Harvesting the Heart (12 page)

It
took ten rings, and the operator was just suggesting I try again
later, when my father picked up. "Hello," he said, and his
voice reminded me of his cigarettes, True, and their cool gray
package. "Collect call from Paige. Do you accept?"

"Yes,"
my father said. "Oh, sure, yes." He waited a second, I
suppose to be certain the operator got off the line, and then he
called my name.

"Dad,"
I told him, "I'm still in Massachusetts."

"I
knew you'd be callin' me, lass," my father said. "I've been
thinkin' about you today."

My
hope jumped at that. If I didn't listen too closely, I could almost
ignore the thickness wrapped around his words. Maybe Nicholas
and I would visit him. Maybe one day he would visit me.

"I
found a photo of you this mornin', stuck behind my router. D'you
remember the time I took you to that pettin' zoo?" I did, but I
wanted to hear him talk. I hadn't realized until then how much I
missed my father's voice. "You were so lookin' forward to seein'
the sheep," he said, "the wee lambs, because I'd told you
about the farm in County Donegal. You couldn'a been more than six, I
figure."

"Oh,
I know the photo," I exclaimed, suddenly remembering the image
of myself hugging the fleece of a dun-colored lamb.

"I'd
be surprised if you didn't," my father said. "The way you
got the wind knocked out of you that day! You went into that pen as
brave as Cuchulainn himself with a palm full of feed, and every llama
and goat and sheep in the place came runnin' over to you. Knocked you
flat on your back, they did."

I
frowned, remembering it as though it were yesterday. They had come
from all sides like nightmares, with their hollow, dead eyes and
their curved yellow teeth. There had been no way out; the world had
closed in around me. Now, under my wedding suit, I broke out in a
light sweat; I thought how much I felt like that, again, today.

My
father was grinning; I could hear it. "What did you do?" I
asked.

"What
I always did," he said, and I listened to his smile fade. "I
picked you up. I came and got you."

I
listened to all the things I wanted and needed to say to him racing
through my mind. In the silence I could feel him wondering why he
hadn't come to get me in Massachusetts; why he hadn't picked up the
pieces and smoothed it over and made it better. I could sense him
running through everything we had said to each other and everything
we hadn't, trying to find the thread that made this time different.

I
knew, even if he didn't. My father's God preached forgiveness, but
did he?

Suddenly
all I wanted to do was take away the pain. It was
my
sin;
it was one thing for
me
to
feel the guilt, but my father shouldn't have to. I wanted to let him
know that he wasn't responsible, not for what I had done and not for
me. And since he wouldn't believe I could take care of myself—
never
would,
not now—I told him there was someone else to take care of me.
"Dad," I said, "I'm getting married."

I
heard a strange sound, as if I had knocked the wind out of him.
"Dad," I repeated.

"Yes."
He drew in his breath. "Do you love him?" he asked. "Yes,"
I admitted. "Actually, I do." "That makes it harder,"
he said.

I
wondered about that for a moment, and then when I felt I was going to
cry, I covered the mouthpiece with my hand and closed my eyes and
counted to ten. "I didn't want to leave you," I said, the
same words I spoke every time I called. "It wasn't the way I
thought things would happen." Miles away, my father sighed. "It
never is," he said. I thought about the easy days, when he would
bathe me as a child d wrap me in my long-john pajamas and comb the
tangles from my hair. I thought about sitting on his lap and watching
the bluest flames in the fireplace and wondering if there was any
finer thing in the world.

"Paige?"
he said into the silence. "Paige?"

I
did not answer all the questions he was trying to ask. "I'm
getting married, and I wanted you to know," I said, but I was
certain he could hear the fear in my voice as loudly as I could hear
it in his.

It
built up in my stomach and my chest, the feeling, as if I were
spiraling into myself. I could feel Nicholas holding back, tensed
like a puma, until 1 was ready. I wrapped my arms and my legs around
Nicholas, and, together, we came. I loved the way he arched his neck
and exhaled and then opened his eyes as though he wasn't quite sure
where he was and how he had got there. I loved knowing I had done
that to him.

Nicholas
cupped my face in his hands and told me he loved me. He kissed me,
but instead of passion I felt protection. He pulled us onto our
sides, and I curled myself in the hollow of his chest and tasted his
skin and his sweat. I tried to burrow closer. I did not close my eyes
to sleep, because I was waiting, as I had the last time I'd been with
a man, for God to strike me down.

