Harvesting the Heart (35 page)

"Yes,
I know. It's
supposed
to
end. The doctor also told me that research says colicky babies grow
up to be more intelligent."

"Should
that make it easier to block out his screaming?"

"Don't
take it out on me, Nicholas. I was just answering
your
question."

"Don't
you want to get him?"

"I
guess."

"Well,
Christ, Paige. If it's such a big deal, I'll go get him." "No.
You stay. I'm the one who has to feed him. There's no point in you
getting up." "All right, then." "All right."

Nicholas
counted the number of steps he took in crossing the street and
reaching the path to his parents' house. Lining the neat slate stones
were rows of tulips: red, yellow, white, red, yellow, white, in
organized succession. His heart was pounding to the beat of his
footsteps; his mouth was unnaturally dry. Eight years was a very long
time.

He
thought about ringing the bell, but he didn't want to face one of the
servants. He pulled his key chain from his pocket and looked through
the many hospital keys to find the old, tarnished one he'd kept on
the brass ring since grade school. He had never thrown it away; he
wasn't quite sure why. And he wouldn't have expected his parents to
ask for it back. A lot might have passed between Nicholas
Prescott and his parents, but in his family even bitter
estrangements had to follow certain civil rules.

Nicholas
was not prepared for the rush of heat that crept up his back and his
neck the moment his key fit into the lock of his parents' home. He
remembered, all at once, the day he'd fallen from the tree-house and
snapped his leg bone through his skin; the time he'd come home drunk
and weaved through the kitchen and into the housekeeper's
bedroom by mistake; the morning he carried the world on his
shoulders—his college graduation. Nicholas shook his head to
force away the emotions and pushed himself into the massive foyer.

The
black marble on the floor reflected a perfect image of his set face,
and the fear in his eyes was mirrored in the high-polished frames of
his mother's Endangered exhibit. Nicholas took two steps that sounded
like primal thunder, certain that everyone now knew he was here. But
no one came. He tossed his jacket onto a gilded chair and walked down
the hall to his mother's darkroom.

Astrid
Prescott was developing her photos of the Moab, nomads who lived
among hills of sand, but she couldn't get her red right. The color of
the ruby dust was still clouding her mind, but no matter how many
prints she made, it wasn't the right shade. It didn't fix angry
enough to whirl around the people, framing them in their nightmares.
She put down the last set of photos and pinched the bridge of her
nose. Maybe she would try again tomorrow. She pulled several contact
sheets from her hanging line, and then she turned and saw the image
of her son.

"Nicholas,"
his mother whispered.

Nicholas
did not move a muscle. His mother looked older, frailer. Her hair was
wound in a tight knot at the nape of her neck, and the veins on her
clenched fists stood out prominently, marking her hands like a
well-traveled map. "You have a grandchild," he said. His
words were tight and clipped and sounded foreign on his tongue. "I
thought you should know."

He
turned to leave, but Astrid Prescott rushed forward, scattering the
elusive prints of the desert onto the floor. Nicholas was stopped by
the touch of his mother's hand. Her fingertips, coated with fixer,
left traces of burns up the length of his arm. "Please stay,"
she said. "I want to catch up. I want to look at you. And you
must need so much for the baby. I'd love to see him—her?—and
Paige too."

Nicholas
regarded his mother with all the cold reserve she'd proudly bred into
him. He pulled a snapshot of Max from his pocket and tossed it onto
the table, on top of a print of a turbaned man with a face as old as
honesty. "I'm sure it isn't as good as yours," Nicholas
said, staring down into the startled blue eyes of his son. When
they'd taken that picture, Paige had stood behind Nicholas with a
white sock pulled onto her hand. She had drawn eyes on the top of it
and a long forked tongue and had hissed and made rattlesnake noises,
pretending to bite Nicholas's ear. In the end, Max had smiled
after all.

Nicholas
pulled his arm away from his mother's touch. He knew he could not
stand there much longer without giving in. He would reach for his
mother, and by erasing the space between them, he would be wiping
clean a slate listed with grievances that were already starting to
fade. He took a deep breath and stood tall. "At one point you
weren't ready to be part of my family." He stepped back, digging
his heel into the melting fossil sunset of one Moab print. "Well,
I'm
not
ready now." And he turned and disappeared through the shifting
black curtain of the darkroom, leaving an outlined glow in the dim
crimson light like the unrelenting face of a ghost.

