Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

Paige wrapped her arms around him, and he leaned into her, still warm and soft with sleep. “Tell me what I can do for you,” she whispered.

“Hold me,” Nicholas said, knowing she would; knowing, with the unswerving faith of a child at Christmastime, that she would never let go.

Paige hadn’t wanted to tell anyone she was pregnant. In fact, if Nicholas hadn’t known better, he would have thought she was avoiding the inevitable. She didn’t run out to buy maternity clothes; they really didn’t have the extra money, she said. In spite of Nicholas’s urging, when she called her father she did not tell him the news. “Nicholas,” she had told him, “one out of every three pregnancies ends in miscarriage. Let’s just wait and see.”

“That’s only true through the first trimester,” Nicholas had said. “You’re almost five months along.”

And Paige had turned on him. “I know that,” she said. “I’m not stupid. ”

“I didn’t say you were stupid,” Nicholas said gently. “I said you were pregnant.”

He drove home quickly, hoping Paige had remembered this dinner party even if he hadn’t. She’d have to, after the way they’d fought over it. Paige insisted the house was too small, that she couldn’t cook anything worthy of a dinner party, that they didn’t have fine china and crystal. “Who cares?” Nicholas had said. “Maybe they’ll feel bad and give me more money.”

He opened the back door and found his wife sitting on the kitchen floor. She wore an old shirt of his and a pair of his pants rolled to the knee. She held a bottle of Drano in one hand and a glass in the other, ringed brown. “Don’t do it,” Nicholas said, grinning. “Or if you do, wouldn’t sleeping pills be more pleasant?”

Paige sighed and put the glass down on the floor. “Very funny,” she said. “Do you know what this means?”

Nicholas pulled open his tie. “That you don’t want to have a dinner party?”

Paige held up her hand and let Nicholas pull her to her feet. “That it’s a boy.”

Nicholas shrugged. The ultrasound had said the same thing; the waitresses at Mercy said she was carrying out in front, the way you carry a boy. Even the old wives’ tale had confirmed it-the wedding ring dangling from a string had moved back and forth. “Drano probably isn’t the definitive test,” he said.

Paige went to the refrigerator and began pulling out trays of food covered by aluminum foil. “You pee into a cup, and then you add two tablespoons of Drano,” she said. “It’s like ninety percent foolproof. The Drano people have even written to OB/GYNS, asking them to tell their patients this is not a recommended use for their product.” She closed the door and leaned against it, her hands pressed against her forehead. “I’m having a boy,” she said.

Nicholas knew that Paige did not want a boy. Well, she wouldn’t admit it, at least not to him, but it was as if she just assumed that being the kind of person she was, it was impossible for her to be carrying anything other than a tiny replica of herself. “Now, really,” Nicholas said, putting his hands on her shoulders, “would a boy really be so awful?”

“Can I still name him after my mother?”

“It would be hard,” Nicholas said, “to be the only boy in first grade named May.”

Paige gave him a smug look and picked up two of her platters. She stuffed one into the oven and took the other into the living room, which had been turned into a dining room for the night. The tiny kitchen table was bolstered on both sides by card tables, and every chair in the house had been dragged into service. Instead of their usual dishes and glassware, there were ten places set with bright dinner plates, each one different and each with a matching glass. Painted on the surfaces were simple, fluid line drawings of diving porpoises, glacial mountains, turbaned elephants, Eskimo women. Curled in the glasses were paper napkins, each fanned in a different shade of the rainbow. The table spilled with color: vermilion and mango, bright yellow and violet. Paige looked uneasily at Nicholas. “It’s not quite Limoges, is it,” she said. “I figured that since we only have service for eight, this would be better than two place settings that looked entirely wrong. I went to the secondhand stores in Allston and picked up the plates and glasses, and I painted them myself.” Paige reached for a napkin and straightened its edge. “Maybe instead of saying we’re poor, they’ll say we’re funky.”

Nicholas thought of the dinner tables he’d grown up with: the cool white china from his mother’s family rimmed in gold and blue; the crystal Baccarat goblets with their twisted stems. He thought of his colleagues. “Maybe,” he said.

The Fogertys were the first to arrive. “Joan,” Nicholas said, taking both of Alistair’s wife’s hands, “you look lovely.” Actually, Joan looked as though she’d had a run-in at Quincy Market: her tailored suit was a silk print of larger-than-life cherries and bananas and kiwis; her shoes and her earrings sported clusters of purple clay grapes. “Alistair,” Nicholas said, nodding. He looked over his shoulder, waiting for Paige to arrive and take over the role of hostess.

She stepped into the room then, his wife: a little pale, even swaying, but still beautiful. Her hair had become thick during pregnancy and covered her shoulders like a shining, dark shawl. Her blue silk blouse curved over her back and her breasts and then billowed, so that only Nicholas would know that beneath it, her black trousers were secured with a safety pin. Joan Fogerty flew to Paige’s side and pressed her hand against her belly. “Why, you’re not even showing!” Joan exclaimed, and Paige looked up at Nicholas, furious.

Nicholas smiled at her and shrugged: What could I do ? He waited until Paige lowered her gaze, and then he led Alistair into the living room, apologizing for the lack of space.

Paige served dinner to the Fogertys, the Russos, the van Lindens, and the Walkers. She had prepared Lionel’s secret recipes: split-pea soup, roast beef, new potatoes, and glazed carrots. Nicholas watched her move from guest to guest, talking softly as she replenished the plates with spinach salad. Nicholas knew his wife well. She hoped that if she kept the plates full, no one would remember that they weren’t a matched set.

Paige was in the kitchen, getting together the main course, when Renee Russo and Gloria Walker ducked their heads together and began to whisper. Nicholas was in the middle of a discussion with Alistair about immunosuppressive drugs and their effect on transplanted tissue, but he was listening to the wives with half an ear. After all, this was his home. Whatever transpired at his first dinner party could make or break him in the political ranks of the hospital as much as a brilliant piece of research. “I bet,” Renee said, “she paid a fortune for these.”

Gloria nodded. “I saw almost the same thing in The Gifted Hand.”

Nicholas did not see Paige enter the room behind him, frozen by the gossip. “It’s the in thing,” Gloria added, “crayon drawings that look like they were done by monkeys, and then someone has the gall to sell them as original art.” Gloria saw Paige standing in the doorway and offered a tight smile. “Why, Paige,” she said, “we were just admiring your dishes.”

And just like that, Paige dropped the roast beef so that it rolled onto the pale beige carpet, steeped in a pool of its own blood.

The year that Nicholas was seven, his parents did not split up. In fact, just a week after the Red Sox game, Nicholas’s life-and that of his parents-miraculously moved back on track. For three days Nicholas ate by himself at the kitchen table while his father drank Dewar’s in the library and his mother hid in the darkroom. He walked through the halls only to hear the echo of his own footsteps. The fourth day, he heard banging and sawing in the basement, and he knew his mother was making a frame. She had done it before when she mounted her originals, like the famous Endangered exhibit, which hung at odd intervals in the hallway and up the staircase. She said she wouldn’t trust her prints to some crackpot frame store, and so she bought her own wood, nails, and matting. Nicholas sat at the foot of the main staircase for hours, rolling a basketball over his bare toes, knowing he wasn’t allowed to have a basketball in the house and wishing someone were around to tell him that.