Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

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 th te aknot fore 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.”

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 dourn 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. ”