Harvesting the Heart (8 page)

They
walked from Mercy to his apartment in total silence, and Nicholas was
starting to hate himself. Paige wasn't acting like Paige. He'd ruined
it, whatever it was that he had liked about her. Nicholas was so
nervous he couldn't fit the key into the door, and he didn't know
what he was nervous about. When she stepped into the apartment
he held his breath until he heard her say quietly, "My room was
never this neat." And then he relaxed and leaned against the
wall. He answered, "I could learn to live messy."

Conversations
like that in the first hours after he proposed to Paige made Nicholas
realize that there was a great deal he still did not know about her.
He knew the big things, the sort of things that make up the talk at
dinner parties: the name of her high school; how she became
interested in drawing; the street she had lived on in Chicago.
But he did not know the little details, the things only a lover would
know—What had she named the mutt her father made her give back
to the animal shelter? Who taught her to throw a sliding curve ball?
Which constellations could she pick out in the night sky? Nicholas
wanted to know it all. He was filled with a greed that made him wish
he could erase the past, oh, six years of his life and relive them
with Paige, so he wouldn't feel he was starting in the middle.

"This
is all I've got," Nicholas said to Paige, holding out a box of
stale graham crackers. He had sat her down on the black leather ouch
and turned on the halogen lights. She had not said whether or not she
would marry him, a detail that Nicholas had not overlooked, To all
intents and purposes, he should have wanted her to pass off his
proposal as a joke, since he still wasn't sure what had prompted him
to make such a rash statement. But he knew Paige hadn't taken it
lightly, and to tell the truth, he wanted to know her answer. God, he
was all knotted up inside over the prospect of her laughing in his
face, which told him more than he cared to admit.

Suddenly
he wanted to get her talking. He figured if she would just stop
looking at him as though she'd never seen him before in her life, if
she would start telling him about Chicago or quote one of Lionel's
little epigrams or introduce any other favorite subject of
conversation, then she might happen to mention that, yes, she
wouldn't mind being his wife.

"I'm
not really hungry," Paige said. Her eyes roamed the walls of the
apartment, the dark shadows of the hallway, and Nicholas began
berating himself for scaring the hell out of her. She was only
eighteen. No wonder she was shying away. Sure, he wanted to be near
her; maybe he could even admit that he was falling for her; but
bringing up marriage? He didn't know
where
that
idea had come from. Christ, that was like using a sledgehammer to
kill a fly. But he still didn't want to take back the offer. Paige
was looking down at her shoes. "This is weird," she said.
"This just feels so weird." She twisted her hands in her
lap. "I mean, I didn't have to worry about this before. This
feeling. I hadn't planned his. You know, when I was just sort of
hanging around with you, it wasn't—it wasn't—" She
looked up, groping for the right words. "So momentous?"
Nicholas filled in.

"Yes."
Paige's face broke into a smile, and she exhaled in one long breath.
"You always know what to say," she said shyly. "That's
one of the reasons I like you."

Nicholas
sat beside her on the couch. He stretched his arm around her. "You
like me," he said. "That's a start."

Paige
looked up at him as if she was going to say something, then shook her
head.

"Hey,"
Nicholas said, tipping up her chin. "Nothing's different. Forget
I said anything. I'm still the same guy you told off in the middle of
Route 2 a day ago. I'm still the one you can beat the pants off when
you play poker."

"You
just happened to mention getting married."

Nicholas
grinned at her. "I did, didn't I?" He tried to sound flip,
unconcerned. "That's the way I end a third date."

Paige
leaned her head against his arm. "We haven't even
had
three
real dates," she said. "I can't stop thinking about you—"

"I
know."

"—but
I don't even know your middle name."

"Jamison."
Nicholas laughed. "My mother's maiden name. Now, what else is
standing in your way?"

Paige
turned up her head to look at him. "And what's my middle name?"
she challenged, trying to make her point.

"Marie."
Nicholas took a stab in the dark, trying to buy time to figure out
his next counterargument. Then he realized he'd got it right.

Paige
was staring at him, her mouth dropped open. "My father used to
tell me I'd know when someone was the perfect match for me," she
murmured. "He said God worked it so that you'd always be in the
right place at the right time." Nicholas waited for her to
elaborate, but she wrinkled her forehead and stared at the carpet.
Then she turned to him. "Why did you ask me?" she said.

There
were a million questions wrapped into that one, and Nicholas
didn't know how to answer them all. He was still reeling from the
fact that, unbidden, her middle name had just materialized in his
thoughts. So he said the one thing that popped into his mind.
"Because you didn't ask
me,"
he
said.

Paige
looked up at him. "I really
do
like
you," she said.

