Harvesting the Heart (10 page)

Nicholas sat on the couch, curling Paige close beside him. “Yes I do,” he said. He stretched out lengthwise, pulling Paige down so that their bodies were pressed together from shoulder to ankle. He could feel her breath, a warm circle on the front of his shirt.

Paige stared over Nicholas's shoulder to the blank wall, haloed in pale light, empty of shadows. She tried to picture their hands, knotted together, fingers indistinguishable in the far reflection. Nothing she could conjure in her mind was quite right; she knew she'd miscalculated the length of the fingers, the curve of the wrist. She wanted to get that eagle right. She wanted to try it again, and again, and again, until she could commit it, faultless, to memory. “Nicholas,” she said. “Yes. I'll marry you.”

chapter
4

I
should have known better than to begin my marriage with a lie. But it seemed so easy at the time. That someone like Nicholas could want me was still overwhelming. He held me the way a child holds a snowflake, lightly, as if he knew in the back of his mind I might disappear in the blink of an eye. He wore his self-assurance like a soft overcoat. I was not just in love with him; I worshiped him. I had never met anyone like him, and, amazed that it was
me
he had chosen, I made up my mind: I would be whatever he wanted; I would follow him to the ends of the earth.

He thought I was a virgin, that I'd been saving myself for someone like him. In a way he was right—in eighteen years I'd never met anyone like Nicholas. But what I
hadn't
told him grated against me every day leading up to our wedding. It was a nagging noise inside my head, and outside too, in the hot hum of traffic. I kept remembering Father Draher speaking of lies of omission. So each morning I woke up resolving that this would be the day I told Nicholas the truth, but in the end there was one thing more terrifying than telling him I was a liar, and that was facing the chance I'd lose him.

Nicholas came out of the bathroom in the little apartment, a towel wrapped around his waist. The towel was blue and had pictures of primary-colored hot-air balloons. He walked to the window, shameless, and pulled dourn the shades. “Let's pretend,” he said, ”that it isn't the middle of the day.
”

I wanted to tell him,
No; in fact, you'd be surprised to know that when it comes to sex I can hold my own.
Instead I felt myself nodding, my chin bobbing up and down. I waited for him to reassure me, to tell me he wasn't going to hurt me, at least not any more than he needed to this first time. But Nicholas stretched out beside me, linked his hands behind his head, and admitted, “So am I. ”

I didn't tell Nicholas right away that I would marry him. I gave him time to back out. He asked that night in the diner after he'd brought his witch of a girlfriend in for coffee. I was terrified at first, because I thought I'd have to face all the secrets I had been running from. For a day or so, I even fought against the idea, but how could I stand in the way of something that was meant to be?

I knew all along he was the one. I could fall into step walking beside him, even though his legs were much longer. I could sense when he came into the diner by the way the sleigh bells on the door rang. I could think of him and smile in just a heartbeat. Although I would have loved Nicholas if he never had proposed, I surprised myself by thinking of tree-lined residential streets and soccer car pools and
Good Housekeeping
recipes curled into handmade sanded boxes. I envisioned a normal life, the kind I'd never had, and even if I would be living it as a wife now, I figured it was better late than never.

The dean of students at Harvard gave Nicholas a one-week hiatus from classes and hospital rotations, during which we would move into married student housing and set a date with a justice of the peace. There would be no honeymoon, because there wasn't any money anymore.

Marvela and Doris, the only two friends I had in Cambridge, took me shopping at a small discount-clothing store in Brighton called The Price of Dreams. They seemed to carry everything there for a woman's wardrobe: underwear, accessories, suits, pants, blouses, sweats. I had one hundred dollars. Twenty-five came from Lionel, a wedding bonus, and the rest was from Nicholas himself. We had moved into married student housing the day before, and when Nicholas realized that I had more art supplies in my knapsack than clothes, and that I had only four pairs of underpants, which I kept washing out, he said I needed to get myself some things. Although we couldn't afford it, he gave me money. “You can't get married in a pink uniform from Mercy,” he had said, and I had laughed and answered, “Just watch me.”

Doris and Marvela flew around the store like seasoned shoppers. “Girl,” Marvela called to me, “you lookin' for something formal like, or you gonna go with funky?”

Doris pulled several pairs of panty hose off a rack. “Whaddya mean, funky,” she muttered. “You don't do funky at weddings.”

Neither Doris nor Marvela was married. Marvela had been, but her husband was killed in a meat-packing incident that she did not like to talk about. Doris, who was somewhere between forty and sixty and guarded her age as if it were the crown of Windsor, said she didn't like men, but I wondered if it was just that men didn't like her.

They made me try on leather-trimmed day dresses and two-piece outfits with polka-dotted lapels and even one slinky sequined cat suit that made me look like a banana. In the end, I got a simple white satin nightgown for the wedding night and a pale-pink cotton suit for the wedding. It had a straight skirt and a peplum on the jacket and, truly, it seemed to have been made for me. When I tried it on, Doris gasped. Marvela said, shaking her head, “And they say redheads ain't supposed to wear pink.” I stood in front of the three-way mirror, holding my hands in front of me as if I were carrying a spilling bouquet. I wondered what it might have been like to have a heavy beaded dress hanging from my shoulders, to feel a train tug behind me down a cathedral aisle, to know the shiver of my breath beneath the veil when I heard the march from
Lohengrin.
But it wasn't going to happen, and anyway it didn't matter. Who cared about the trappings of one stupid day when you had the rest of your life to make perfect? And just in case I needed reassurance, when I turned again to look at my friends, I could see my future shining in their eyes.