Harvesting the Heart (26 page)

He held a dandelion in his hand. “This is for you,” he said, and I stepped back, frustrated because I could not see his eyes.

“That's a weed,” I told him.

He came closer and pressed the wilted stem into my hand. As our palms touched, the fire in my stomach leaped higher to burn my throat and the dry backs of my eyes. This was like being on a roller coaster, like falling off the edge of a cliff. It took me a second to place the feeling—it was fear, overwhelming fear, like the moment you realize you've escaped a car accident by precious inches. Jake held my hand, and when I tried to pull away, he wouldn't let go.

“Tonight was your prom,” he said.

“No kidding.”

Jake stared at me. “I saw everyone coming home. I would have gone with you. You know I would have gone with you.”

I lifted my chin. “It wouldn't have been the same.”

Finally, Jake released me. I was shocked by how cold I became, just like that. “I came for a dance,” he said.

I looked around the tiny kitchen, at the dishes still in the sink and the muted gleam of the white appliances. Jake pulled me toward him until we were touching at our palms, our shoulders, our hips, our chests. I could feel his breath on my cheek, and I wondered what was keeping me standing. “There isn't any music,” I said.

“Then you aren't listening.” Jake began to move with me, swaying back and forth. I closed my eyes and pressed my bare feet against the linoleum, craving the cold that came from the floor when the rest of me was being consumed by flames I could not see. I shook my head to clear my thoughts. This was what I wanted, wasn't it?

Jake let go of my hands and held my face in his palms. He stared at me and brushed his lips over mine, just as he had three years before at the drive-in, the kiss I had carried with me like a holy relic. I leaned against him, and he twisted his fingers into my hair, hurting me. He moved his tongue over my lips and into my mouth. I felt hungry. Something inside me was tearing apart, and at my core was something hot, hard and white. I wrapped my arms around Jake's neck, not knowing if I was doing this right, just understanding that if I did not have more, I would never forgive myself.

Jake was the one who pushed away. We stood inches apart, breathing hard. Then he picked up his jacket, which had fallen to the floor, and ran out of my house. He left me shivering, my arms wrapped tight around my chest, terrified of the power of myself.

“My God,” Jake said, when we were alone the next day. “I should have known it would be like this.”

We were sitting on overturned milk crates behind his father's garage, listening to the hiss of flies sinking into puddles left from the rain. We were not even kissing. We were simply holding hands. But even that was a trial of faith. Jake's palm enveloped mine, and the pulse in his wrist adjusted to fit the rhythm of my own. I was afraid to move. If I even took too deep a breath, I would wind up as I had when I had run into his arms and kissed him hello—pressed too close for comfort, lips burning a trail down his neck, with that strange reaching feeling that started between my legs and shot into my belly. For the first time in three years I did not trust Jake. What was worse, I did not trust myself.

I had been brought up with stricter religious values than Jake, but we were both Catholic, and we both understood the consequences of sin. I had been taught that earthly pleasure was a sin. Sex was for making babies and was a sacrilege without the bond of marriage. I felt the swelling of my chest and my thighs, heavy with hot running blood, and I knew that these were the impure thoughts I had been warned of. I did not understand how something that felt so good could be so bad. I did not know who I could ask. But I could not help wanting to be closer to Jake, so close I might squeeze through him and come out on the other side.

Jake rubbed his thumb over mine and pointed to a rainbow coming up in the east. I was itching to draw this feeling: Jake, me, protected by the bleeding strands of violet and orange and indigo. I remembered my First Communion, when the priest had put the dry little wafer on my tongue. “The body of Christ,” he had said, and I dutifully repeated, “Amen.” Afterward I had asked Sister Elysia if the Host really was the body of Christ, and she had told me it would be if I believed hard enough. She said how lucky I was to take His body into my own, and for that precious sunny day I had walked with my arms outstretched, convinced that God was with me.

Jake put his arm around my shoulder—creating a whole new flood of sensations—and wrapped his fingers in my hair. “I can't work,” he said. “I can't sleep. I can't eat.” He rubbed his upper lip. “You're driving me crazy,” he said.

I nodded; I couldn't find my voice. So I leaned into his neck and kissed the hollow under his ear. Jake groaned and pushed me off the milk crate so that I was lying in the wet crabgrass, and he brutally crushed his mouth against mine. His hand slipped from my neck to my cotton blouse, coming to rest under my breast. I could feel his knuckles against the curve of my flesh, his fingers flexing and clenching, as if he was trying to exercise control. “Let's get married,” he said.

