Harvesting the Heart (40 page)

May
wanted her mother to move to California. Years of leading the cows to
the milking machines had chapped her mother's hands and permanently
bent her back. May brought home pictures of Los Angeles, where lemons
could grow in your backyard and where there wasn't any snow. Her
mother refused to go. And so at least three times a year, May would
start to run away.

She
would take all her money out of the bank and pack her bag with only
the most important things and put on what she called her traveling
outfit: a halter top and tight white shorts. She bought bus tickets
and railroad tickets and went to Madison, Springfield, even Chicago.
At the end of the day she always turned around and went back home.
She'd redeposit her money in the bank and unpack her suitcase and
wait for her mother to return from work. As if it had all been just a
lark, she'd tell her mother where she'd gone. And her mother would
say,
Chicago.
Now, that's farther than you went the last time.

It
was on one of these excursions to Chicago that she met my father in a
diner. Maybe she'd never finished her journey because she just needed
an extra push. Well, that's what my father gave her. She used to tell
the neighbors that the day she laid eyes on Patrick O'Toole, she knew
she was looking at her destiny. Of course she never mentioned if that
was good or bad.

She
married my father three months after she met him at the diner, and
they moved into the little row house I would grow up in. That was
1966. She took up smoking and became addicted to the color TV they
had bought with the money they got at their wedding. She watched
The
Beverly Hillbillies
and
That
Girl
and
told my father repeatedly that her calling was to be a script writer.
She practiced, writing comic routines on the backs of the brown paper
grocery bags when she'd unpacked the week's food. She told my father
that one day she was going to hit it big.

Because
she thought she had to start somewhere, she took a job at the
Tribune,
writing
the obituaries. When she found out that year that she was pregnant,
she insisted on keeping the job, saying she'd go back after she had
her maternity leave, because they needed the money.

She
took me to the office with her three times a week, and the other two
days I was watched by our next-door neighbor, an old woman who
smelled of camphor. My father said May was good as a mother, but she
never talked to me like I was a baby or did baby things like play
patty-cake or hide-and-seek. When I was only nine months old, my
father had come home to find me sitting at the threshold of the front
door, wearing a diaper and a string of pearls, my eyes and lips
colored with violet eye shadow and rouge. My mother had come running
out of the living room, laughing. "Doesn't she look perfect,
Patrick?" she'd said, and when my father shook his head, all the
life had gone out of her eyes. Things like that happened often when I
was a baby. My father said she was trying to make me grow up faster
so she'd have a good, close friend.

May
left us without saying goodbye on May 24, 1972. My father said that
what bothered him most about my mother's disappearance was that he
hadn't seen it coming. He'd been married to her for six years, and
he'd known so many details: the order in which she removed her
makeup at night, the salad dressings she hated, the shifting color of
her eyes when she needed to be held. But she had completely surprised
him. For a while he bought the Los Angeles papers at an international
newsstand, thinking she would certainly show up in Hollywood writing
sitcoms and he'd get wind of it. But as the years went on, he began
to suspect this: Surely anyone who could vanish without a trace could
have been lying all those years. My father believed that the
whole time they were married, she'd been getting together a plan. He
resolved that if she ever did come back he wouldn't let her in,
because he had been wounded beyond repair. Unfortunately, he still
found himself wondering from time to time if she was alive, if she
was all right. It was not that he expected to find word of her
anymore; he had lost his faith in love. After all, it had been twenty
years. If she appeared on his doorstep, she'd have been no more than
a stranger.

My
father came into my bedroom that night when the stars were starting
to lose themselves in the yawn of the morning. "You're awake,
aren't you," he said, his brogue thick from a lack of sleep.

"You
knew I would be," I said. He sat down, and I took his hand

in
my own and looked up at him. Sometimes I could not believe all he had
done for me. He had tried so hard.

"What
will you do when you find her?" he said.

I
sat up, pulling the covers with me. "I may not ever get that
far," I said. "It's been twenty years."

"Oh,
you'll find her, all right," he said. "That's the way it
should be." My father was a great believer in Fate, which he had
twisted to mean Divine Wisdom. As far as he was concerned, if God
meant for me to find May Renault, I would find her. "When you do
find her, though, you shouldn't be tellin' her things she doesn't
need to know." I stared at him, unsure of what he meant. "It's
too late, Paige," he said.

Then
I realized that maybe for the past two days I had been harboring a
rosy image of my father, my mother, and me all living again under
this roof in Chicago. My father was letting me know that wouldn't
happen, not on his end. And I knew that it couldn't happen on my end,
either. Even if my mother packed her bags and followed me home, my
home was no longer Chicago. My home was miles away, with a very
different man.

"Dad,"
I said, pushing away the thought, "tell me a story again."

I
had not heard my father's stories in years, not since I was fourteen
and decided I was too old to thrill to the exploits of muscled Black
Irish folk heroes possessing wit and ingenuity.

My
father smiled at my request. "I suppose you'll be wantin' a love
story," he said, and I laughed.

