Harvesting the Heart (63 page)

to
lean against the doorframe and let the room settle before his memory
returns. Maybe he believed that at some point he'd stop playing the
game and let Paige back; but he can see that isn't going to happen.
She's come for Max, only for Max, and something about that is driving
him crazy. The feeling is like a fist being driven into his gut, and
he knows exactly why. He still loves her. As stupid as it seems, as
much as he hates her for what she has done, he can't quite stop that.

He
peeks out the window and sees Paige settled in his overcoat and a
sleeping bag she's borrowed from some goddamned neighbor. Part of him
hates her for being given that comfort, and part of him hates himself
for wanting to give her even more. With Paige, there have never been
easy answers, only impulses, and Nicholas is beginning to wonder
if it has all been a huge mistake. He can't keep doing this; not to
himself and not to Max. There has to be a reconciliation or a clean
break.

The
moon slips under the front door, filling the hallway with a spectral
glow. Suddenly exhausted, Nicholas pulls himself up the stairs. He
will have to sleep on it. Sometimes things look different in the
morning. He crawls into bed with his clothes still on and envisions
Paige lying like a sacrifice beneath that stifling moon. His last
conscious thought is of his bypass patients, of the moment during
surgery when he stops their hearts from beating. He wonders if they
ever feel it.

^chapter
3
5

Paige

Anna
Maria Santana, whom I had never met, was born and

died
on
March
30, 1985.
OUR
FOUR HOUR ANGEL,
the

tombstone
reads, still fairly new among the grave markers in the Cambridge
graveyard I had last walked through when I was pregnant. I do not
know why I didn't notice Anna Maria's grave back then. It is tidy and
trimmed, and violets grow at the edges. Someone comes here often to
see their little girl.

It
does not pass my notice that Anna Maria Santana died at just about
the same time I conceived my first child. Suddenly I wish I had
something to leave—a silver rattle or a pink teddy bear—and
then I realize that both Anna Maria and my own baby would have been
eight now, growing out of baby gifts and into Barbies and bicycles.
I hear my mother's voice:
You
were stuck in my mind at five years old. Before I knew it, you were
all grown up.

Something
has to come to a head soon. Nicholas and I can't keep

stepping
around each other, moving closer and then ripping apart as though
we're following a strange tribal dance. I have not even attempted
going to Mass General today, and I do not plan to go to the
Prescotts' to see Max. I can't push Nicholas any more, because he is
at the breaking point, but that makes me restless. I won't just sit
around and let him decide my future the way I used to. But I can't
make him see what I want him to see.

I
am in the graveyard to clear my mind—it worked for my mother,
so I hope it will work for me. But seeing Anna Maria's tombstone
doesn't help much. I have told Nicholas the truth about leaving, but
I still haven't really come clean. What if, when I get home, Nicholas
is standing on the porch with open arms, willing to pick up where we
left off? Can I let myself make the same mistakes all over again?

I
read a "Dear Abby" column years ago in which a man had
written about having an affair with his secretary. It had been over
for years, but he had never told his wife, and although they had a
happy marriage, he felt he should reveal what had happened. I was
surprised by Abby's answer.
You're
opening a can of worms,
Abby
wrote.
What
she does not know she cannot be hurt by.

I
do not know how long I can wait. I would never take Max and flee in
the night, like I know Nicholas is thinking. I couldn't do it to Max,
and I especially couldn't do it to Nicholas. Being with Max for three
months has softened him around the edges. The Nicholas I left in July
would never have crept around a corner on his hands and knees,
pretending to be a grizzly bear to entertain his son. But
practically, I cannot keep sleeping on the front lawn. It's
mid-October, and already the leaves have come off the trees. We've
had a frost at night. Soon there will be snow.

I
walk to Mercy, hoping to get a cup of coffee from Lionel. The first
familiar face is Doris's, and she drops two blue-plate specials at a
booth and comes to hug me. "Paige!" She cries into the
kitchen pass-through: "Paige is back again!"

Lionel
runs in front and makes a big show of sitting me at the counter on a
cracked red stool. The diner is smaller than I have remembered
it, and the walls are a sickly shade of yellow. If I did not know the
place, I would not feel comfortable eating here. "Where's that
precious baby?" Marvela says, leaning in front of me so that her
earbobs sway against the edges of my hair. "You got to have
pictures, at least."

I
shake my head and gratefully accept the cup of coffee that Doris
brings. Lionel ignores the small line that has formed by the cash
register and sits down beside me. "That doctor boy of yours came
in here some months back. Thought you'd up and run off, and come to
us for help." Lionel stares straight at me, and the line of his
jagged scar darkens with emotion. "I tell him you ain't that
kind of person," he says. "I know these things."

He
looks for a moment as if he is going to hug me, but then he remembers
himself and hoists his frame off the neighboring stool. "What
you lookin' at?" he snaps at Marvela, who is wringing her hands
beside me. "We got us a business, sweet pea," he says to
me, and he stomps toward the cash register.