Nicholas
brought me violets, two huge bunches, still misted and swollen with
the spray of a florist. "Violets," I said, smiling. "For
faithfulness."

"Now,
how do you know that?" Nicholas said.

"That's
what Ophelia says, anyway, in
Hamlet,"
I
told him, taking the bunches and holding them in my left hand. I had
a quick vision of the famous painting of Ophelia, where she floats
faceup in a stream,

dead,
her hair swirled around her and tangled with flowers. Daisies, in
fact. And violets.

The
justice of the peace and a woman whom he introduced only as a witness
were standing in the center of a plain room when we walked in. I
think Nicholas had told me the man was a retired judge. He asked us
to spell and pronounce our names, and then he said "Dearly
beloved." The entire thing took less than ten minutes.

I
did not have a ring for Nicholas and I started to panic, but Nicholas
pulled from his suit pocket two bright gold bands and handed the
larger one to me. He looked at me, and I could clearly read his eyes:
I
didn't
forget. I won't forget anything.

Within
a few minutes I began to cry. It was not that I was hurt, which
Nicholas thought, or that I was happy or disillusioned. It was
because I had spent the past eight weeks with a hole in my heart. I
had even started to hate myself a little. But in making love with
Nicholas, I discovered that what had been missing was replaced.
Patchwork, but still, it was better. Nicholas had the ability to fill
me.

Nicholas
kissed the tears off my cheeks and stroked my hair. He was so close
that we were breathing the same square of air. And as he stirred
beside me again, 1 began to erase my past until almost all I could
remember was whatever I had told Nicholas, whatever he wanted to
believe. "Paige," he said, "the second time is even
better." And reading into this, I moved astride him and eased
him inside me and started to heal.

^chapter
5

Paige

_T
he
best of the several memories I have of my mother involved the
betrayal of my father. It was a Sunday, which had meant for as long
as I'd been alive that we would be going to Mass. Every Sunday, my
mother and my father and I would put on our best outfits and walk
down the street to Saint Christopher's, where I would listen to the
rhythmic hum of prayers and watch my mother and my father receive
Communion. Afterward we'd stand in the sun on the worn stone steps of
the church, and my father's hand would rest warm on my head while he
talked to the Morenos and the Salvuccis about the fine Chicago
weather. But this particular Sunday, my father had left for O'Hare
before the sun came up. He was flying to Westchester, New York, to
meet with an eccentric old millionaire in hopes of promoting his
latest invention, a polypropylene pool float that hung suspended by
wires in the middle of the two-car garages that were part of the new
suburban tract houses. He called it the Sedan Saver,

and
it kept car doors from scratching each other's paint when they were
opened.

I
was supposed to be asleep, but I had been awakened by the dreams I'd
been having. At four, almost five, I didn't have many friends. Part
of the problem was that I was shy; part was that other kids were
steered clear of the O'Toole house by their parents. The bosomy
Italian mothers in the neighborhood said my mother was too sassy for
her own good; the dark, sweating men worried that my father's bad
luck in inventing could ooze uninvited over the thresholds of their
own homes. Consequently, I had begun to dream up playmates. I
wasn't the type of kid who saw someone beside me when I took out my
Tinkertoys and my dominoes; I knew very well when I was alone that I
was truly alone. But at night, I had the same dream over and over:
another girl called to me, and together we rolled mud-burgers in our
hands and pumped on swings until we both grazed the sun with our
toes. The dream always ended the same way: I would get up the courage
to ask the girl's name so that I'd be able to find her and play
together again, and just before she answered I'd wake up.

And
so it was that on that Sunday I opened my eyes already disappointed,
to hear my father tugging his suitcase down the hall and my mother
whispering goodbye and reminding him to call us later, after we got
home from Saint Christopher's, to tell us how it went.

The
morning started the way it always did. My mother made me breakfast—my
favorite today, apple pancakes in the shape of my initials. She
laid my pink lace last-year Easter dress on the foot of my bed. But
when the time came to leave for Mass, my mother and I stepped into
one of those perfect April days. The sun was as filling as a kiss,
and the air held the promise of freshly mowed grass. My mother smiled
and took my hand and headed up the street, away from Saint
Christopher's. "On a day like this," she said, "God
didn't mean for us to rot away indoors."