He
leaned his head back against the couch, determined to have an
ordinary conversation, the kind people who've been together forever
have all the time. He brought up the weather, and the local sports
teams, and then Paige began to gossip about the waitresses at Mercy.
Nicholas was soothed by the sound of her voice. He kept asking her
questions just to keep her talking. She told him in detail about the
angles of her father's face; she told him that she'd once tried to
read the dictionary from cover to cover because a classmate told her
it would make her smarter, but she'd only got to N. She described
wading into Lake Michigan at the end of May, so vividly that Nicholas
actually shivered and got goose bumps up his arms.

They
were lying side by side on the narrow couch when Nicholas asked Paige
about her mother. She'd mentioned her at the diner, and from what
Nicholas could tell, the elusive Mrs. O'Toole drifted across Paige's
consciousness like a shadow from time to time but Paige wasn't
willing to share the details. He knew that the woman had left; he
knew that Paige had been five; he knew that Paige didn't remember
her very well. But she had to have feelings about it. At the very
least, she had to have an impression.

"What
was your mother like?" Nicholas asked gently, so close his lips
were brushing Paige's cheek.

He
felt her tense almost instantly. "Supposedly she was like me,"
Paige said. "My father said she looked like me."

"You
mean you look like
her,"
Nicholas
said, correcting.

"No."
Paige turned and sat up on the end of the couch. "I mean she
looked like
me.
I'm
the one that's still around, right? So I'm the one that you should be
comparing her to."

Nicholas
didn't argue with that logic, but he sat up and leaned against the
opposite end of the couch. He ran his fingers over the smooth black
leather. "Did your father ever tell you why she left?"

Nicholas
watched the color drain from Paige's face. And almost as quickly, a
flush of red worked its way up her neck and into her cheeks. Paige
stood. "Do you want to marry me or my family?" she said.
She stared at Nicholas, who was speechless, for several seconds, and
then she smiled so openly that her dimples showed and the honesty
of it reached all the way into her eyes. "I'm just tired,"
she said. "I didn't mean to yell at you. But I really have to go
home."

Nicholas
helped her into her coat and drove her to Doris's apartment. He
parked at the curb and clenched his hands on the steering wheel while
Paige fished in her bag for the key. He was so intent on silently
reviewing Paige's comments about her mother that he almost did not
hear her speaking. He had frightened her away by asking her to marry
him, and then just when she was warming up to him again, he'd blown
it by asking about her mother. She had been so flustered by that one
stupid question. Was there something she wasn't telling him? A Lizzie
Borden kind of story? Was her mother crazy, and was she unwilling to
mention that just in case Nicholas thought it might be hereditary? Or
was Nicholas crazy himself, for trying to convince his conscience
that this gaping hole in Paige's past couldn't really matter in the
long run?

"Well,"
Paige said, facing him. "It's been some night, hasn't it?"
When Nicholas didn't look at her, she turned her gaze to her lap. "I
won't hold you to it," she said softly. "I know you didn't
mean it."

At
that, Nicholas turned and pressed his own spare key into Paige's
palm. "I want you to hold me to it," he said.

He
pulled Paige into his arms. "When will you be home tomorrow?"
she whispered against his neck. He could feel her trust opening like
a flower and passing through her fingertips to the places where she
touched him. She tilted her head up, expecting his kiss, but he only
pressed his lips gently to her forehead.

Surprised,
Paige drew back and looked at Nicholas as if she were studying him
for a portrait. Then she smiled. "I'll think about your
question," she said.

Paige
was waiting for him the next day when he got home from the hospital,
and things between them were back to normal. He knew it before he
even opened the door, because the smell of butter cookies was seeping
over the threshold, into the hall. He also knew that when he'd left
that morning, his refrigerator had held little more than a moldy
banana loaf and a half jar of relish. Paige had obviously walked all
the way here with groceries, and he was shocked at how his whole
center seemed to soften at the thought.

She
was sitting on the floor, with her hands spread over the pages of
Gray's
Anatomy
as
if she were modestly trying to cover the naked musculoskeletal image
of a man. At first she did not see him. "Phalanges,"
she murmured, reading. She pronounced the clinical names for fingers
and toes all wrong, as if it rhymed with
fangs,
and
Nicholas smiled. Then, hearing his footsteps, she jumped to her feet,
as though she'd been caught doing something she shouldn't have been
doing. "I'm sorry," she blurted out.

Paige's
cheeks were flushed; her shoulders were shaking. "What are you
sorry for?" Nicholas said, tossing his bag onto the couch.

Paige
looked around, and following her glance, Nicholas began to see that
she'd been doing more than baking cookies. She had cleaned the entire
apartment, even scrubbed the hardwood floors, from the looks of
things. She had taken the extra quilt out of the linen closet and
draped it over the couch, so bright colors like lime and violet and
magenta washed over the Spartan room. She had moved the copies of
Smithsonian
and
the
New
England Journal of Medicine
off
the coffee table to make room for a
Mademoiselle
magazine
open to a feature on shaping your buttocks. On the kitchen counter
was a spray of black-eyed Susans, arranged neatly in a clean-washed
peanut butter jar.