Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

“I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t believe what? That my father had no money?”

“No,” Paige said slowly. “That he chose to live the way he does now.”

Nicholas smiled, relieved. “It has its advantages,” he pointed out. “You know where the next mortgage payment is coming from. You know who your friends are. You don’t worry nearly as much about what everyone else thinks of you.”

“And that’s what you care about?” Paige shifted away from him. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

Nicholas shrugged. “It never came up.”

In the distance, someone shouted out a punch line. “I’m sorry,” Paige said tightly, balling her hands into fists. “I didn’t know you made such a sacrifice to marry me.”

Nicholas pulled her into his arms and stroked her back until he felt her relax. “I wanted to marry you,” he said. “And besides,” he added, grinning, “I didn’t give it all up. I put it on hold. A few more dinner parties, a few less roasts on the floor, and we’ll be in the black.” He helped her stand. “Would it really be so awful? I want our baby to have the things I did when I was growing up, Paige. I want you to live like a queen.”

Nicholas started to lead her into the hall. “What about what I want?” Paige whispered, so soft that even she could not clearly hear herself.

When they walked back into the living room, Paige held on to Nicholas’s hand so tightly that when she stepped away, marks from her fingernails were pressed into his palm. He watched her lift her chin. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m not feeling too well these days.” She stood with the grace of a madonna while the women took turns holding their hands up to her stomach, prodding and pressing and guessing the sex of their child. She saw each pair of guests out, and as Nicholas stood on the porch, talking to Alistair about tomorrow’s schedule, she went to clean up the dirty dishes.iv›

Nicholas found her in the living room, throwing the plates and the glasses into the fireplace. He stood very still as she hurled the ceramic and watched her smile when the shards, littered with fragments of clouds and flamingos, fell at her feet. He had never seen her destroy her own work; even the little doodles on the telephone pad were tucked into a folder somewhere for future ideas. But Paige shattered dish after dish, glass after glass, and then she lit a fire underneath the pieces. She stood in front of the hearth, flames dancing in shadow over her face, while the colors and friezes were ashed over in black. And then she turned to face Nicholas, as if she knew he had been standing there all along.

If Nicholas had been frightened by her actions before, he was shocked by what he saw in Paige’s eyes. He had seen it once before, when he was fifteen, the one and only time he had gone hunting with his father. They had walked in the mist of a Vermont morning, stalking deer, and Nicholas had spotted a buck. He had tapped his father’s shoulder, as he’d been taught to do, and watched Robert raise the barrel of his Weatherby. The buck had been a distance away, but Nicholas could clearly see the tremble of its rack, the rigidity of its stance, the way the life had gone out of its gaze.

Nicholas took a step back into the safety of his living room. His wife was framed by fire; her eyes were those of an animal trapped.

Spread around my kitchen were the travel brochures. I was supposed to be planning my family, painting the nursery and knitting pale-peach sacque sets, but instead I had become obsessed with places where I had never been. The leaflets were spilled like a rainbow across the counter, they covered the length of the window seat in splashes of aqua, magenta, and gold. Progressive Travels. Smuggler’s Notch. Civilized Adventures.

Nicholas was starting to get annoyed. “What the hell are these,” he’d said, sweeping them off the black glass stovetop.

“Oh, you know,” I had hedged. “Junk mail.”

But they weren’t. I had sent away for them, a dollar here and fifty cents there, knowing I would receive in the mail a new destination every day. I read the brochures from cover to cover, rolling the names of the cities in my mouth. Dordogne, Pouilly-sur-Loire. Verona and Helmsley, Sedona and Banff. Bhutan, Manaslu, Ghorapani Pass. They were tours that were impossible for someone who was pregnant; most involved intense hiking or bicycling, preventive inoculations. I think I read them because they were exactly what I couldn’t do. I would lie on my back on the floor of my pristine kitchen, and I’d imagine valleys heavy with the scent of rhododendrons, the lush parks and canyons where guanacos, serows, and pandas made their homes. I imagined sleeping in the Kalahari bush, listening to the distant thunder of antelope, buffalo, elephants, cheetahs. I thought about this baby, weighing me down more and more each day, and I pretended that I was anywhere but here.

My baby was eight inches long. He could smile. He had eyebrows and eyelashes; he sucked his thuv›‹ D‡mb. He had his own set of fingerprints and footprints. His eyes were still closed, heavy-lidded, waiting to see.

I knew everything I could about this baby. I read so many books on pregnancy and birth that I memorized certain sections. I knew what the signs of false labor were. I learned the terms “bloody show” and “effacement and dilatation.” Sometimes I actually believed that studying every possible fact about pregnancy might make up for the shortcomings I would have as a mother.

My third month had been the hardest. After those first few episodes, I was never sick, but the things I learned cramped my gut and took my breath away. At twelve weeks, my baby had been one and a half inches long. He weighed one twenty-eighth of an ounce. He had five webbed fingers, hair follicles. He could kick and move. He had a tiny brain, one that could send and receive messages. I spent much of that month with my hands spread over my abdomen, as if I could hold him in. Because once, a long long time ago, I had had another baby twelve weeks old. I tried not to compare, but that was inevitable. I told myself to be happy I did not know the facts about it then, as I did now.

The reason I had had an abortion was that I wasn’t ready to be a mother; I couldn’t have given a child the kind of life it deserved to have. Adoption wasn’t an alternative, either, since that would have meant I’d be pregnant full term-I couldn’t bring that kind of shame to my father. Seven years later, I had almost convinced myself that these were good excuses. But sometimes I would sit in my Barely White kitchen, run my fingers over the cool, smooth travel photos, and I would wonder if things were so different. Yes, I now had the means to support a baby. I could afford to buy the beautiful blond Scandinavian nursery furniture, the bright googly-eyed fish mobile. But I had two strikes against me: I still had no mother of my own as a model. I had killed my first child.

I went to stand and ground my belly into the edge of the kitchen table, wincing at the pain. My stomach was round but rock hard, and it seemed to have a million nerve endings. My body, curved in places where it never had been, was a hazard. I found myself stuck in tight spots-backed against walls, caught between closely placed restaurant chairs, trapped in the aisles of buses. I couldn’t judge the space I needed anymore, and I willed myself to believe that this would change in time.

Restless, I pulled on my boots and went to stand on the porch. It was raining, but I didn’t particularly care. It was my only day off all week, Nicholas was at the hospital, and I had to go somewhere-anywhere-even if it wasn’t to Borneo or Java. These days, I seemed always to want to be moving. I twitched all night in bed, never staying asleep for a full eight hours. I paced behind the receptionist’s desk at work. When I sat down to read, my fingers fluttered at my sides.