Harvesting the Heart (10 page)

Paige
looked up from the anatomy book. "If I quizzed you, would you
know every little thing?"

Nicholas
laughed. "No. Yes. Well, it depends on what you ask me." He
leaned forward. "But don't tell anyone, or I'll never get my
degree."

Paige
sat up, cross-legged. "Take my medical history," she said.
"Isn't that good practice? Wouldn't that help you?"

Nicholas
groaned. "I do it about a hundred times a day," he said. "I
could do it in my sleep." He rolled onto his back. "Name?
Age?

Date
of birth? Place of birth? Do you smoke? Exercise? Do you or does
anyone in your family have a history of heart disease . . . diabetes
. . . breast cancer. Do you or does anyone in your family . . ."
He let his words trail off, and then he slid off the couch to sit
next to Paige. She was looking into her lap. "I'd have a little
problem with a medical history, I guess," she said. "If
it's
my
medical
history, why do you focus on everyone else in my family?"

Nicholas
reached for her hand. "Tell me about your mother," he said.

Paige
jumped to her feet and picked up her purse. "I've got to go,"
she said, but Nicholas grabbed her wrist before she could move away.

"How
come every time I mention your mother you run away?"

"How
come every time I'm with you you bring it up?" Paige stared down
at him and then tugged her wrist free. Her fingers slipped over
Nicholas's until their hands rested tip to tip. "It's no big
mystery, Nicholas," she said. "Did it ever occur to you
that I have nothing to tell?"

The
dim light of Nicholas's green-shaded banker's lamp cast shadows
of him and of Paige on the opposite wall, images that were nothing
more than black and white and were magnified, ten feet tall. In the
shadow, where you couldn't see the faces, it almost looked as if
Paige had reached out her hand to help Nicholas up. It almost looked
as if she were the one supporting him.

He
pulled her down to sit next to him, and she didn't really resist.
Then he cupped his hands together and fashioned a shadow alligator,
which began to eat its way across the wall. "Nicholas!"
Paige whispered, a smile running across her face. "Show me how
you do it!" Nicholas folded his hands over hers, twisting her
fingers gently and cupping her palms just so until a rabbit was
silhouetted across the room. "I've seen it done before,"
she said, "but no one ever showed me how."

Nicholas
made a serpent, a dove, an Indian, a Labrador. With each new image,
Paige clapped, begged to be shown the position of the hands. Nicholas
couldn't remember the last time someone had got so excited about
shadow animals. He couldn't remember the last time he'd made them.

She
couldn't get the beak right on the bald eagle. She had the head down
pat, and the little open knot for the eye, but Nicholas couldn't mold
her fingers just so for the hook in the beak. "I think your
hands are too small," he said.

Paige
turned his hands over, tracing the life lines of his palms. "I
think yours are just right," she said.

Nicholas
bent his head to her hands and kissed them, and Paige watched their
silhouette, mesmerized by the movement of his head and the sleek
outline of his nape and the spot where his shadow melted into hers.
Nicholas looked up at her, his eyes dark. "We never finished
your medical history," he said, and he slid his palms up her rib
cage.

Paige
leaned her head into his shoulder and closed her eyes. "That's
because I don't have a history," she said.

"We'll
skip that part," Nicholas murmured. He pressed his lips against
her throat. "Have you ever been hospitalized for major
surgery?" he said. "Say, a tonsillectomy?" He
kissed her neck, her shoulders, her abdomen. "An
appendectomy?"

"No,"
Paige breathed. "Nothing." She lifted her head as Nicholas
grazed her breasts with his knuckles.

Nicholas
swallowed, feeling as though he were seventeen all over again. He
wasn't going to do something he'd regret. After all, it wasn't as if
she'd done this before. "Intact," he whispered. "Perfect."
He lowered his hands, still shaking, to Paige's hips and pushed her
back several inches. He brushed her hair away from her eyes.

Paige
made a sound that started low in her throat. "No," she
said, "you don't understand."

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

Paige

_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 down the shades. "Let's pretend," he said, "that
it isn't the middle of the day."

He
sat on the edge of the mattress. I was tucked under the covers.
Although it was over ninety degrees outside, I had been shivering the
whole day. I also wished it were nighttime, but not out of modesty.
This had been such a tense, awful day that I wanted it to be tomorrow
already. I wanted to wake up and find Nicholas and get on with the
rest of my life. Our life.

Nicholas
leaned over me, bringing the familiar scent of soap and baby shampoo
and fresh-cut grass. I loved the way he smelled, because it wasn't
what I had expected. He kissed my forehead, the way you would a sick
child. "Are you scared?" he asked.

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.

Nicholas
pulled the sheet away from me. "Where did you get that?" he
asked, running his hands over the white satin. He slipped his fingers
beneath the thin straps. His breath brushed the hollow of my neck,
and I could feel us touching at so many points—our shoulders,
our stomachs, our thighs. He moved his head lower and circled my
nipple with his tongue. I ran my hands through his hair, watching a
shaft of sun bring out the blue base under thick black.

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.