Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

Robert led us into the parlor for coffee and brandy. Astrid made sure we all had a glass. Nicholas sat beside me on a love seat and put his arm over my shoulders. He leaned over and whispered to me that dinner had gone so well he wouldn’t be surprised if his parents now offered us a huge, extr at q huge, eavagant wedding. I knotted my hands in my lap, noticing the small framed photos tucked in every spare inch of space in the parlor-in the bookshelves, on the piano, even beneath the chairs. All were photos of Nicholas, at different ages: Nicholas on a tricycle, Nicholas’s face turned up to the sky, Nicholas sitting on the front steps with a ratty black puppy. I was trying so hard to see these pieces of his life, the things I had missed, that I almost did not hear Robert Prescott’s question. “Just how old,” he said, “are you really.”

I was caught off guard. I had been examining the ice-blue satin paper on the walls, the overstuffed white wing chairs, and the Queen Anne side tables, tastefully highlighted with antique vases and painted copper boxes. Nicholas had told me that the portrait over the fireplace, a Sargent which had held my interest, was not anyone he knew. It wasn’t the subject that had led his father to purchase it, he said; it was the investment. I wondered how Astrid Prescott had found the time to create a name for herself and a house that could put a museum to shame. I wondered how a boy could possibly grow up in a home where sliding down the banister or walking the dog on a yo- yo could unintentionally destroy hundreds of years of history.

“I’m eighteen,” I said evenly, thinking that in my house- our house-furniture would be soft, with curved edges, colored bright to remind you you were alive, and everything, everything, would be replaceable.

“You know, Paige,” Astrid said, “eighteen is such an age. Why, I didn’t know what I really wanted to do with my life until I was at least thirty-two.”

Robert stood and paced in front of the fireplace. He stopped directly in the middle, blocking the face of the Sargent so that from where I sat it seemed he was the painting’s center, hideously larger than life. “What my wife is trying to say is that of course you two have the right to decide what you’d like-”

“We already have,” Nicholas pointed out.

“If you please,” Robert said, “just hear me out. You certainly have the right to decide what you’d like out of life. But I wonder if perhaps your thoughts have been clouded by faulty judgment. Now, Paige, you’ve barely even lived. And Nicholas, you’re still in school. You can’t support yourself yet, much less a family, and that’s to say nothing of the hours you’ll spend doing your residency.” He came to stand in front of me and placed his hand, cold, on my shoulder. “Surely Paige would prefer more than the shadow of a husband.”

“Paige needs time to discover herself,” Astrid said, as if I were not in the room. “I know, believe me, that it’s virtually impossible to sustain a marriage when-”

“Mother,” Nicholas interrupted. His lips were pressed together in a thin white gash. “Cut to the chase,” he said.

“Your mother and I think you ought to wait,” Robert Prescott said. “If you still feel the same way in a few years, well, of course you’ll have our blessing.”

Nicholas stood up. He was two inches taller than his father, and when I saw him like that my breath caught in my throat. “We’re getting marrier t qting mard now,” he said.

Astrid cleared her throat and hit her diamond wedding band against the rim of her glass. “This is so difficult to bring up,” she said. She looked away from us, this woman who had journeyed into the Australian bush, who, armed only with a camera, had faced Bengal tigers, who had slept in the desert beneath saguaros, searching out the perfect sunrise. She looked away, and all of a sudden she changed from the mythic photographer to the shadow of an aging debutante. She looked away, and that was when I knew what she was going to say.

Nicholas stared past his mother. “Paige is not pregnant,” he said, and when Astrid sighed and sank back in the chair, Nicholas flinched as if he had fielded a blow.

Robert turned his back on his son and put his brandy snifter on the mantel of the fireplace. “If you marry Paige,” he said quietly, “I will withdraw financial support for your education.”

Nicholas took a step backward, and I did the only thing I could: I stood up beside him and gave him my weight to lean on. Across the room, Astrid was looking blindly out the window into the night, as though she would do anything in her power to avoid watching this scene. Robert Prescott turned around. His eyes were tired, and in the corners were the beginnings of tears. “I’m trying to keep you from ruining your life,” he said.

“Don’t do me any favors,” Nicholas said, and he pulled me across the room. He led me out of the house, leaving the door wide open behind us.

When we were outside, Nicholas started to run. He ran around the side of the house into the backyard, past the white marble bird-bath, past the trellised grape arbor, deep into the cool woods that edged his parents’ property. I found him sitting on a bed of dying pine needles. His knees were drawn up, and his head was bent, as if the air around him was too heavy to keep it upright. “Listen,” I said. “Maybe you need to think this through.”

It killed me to say those words, to think that Nicholas Prescott might disappear into his parents’ million-dollar house and wave goodbye and leave my life what it used to be. I had come to the point where I truly did not think I could exist without Nicholas. When he was not around, I spent my time imagining him with me. I depended on him to tell me the dates of upcoming holidays, to make sure I got home from work safely, to fill my free time till I felt I would burst. It seemed so easy to blend into his life that at times I wondered if I had been anyone at all before I met him.

“I don’t need to think this through,” Nicholas said. “We’re getting married.”

“And I suppose Harvard is going to keep you on because you’re God’s gift to medicine?”

I realized after I said it that it was not phrased the way it should have been. Nicholas looked up as if I had slapped him. “I could drop out,” he said, turning the words over like he was speaking a foreign language.

But I would not spend the rest of my life married to a man who, at least a little, hated me because he never got to be what he hadgoo qwhat he wanted. I didn’t love Nicholas because he was going to be a doctor, but I did love him because he was, unquestionably, the best. And Nicholas wouldn’t have been Nicholas if he had to compromise. “Maybe there’s a dean you can talk to,” I said softly. “Not everyone at Harvard is made of money. They’ve got to have scholarships and student aid. And next year, between your salary as a resident and mine at Mercy, we could make ends meet. I could get a second job. We could take out a loan based on your future income.”

Nicholas pulled me down beside him on the pine needles and held me. In the distance I heard a blue jay trill. Nicholas had taught me, a city girl, these things: the differences between the songs of blue jays and starlings, the way to start a fire with birch bark, the humming sound of a faraway flock of geese. I felt Nicholas’s chest shake with every breath. I made a mental list of the people we would have to contact tomorrow to figure out our finances, but I felt confident. I could put off my own future for a while; after all, art school would always be there, and you could very well be an artist without ever having attended one. Besides, some part of me believed that I was getting something just as good. Nicholas loved me; Nicholas had chosen to stay with me. “I will work for you,” I whispered to him, and even as I said it I had the dark thought of the Old Testament, of Jacob, who labored seven years for Rachel and still did not get what he wanted.