship?”

  He laughed. “God, no. She would’ve killed me if I had ever suggested taking a trip on”—he waved his hand around all that red and gold—“on a cruise ship. Nothing of hers is here.”

  Except him. He’d put Jen’s precious belongings in a safe place. Except for what she cherished most.

  “What about her Chicago apartment?”

  He looked surprised, then angry. Of course he hated when she did that. Hated that she knew these things about Jen. What use was another apology? She pushed away the one that rose to her lips.

  His wide, bony shoulders slumped. “No, I didn’t move anything there.”

  He disappeared behind silence again. She waited. He had to burrow out on his own.

  For what seemed like an age, he spun his ring around his finger. Maybe it had been too early to heave a sigh of relief. She knew he wanted to believe her, but in asking him to trust her she was asking him to change everything he’d ever believed.

  “Did you have a chance to check up on the transplant records?” she asked, trying to sound as if she were asking him if the weather was conducive to walking on the beach.

  * * *

  Her voice dragged Nikhil out of the sinkhole of his memories. Her nonchalance made everything seem mundane. As if these were not the most absurd of conversations. As if believing that your dead wife was communicating with the woman who had her heart was not downright certifiable.

  He didn’t respond. He shouldn’t have hung up on the cop without checking out her story. What if she wasn’t who she said she was? Well then, he’d make sure she never walked free to do this again.

  Yes, he wanted nothing to do with the criminals his wife had staked her life to apprehend, but this calm-as-a-lotus-pond woman claiming to have his wife’s heart, claiming to somehow be able to talk to his wife, he was willing to see her all the way to jail. Did his heroism know no bounds?

  “If you need more time to make sure who I am, I can wait. We can talk about this later.”

  He looked at her upturned face, where her need to go home to her child had just flashed so clear and bright. He searched for a scavenger’s deviousness, but found only a strange mix of raw hope and understanding. Something sparked inside his numbness. “What was wrong with it?” He pointed a finger at the center of her chest.

  She blinked in surprise. Then did one of her quick recoveries. “Congenital hole in the heart.”

  “When was it diagnosed?”

  “Eight years ago when I—”

  “When you were pregnant.”

  She nodded.

  “You still had your baby.” Warmth crackled through his numbness, but her gaze went cold. What he had said made her furious.

  “As opposed to what?” Her tone didn’t alter, but he knew
when he was being snapped at.

  He reached out and touched her shoulder. “You risked your life for your baby.”

  She lifted his hand off her shoulder and put it back on the bench next to her. “Actually, my baby saved my life.”

  For a moment he couldn’t look away from her eyes. All those clashing browns coalesced around something so fierce, he felt alive again. But only for the briefest moment. Whatever it was, it flashed by so fast his insides spun. She went icy calm again, drawing back into herself.

  His own baby had gone before anyone could save her. But her little heart had kept her mother’s beating long enough to save a life.

  For hours, for years, for an eternity, neither one of them spoke.

  Everything had seemed meaningless for so long, he couldn’t ignore that tiniest ember kindling inside him. He couldn’t ignore that he wanted to follow where this girl was taking him. Even if he didn’t believe her story, he believed something.

  He stopped studying the swirls on the thickly carpeted floor and met those perfectly shuttered eyes again. A lock of the violently red hair she had pushed behind a headband and a hood escaped and she shoved it back.

  “How will I know what to look for in Jen’s things?” he asked.

  It took her a moment to absorb what he’d just agreed to. “I’m not sure.” Her eyes gave him another flash of hope, asking for things knowing they were impossible. “But I think I’ll know when I’m near it.”

  “Jen will tell you?”

  She searched his face, unsure if he was mocking her. Hell if he knew what he was doing.

  “Is she here now?”

  She nodded. “She’s always here. But she’s been very quiet since I . . . since I met you. And I know that she’ll help us,” she said in a small voice.

  If anyone could help him right now, it was Jen. That was for sure. “The ship gets back to Miami in two days. It will take me that long to arrange for a doctor to replace me. Will you come to Chicago with me and help me look? All of Jen’s stuff is there.”

  * * *

  Jess pushed past the floor-to-ceiling glass doors that led into the ship’s salon. As if by magic, the red-and-gold splendor transformed into black-and-gold splendor. All that granite and gilding and sheets of falling water put together to affect a soothing mood. The Buddha might have been mistaken in searching for peace amid austerity. There was no austerity here, just a lot of rich people who seemed perfectly at peace thumbing through glossy magazines on plush sofas.