When
the waitresses and Lionel have settled back into their routines,
I let myself look around. The menus haven't changed, though the
prices have. They have been rewritten on tiny fluorescent stickers.
The men's bathroom is still out of order, as it was the last day I
had worked there. And tacked above the cash register, dangling above
the counter, are all the portraits I drew of the customers.

I
cannot believe Lionel hasn't thrown them out. Surely some of the
people have died by now. I scan the portraits: Elma the bag lady;
Hank the chemistry professor; Marvela and Doris and Marilyn Monroe;
Nicholas.
Nicholas.
I
stand up, and then I crawl onto the countertop to get a closer look.
I crouch with my hands pressed against Nicholas's portrait, feeling
the stares of the customers. Lionel and Marvela and Doris, true
friends, pretend they do not notice.

I
remember this one very well. In the background I had drawn the face
of a little boy, sitting in a twisted tree and holding the sun. At
first I thought I'd drawn my favorite Irish legend, the one about
Cuchulainn leaving the sun god's palace when his mother went home to
her original husband. I did not understand why I would have drawn
this particular scene, something from my own childhood, on
Nicholas's portrait, but I thought it had something to do with
my running away. I had stared at the drawing, and I imagined my
father telling me the story while he smoked a bayberry pipe. At the
time, I could easily see my father's hands, studded with glue and
bits of twine from his workshop, waving in the air as he mimicked the
passage of Cuchulainn back to ordinary earth. I wondered if
Cuchulainn missed that other life.

Months
afterward, when Nicholas and I were sitting in the diner and looking
at his portrait, I told him the story of Dechtire and the sun god. He
laughed. When I'd drawn it he had seen something completely different
in the picture. He said he'd never even
heard
of
Cuchulainn, but that as a kid he believed that if he climbed high
enough he could truly catch the sun. I
guess,
he
said,
in
a way, we all do.

I
unlock the house and spend a full hour pulling dirty socks and
Onesies and fuzzy blanket sleepers from unimaginable places: the
microwave, the wine rack, a soup tureen. When I have gathered a
pile of laundry, I start a wash. In the meantime I dust the living
room and the bedroom and scrub the white counters in the bathroom. I
scour the toilet and vacuum the skin-colored rugs and try my best to
get the jelly stains off the ivory tiles in the kitchen. I change the
sheets on the bed and the ones in Max's crib, and I empty his diaper
pail and spray perfume into the carpet so that some of the smell is
masked. All the while, the TV is on, tuned to the soap operas I
watched when my mother's ankle was first broken. I tell Devon to
leave her husband and I cry when Alana's baby is stillborn and I
watch, riveted, a love scene between a rich girl named Leda and
Spider, a street-smart hustler. I am just setting the table for
two when the telephone rings, and out of force of habit, I pick it
up.

"Paige,"
the voice says. "I can't
tell
you
how glad I am to find you."

"It's
not what you think," I say, hedging, while I try to figure out
who is on the other end.

"Aren't
you coming to see Max? He's been waiting all day." Astrid. Who
else would call? I don't have any friends in this city. "I—I
don't know," I say. "I'm cleaning the house."

"Nicholas
didn't say that you'd moved back in," she says. "I
haven't."

"Paige,"
Astrid says, her voice as sharp as the edges of her black-and-white
stills. "We need to have a little talk."

She
is waiting for me at the front door with Max. He's dressed in
Osh-Kosh overalls and is wearing the tiniest Nike sneakers I have
ever seen. "Imelda has coffee waiting for us in the parlor,"
she says, handing Max over to me. She turns and walks into the
imposing hall, expecting me to follow.

The
parlor, just a room full of toys now, is much less intimidating than
it was the first time I was there with Nicholas. If the rocking horse
and the Porta-Crib had been there eight years ago, I wonder if things
would have turned out this way. I set Max down on the floor, and he
immediately gets onto his hands and his knees, rocking back and
forth. "Look," I say, breathless. "He's going to
crawl!"

Astrid
hands me a cup and saucer. "Not to burst your bubble, but he's
been doing that for two weeks. He can't seem to figure out the
coordination." I watch Max bounce for a while; I accept cream
and sugar. "I have a proposition for you," Astrid says.

I
look up, a little afraid. "I don't know," I say.

Astrid
smiles. "You haven't even heard it yet." She moves a
fraction of an inch closer to me. "Listen. It's freezing
these nights, and I know you can't stay much longer on your lawn. God
only knows how long it's going to take my stubborn son to come to his
senses. I want you to move in here. Robert and I have discussed it;
we have more rooms than a small hotel. Now, out of deference to
Nicholas, I'll have to ask you to leave during the day, so that Max
is still in my care—he's a bit uptight about you being around
him, as you've probably noticed. But I don't see why every now and
then you and I and Max might not just cross paths."

I
gape at Astrid, my mouth hanging open. This woman is offering me a
gift. "I don't know what to say," I murmur, tugging my gaze
away to rest on Max on the floor. A million things are running
through my mind:
There
has to be a catch. She's worked something out with Nicholas,
something to prove that I'm an unfit mother, something to keep me
even further away from Max. Or else she wants something in return.
But what could I possibly give her?