Harvesting the Heart (46 page)

Nicholas
nodded, secretly thrilled. He was amazed when people asked to hold
the baby. He would have given him to a complete stranger, the way
he'd been acting these past few days; that's how big a relief it was
to see him in someone else's arms. Nicholas traced his initials in
the soft, cool sand and, from the corner of his eye, watched Max
perched over Judy's shoulder.

"I
fed him cereal for the first time yesterday," Nicholas said. "I
did it the way you said, mostly formula, but he kept pushing out his
tongue like he couldn't figure out what a spoon was. And no matter
what you told me, he did
not
sleep
through the night."

Fay
smiled. "Wait till he's having more than a teaspoon a day,"
she said. "Then come back so I can say, 'I told you so.' "

Judy
walked toward them, still bouncing Max. "You know, Nicholas,
you've really come along. Hell, if you were my husband, I'd kiss your
feet. Imagine having someone who could take care of the kids and not
ask every three minutes why they're crying." She leaned close to
Nicholas and batted her eyelashes, smiling. "You give me a sign,
and I'll get a divorce lawyer."

Nicholas
smiled, and the women fell quiet, watching their children
overturn plastic buckets and build free-form castles. "Tell me
if this bothers you," Nikki said hesitantly. "I mean, we
haven't really known you very long, and we barely know anything about
you, but I have this friend who's divorced, with a kid. and I was
wondering if sometime you might . . . you know
..."

"I'm
married." The words came so quickly to Nicholas's lips that they
surprised him more than the mothers. Fay, Judy, and Nikki exchanged a
look. "My wife . . . she isn't around."

Fay
smoothed her hand over the edge of the sandbox. "We're sorry to
hear that," she said, assuming the worst.

"She's
not dead," Nicholas said. "She sort of left."

Judy
came to stand behind Fay. "She left?"

Nicholas
nodded. "She took off about a week ago. She, well, she wasn't
very good at this—not like you all are—and she was a
little overwhelmed, I think, and she cracked under the pressure."
He looked at their blank faces, wondering why he felt he had to make
explanations for Paige when he himself couldn't forgive her.
"She never had a mother," he said.

"Everyone
has
a mother," Fay said. "That's the way it happens."

"Hers
left her when she was five. Last I heard, actually, she was trying to
find her. Like that might give her all the answers."

Fay
pulled her son toward her and restrapped the hanging front of his
overalls. "Answers, jeez. There aren't any answers. You should
have seen me when he was three months old," she said lightly. "I
had scared away all my friends, and I was almost declared legally
dead by my family doctor."

Nikki
sucked in her breath and stared at Nicholas, her eyes wide and liquid
with pity. "Still," she whispered, "to leave your own
child."

Nicholas
felt the silence crowding in on him. He didn't want their stares; he
didn't want their sympathy. He looked at the toddlers, wishing for
one of them to start crying, just to break the moment. Even Max was
being quiet.

Judy
sat down beside Nicholas and balanced Max on her lap. She touched
Nicholas's wrist and lifted his hand to the baby's mouth. "I
think I've found out what's making him such a monster," she said
gently. "There." She pressed Nicholas's finger to the
bottom of Max's gums, where a sharp triangle of white bit into his
flesh.

Fay
and Nikki crowded closer, eager to change the subject. "A
tooth!" Fay said, as animated as if Max had been accepted to
Harvard; and Nikki added, "He's just over three months, right?
That's awfully early. He's in a hurry to grow up; I bet he crawls
soon." Nicholas

stared
at the downy crown of black hair on his son's head. He pressed down
with his finger, letting Max bite back with his jaws, with his
brand-new tooth. He looked up at the sky, a day without clouds, and
then let the women run their fingers over Max's gums.
Paige
would have wanted to he here,
he
thought suddenly, and then he felt anger searing through him like a
brush fire.
Paige
should
have
wanted to be here.

^chapter
25

Paige

If
had
never been there, but this was the way I had pictured Ireland from my
father's stories. Rich, rolling hills the deep green of emeralds;
grass thicker than a plush rug, farms notched into the slopes and
bordered by sturdy stone walls. Several times I stopped the car, to
drink from streams cleaner and colder than I had ever imagined
possible. I could hear my father's brogue in the cascade and the
current, and I could not believe the irony: my mother had run away to
the North Carolina countryside, a land my father would have loved.

If
I hadn't known better, I would have assumed the hills were virgin
territory. Paved roads were the only sign that anyone else had been
here, and in the three hours I'd been driving across the state, I
hadn't passed a single car. I had rolled down all the windows so that
the air could rush into my lungs. It was crisper than the air in
Chicago, lighter than the air in Cambridge. I felt as if I were
drinking

in
the endless open space, and I could see how, out here, someone could
easily get lost.

Since
leaving Chicago, I had been thinking only of my mother. I ran through
every solid memory I'd ever had and froze each of them in my mind
like an image from a slide projector, hoping to see something I
hadn't noticed before. I couldn't come up with an image of her face.
It drifted in and out of shadows.

