Harvesting the Heart (52 page)

I
went up to the bathroom and undressed. I ran hot water in the
claw-footed tub and thought about how good it would feel on the
clenched muscles of my thighs. Riding had made me aware of places on
my body that I hadn't known existed. I brushed my teeth and stepped
neatly into the tub. I leaned my head back against the enamel rim,
closed my eyes, and tried to will away thoughts of my mother.

Instead
I pictured Max, who would be exactly three and a half months old the
next day. I tried to remember the milestones he should have been
reaching now, according to that
First
Year
book
Nicholas had brought me. Solid foods, that was the only one I could
remember, and I wondered what he thought of bananas, applesauce,
strained peas. I tried to imagine his tongue pushing out against a
spoon, that unfamiliar object. I smoothed one hand over the other and
tried to remember his silky powdered touch.

When
I opened my eyes, my mother was standing over the bathtub,
wearing a yellow wrapper. I tried to cross my arms over my chest and
to twist my legs, but it was too small a tub. A flush of
embarrassment ran from my belly up to my cheeks. "Don't,"
she said. "You've turned out quite beautiful."

I
stood up abruptly, grabbing a towel and sloshing water all over the
floor in my hurry. "I don't think so," I murmured, and I
threw open the bathroom door. I ran to my little-girl room, letting
the steam steal down the hall to veil my image from my mother.

When
I first woke up, before I was fully conscious, I thought that they
were at it again. I could so clearly hear in my imagination the
voices of my mother and father attacking, tangling, retreating.

They
were not fights; they were never really fights. They were triggered
by the simplest things: a burned
souffle,
a
priest's sermon, a supper my father came home to late. They were only
half-arguments, started by my mother and quelled by my father. He
never picked up the gauntlet. He'd let her scream and accuse, and
then, when the sobs came, his soft words would cover her like a soft
blanket.

It
didn't scare me. I used to lie in bed and listen to the scene that
had been replayed so many times I knew the dialogue by heart.
Slam:
that
was my mother at the bedroom door, and seconds later it would open
again, once my father came upstairs. In the months after my mother
left, when I was doing my remembering, I thought of the arguments and
I added the pictures I could never see, fashioning them like actors
in a grainy black-and-white film. So, for example, here I envisioned
my parents back-to-back, my mother tugging a brush through her hair
and my father unbuttoning his shirt. "You don't understand,"
my mother said, her words always hitched and high, always the same.
"I can't do it all. You expect me to do everything."

"Sssh,
May," my father murmured. "You take it so hard." I
imagined him turning to her and grasping her shoulders, like
Bogart in
Casablanca.
"Nobody
expects anything."

"Yes
you do," my mother screamed, and the bed creaked as she stood. I
could hear her pacing, footsteps like rain. "I can't do anything
right, Patrick. I'm tired. I'm just bone-tired. Dear God, I just wish
—I want—"

"What
do you want,
a
mhulrndn?"

"I
don't know," my mother said. "If I knew, I wouldn't be
here."

Then
she would start crying, and I would listen to the gentle sounds that
drifted through the wall: the butterfly kisses and the slip of my
father's hands over my mother's skin and the charged quiet that I
later learned was the sound of making love.

Sometimes
there were variations—like when my mother begged my father to
go away with her, just the two of them, sailing in a dugout canoe to
Fiji. Another time she scratched and clawed at my dad and made him
sleep on the couch. Once she said that she still believed the world
was flat and that she was hanging at the edge.

My
father was an insomniac, and after these episodes he'd get up in the
dead of the night and creep down to his workshop. As if on cue, I'd
tiptoe out of my room, and I would crawl under the covers of their
big bed. It was like that in our family; someone was always

filling
in for someone else. I'd press my cheek against my mother's back and
hear her murmur my name, and I held her so close my own body trembled
with her fear.

I
had heard the cries again tonight; that's what made me wake so
suddenly. But my father's voice was missing. For a moment I couldn't
place the crowded wallpaper, the intruding moon. I slipped out of bed
and turned in at the bathroom, then I redirected myself and walked
till I stood at the threshold of my mother's room.

I
hadn't dreamed it. She was curled beneath the covers, her fists
pressed to her eyes. She was crying so hard she couldn't catch her
breath.

I
shifted from one foot to the other, nervously wringing the sleeve of
my nightshirt. I just couldn't do it. After all, so much had
happened. I wasn't a four-year-old child, and she was no more
than a stranger. She was practically nothing to me.

