Harvesting the Heart (51 page)

There were twenty-one horses in her class, the last event of the day. She was the third rider up. While Donegal pranced around the warm-up ring, I watched from the bleachers, keeping an eye on the man jumping the largest stallion I'd ever seen, over fences that were nearly as tall as me. My mother's number was forty-six, tied on her back on a crinkled piece of yellowed card. She smiled at the man who had finished the course, passing him on her way in.

The judge sat off to the side. I tried to make out what he was writing, but it was impossible at this distance. Instead I concentrated on my mother. It took only seconds. I watched Donegal come down the final line on the outside of the ring. As he reared up, his front legs were tight, his knees were high. He didn't take the jump long or chip it; it was right in stride. I saw my mother sit back, holding Donegal slow until the next jump rose in front of them, and then she pulled into her half-seat, chin high, eyes burning straight ahead. It was only when they finished the course that I realized I had been holding my breath.

The woman sitting beside me had on a copper-colored polka-dotted dress and a wide-brimmed white straw hat, as if she'd been expecting Ascot. She held a program, and on the back she was writing the numbers of the riders she believed would win. “I don't know,” she murmured to herself. “I think the first man was much better.”

I turned to her, angry. “You've got to be joking,” I said. “His horse took every jump long.” The woman sniffed and tapped her pencil against her chin. “I'll give you five dollars if forty-six doesn't beat that guy,” I said, pulling a fold of cash from my back pocket.

The woman stared at me, and for a moment I wondered if this was illegal, but then a smile spread across her onion features and she held out a gloved hand. “You're on,” she said.

Nobody else in the class was as good as my mother on Donegal. Several of the horses ducked out at the jumps, or dumped their riders and were disqualified. When the results were announced, the blue ribbon went to number forty-six. I stood up in the bleachers and cheered, and my mother twisted her head around to look at me. She jogged the horse back into the ring so Donegal could be judged sound, then fixed her blue ribbon on the loop of Donegal's bridle. The woman beside me sniffed loudly and held out a crisp five-dollar bill. “One thirty-one was better,” she insisted.

I took the money from her palm. “Maybe,” I said, “but forty-six is my mother.”

At my mother's suggestion, we celebrated the end of summer by camping out in the backyard. I didn't think I would like it. I figured the ground would be lumpy and I'd be worried about ants crawling up my neck and into my ears. But my mother found two old sleeping bags the owners of Pegasus had used in Alaska, and we stretched out on them in the field where my mother rode Donegal. We watched for falling stars.

It had been unbearably hot in August, and I had become used to seeing blisters on the backs of my hands and my neck—the parts that were exposed to sun all the time. “You're a country girl, Paige,” my mother said, reaching her arms up behind her head. “You wouldn't have lasted this long if you weren't.”

There were things to be said about North Carolina. It was nice to see the sinking sun cool itself against the face of a mountain instead of the domes of Harvard; there was no pavement to breathe beneath your feet. But sometimes I felt so secluded that I stopped to listen, to make sure I could hear my pulse over the singing black flies and the rumble of hoofbeats.

My mother rolled toward me, propping herself on an elbow. “Tell me about Patrick,” she said.

I looked away. I could tell her what my father had looked like or that he hadn't wanted me to search for her, but either one would hurt. “He's still building pipe dreams in the basement,” I said. “A couple have actually sold.” My mother held her breath, waiting. “His hair is gray now, but he hasn't really lost any of it.”

“It's still there, isn't it? That look in his eyes?”

I knew what she meant: it was this glow that came over my father when he saw a masterpiece even though he was looking at a concoction of spit and glue. “It's still there,” I said, and my mother smiled.

“I think that's what made me fall for him,” she said, “that and the way he promised to show me Ireland.” She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes. “And what does he think of the fine Dr. Prescott?”

“He's never met him,” I blurted, cursing myself for making such a stupid mistake. I decided to tell her a half-truth. “I've just barely kept in touch with Dad. I ran away from Chicago when I graduated from high school.”

My mother frowned. “That doesn't sound like Patrick. Patrick only wanted you to go to college. You were going to be the first Irish Catholic woman President.”

“It wasn't college,” I told her. “I was planning on going to the Rhode Island School of Design, but something else came up.” I held my breath, but she did not pressure me. “Mom,” I said, eager to change the subject, “what about that rodeo guy?”

She laughed. “That rodeo guy was Wolliston Waters, and we ran around together with the money we stole from the Wild West show. I slept with him a couple of times, but only to remember what it was like to feel another person next to me. It wasn't love, you know; it was sex. You've probably seen the difference.” I turned away, and my mother touched my shoulder. “Oh, come on, now. There had to be a high school guy who broke your heart.”

“No,” I said, avoiding her eyes. “I didn't date.”

My mother shrugged. “Well, the point is I never got over your father. Never really wanted to. Wolliston and I, well, more than anything we were in business together. Until one morning I woke up and he'd taken all our cash and savings, plus the toaster oven and even the stereo. Just disappeared, like that.”

I rolled onto my back and remembered Eddie Savoy. “People don't just disappear,” I told her. “You of all people should know that.”

Overhead, stars shifted and winked against the dark night sky. I opened my eyes wide and tried to see the other galaxies that hid at the edges of ours. “There was nobody else?” I asked.

“No one worth mentioning,” my mother said.

I looked at her. “Don't you—you know—miss it?”

My mother shrugged. “I have Donegal.”

I smiled into the darkness. “That's not really the same,” I said.