"I
went today." "I know."

"How
did you know?"

"You
haven't said three words to me since you got home. You're a million
miles from here."

"Well,
only about ten miles. Brookline's not so far. But you're just a
Chicago girl; what could you know?"

"Very
funny, Nicholas. So what did they say?"

"She.
I
wasn't going to go when my father was home. I went during my lunch
break today."

"I
didn't know you got lunch breaks—"

"Paige,
let's not start this again."

"So—what
did she say?"

"I
don't remember. She wanted to know more. I left her
a
picture."

"You
didn't talk to her? You didn't sit down and have tea and crumpets and
all that?" "We're not British." "You know what I
mean."

"No,
we did not sit down and have tea. We didn't sit down at all. I was
there for ten minutes, tops."

"Was
it very hard? . . . Why are you looking at me like that? What?"

"How
can you do it? You know, just cut to the heart of the matter like
that?"

"Well,
was
it?"

"It
was harder than putting together a heart-lung. It was harder than
telling the parents of a three-year-old that their kid just died on
the operating table. Paige, it was the hardest thing I've ever done
in my life."

"Oh,
Nicholas."

"Are
you going to turn off that light?" "Sure."

"Paige?
Do we have a copy of that picture I left at my parents'?" "The
one of Max we got with the sock snake?" "Yeah. It's a good
picture."

"I
can get a copy. I have the negative somewhere."

"I
want it for my office."

"You
don't have an office."

"Then
I'll put it in my locker. . . . Paige?"

"Mmm?"

"He's
a pretty attractive kid, isn't he? I mean, on the average, I don't
think babies are quite as good-looking. Is that a pretentious thing
to say?"

"Not
if you're his father."

"But
he's handsome, isn't he?"

"Nicholas,
love, he looks exactly like you."

^chapter
1
8

Paige

I
was
reading an article about a woman who had a bad case of
the
postpartum blues. She swung from depression to exhilaration; she had
trouble sleeping. She became slovenly, wild-eyed, and agitated. She
began to have thoughts about hurting her baby girl. She called these
thoughts The Plan and told them, in fragments, to her co-workers. Two
weeks after she began having these ideas, she came home from work and
smothered her eight-month-old daughter with a couch pillow.

She
had not been the only one. There was a woman before her who killed
her first two babies within days of their births and who tried to
kill the third before authorities stepped in. Another woman drowned
her two-month-old and told everyone he'd been kidnapped. A third shot
her son. Another ran her baby over with her Toyota.

This
apparently was a big legal battle in the United States. Women accused
of infanticide in England during the first year after

birth
could be charged only with manslaughter, not murder. People said it
was mental illness: eighty percent of all new mothers suffered from
the baby blues; one in a thousand suffered from postpartum psychosis;
three percent of those who suffered from psychosis would kill their
own children.

I
found myself gripping the magazine so tightly that the paper ripped.
What if I was one of them?

I
turned the page, glancing at Max in his playpen. He was gumming
a plastic cube that was part of a toy too advanced for his age. No
one ever sent us age-appropriate baby gifts. The next article was a
self-help piece.
Make
a list,
the
article suggested,
of
all the things you can do.
Supposedly
after fashioning such a list, you'd feel better about yourself and
your abilities than when you started. I flipped over the grocery list
and picked up a dull pencil. I looked at Max. I
can
change a diaper.
I
wrote it down, and then the other obvious things: I
can
measure formula. I can snap Max's outfits without screwing up. I can
sing him to sleep.
I
began to wonder what talents I had that had nothing to do with my
baby. Well, I could draw and sometimes see into people's lives with a
simple sketch. I could bake cinnamon buns from scratch. I knew all
the words to "A Whiter Shade of Pale." I could swim half a
mile without getting too tired; at least I
used
to
be able to do that. I could list the names of most of the cemeteries
in Chicago; I knew how to splice electrical cords; I understood the
difference between principal and interest payments on our mortgage. I
could get to Logan Airport via the T. I could fry an egg and flip it
in the pan without a spatula. I could make my husband laugh.

The
doorbell rang. I stuffed the list into my pocket and tucked Max under
my arm, especially unwilling to leave him alone after reading that
piece on killer mothers. The familiar brown suit and cap of the UPS
man was visible through the thin stained-glass pane of the door.
"Hello," I said. "It's nice to see you again."