"There
aren't any," I said. "There are only love stories gone
wrong." The Irish had a story for every infidelity.
Cuchulainn—the Irish equivalent to Hercules—was married
but seduced every maiden in Ireland. Angus, the handsome god of love,
was the son of Dagda —king of the gods—and a mistress,
Boann, while her husband was away. Deirdre, forced to marry the old
king Conchobhar to avoid a prophecy of nationwide sorrow, eloped
instead with a handsome young warrior named Naoise to Scotland. When
messengers tracked and found the lovers, Conchobhar had Naoise killed
and commanded Deirdre to marry him. She never smiled again, and
eventually she dashed her brains out on a rock.

I
knew all these stories and their embellishments well enough to tell
them to myself, but all of a sudden I wanted to be tucked under the
covers in my childhood bedroom, listening to the tumbling brogue of
my father's voice as he sang me the stories of his homeland. I
settled under my blankets and closed my eyes. "Tell me the story
of Dechtire," I whispered.

My
father placed his cool hand on my forehead. '"Twas always your
favorite," he said. He lifted his chin and stared out at the sun
coming over the edge of the buildings across the street. "Well,
Cuchulainn was no ordinary Irishman, and he had no ordinary birth.
His mother was a beautiful woman named Dechtire, with hair as bright
as king's gold and eyes greener than rich Irish rye. She was married
to an Ulster chieftain, but she was too beautiful to escape the
notice of the gods. And so one day she was turned into a bird, an
even more beautiful creature than she had been before. She had
feathers white as snow and wore a wreath braided from the pink clouds
of mornin'; only her eyes were that same emerald green. She flew with
fifty of her handmaidens to an enchanted palace on a lush isle in the
sky, and there she sat, surrounded by her women, rufflin' and
settlin' her wings.

"So
nervous she was at first that she did not notice that she had been
changed back into the beautiful woman she had been; nor did she
notice the sun god, Lugh, standing before her and fillin' up her sky.
When she turned her head and looked at him, at the rays of light
spillin' from him in a bright halo, she immediately fell in love. She
lived there with Lugh for many years, and there she bore him a
son—Cuchulainn himself—but she eventually took her boy
and went back home."

I
opened my eyes, because this was the part I liked best, and even
before my father said it, I realized for the first time as an adult
why this story had always held such power for me.

"Dechtire's
chieftain husband, who had spent years starin' into the sky and just
waitin', welcomed her back, because after all, you never really stop
lovin' someone, now, and he raised Cuchulainn as his own."

In
all the years I had been listening, I had pictured my mother as
Dechtire and myself as Cuchulainn, victims of Fate living together on
a magical glittering isle. And yet I had also seen the wisdom of the
waiting Ulster chieftain. I had never stopped thinking that maybe one
day my mother was coming back to us too.

My
father finished and patted my hand. "I've missed you, Paige,"
he said. He stood up then and left. I blinked at the pale ceiling. I
wondered what it was like to have the best of both worlds. I wondered
what it might be like to feel the smooth tiles of the sun god's
palace beneath my running feet, to grow up in his afterglow.

Armed
with the wedding photo and all of my mother's history, I waved
goodbye to my father and got into my car. I waited until he
disappeared behind the peach door curtain, and then I sank my head
against the wheel. Now what was I going to do?

I
wanted to find a detective, someone who wouldn't laugh at me for
picking up a missing persons search twenty years after the fact. I
wanted to find someone who wouldn't charge me too much. But I didn't
have the slightest idea where to look.

As
I drove down the street, Saint Christopher's loomed on my left. I had
not been into a church in eight years; Max hadn't even been baptized.
This had surprised Nicholas at the time. "I thought you were
just a lapsed Catholic," he said, and I told him I no longer
believed in God. "Well," he had said, raising his eyebrows.
"For once we see eye to eye."

I
parked the car and pulled myself up the smooth stone steps of the
church. Several older women were in the left aisle, waiting for a
confessional to become vacant. As the minutes passed, the curtains
drew back one at a time, spitting out sinners who had yet to cleanse
their souls.

I
walked down the central aisle of the church, the one I'd always
believed I'd walk down as a bride. I sat in the first pew. The
stained glass cast a rippled puddle at my feet, the dappled image of
John the Baptist. I frowned at it, wondering how I had seen only the
splendor of the blues and greens when I was growing up, how I never
noticed that the window really blocked out the sun.

I
had given up my religion, just as I told Nicholas, but that didn't
mean it had given up on me. It was a two-way street: just because I
chose not to pray to Jesus and the Virgin Mary didn't mean they were
going to let me go without a fight. So even though I didn't attend
Mass, even though I hadn't been to confession in almost a decade, God
was still following me. I could feel Him like a whisper at my
shoulder, telling me it wasn't as easy as I thought to renounce my
faith. I could hear Him smiling gently when, in moments of
crisis—like Max's nosebleed—I automatically called out to
Him. It only made me angrier to know that no matter how forcefully I
pushed Him out of my head, I had little choice in the matter. He was
still charting my course; He was still pulling the strings.

I
knelt, thinking I should look the part, but I did not let prayers
form on my lips. Almost directly in front of me was the statue of the
Virgin I'd wreathed as May Queen.