Harvesting the Heart (36 page)

“Sometimes,” she said, “bad blood skips a generation.”

I waited for her to explain, but she released my hand and cleared her throat. “That'll be twenty-five,” she said, and I rummaged through my purse. Ruby walked me outside, and I swung open the hot, heavy door of the car. “You need to call him too,” she said, and by the time I looked up at her, she was gone.

“Nicholas?” I pulled at the collar of my shirt and ran my fingers over the smooth silk scarf from Astrid, trying to escape the phone booth's heat.

“My God, Paige. Are you hurt? I called the supermarket—I called six of them, because I didn't know where you'd gone, and I tried the nearest gas stations. Was there an accident?”

“Not really,” I said, and I heard Nicholas draw in his breath. “How's the baby?” I asked, feeling tears prick the back of my throat. It was strange; for almost three months, all I'd thought about was getting away from Max, and now I couldn't stop thinking about him. He was always in the corner of my mind, clouding my vision, his gummy fists reaching toward me. I actually missed him.

“The baby's fine. Where are you? When are you coming home?”

I took a deep breath. “I'm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”

“You're
where?”
In the background, I heard Max start to cry, and then the sounds became louder, so I knew Nicholas was jiggling the baby in his arms.

“I was headed to the Stop & Shop, and I kind of kept going. I just need a little time—”

“Well, hey, Paige, so does the rest of the free world, but we don't just up and run away!” Nicholas was yelling; I held the receiver away from my ear. “Let me get this straight,” he said, “you left us on
purpose?”

“I didn't run away,” I insisted. “I'm coming back.”

“When?” Nicholas demanded. “I have a life, you know. I have a job to get back to.”

I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the glass of the phone booth. “I have a life too.”

Nicholas did not answer, and for a moment I thought he'd hung up, but then I heard Max babbling in the background. “Your life,” Nicholas said, “is right here.
Not
in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”

What I wanted to tell him was: I'm not ready to be a mother. I can't even be your wife, not until I patch together the pieces of my own life and fill in all the holes. I
will
come home, and we'll pick up where we left off. I won't forget you; I love you. But what I said to Nicholas was: “I'll be back soon.”

Nicholas's voice was hoarse and low. “Don't bother,” he said, and he slammed down the phone.

I drove all night and all day, and by 4:00 P.M. I was on the Loop, heading into Chicago. Knowing that my father wouldn't be home for a couple of hours, I headed toward the old art supply store I used to go to. It felt strange driving through the city. When I had been here last, I had no car; I had always been escorted. At a stoplight I thought about Jake—the angles of his face and the rhythm of his breathing. Once, that was all it had taken to make him appear. I drove carefully when the light turned green, expecting him to be on the next street corner, but I was mistaken. That telepathy had been severed years ago by Jake, who knew we could never go back.

The owner of the art store was Indian, with the smooth brown skin of an onion. He recognized me right away. “Missy O'Toole,” he said, his voice running over my name like a river. “What can I get for you?” He clasped his hands in front of himself, as if I had last stepped into the store a day or two before. I did not answer him at first. I walked to the carved statues of Vishnu and Ganesh, running my fingers over the cool stone elephant's head. “I'll need some conté sticks,” I whispered, “a newsprint pad, and charcoal.” The words came so easily, I might as well have been seventeen again.

He brought me what I had asked for and held out the conté sticks for my approval. I took them into my palm as reverently as I'd taken the Host at Communion. What if I couldn't do it anymore? It had been years since I'd drawn anything substantial.

“I wonder,” I said to the man, “if maybe you would let me draw you.”

Pleased, the man settled himself between the Hindu sculptures of the Preserver of Life and the God of Good Fortune. “What better place for me to be sitting myself,” he chattered. “If you please, missy, this place would be very good, very good indeed.”

I swallowed hard and picked up the newsprint pad. With hesitant lines I drew the oval of the man's face, the fierce glitter of his eyes. I used a white conté stick for relief shading, creating a fine web of wrinkles at his temples and his chin. I mapped the age of his smile and the slight swell of his pride. When I finished, I stepped away from the pad and observed it critically. I was a little off on the likeness, but it was good enough for a first try. I peered into the background and the shadows of his face, expecting to see one of my hidden pictures, but there was nothing except for the calm brush of charcoal. Maybe I had lost my other talent, and I thought that this might not be so bad.

“Missy, you have finished? You do not want to keep such work all to yourself.” The man scurried toward me and beamed at my sketch. “You will leave it here for me, yes?”

I nodded. “You can have it. Thank you.”

I handed him the sketch, and a twenty to pay for the supplies, but he waved me away. “You give me a gift,” he said, “I give you one in return.”

