Read Harvesting the Heart Online
Authors: Jodi Picoult
Tags: #Women - United States, #Family Life, #General, #Literary, #Mystery fiction, #Fiction, #Domestic fiction, #Women
"Perhaps
the past seven years haven't clarified my position at the hospital
for you," Fogerty said. "I'm the head of cardiothoracic,
not day care."
"Alistair—"
"Nicholas,"
Fogerty said, "this is
your
problem.
Good night." And he hung up the phone.
Nicholas
stared at the receiver in his hand in disbelief. He had less than
twelve hours to find a baby-sitter. "Shit," he said,
rummaging through the kitchen drawers. He tried to find an
address book of Paige's, but there seemed to be nothing around.
Finally, tucked against the microwave, he found a thin black binder.
He opened it and riffled through the pages, alphabetically
thumb-indexed. He looked for unfamiliar female names, friends of
Paige's he might prevail upon. But there were only three
numbers: Dr. Thayer, the obstetrician; Dr. Rourke, the
pediatrician; and Nicholas's beeper number. It was as if Paige didn't
know anyone else.
Max
began to cry, and Nicholas realized he hadn't changed the baby's
diaper since Paige disappeared. He carried him into the nursery,
holding him away from his chest as if he might get soiled. Nicholas
pulled at the crotch of the playsuit until the snaps all freed
themselves, and then he untaped the disposable diaper. He went to
reach for another and was holding it in the air, trying to determine
if the little Mickey and Donald faces went in the front or the back,
when he felt something warm strike him. A thin arc of urine jetted
from between Max's kicking legs and soaked Nicholas's neck and
collar.
"God
damn you," Nicholas said, looking squarely at his son but
speaking to Paige. He loosely tacked on the new diaper and left the
playsuit to hang free, unwilling to bother with the snaps. "We're
going to feed you," Nicholas said, "and then you're going
to sleep."
Nicholas
didn't realize until he reached the kitchen that Max's primary source
of food was hundreds of miles away. He seemed to remember Paige
mentioning formula. He put Max into the high chair wedged into a
corner of the kitchen and pulled cereals, pasta, and canned fruit
from the cabinets in an effort to find the Enfamil.
It
was a powdered mix. He knew something should be sterilized, but there
wasn't time for that now. Max was starting to cry, and without even
checking him, Nicholas put the water up to boil and found three empty
plastic bottles that he assumed were clean. He read the back of the
Enfamil bucket. One scoop for every two ounces. Surely in this
kitchen he could find a measuring cup.
He
looked under the sink and over the refrigerator. Finally, under a
collection of spatulas and slotted spoons he found one. He tapped his
foot impatiently, willing the teakettle to whistle. When it did he
poured eight ounces of water into each bottle and added four scoops
of powder. He did not know that a baby Max's age could not finish an
eight-ounce bottle in one sitting. All that Nicholas cared about was
getting Max fed, getting Max to go to sleep, and then crawling into
bed himself.
Tomorrow
he'd find a way to keep Max at the hospital with him. If he showed up
at the OR with a baby on his shoulder,
someone
would
give him a hand. He couldn't think about it now. His head was
pounding, and he was so dizzy he could barely stand.
He
stashed two bottles in the refrigerator and took the third to Max.
Except he couldn't find Max. He'd left him in the high chair, but
suddenly he was gone. "Max," Nicholas called. "Where'd
you go, buddy?" He walked out of the kitchen and ran up the
stairs, so wiped out he half expected his son to be standing at the
bathroom sink, shaving, or in the nursery getting dressed for a date.
Then he heard the cries.
It
had never occurred to him that Max couldn't sit up well enough to go
into a high chair. What the hell was the thing doing in the kitchen,
then? Max had slipped down in the seat until his head was wedged
under the plastic tray. Nicholas tugged at the tray, unsure which
latch would release it, and finally pulled hard enough to dislodge
the whole front section. He tossed it across the room. As soon as he
picked up his son, the baby quieted, but Nicholas couldn't help
noticing the red welted pattern pressed into Max's cheek by the
screws and grooves of the high chair.
"I
only left him for half a second," Nicholas muttered, and in the
back of his mind he heard Paige's soft, clear words:
That's
all it takes.
Nicholas
hiked the baby higher on his shoulder, hearing Max's muffled
sigh. He thought about the nosebleed and the way Paige's voice shook
when she told Nicholas about it. Half a second.
He
took the baby into the bedroom and fed him the bottle in the dark.
Max fell asleep almost immediately. When Nicholas realized that the
baby's lips had stopped moving, he pulled away the bottle and
adjusted Max so that he was cradled in his arms. Nicholas knew that
if he stood up to bring Max to his crib, he'd wake up. He had a
vision of Paige nursing Max in bed and falling asleep.
You
don't want him to get used to sleeping here,
he'd
told her.
You
don't want to create bad habits.
And
she'd stumble into the nursery, holding her breath so the baby
wouldn't wake.
Nicholas
unbuttoned his shirt with one hand and settled a pillow under the arm
that held Max. He closed his eyes. He was bone tired; he felt worse
after taking care of Max than he did after performing open-heart
surgery. There were similarities: both required quick thinking, both
required intense concentration. But he was good at one, and as for
the other, well, he didn't have a clue.
