Harvesting the Heart (23 page)

Nicholas
sighed. It wasn't Paige's fault; it was his own. Somewhere along
the way he'd been tricked into thinking, again, that the only life
worth living was the one waiting for him downstairs. He wondered what
Alistair Fogerty would say if he took Paige and crawled out the
window and shimmied down the drainpipe and ran out to the Greek pizza
place in Brighton. He wondered how he had wound up coming full
circle.

When
he pushed open the bedroom door, he couldn't find his wife. Then he
saw her, blended into the blue bedspread, tucked into the upper right
corner. She was lying on her side, with her knees drawn up. "They
made fun of me," she said.

"They
didn't know it was you," Nicholas pointed out. "You know,
Paige," he said, "not everything is about
you."
He
reached for her shoulder, pulling her roughly to face him, and saw
the mapped silver lines tears had cut across her cheeks. "About
these dinner parties," he said.

"What
about them?" Paige whispered.

Nicholas
swallowed. He imagined Paige as she might have looked earlier that
day, painstakingly painting the dishes and the glassware. He saw
himself at age ten, learning table etiquette and patterned waltzes on
Saturday mornings at Miss Lillian's Finishing Sessions. Well, like it
or not, he thought, it all was a game. And if you had any intention
of winning, you had to at least
play.
"You're
going to go to these stupid dinners, whether or not you like them,
for a long time. You're going to go out there tonight and apologize
and blame it on hormones. And when you say goodbye to those two
bitches, you're going to smile and tell them you can't wait to see
them again." He watched Paige's eyes fill with tears. "My
life, and your life, doesn't only depend on what I do in an operating
suite. If I'm going to get

anywhere
I have to kiss ass, and it's sure as hell not going to help if I have
to spend half the time making excuses for you."

"I
can't do it," Paige said. "I can't keep going to your
stupid parties and fund-raisers and watch everyone pointing at me
like I'm the freak at the sideshow."

"You
can," Nicholas said, "and you will."

Paige
raised her eyes to his, and for a long minute they stared at each
other. Nicholas watched new tears well up and spill over, spiking her
lashes. Finally, he pulled her into his arms, burying his face in her
hair. "Come on, Paige," he whispered. "I'm only doing
this for

you."

Nicholas
did not have to look to know that Paige was staring straight ahead,
still sobbing. "Are you," she said quietly.

They
sat on the edge of the bed, Nicholas curling his body around Paige's,
and they listened to the laughter of their guests and the
ting
of
glasses being raised in toasts. Nicholas brushed a tear off Paige's
cheek. "Jesus, Paige," he said quietly. "You think I
like making you upset? It's just that this is important."
Nicholas sighed. "My father d to tell me that if you want to
win, you have to play by the rules."

Paige
grimaced. "Your father probably
wrote
the
rules." Against his will, Nicholas felt his shoulders stiffen.
"As a matter of fact," he said, "my father didn't have
any family money. He worked to get what he has now, but he was born
flat broke."

Paige
pulled away to stare at him. Her jaw dropped open as if she was about
to say something, but she only shook her head.

Nicholas
caught her chin with his fingers. Maybe he had been wrong about
Paige. Maybe money and breeding were as important to her as they were
to his old girlfriends. He shivered, wondering what this admission
had cost him. "What?" he said. "Tell me." "I
don't believe it."

"You
don't believe what? That my father had no money?" "No,"
Paige said slowly. "That he
chose
to
live the way he does now."

Nicholas
smiled, relieved. "It has its advantages," he pointed out.

"You
know where the next mortgage payment is coming from. You know who
your friends are. You don't worry nearly as much about what everyone
else thinks of you."

"And
that's what you care about?" Paige shifted away from him. "Why
didn't you tell me this before?"

Nicholas
shrugged. "It never came up."

In
the distance, someone shouted out a punch line. "I'm sorry,"
Paige said tightly, balling her hands into fists. "I didn't know
you made such a sacrifice to marry me."

Nicholas
pulled her into his arms and stroked her back until he felt her
relax. "I
wanted
to
marry you," he said. "And besides," he added,
grinning, "I didn't give it all up. I put it on hold. A few more
dinner parties, a few less roasts on the floor, and we'll be in the
black." He helped her stand. "Would it really be so awful?
I want our baby to have the things I did when I was growing up,
Paige. I want you to live like a queen."

Nicholas
started to lead her into the hall. "What about what I want?"
Paige whispered, so soft that even she could not clearly hear
herself.

When
they walked back into the living room, Paige held on to Nicholas's
hand so tightly that when she stepped away, marks from her
fingernails were pressed into his palm. He watched her lift her chin.
"I'm so sorry," she said. "I'm not feeling too well
these days." She stood with the grace of a madonna while the
women took turns holding their hands up to her stomach, prodding and
pressing and guessing the sex of their child. She saw each pair of
guests out, and as Nicholas stood on the porch, talking to Alistair
about tomorrow's schedule, she went to clean up the dirty dishes.

