Harvesting the Heart (45 page)

Jake
pulled me into his arms, awkwardly twisting my body around the center
console. "Now what do I do?" I said.

He
ran his hands over my ponytail, tugging just a little. "You go
to Farleyville, North Carolina," he said.

Finding
her had been the easy part. I was terrified of meeting my mother, a
woman I'd remade in the image of myself. I didn't know what was
worse: stirring up memories that might make me hate her at first
sight, or finding out that I was exactly like her, destined to keep
running, too unsure of myself to be somebody's mother. That was the
risk I was taking. In spite of what I had promised myself or

pleaded
to Nicholas, if I really had turned out like May O'Toole, I might
never feel whole enough to go home.

I
looked up at Jake, and the message was clear in my eyes. He smiled
gently. "You're on your own now."

I
remembered the last time he'd said that to me, silently, in slightly
different words. I lifted my chin, resolved. "Not for long,"
I said.

^chapter
24

_Nicholas

When
her voice came over the line, crackling at the edges, the bottom
dropped out of Nicholas's world. "Hello,

Nicholas,"
Paige said. "How are you?"

Nicholas
had been changing Max, and he had carried him to the phone in the
kitchen with his snaps all undone. He placed the baby on the kitchen
table, cradling his head on a stack of napkins. At the cadence of his
wife's voice, he had suddenly become very still. It was as if the air
had stopped circulating, as if the only motion was the quick kick of
Max's legs and the insistent pounding of blood behind Nicholas's
ears. Nicholas tucked the phone in the crook of his neck and laid the
baby facedown on the linoleum. He pulled the cord as far as it could
stretch. "Are you calling to apologize to me?"

When
she didn't answer at first, his mouth became dry. What if she was in
trouble? He had cut off her money. What if she'd had a problem with
the car, had had to hitchhike, was running away from

some
lunatic with a knife? "I'm in Chicago," Paige said. "I'm
going to find my mother."

Nicholas
ran his hand through his hair and almost laughed. This was a joke.
This did not happen to real people. This was something you'd see on
the Sunday Movie of the Week or read about in a
True
Confessions
magazine.
He had always known that Paige was haunted by her mother; she was so
guarded when speaking about her that she gave herself away. But why
now?

When
she didn't say anything, Nicholas stared out the tiny kitchen window
and wondered what Paige was wearing. He pictured her hair, loose and
framing her face, rich with the colors of autumn. He saw the ragged
pink tips of her bitten fingernails and the tiny indentation at the
base of her neck. He opened the refrigerator and let the cool gust of
air clear her image from his mind. He did not care. He simply would
not let himself.

When
he heard her ask about Max, his anger started to boil again.
"Apparently you don't give a damn," he said, and he walked
back toward Max, planning to slam down the phone. She was babbling
about how long she'd been away from Chicago, and suddenly Nicholas
was so tired he could not stand. He sank into the nearest chair and
thought of how today could possibly have been the worst day of his
life. "Let me tell you what I did today,
dear,"
Nicholas
said, biting off each word as if it were a bitter morsel. "After
getting up with Max three times during the night, I took him to the
hospital this morning. I had a quadruple bypass scheduled, which I
almost didn't complete because I couldn't stay on my feet." He
spit out the rest of his words, barely even hearing them himself.
"Someone could have died because of your need for a—what
did you call it?—a
vacation."
He
held the receiver away from his mouth. "Paige," he said
softly, "I don't want to see your face again." And closing
his eyes, he put the phone back in its cradle.

When
the phone rang again, minutes later, Nicholas picked it up and yelled
right into it, "Goddammit, I'm not going to say it again."

He
paused long enough to catch his breath, long enough for Alistair
Fogerty's control to snap on the other end of the line. The sharp
edge of his voice made Nicholas take a step backward. "Six
o'clock, Nicholas. In my office." And he hung up.

By
the time Nicholas drove back to the hospital, he had a splitting
headache. He had forgotten to bring a pacifier, and Max had yelled
the entire way. He trudged up the stairs to the fifth floor, the
administrative wing, because the elevator from the parking garage was
broken. Fogerty was in his office, systematically spitting into the
spider plants that edged his window. "Nicholas," he said,
"and, of course, Max. How could I forget? Everywhere Dr.
Prescott goes, the little Prescott isn't far behind."

Nicholas
continued to look at the potted plant that Alistair had been leaning
over. "Oh," Fogerty said, dismissing his actions with a
wave of his hand. "It's nothing. For unexplained reasons, my
office flora react favorably to sadism." He stared at Nicholas
with the predatory eyes of a hawk. "What we are here to
talk about, however, is not me, Nicholas, but you."

Nicholas
had not known what he was going to say until that moment. But before
Alistair could open his mouth about the hospital not being a day care
facility to meet Nicholas's whims, he sat in a chair and settled Max
more comfortably on his lap. He didn't give a damn about what
Alistair had to tell him. The son of a bitch didn't have a heart.
"I'm glad you wanted to see me, Alistair," he said, "since
I'll be taking a leave of absence."