It was not his words that shocked me; it was the realization that I was in over my head. Jake was all I had ever wanted, but I could see now that this fever inside me was just going to grow stronger and stronger. The only way I'd be able to put it out would be to give myself completely away—unraveling my secrets and baring my pain —and I did not think I could do that. If I kept seeing Jake I would be consumed by this fire; surely I would touch him and keep touching him until I couldn't go back.

“We can't get married,” I said, pushing away from him. “I'm only seventeen.” I turned my face up to his, but all I saw in his eyes was a distorted reflection of myself. “I don't think I can see you anymore,” I said, my voice breaking over the syllables.

I stood up, but Jake still held my hand. I felt the panic building in me, bubbling up and threatening to spill. “Paige,” he said, “we'll go slowly. I know you better than you know yourself. I know you want what I want.”

“Really?” I whispered, angry that my self-control was slipping away and that he was probably right. “What, exactly, Jake, do you want?”

Jake stood up. “I want to know what you see when you look at me.” His fingers dug into my shoulders. “I want to know your favorite Stooge and the hour you were born and the thing that scares you more than anything else in the world. I want to know,” he said, “what you look like when you fall asleep.” He traced the line of my chin with his finger. “I want to be there when you wake up.”

For a moment I saw the life I might have, wrapped in the laughter of his big family, writing my name beside his in the old family Bible, watching him leave in the morning. I saw all these things I had wished for my whole life, but the images made me tremble. It wasn't meant to be; I didn't know the first thing about fitting into such a normal, solid scene. “You aren't safe anymore,” I whispered.

Jake looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “Neither are you,” he said.

That night, I learned the truth about my parents' marriage. My father was working in the basement when I came home, still restless and thinking of Jake's hands. He was bent over his sawhorse worktable, screwing a plastic fitting onto the back of his Medicine Pacifier, which, when finished, would be able to dispense controlled amounts of baby Tylenol and Triaminic.

My father had been everything to me for so long that it did not seem unnatural to ask him questions about falling in love. I was less embarrassed than I was afraid, since I figured he'd think I was speaking up out of guilt and send me off to confession. For a few minutes I watched him, taking in his light-brown hair and the whiskey color of his eyes, his capable, shaping hands. I had always thought I'd fall in love with someone like my father, but he and Jake were very different. Unless you counted the little things—the way they both let me cheat at gin rummy so I could win; the way they carefully weighed my words as if I were the Secretary of State; the fact that when I was miserable, they were the only two people in the world who could make me forget. In my whole life, only when I was with my father or with Jake was I able to believe, as they did, that I was the finest girl in the world.

“How did you know,” I asked my father without any preliminary conversation, “that you were going to marry my mother?”

My father did not look up at me, but he sighed. “I was engaged to somebody else at the time. Her name was Patty—Patty Connelly —and she was the daughter of my parents' best friends. We all came over to the United States from County Donegal when I was five. Patty and I grew up together-you know, all-American kids. We went swimming naked in those little summer pools, and we got the chicken pox at the same time, and I took her to all our high-school proms. It was expected, Patty and me, you see.”

I came to stand beside him, pulling a length of black electrical tape when he gestured for it. “What about Mom?” I said.

“A month before the wedding, I woke up and asked what in the name of heaven I was doing, throwing my life away. I didn't love Patty, and I called her and told her the wedding was off. And three hours later she called me back to let me know she'd swallowed about thirty sleeping pills.”

My father sat down on the dusty green sofa. “Quite a turn of the cards, eh, lass?” he said, slipping into the comfort of his brogue. “I had to drive her to the hospital. I waited around until they were done pumping her stomach, and then I turned her over to her parents.” My father rested his head in his hands. “Anyway, I went to a diner across the street from the hospital, and there was your mother. Sitting on one of the counter stools she was, and she had cherry Danish all over her fingers. She had on this little red-checked halter top and white shorts. I don't know, Paige, I can't really explain it, but she turned around when I came in, and the second our eyes connected, it was like the world just disappeared.”

I closed my eyes, trying to picture this. I did not believe it was one hundred percent true. After all, I had not heard my mother's side of the story. “And then what?” I said.

“And then we got married in three months. It wasn't the easiest thing for your mother. Some of my old deaf aunts called her Patty at the wedding. She got china and crystal and silver picked out by Patty, because people had already bought the gifts when the first wedding was called off.”

My father stood and went back to the pacifier. I stared at his back and remembered that on holidays, when my mother served with the rose-wreathed dishes and the gold-leaf goblets, she would get tight-lipped and uncomfortable. I started to wonder what it might have felt like to live your life in a place someone else had carved. I wondered if, had our china been blue-rimmed or geometric, she might have never left.

“And what,” I said, “ever happened to Patty?”