I drove to the lake and parked illegally. Carrying my pad and my box of charcoal under my arm, I went to sit on the shore. It was a cool day, and not many people were in the water, just some children with bubble floats around their waists, whose mothers watched with lioness stares in case they drifted away. I sat on the edge of the water and brought Max to mind, trying to conjure a clear enough image to draw him. When I couldn't, I was shocked. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't catch in his eyes the way he looked at the world, the way everything was a series of first times. And without that, a picture of Max just wasn't a picture of Max. I tried to imagine Nicholas, but it was the same. His fine aquiline nose, the thick sheen of his hair—they appeared and receded in waves, as if I were looking at him lying on the bottom of a rippled pond. When I touched the charcoal to the paper, nothing happened at all. It struck me how strong the slam of that phone might have been. As Jake had done once before, it was possible that Nicholas had broken all of our connections.

Determined not to start crying, I stared across the dappled surface of the lake and began to move the charcoal over the blank page. Diamonds of sunlight and shifting currents appeared. Even though the picture was black and white, you could clearly see how blue the water was. But as I continued, I realized that I was not drawing Lake Michigan at all. I was drawing the ocean, the Caribbean ring that banded Grand Cayman Island.

When I was twelve I had gone with my father to Grand Cayman for an Invention Convention. He used up most of our savings for the plane ticket and the rental condo. He was setting up a booth of rocks, the fake ones he'd created that held a secret compartment for a key and could be placed on the dirt right outside your front door just in case. The convention lasted for two days, during which I was left at the condo to roam the beach. I made snow angels in the white sand and I snorkeled around the reefs and dove to grab at fire-colored coral and neon-streaked angelfish. The third day, our last, my father sat on a chaise longue on the beach. He didn't want to go into the water with me, because, he said, he'd barely even seen the sun. So I went in alone, and to my surprise, a sea turtle came swimming beside me. It was two feet long and had a tag under its armpit. It had black beaded eyes and a leathery smile; its shell was curved down like a topaz horizon. It seemed to grin at me, and then it swam away.

I followed. I was always a few strokes behind. Finally, when the turtle disappeared behind a wall of coral, I stopped. I floated on my back and rubbed the stitch in my side. When I opened my eyes, I was at least a mile away from where I'd started.

I breast-stroked back, and by that time my father was frantic. He asked where I'd gone, and when I told him he said it had been a stupid thing to do. But I went into the ocean again anyway, hoping to find that sea turtle. Of course it was a big ocean and the turtle was long gone, but I had known—even at twelve—that I had to take the chance.

I laid down the drawing. A familiar breathlessness came when I finished the sketch, as if I'd had a spirit channeling through me and was only just returning now. In the middle of Lake Michigan I'd drawn that vanishing turtle. Its back was made up of a hundred hexagons. And very faintly, in every single polygon, I had drawn my mother.

I knew before I even turned onto my old block that I would not be staying long enough to remember all the things about my childhood that I'd trapped in some dark corner of my mind. I would not be able to remember the bus route to the Institute of Art. I would not have time to recall the name of the Jewish bakery with fresh onion bagels. I would stay only until I had gathered the information I needed to find my mother.

I realized that in a way I'd always been trying to find her. Except I hadn't been chasing her; she'd been chasing me. She was always there when I looked over my shoulder, reminding me of who I was and how I got to be that way. Until today I had believed she was the reason I had lost Jake, the reason I'd run from Nicholas, the reason I'd left Max. I saw her at the root of every mistake I'd ever made. But now I wondered if she really
was
the enemy. After all, I seemed to be following in her footsteps. She had run away too, and maybe if I knew her reasons I'd understand mine. For all I knew, my mother could be just like me.

I walked up the steps to my childhood home, my feet falling into the sunken brick patterns. Behind me lay Chicago, winking at dusk and spread like a destiny. I knocked on the front door for the first time in eight years.

My father opened it. He was shorter than I remembered, and his hair, streaked with gray, fell over his eyes. “May,” he whispered, frozen. “A
mhuírnán.”

My love.
He had spoken in Gaelic, which he almost never did, an endearment I remembered him saying to my mother. And he had called me by my mother's name.

I did not move. I wondered if this was an omen. My father blinked several times and took a step backward, and then he stared at me again.
“Paige,”
he said, shaking his head as if he still could not believe it was me. My father held out his hands and, with them, everything he could offer. “Lass,” he said, “you're the image of your mother.”

chapter
20

W
ho the hell did she think she was? She picked up and vanished for hours, and then she phoned from goddamned Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and all the time that he'd been pacing and calling hospital emergency rooms she'd been running away. In one fell swoop, Paige had overturned his entire life. This was not the way Nicholas liked things. He liked neat sutures, very little bleeding, OR schedules that did not waver. He liked organization and precision. He did not enjoy surprises, and he
hated
being shocked.