This
was all Paige's fault. If it was her idea of some stupid little
lesson, she wasn't going to get away with it. Nicholas didn't care if
he never saw Paige again. Not after she'd pulled this stunt.
Out
of nowhere, he remembered being eleven years old, his lip split by a
bully in a playground fight. He had lain on the ground until the
other kids left, but he would not let them see him cry. Later, when
he'd told his parents about it, his mother had held her hand against
his cheek and smiled at him.
He
would not let Paige see him cry, or complain, or be in any way
inconvenienced. Two could play the same game. And he'd do what he did
to that bully—he'd ignored him so completely in the days
following the fight that other children began to follow Nicholas's
lead, and in the end the boy had come to Nicholas and apologized,
hoping he'd win back his friends.
Of
course, that was a kids' competition. This was his life. What Paige
had done was somewhere beyond forgiveness.
Nicholas
expected to toss and turn, racked by black thoughts of his wife. But
he was asleep before he reached the pillow. He did not remember, the
next morning, how quickly sleep had come. He did not remember the
dream he had of his first Christmas with Paige, when she'd given him
the children's game Operation! and they'd played for hours. He did
not remember the coldest part of the night, when out of pure instinct
Nicholas had pulled his son closer and given him his heat.
chapter
2
1
Paige
My
mother's clothes didn't fit. They were too long in the waist and
tight at the chest. They were made for someone taller and
thinner. When my father brought up the
old
trunk filled with my mother's things, I had held each musty scrap of
silk and cotton as if I were touching her own hand. I pulled on a
yellow halter top and seersucker walking shorts, and then I peeked
into the mirror. Reflected back was the same face I'd always seen.
This surprised me. By now my mother and I had grown so similar in my
mind, I believed in some ways I had
become
her.
When
I came back down to the kitchen, my father was sitting at the table.
"This is all I have, Paige," he said, holding up the
wedding photo I knew so well. It had sat on the night table beside
my father's bed my whole life. In it, my father was looking at my
mother, holding her hand tightly. My mother was smiling, but her
eyes betrayed her. I had spent years looking at that photo, trying
to figure out what my
mother's
eyes reminded me of. When I was fifteen, it had come to me. A raccoon
trapped by headlights, the minute before the car strikes.
"Dad,"
I said, running my finger over his younger image, "what about
her other stuff? Her birth certificate and her wedding ring, old
photos, things like that?"
"She
took them. It isn't as if she died, you know. She planned leavin',
right on down to the last detail."
I
poured myself a cup of coffee and offered some to him. He shook his
head. My father moved uncomfortably in his chair; he did not like the
topic of my mother. He hadn't wanted me to look for her— that
much was clear—but when he saw how stubborn I was about it, he
said he'd do what he could for me. Still, when I asked him questions,
he wouldn't look up at me. It was almost as if after all these years
he blamed himself.
"Were
you happy?" I said quietly. Twenty years was a long time, and I
had been only five. Maybe there had been arguments I hadn't heard
behind sealed bedroom doors, or a physical blow that had been
regretted even as it found its mark.
"I
was very happy," my father said. "I never would have
guessed May was goin' to leave us."
The
coffee I'd been drinking seemed suddenly too bitter to finish. I
poured it down the sink. "Dad," I said, "how come you
never tried to find her?"
My
father stood up and walked to the window. "When I was very
little and we were livin' in Ireland, my own father used to cut the
fields three times each summer for haying. He had an old tractor, and
he'd start on the edge of one field, circlin' tighter and tighter in
a spiral until he got almost dead center. Then my sisters and I would
run into the grass that still stood and we'd chase out the
cottontails that had been pushed to the middle by the tractor. They'd
come out in a flurry, the lot of them, jumpin' faster than we could
run. Once —I think it was the summer before we came over here—I
caught one by the tail. I told my da I was going to keep it like a
pet, and he got very serious and told me that wouldn't be fair to the
rabbit, since God hadn't made it for that purpose. But I built a
hutch and gave it hay and water and carrots. The next day it was
dead, lyin' on its side. My father came up beside me and said that
some things were just meant to stay free." He turned around and
faced me, his eyes brilliant and dark. "That," he said, "is
why I never went lookin' for your mother."
I
swallowed. I imagined what it would be like to hold a butterfly in
your hands, something bejeweled and treasured, and to know that
despite your devotion it was dying by degrees. "Twenty years,"
I whispered. "You must hate her so much."
"Aye."
My father stood and grasped my hands. "At least as much as I
love her."
My
father told me that my mother was born Maisie Marie Renault, in
Biloxi, Mississippi. Her father had tried to be a farmer, but most of
his land was swamp, so he never made much money. He died in a combine
accident that was heavily questioned by the insurance company, and
when she was widowed, Maisie's mother sold the farm and put the money
in the bank. She went to Wisconsin and worked for a dairy. Maisie
began calling herself May when she was fifteen. She finished high
school and got a job in a department store called Hersey's, right on
Main Street in Sheboygan. She had stolen her mother's emergency
money from the crock pot, bought herself a linen dress and alligator
pumps, then told the personnel director at Hersey's that she was
twenty-one and had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin.
Impressed by her cool demeanor and her smart outfit, they put her in
charge of the makeup department. She learned how to apply blusher and
foundation, how to make eyebrows where there were none, how to make
moles disappear. She became an expert in the art of deception.