Nicholas
found her in the living room, throwing the plates and the glasses
into the fireplace. He stood very still as she hurled the ceramic and
watched her smile when the shards, littered with fragments of
clouds and flamingos, fell at her feet. He had never seen her destroy
her own work; even the little doodles on the telephone pad

were
tucked into a folder somewhere for future ideas. But Paige shattered
dish after dish, glass after glass, and then she lit a fire
underneath the pieces. She stood in front of the hearth, flames
dancing in shadow over her face, while the colors and friezes were
ashed over in black. And then she turned to face Nicholas, as if she
knew he had been standing there all along.

If
Nicholas had been frightened by her actions before, he was shocked by
what he saw in Paige's eyes. He had seen it once before, when he was
fifteen, the one and only time he had gone hunting with his father.
They had walked in the mist of a Vermont morning, stalking deer,
and Nicholas had spotted a buck. He had tapped his father's shoulder,
as he'd been taught to do, and watched Robert raise the barrel of his
Weatherby. The buck had been a distance away, but Nicholas could
clearly see the tremble of its rack, the rigidity of its stance, the
way the life had gone out of its gaze.

Nicholas
took a step back into the safety of his living room. His wife was
framed by fire; her eyes were those of an animal trapped.

^chapter
10

Paige

_S
pread
around my kitchen were the travel brochures. I was supposed to be
planning my family, painting the nursery and knitting pale-peach
sacque sets, but instead I had become obsessed with places where
I had never been. The leaflets were spilled like a rainbow across the
counter, they covered the length of the window seat in splashes of
aqua, magenta, and gold. Progressive Travels. Smuggler's Notch.
Civilized Adventures.

Nicholas
was starting to get annoyed. "What the hell
are
these,"
he'd said, sweeping them off the black glass stovetop. "Oh, you
know," I had hedged. "Junk mail." But they weren't. I
had sent away for them, a dollar here and fifty cents there, knowing
I would receive in the mail a new destination every day. I read the
brochures from cover to cover, rolling the names of the cities in my
mouth. Dordogne, Pouilly-sur-Loire. Verona and Helmsley, Sedona and
Banff. Bhutan, Manaslu, Ghorapani Pass. They

were
tours that were impossible for someone who was pregnant; most
involved intense hiking or bicycling, preventive inoculations. I
think I read them because they were exactly what I couldn't do. I
would lie on my back on the floor of my pristine kitchen, and I'd
imagine valleys heavy with the scent of rhododendrons, the lush parks
and canyons where guanacos, serows, and pandas made their homes. I
imagined sleeping in the Kalahari bush, listening to the distant
thunder of antelope, buffalo, elephants, cheetahs. I thought
about this baby, weighing me down more and more each day, and I
pretended that I was anywhere but here.

My
baby was eight inches long. He could smile. He had eyebrows and
eyelashes; he sucked his thumb. He had his own set of fingerprints
and footprints. His eyes were still closed, heavy-lidded, waiting to
see.

I
knew everything I could about this baby. I read so many books on
pregnancy and birth that I memorized certain sections. I knew what
the signs of false labor were. I learned the terms "bloody show"
and "effacement and dilatation." Sometimes I actually
believed that studying every possible fact about pregnancy might make
up for the shortcomings I would have as a mother.

My
third month had been the hardest. After those first few episodes,
I was never sick, but the things I learned cramped my gut and took my
breath away. At twelve weeks, my baby had been one and a half inches
long. He weighed one twenty-eighth of an ounce. He had five webbed
fingers, hair follicles. He could kick and move. He had a tiny brain,
one that could send and receive messages. I spent much of that month
with my hands spread over my abdomen, as if I could hold him in.
Because once, a long long time ago, I had had another baby twelve
weeks old. I tried not to compare, but that was inevitable. I told
myself to be happy I did not know the facts about it then, as I did
now.

The
reason I had had an abortion was that I wasn't ready to be a mother;
I couldn't have given a child the kind of life it deserved to have.
Adoption wasn't an alternative, either, since that would have meant
I'd be pregnant full term—I couldn't bring that kind of shame
to my father. Seven years later, I had almost convinced myself that
these were good excuses. But sometimes I would sit in my Barely White
kitchen, run my fingers over the cool, smooth travel photos, and I
would wonder if things were so different. Yes, I now had the means to
support a baby. I could afford to buy the beautiful blond
Scandinavian nursery furniture, the bright googly-eyed fish mobile.
But I had two strikes against me: I still had no mother of my own as
a model. I had killed my first child.

I
went to stand and ground my belly into the edge of the kitchen table,
wincing at the pain. My stomach was round but rock hard, and it
seemed to have a million nerve endings. My body, curved in places
where it never had been, was a hazard. I found myself stuck in tight
spots—backed against walls, caught between closely placed
restaurant chairs, trapped in the aisles of buses. I couldn't judge
the space I needed anymore, and I willed myself to believe that this
would change in time.