Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

Nicholas kissed the tears off my cheeks and stroked my hair. He was so close that we were breathing the same square of air. And as he stirred beside me again, I began to erase my past until almost all I could remember was whatever I had told Nicholas, whatever he wanted to believe. “Paige,” he said, “the second time is even better.” And reading into this, I moved astride him and eased him inside me and started to heal.

The best of the several memories I have of my mother involved the betrayal of my father. It was a Sunday, which had meant for as long as I’d been alive that we would be going to Mass. Every Sunday, my mother and my father and I would put on our best outfits and walk down the street to Saint Christopher‘s, where I would listen to the rhythmic hum of prayers and watch my mother and my father receive Communion. Afterward we’d stand in the sun on the worn stone steps of the church, and my father’s hand would rest warm on my head while he talked to the Morenos and the Salvuccis about the fine Chicago weather. But this particular Sunday, my father had left for O’Hare before the sun came up. He was flying to Westchester, New York, to meet with an eccentric old millionaire in hopes of promoting his latest invention, a polypropylene pool float that hung suspended by wires in the middle of the two-car garages that were part of the new suburban tract houses. He called it the Sedan Saver, and it kept car doors from scratching each other’s paint when they were opened.

I was supposed to be asleep, but I had been awakened by the dreams I’d been having. At four, almost five, I didn’t have many friends. Part of the problem was that I was shy; part was that other kids were steered clear of the O’Toole house by their parents. The bosomy Italian mothers in the neighborhood said my mother was too sassy for her own good; the dark, sweating men worried that my father’s bad luck in inventing could ooze uninvited over the thresholds of their own homes. Consequently, I had begun to dream up play-mates. I wasn’t the type of kid who saw someone beside me when I took out my Tinkertoys and my dominoes; I knew very well when I was alone that I was truly alone. But at night, I had the same dream over and over: another girl called to me, and together we rolled mud-burgers in our hands and pumped on swings until we both grazed the sun with our toes. The dream always ended the same way: I would get up the courage to ask the girl’s name so that I’d be able to find her and play together again, and just before she answered I’d wake up.

And so it was that on that Sunday I opened my eyes already disappointed, to hear my father tugging his suitcase down the hall and my mother whispering goodbye and reminding him to call us later, after we got home from Saint Christopher’s, to tell us how it went.

The morning started the way it always did. My mother made me breakfast-my favorite today, apple pancakes in the shape of my initials. She laid my pink lace last-year Easter dress onmote last-† the foot of my bed. But when the time came to leave for Mass, my mother and I stepped into one of those perfect April days. The sun was as filling as a kiss, and the air held the promise of freshly mowed grass. My mother smiled and took my hand and headed up the street, away from Saint Christopher’s. “On a day like this,” she said, “God didn’t mean for us to rot away indoors.”

It was the first time that I realized my mother had a second life, one that had nothing at all to do with my father. What I had always assumed was spirituality was really just the side effect of the energy that hovered around her like a magnetic field. I discovered that when my mother wasn’t bending to someone else’s whims, she could be a completely different person.

We walked for blocks and blocks, coming closer to the lake, I knew, by the way the wind hung in the air. It became unseasonably warm as we walked, reaching into the high seventies, maybe even eighty. She let go of my hand as we came to the white walls of the Lincoln Park Zoo, which prided itself on its natural habitats. Instead of keeping the animals locked in, they cleverly kept the people out. There were few fences or concrete barriers. What kept the giraffes penned was a wide-holed grate that their legs would have slipped through; what kept the zebras in were gulleys too wide to leap. My mother smiled at me. “You’ll love it here,” she said, making me wonder if she came often, and if so, whom she brought instead of me.

We were drawn to the polar bear exhibit simply because of the water. The free-form rocks and ledges were painted the cool blue of the Arctic, and the bears stretched in the sun, too warm in their winter fur. They slapped their paws at the water, which, my mother said, was just thirty-three degrees. There were two females and a cub. I wondered what the relationship was.

My mother waited until the cub couldn’t take the heat anymore, and then she pulled me down a few shadowed steps to the underwater viewing lounge, where you could see into the underwater tank through a window of thick plexiglass. The cub swam right toward us, sticking its nose against the plastic. “Look, Paige!” my mother said. “It’s kissing you!” She held me up to the window so that I could get a closer look at the sad brown eyes and the slippery whiskers. “Don’t you wish you could be in there?” my mother said, putting me down and dabbing at my forehead with the hem of her skirt. When I did not answer her, she began to walk back up into the heat, still talking quietly to herself. I followed her; what else could I do? “There are many places,” I heard her whisper, “I’d like to be.”

Then she got an inspiration. She found the nearest totem pole directional sign and dragged me toward the elephants. African and Indian, they were two different breeds but similar enough to live in the same zoo space. They had wide bald foreheads and paper-thin ears, and their skin was folded and soft and spread with wrinkles, like the saggy, mapped neck of the old black woman who came to clean Saint Christopher’s. The elephants shook their heads and swatted at gnats with their trunks. They followed each other from one end of their habitat to the other, stopping at, trees and examining them as if they’d never seen them before. I looked at them and wondered what it would be like to have one eye on each side of my body. I didn’t know if I’d like not being able to see things head-on.

A moat separated us from the elephants. My mother sat down on the hot coin n the hotncrete and pulled off her high heels. She was not wearing stockings. She hiked up her dress and waded into the knee-high water. “It’s lovely,” she said, sighing. “But don’t you come in, Paige. Really, I shouldn’t be doing this. Really, I could get in trouble.” She splashed me with the water, little bits of grass and dead flies sticking to the white lace collar of my dress. She sashayed and stomped and once almost lost her footing on the smooth bottom. She sang tunes from Broadway shows, but she made up her own lyrics, silly things about firm pachyderms and the wonder of Dumbo. When the zoo guard came up slowly, unsure of how to confront a grown woman in the elephant moat, my mother laughed and waved him away. She stepped out of the water with the grace of an angel and sat down on the concrete again. She pulled on her pumps, and when she stood, there was a dark oval on the ground where her damp bottom had been. She told me with the serious demeanor she’d used to tell me the Golden Rule that sometimes one had to take chances.

Several times that day I found myself looking at my mother with a strange tangle of feelings. I had no doubt that when my father called, she would tell him we’d been at Saint Christopher’s and that it had been just as it always was. I loved being part of a conspiracy. At one point I even wondered if the girlfriend I’d been seeing night after night in my dreams was really just my own mother. I thought of how convenient and wonderful that might be.