Harvesting the Heart (64 page)

Sometimes I sing Max to sleep. It doesn't seem to matter what I sing—gospel or pop, Dire Straits or the Beatles. I usually skip the lullabies, because I figure Max will hear those from everyone else.

We sit on the rocking chair in his room at the Prescotts'. Astrid lets me hold him whenever I want to now, as long as Nicholas isn't around and isn't about to show up. It's her way of getting me to stay, I think, although I don't consider leaving a real option anymore.

Max has just had his bath. The easiest way to give it, because he's so slippery in the bathtub, is just to get naked with him and set him between my legs. He has a Tupperware bowl and a rubber duck that he plays with in the water. He doesn't mind when I get baby shampoo in his eyes. Afterward I wrap him in the towel with me, pretending we share the same skin, and I think of wallabees and opossums and other animals that always carry around their young.

Max is getting very sleepy, rubbing his eyes with his little fists and yawning often. “Hang on a second,” I say, sitting him up on the floor. I lean down and pop a pacifier into his mouth.

He watches me as I straighten his crib. I smooth the sheet and move the Cookie Monster and the rabbit rattle out of the way. When I turn around fast, he smiles, as if this is a game, and he loses his pacifier in the process. “You can't suck and smile at the same time,” I tell him. I turn around to plug in the night-light, and when I face Max again he laughs. He holds up his arms to me, asking to be held.

Suddenly I realize that this is what I've been waiting for—a man who depends entirely on me. When I met Jake, I spent years trying to make him fall in love with me. When I married Nicholas, I lost him to the mistress of medicine. I dreamed for years of a man who couldn't live without me, a man who pictured my face when he closed his eyes, who loved me when I was a mess in the morning and when dinner was late and even when I overloaded the washing machine and burned out the motor.

Max stares up at me as if I can do no wrong. I have always wanted someone who treats me the way he does; I just didn't know that I'd have to give birth to him. I pick Max up, and immediately he wraps his arms around my neck and starts crawling up my body. This is the way he hugs; it is something he's just learned. I can't help but smile into the soft folds of his neck.
Be careful what you wish for,
I think.
It might come true.

Nancy Bianna stands in the long main founders' hallway, her finger pressed against her pursed lips. “Something,” she murmurs. “I'm missing something.” She swings her head back and forth, and her hair, blunt cut, moves like an Egyptian's.

Nancy has been the primary reason that my sketches of Nicholas's patients and some new ones, of Elliot Saget and Nancy and even Astrid and Max, now hang framed in the entrance to the hospital. Previously a row of unimaginative prints, imitations of Matisse, hung against the cinder-block walls. But Nancy says this will be the start of something big. “Who knew Dr. Prescott was so well connected?” she mused to me. “First you, and then maybe an exhibit by his mother.”

That first day I met her, after I had left Nicholas in his office, she shook my hand vigorously and slid her thick black-rimmed glasses up her nose. “What patients want to see when they check into a hospital,” she explained, “isn't a line of meaningless color. They want to see
people.”
She leaned forward and gripped my shoulders. “They want to see
survivors.
They want to see
life.”

Then she stood up and walked casually in a circle around me. “Of course we understand you'd have the final say on placement and inclusion,” she added, “and we'd compensate you for your work.”

Money. They were going to give me money for the silly little pictures I drew to get Nicholas to notice me. My sketches were going to hang on the walls at Mass General, so that even when I wasn't around Nicholas, he couldn't help but be reminded.

I smiled at Nancy. “When can we start?”

Three days later, the exhibit is being set up. Nancy paces the hallway and switches a portrait of Mr. Kasselbaum with one of Max. “The juxtaposition of youth and age,” she says. “Autumn and spring. I love it.”

At the far end of the exhibit, near the admissions desk, is a small white card with my name printed on it. PAIGE PRESCOTT, it reads, VOLUNTEER. There is no biography, nothing at all about Nicholas or Max, and this is sort of nice. It makes me feel as though I have just appeared out of nowhere and stepped into the limelight; as if I have never had a history at all.

“Okay, okay ... places,” Nancy calls, grasping my hand. There are only two other people in the hall, custodians with ladders and wire-cutters, and neither of them speaks very good English. I don't really know who Nancy is talking to. She pulls me to the side and draws in her breath. “Ta-da!” she trills, although nothing has changed from a moment before.

“It's lovely,” I say, because I know she is waiting.

Nancy beams at me. “Stop by tomorrow,” she says. “We're thinking of changing our stationery, and if you're any good at lettering ...” She lets her sentence trail off, speaking for itself.

When she disappears into an elevator, taking the workmen and the ladders with her, I stand in the hallway and survey my own work. It is the first time I have ever seen my skills on formal display. I am good. A sweet rush of success bubbles inside me, and I walk down the hall, touching each individual picture. I take away a shot of pride from each one and leave in its place the promise-marker of my fingerprints.

