Harvesting the Heart (55 page)

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 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 ex-tremely hard, and that's important, you know,
but because of that I n'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 witched
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

For
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 a11 set," he said, watching his words puff out his blue
paper mask as if they had meaning or substance.