I
remembered how I had flinched at her touch this afternoon, and how
annoyed I had been when she took my arrival as easily as she'd take
an afternoon tea. I remembered seeing my face reflected in her eyes
when she was talking about my father. I considered the room, that
god-awful room, that she had had waiting for me.

Even
as I crossed the floor I was listing all the reasons I shouldn't.
You
don't know her. She doesn't know you. She shouldn't be forgiven.
I
crawled under the covers. With a sigh that unraveled the years, I put
my arms around my mother and willingly slid back to where I'd
started.

^chapter
28

_Nicholas

At
the end of their other three dates, Nicholas had gone no further than
gently cupping her breasts, and from her quiet trembling he knew that
was enough. In spite of the fact that she'd run away from home, that
she was not college educated, and that she was a waitress in a diner,
to Nicholas, Paige O'Toole was as chaste as they came. When he
pictured her, he thought of the image of Psyche from the White Rock
ginger ale label, a girl-woman kneeling on a boulder, staring at her
reflection as if she was surprised to see it in the water below. The
way Paige was shy to smile, the instinctive habit she had of covering
her body when Nicholas touched her—it all added up. They had
never spoken of it; Nicholas wasn't like that. But he believed
in the strength of coincidence, and surely there was a reason he had
been in Mercy when she had begun to work there: Paige did not know
it, but she had been waiting for him all her life.

"You
look wonderful," Nicholas said, kissing the spot below her left
ear. They were waiting for the elevator.

Paige
smoothed her hands over the dress, tugging as if it didn't fit her
like a second skin. "This is Doris's," she admitted. "I
didn't have any couture, so we went through her closet. Would you
believe this is from 1959? We spent the whole afternoon taking in the
seams."

"And
the shoes?" The bell rang, and Nicholas took Paige's elbow to
lead her into the elevator.

Paige
looked straight at him, challenging. "I bought them. I figured
I deserved something new."

Nicholas
was sometimes surprised by the fury she held in check. When she
believed she was right, she would fight to the end to make you see
her side, continuing emphatically even after she had proof that she
was wrong.

When
the elevator touched ground level, Nicholas waited for Paige to step
out first, as he'd been taught in eighth grade. But when she didn't,
he turned to face her, and he saw again the expression she often had
when looking at Nicholas. It was as if he filled up her entire world;
as if there was nothing he could do wrong. "What is it?"
Nicholas said, taking her hand.

Paige
shook her head. "It's just you." She took two steps and
then looked back at him, smiling. "If you had lived in Chicago,
you would have passed me on the street."

"No
I wouldn't," Nicholas said.

Paige
laughed. "You're absolutely right. You wouldn't have been caught
dead
on
Taylor Street."

Nicholas
couldn't convince Paige that it didn't matter to him where she had
come from, where she was working, whether she had a diploma. The one
important thing was where she was going, and Nicholas was planning to
make sure that she would go there with him. It was one of the reasons
he'd told her to dress to the nines and had booked a reservation at
the Empress in the Hyatt Regency on the river. They'd head up to the
Spinnaker afterward, the revolving bar, and then he'd take her home
and they'd sit beneath the street.-lights of Porter Square, kissing
until their lips were swollen and bruised. Then Nicholas would drive
back to his own apartment in Cambridge, and he would lie naked
beneath the ceiling fan in the bedroom, lazily tracing circles on the
sheets and imagining the silk of Paige's skin underneath his fingers.

"Where
are we going?" Paige asked as she slipped into the car.

Nicholas
grinned at her. "A surprise," he said.

Paige
fastened her seat belt and smoothed the wrinkles out of the black
skirt stretched over her lap. "Probably not McDonald's,"
she said. "They've relaxed the dress code."

The
tuxedoed maitre d' at the restaurant bowed to Nicholas and led the
way to a tiny corner table that abutted a wall of glass. The basin of
the Charles River was bathed in the fuchsia and orange of sunset.
Playing across the surface like skittering butterflies were the
distant billowed sails of the MIT sailing club. Paige drew in her
breath and pressed her palms to the glass for a second, leaving a
neat steamed print when she took them away. "Oh, Nicholas,"
she said, "this is great."

Nicholas
picked up the black matchbook in the crystal ashtray, embossed with
Paige's initials in gold lettering. It was one of the reasons he'd
chosen the Empress instead of Cafe" Budapest or the Ritz-

Carlton;
this was one of their touches. Nicholas handed the matches to Paige.
"You might want to hang on to these," he said.