One night when the house is as dark as a forest I go to the library to call my mother. I pass Astrid and Robert's room on the way and I hear the sound of lovemaking, and for some reason instead of being embarrassed I am frightened. When I reach the library, I settle in the big wing chair Robert likes best and I hold the heavy phone in my hands like a trophy.

“I forgot to tell you something,” I say when my mother answers the phone. “We named the baby after you.”

I hear my mother draw in her breath. “So you're speaking to me after all.” She pauses, and then she asks me where I am.

“I'm staying with Nicholas's parents,” I say. “You were right about coming back.”

“I wish I didn't have to be,” my mother says.

I didn't really want to call my mother, but I couldn't help it. In spite of myself, now that I had found her I needed her. I wanted to tell her about Nicholas. I wanted to cry about the divorce. I wanted her suggestions, her opinion.

“I'm sorry you left like that,” she says.

“Don't be sorry.” I want to tell her that no one is at fault. I think about the way the clean air in North Carolina would thrill to the back of my throat with the first breath of the morning. “I had a very nice time.”

“For God's sake, Paige,” she says, “that's the kind of thing you'd tell some Daughter of the American Revolution after a luncheon.”

I rub my eyes. “Okay,” I say, “I
didn't
have a very nice time.” But I'm lying, and she knows it as well as I do. I picture the two of us, bracing Donegal when he could barely stand. I picture my arms around my mother's shoulders when she cried at night. “I miss you,” I say, and instead of feeling sort of empty as the words leave my mouth, I start to smile. Imagine me saying that to my own mother after all these years, and meaning it, and no matter what I expected, the world hasn't shattered at my feet.

“I don't blame you for leaving,” my mother says. “I know you'll be back.”

“How do you know that?” I say sulkily, a little upset that she can pin me down so easily.

“Because,” my mother says, “that's what's keeping me going.”

I tighten my grip on the arm of Robert's chair. “Maybe I'm wasting my time,” I say. “Maybe I should just come back now.”

It would be so easy to be someplace where I am wanted, anyplace but here. I pause, waiting for her to take me up on the offer. But instead my mother laughs softly. “Do you know that your first word,” she says, “even before
Mama
and
Dada,
was
goodbye?”

She's right. It isn't going to do me any good to just keep running. I sink back against the chair and close my eyes, trying to picture the hairpin stream I jumped with Donegal, the ribbons of clouds lacing the sky. “Tell me what I'm missing,” I say. I listen to my mother speak of Aurora and Jean-Claude, of the sun-bleached paint on the chipped wall of the barn, of a brisk seasonal change that creeps farther up the porch every night. After a while I don't bother to concentrate on her actual words. I let the sound of her voice wash over me, making itself familiar.

Then I hear her say, “I called your father, you know.”

But I haven't spoken to my father since I've been back, so of course I could not have known. I am certain I've heard her wrong. “You
what?”
I say.

“I called your father. We had a good talk. I never would have called, but you sort of encouraged me. By leaving, I mean.” There is silence for a moment. “Who knows,” she murmurs. “Maybe one day I'll even see him.”

I look around at the mutated, hunkering shapes of chairs and end tables in the dark library. I rub my hands over my shoulders. I am beginning to feel hope. Maybe, after twenty years, this is what my mother and I can do for each other. It is not the way other mothers and daughters are—we will not talk about seventh-grade boys, or French-braid my hair on a rainy Sunday; my mother will not have the chance to heal my cuts and bruises with a kiss. We cannot go back, but we can keep surprising each other, and I suppose this is better than nothing at all.

Suddenly I really believe that if I stick it out long enough, Nicholas will understand. It's just a matter of time, and I have a lot of that on my hands. “I'm a volunteer at the hospital now,” I tell my mother proudly. “I work wherever Nicholas works. I'm closer than his shadow.”

My mother pauses, as if she is considering this. “Stranger things have happened,” she says.

Max wakes up screaming, his legs bent close to his chest. When I rub his stomach, it only makes him scream harder. I think that maybe he needs to burp, but that doesn't seem to be the problem. Finally, I walk around with him perched on my shoulder, pressing his belly flush against me. “What's wrong?” Astrid says, her head at the nursery doorway.

“I don't know,” I say, and to my surprise, uttering those words doesn't throw me into a panic. Somehow I know I will figure it out. “It might be gas.”

Max squeezes up his face and turns red, the way he does when he's trying to go to the bathroom. “Ah,” I say. “Are you leaving me a present?” I wait until he looks as if he's finished, and then I pull down his sweatpants to change his diaper. There is nothing inside, nothing at all. “You fooled me,” I say, and he smiles.