My
father had said I looked like her, but it had been twenty years since
he'd seen her and eight since he'd seen me, so he might have been
mistaken. I knew from her clothes that she was taller and thinner.
I knew from Eddie Savoy how she'd spent the past two decades. But I
still didn't think I'd be able to spot her in a crowd.

The
more I drove, the more I remembered about my mother. I remembered how
she tried to get ahead of herself, making all my lunches for the week
on Sunday night and stowing them in the freezer, so that my bologna
and my turkey and my Friday tuna fish were never fully thawed by the
time I ate them. I remembered that when I was four and got the mumps
on only the right side of my face, my mother had fed me half-full
cups of Jell-o and kept me in bed half the day, telling me that after
all, I was half healthy. I remembered the dreary day in March
when we were both worn down by the sleet and the cold, and she had
baked a devil's food cake and made glittery party hats, and together
we celebrated Nobody's birthday. I remembered the time she was
in a car accident, how I had come downstairs at midnight to a room
full of policemen and found her lying on the couch, one eye swollen
shut and a gash over her lip, her arms reaching out to hold me.

Then
I remembered the March before she left, Ash Wednesday. In
kindergarten, we had a half day of school, but the
Tribune
was
still open. My mother could have hired the baby-sitter to take care
of me until she came home, or told me to wait next door at the
Manzettis'. But instead she'd come up with the idea that we would go
out to lunch and then make afternoon Mass. She had announced this
over the dinner table and told my father that I was smart enough to
take the bus all by myself. My father stared at her, not believing
what he had heard, and then finally he grabbed my mother's hand and
pressed it to the table, hard, as if he could make her see the truth
through the pain. "No, May," he'd said, "she's too
young."

But
well after midnight, the door to my room opened, and in the slice of
light that fell across my bed I saw the shadow of my mother. She came
in and sat in the dark and pressed into my hand twenty cents, bus
fare. She held out a route map and a flashlight and made me repeat
after her:
Michigan
and Van Buren Street, the downtown local. One, two, three, four
stops, and Mommy will be there.
I
said it over and over until it was as familiar as my bedtime prayers.
My mother left the room and let me go to sleep. At four in the
morning, I awoke to find her face inches away from mine, her breath
hot against my lips. "Say it," she commanded, and my mouth
formed the words that my brain could not hear, stuffed as it was with
sleep.
Michigan
and Van Buren Street,
I
murmured.
The
downtown local.
I
opened my eyes wide, surprised by how well I had learned. "That's
my girl," my mother said, cupping my cheeks in her hands. She
pressed a finger to my lips. "And don't tell your daddy,"
she whispered.

Even
I knew the value of a secret. Through breakfast, I avoided my
father's gaze. When my mother dropped me off at the school gates, her
eyes flashed, feverish. For a moment she looked so different that I
thought of Sister Alberta's lectures on the devil. "What's it
all for," my mother said to me, "without the risk?"
And I had pressed my face against hers to kiss her goodbye the way I
always did, but this time I whispered against her cheek:
One,
two, three, four stops. And you'll be there.

I
had swung my feet back and forth under my chair that morning, and I
colored in the pictures of Jesus outside the lines because I was so
excited. When Sister let us out at the bell, blessing us in a stream
of rushed words, I turned to the left, the direction I never went. I
walked until I came to the corner of Michigan and Van Buren and saw
the pharmacy my mother had said would be there. I stood underneath
the Metro sign, and when the big bus sighed into place beside the
curb, I asked the driver, "Downtown local?"

He
nodded and took my twenty cents, and I sat in the front seat as my
mother had said, not looking beside me because there could be bums
and bad men and even the devil himself. I could feel hot breath on my
neck, and I squeezed my eyes shut, listening to the roll of the
wheels and the lurch of the brakes and counting the stops. When the
door opened for the fourth time, I bolted from my seat, peeking into
the one beside mine just that once, to see only blue vinyl and the
lacy grate of the air conditioner. I stepped off the bus and waited
for the knot of people to clear, shielding my eyes from the sun. My
mother knelt, her arms open, her smile red and laughing and wide.
"Paige-boy," she said, folding me into her purple raincoat.
"I knew you'd come."

I
had asked a man with spare tufts of gray hair, who'd been sitting on
a milk can at the side of the road, if he'd heard of Farleyville.
"Yuh," he said, pointing in front of me. "You almost
there now."

"Well,"
I said, "maybe you've heard of a salon called Bridal Bits?"

The
man scratched his chest through his worn chambray shirt. He laughed,
and he had no teeth. "A sa-lon," he said, mocking my words.
"I don't know 'bout that."

The
corners of my mouth turned down. "Could you just tell me where
it is?"

The
man grinned at me. "If it be the same place I'm thinking of, and
I'm bettin' it ain't, then you want to take the first right at the
'baccy field and keep goin' till you see a bait shop. It's three
miles past that, on the left." He shook his head as I stepped
back into the car. "You said Farleyville," he said, "di'n't
you?"