"A
what?"
Fogerty
stood and moved closer to Nicholas. Max giggled and reached out
his hand toward the pen in Fogerty's lab coat pocket.

"A
week should do it. I can have Joyce reschedule my planned surgeries;
I'll double up the next week if I have to. And the emergencies
can be handled by the residents. What's-his-name, that little skunky
one with the black eyes—Wollachek—he's decent. I won't
expect pay, of course. And"—Nicholas smiled—"I'll
come back better than ever."

"Without
the infant," Fogerty added.

Nicholas
bounced Max on his knee. "Without the infant."

Saying
it all out loud lifted a tremendous pressure from Nicholas's chest.
He had no idea what he'd do in the span of a week, but surely he
could find a nanny or a full-time sitter to stay in the house. At the
very least, he could figure Max out—which cry meant he was
hungry and which meant he was tired; how to keep his undershirts from
riding up to his armpits; how to open the portable stroller. Nicholas
knew he was grinning like an idiot, and he didn't give a damn. For
the first time in three days, he felt on top of the world.

Fogerty's
mouth contorted into a black, wiry line. "This will not reflect
well upon your record," he said. "I had expected more from
you."

I
had expected more from you.
The
words brought back the image of his father, standing over him like an
impenetrable basilisk and holding out a prep school physics exam
bearing the only grade lower than an A that Nicholas had received in
his whole life.

Nicholas
grabbed Max's leg so tightly that the baby started to cry. "I'm
not a goddamned machine, Alistair," he yelled. "I can't do
it all." He tossed the diaper bag over his shoulder and walked
to the threshold of the office,
alistair
fogerty
,
it said on the door,
director,
cardiothoracic surgery
.
Maybe Nicholas's name would never make it to that door, but that
wasn't going to change his mind. You couldn't put the cart before the
horse. "I'll see you," he said quietly, "in a week."

Nicholas
sat in the park, surrounded by mothers. It was the third day he'd
come, and he was triumphant. Not only had he discovered how to open
the portable stroller; he'd figured out a way to hook on the diaper
bag so that even when he lifted Max out, it wouldn't tip over. Max
was too little to go into the sandbox with the other kids, but he
seemed to like the sturdy infant swings. Nikki, a pretty blond woman
with legs that went on forever, smiled up at him. "And how's our
little Max doing today?" she said.

Nicholas
didn't understand why Paige wasn't like these three women. They all
met in the park at the same time and talked animatedly about
stretch marks and sales on diapers and the latest gastrointestinal
viruses running through the day care centers. Two of them were on
maternity leave, and one was staying home with the kids until they
went to school. Nicholas was fascinated by them. They could see with
the backs of their heads, knowing by instinct when their kid had
swatted another in the face. They could pick out their own child's
cry from a dozen others. They effortlessly juggled bottles and
jackets and bibs, and their babies' pacifiers never fell to the dirt.
These were skills, Nicholas believed, that he could never learn in a
million years.

The
first day he'd brought Max, he had been sitting alone on a chipped
green bench, watching the women across the way spoon sand over the
bare legs of the toddlers. Judy had spoken to him first. "We
don't get many dads," she had said. "And never on
weekdays."

"I'm
on vacation," Nicholas had replied uncomfortably. Max then let
forth a burp that shook his entire body, and everyone laughed.

That
first day, Judy and Nikki and Fay had set him straight about day care
and nanny services. "You can't buy good help these days,"
Fay had said. "A British nanny—and that's the one you
want—they take six months to a year to get. And even so, didn't
you see
Donahue?
The
ones with the highest references could still drop your kid on the
head or abuse her or God knows what."

Judy,
who was going back to work in a month, had found a day care center
when she was six months pregnant. "And even then," she had
said, "I was only on a waiting list."

And
so Nicholas's week was almost up, and he still didn't know what to do
with the baby when Monday came. On the other hand, it had been worth
it—these women had taught him more about his own son in the
span of three days than he had ever hoped to know. When Nicholas went
home from the park, he almost felt as if he was in control.

Nicholas
pushed Max higher on the swing, but he was whining. He'd been crabby
for the past three days. "I called your baby-sitter," he
told Nikki, "but she's got a summer job as a counselor and
said she can't sit for me until the end of August, when camp lets
out."

"Well,
I'll keep asking around for you," Nikki said. "I bet you
can find somebody." Her little girl, a thirteen-month-old with
wispy strawberry-blond bangs, fell on her face in the sandbox and
came up crying. "Oh, Jessica." Nikki sighed. "You've
got to figure out this walking thing."

He
liked Nikki best. She was funny and smart, and she made being a
mother seem as easy as chewing gum. Nicholas pulled Max out of the
swing and sat down on the edge of the sandbox, letting Max squish the
sand through his toes. Max looked up at Judy and began to scream. She
held out her hands. "Let me," she said.