My mother frowned, as if she was thinking about this. “You're right; it's more fulfilling. See, I'm the one who trained him, so I'm the one who can take credit for whatever Donegal does. With a horse I've made a name for myself. With a husband I was nobody.” Barely moving a muscle, my mother covered my hand with her own. “Tell me what Nicholas is like,” she said.

I sighed and tried to do with words what I would ordinarily do in a sketch. “He's very tall, and he has hair as dark as Donegal's mane. His eyes are the same color as yours and mine—”

“No, no, no,” my mother interrupted. “Tell me what Nicholas is like. ”

I closed my eyes, but nothing came clearly to mind. I seemed to be seeing my life with him through shadows, and even after eight years I could barely hear the patterns of his voice or feel the touch of his hands on me. I tried to picture those hands, their long, surgeon's fingers, but couldn't even imagine them holding the base of a stethoscope. I felt a hollow pit in the base of my chest, where I knew these memories should be, but it was as if I had married someone a long time ago and hadn't kept contact since. “I really don't know what Nicholas is like,” I said. I could feel my mother's eyes on me, so I tried to explain. “He's just a different man these days; he works extremely hard, and that's important, you know, but because of that I don't get to see him all that much. A lot of the time when I do see him I'm not at my best—I'm at a fund-raising dinner table and he's sitting beside a Radcliffe girl making comparisons, or I've been up half the night with Max and I look like the wild woman of Borneo.”

“And that's why you left,” my mother finished for me.

I sat up abruptly. “That's
not
why I left,” I said. “I left because of you.”

It was a what came first, the chicken or the egg dilemma. I had left because I needed time to catch my breath and get my bearings and start with a clean slate. But obviously, this tendency had been bred into me. Hadn't I known all along I would grow up to be just like my mother? Hadn't I worried about this very thing happening when I was pregnant with Max—and with my other baby? I still believed these events were all linked together. I could honestly say that my mother was the reason I'd run away, but I wasn't sure if she had been the cause or the consequence of my actions.

My mother crawled into her sleeping bag. “Even if that was true,” she said, “you should have waited until Max was older.”

I rolled away from her. The scent of the pine trees on the ridge behind us was so overwhelming I was suddenly dizzy. “That's the pot calling the kettle black,” I murmured.

From behind me came my mother's voice. “When you were born, they were just starting to let men in the delivery room, but your father didn't want any part of it. He actually wanted me to give birth at home, like his mother had, but I vetoed that. So he took me to the hospital, and I begged him not to leave me. Told him I couldn't go through with it. I was all alone for twelve hours, until you decided to make your appearance. It was another hour until they let him in to see you and me together—it took that long for the nurses to comb my hair and give me my makeup so I'd look like I hadn't been doing anything at all for the past day.” My mother was so close I could feel her breath against my ear. “When your father came in and saw you, he stroked your cheek and said, ‘Now, May, now that you've got her, where's the sacrifice?' And do you know what I told him? I looked at him and I said, ‘Me.' ”

My heart constricted as I remembered staring at Max and wondering how he could possibly have come from inside me and what I could do to make him go back. “You resented me,” I said.

“I was terrified of you,” my mother said. “I didn't know what I'd do if you didn't like me.”

I remembered that the year I was enrolled in Bible preschool my mother had bought me a special coat for Easter, as pink as the inside lip of a lily. I had bothered her and begged and pleaded to wear it to school after Easter. “Just once,” I had cried, and finally she let me. But it rained on the way home from school, and I was afraid she'd be angry if the coat got wet, so I took it off and stuffed it into a little ball. The neighbor's daughter, who walked me home every day because she was nine years old and responsible, helped me jam the coat inside my Snoopy book bag. “You little fool,” my mother had said when my friend left me at the door, “you're going to catch pneumonia.” I had run up to my room and thrown myself on the bed, angry that I had disappointed her yet again.

But then again, this was the woman who let me take a bus across downtown Chicago when I was five because she thought I was trustworthy. She had tinted clear gelatin with blue food coloring because that was my favorite color. She taught me how to dance the Stroll and how to hang from the monkey bars with my hem tucked a certain way so that my skirt didn't fall up over my head. She had given me my first crayons and coloring book, and had held me when I messed up, assuring me that the lines were for people with no imagination. She had turned herself into someone who was larger than life; someone whose gestures I practiced at night in the bathroom; someone I wanted to be when I grew up.

The night closed around us like a choked throat, suffocating the twitched sounds of the squirrels and the whistling grass. “You weren't all that bad as a mother,” I said.

“Maybe,” my mother whispered. “Maybe not.”

chapter
30

Nicholas

F
or the first time in years, Nicholas's gloved hands shook as he made the incision in the patient's chest. A neat red line of blood spilled into the hollow left by the scalpel, and Nicholas swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. Anything but this, he thought to himself: climbing Everest, memorizing a dictionary, fighting a war from the front line. Anything had to be easier than doing a quadruple bypass on Alistair Fogerty himself.

He did not have to look under the sterile drapes to know the face connected with the hideously swabbed orange body. Every muscle and line had been etched into his mind; after all, he'd spent eight years absorbing Fogerty's insults and rallying to meet his boundless expectations. And now the man's life was in his hands.

Nicholas picked up the saw and switched it to life. It vibrated in the circle of his hands as he touched it to the sternum, carving through the bone. He spread the ribs and he checked the solution in which the leg veins, already harvested, were floating. He imagined Alistair Fogerty standing in the background of the operating suite, his presence hovering at Nicholas's neck like the stale breath of a dragon. Nicholas looked up at his assisting resident. “I think we're all set,” he said, watching his words puff out his blue paper mask as if they had meaning or substance.