Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

For a long time I sat on the porch outside the house, ignoring neighbors who stared at me briefly from the sidewalk or from car windows. I didn’t know how to be a good mother. I hadn’t had one. I mostly saw them on TV. My mind brought up pictures of Marion Cunningham and Laura Petrie. What did those women do all day?

Nicholas’s car came into the driveway hours later, when I was thinking of all the things I wouldn’t have access to that I needed for having a child. I couldn’t tell Dr. Thayer about my mother’s family history. I didn’t know the details of her labor. And I would not tell Nicholas that there had been a baby before this and that I was someone else’s before I was his.

Nicholas swung out of his car when he saw me, his body unfolding and straightening for an attack. But as he came closer he realized the fight had gone out of me. I sagged la¡me. I sag against the pillar of the porch and waited until he stepped in front of me. He seemed impossibly tall. “I’m pregnant,” I said, and I burst into tears.

He smiled, and then he bent down and lifted me up, carrying me into the house in his arms. He danced over the threshold. “Paige,” he said, “this is great. Absolutely great.” He set me down on the skin-colored couch, smoothing my hair away from my eyes. “Hey,” he said, “don’t worry about the money.”

I didn’t know how to tell him that I was not worried, just scared. I was scared about not knowing how to hold an infant. I was scared that I might not love my own child. More than anything, I was scared that I was doomed before I began, that the cycle my mother had started was hereditary and that one day I would just pack up and disappear off the face of the earth.

Nicholas put his arms around me. “Paige,” he said, holding my thoughts in the palm of his hand, “you’re going to be a terrific mother.”

“How do you know?” I cried, and then I said it again, softly: “How do you know?” I stared at Nicholas, who had done everything he’d ever set out to do. I wondered when I had lost control of my own life.

Nicholas sat down beside me and slipped his hand underneath my sweater. He unzipped the waistband of my pants. He spread his fingers across my abdomen as if whatever was growing inside needed his protection. “My son,” he said, his voice thick at the edges.

It was as if a window opened, showing me the rest of my life as it lay, dissected and piecemeal. I considered my future, stunted and squeezed into boundaries defined by two men. I imagined being in a house where I was always the odd one out. “I’m not making any promises,” I said.

The first person I fell in love with was Priscilla Divine. She had come from Texas to Chicago and enrolled in Our Lady of the Cross, my grade school, when I was in sixth grade. She was a year older than the rest of us, though she’d never been left back. She had long blond hair the color of honey, and she never walked but glided. It was said by some of the other girls that she was the reason her family had to move.

There was such an aura of mystery surrounding Priscilla Divine that she probably could have picked just about anyone she wanted to be her friend, but she happened to choose me. One morning during religion class she raised her hand and told Sister Theresa that she thought she might throw up and she’d like it very much if Paige could help her down to the nurse’s office. But once we were in the hall she didn’t look sick at all, and in fact she pulled me by the hand into the girls’ bathroom and took a pack of cigarettes out of the waistband of her skirt and matches from her left sock. She lit up, inhaled, and offered the cigarette to me like a peace pipe. With my reputation hanging in the balance, I drew in deeply, knowing enough not to let myself cough. Priscilla was impressed, and those were the beginnings of my bad years.

Priscilla and I did everything we cagt wasselweren’t supposed to. We walked through Southside, the black neighborhood, on our way home from Our Lady. We stuffed our bras, and we cheated on algebra tests. We did not confess these things, because as Priscilla taught me, there are certain things you do not tell priests. It got to the point where we had each been suspended from school three times, and the sisters suggested we give up each other’s friendship for Lent.

We discovered sex on a rainy Saturday when we were in seventh grade. I was at Priscilla’s, lying on my back on her lollipop bedspread and watching lightning freeze the street outside into still-life photos. Priscilla was thumbing through a Playboy that we’d stolen from her brother’s room. We had had the magazine for several months and had already memorized the pictures and read all the letters to the “Advisor,” looking up the words we didn’t understand. Even Priscilla was bored by the same old thing. She stood up and moved to the window. For a moment a trick of lightning darkened her eyes and created shadows that made her look drained and disillusioned, as if she had been staring at the street below for ages rather than seconds. When she turned to me, arms crossed, I barely recognized her. “Paige,” she said casually, “have you ever kissed an actual boy?”

I hadn’t, but I wasn’t about to let her know that. “Sure,” I said. “Haven’t you?”

Priscilla tossed her hair and took a step forward. “Prove it,” she said.

I couldn’t; and this very topic, in fact, had been one of my biggest worries. I had spent entire nights awake, practicing kissing with my pillow, but I couldn’t figure out the finer points, like where my nose should go and when I was supposed to take a breath. “How am I supposed to prove it?” I said. “Unless there’s a guy in here that I can’t see.”

Priscilla walked toward me, thin and almost see-through in the purple afternoon. She leaned over me so that her hair made a quiet tent. “Pretend,” she said, “ I’m the guy.”

I knew that Priscilla knew I had been lying; just as well as I knew that I wasn’t going to admit it. So I leaned forward and put my hands on her shoulders and pressed my lips against hers. “You see,” I said, dismissing her with a wave of my hand.

“No,” she said, “it’s like this.” And she turned her head and kissed me back. Her lips moved as much as mine hadn’t, molding me beneath her until my mouth was doing the same thing. My eyes were wide open, still watching the lightning. In that instant I knew that every rumor told about Priscilla Divine in school, every nun’s warning and every altar boy’s sideways glance, was justified. Her tongue slipped over my lips, and I jumped back. Priscilla’s hair clung to my shoulders and my face like a web, that’s the kind of electricity we had generated.

We spent time after that getting kissing down to a science. We’d borrow Priscilla’s mother’s red lipstick and make out with the bathroom mirror, watching our own faces fog up as we learned to love ourselves. We went to the public library and hid in the stacks with adult romance novels, skimming the pages until we came to the sex scenes, and then we’d whisper them out loud. Occasionally we kissed each other, taking turns playing the boy. Whoever was the girl got to swoon and to lower her eyelashes and to whisper breathlessly l my±eathlesslike the women in those forbidden books. Whoever was the boy had to stand still and straight, to accept.

One day after school Priscilla showed up at my front door, out of breath. “Paige,” she said, “you’ve got to come now.” She knew I was supposed to stay at home alone until my father returned from the office where he worked as a computer programmer to supplement his income from inventions. She knew that I never broke promises to my father. “Paige,” she insisted, “this is important.”