Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

Her voice was low and rhythmic, a tune I had never heard. With each tremble of her music, my stomach seemed to quiver. Her call said over and over, in a clicking honey tongue, Come with me. Come with me. I held my hands to my belly, sensing that quick flutter of longing, like a firefly in a sealed glass jar. And then I realized these were the first felt movements of my baby, reminding me just why I couldn’t go.

To my disappointment, Jake Flanagan became the brother I had never had. He did not kiss me again after that lost moment at the drive-in. Instead he took me under his wing. For three years he let me tag along right at his heels, but to me even that was too far away. I wanted to be closer to his heart.

I tried to make Jake fall in love with me. I prayed for this at least three times a day, and once in a while I was rewarded. Sometimes, after the final bell of classes rang, I’d come out onto the steps of Pope Pius and find him leaning against the stone wall, biting on a toothpick. I knew that to get to my school, he had to cut his last class and take an uptown bus. “Hello, Flea,” he said, because that was his nickname for me. “And what did the good sisters teach you today?”

As if he did this all the time, he would take my books from my arms and lead me down the street, and together we’d walk to his father’s garage. Terence Flanagan owned the Mobil station on North Franklin, and Jake worked there for him afternoons and on weekends. I would squat on the cement floor, my pleated skirt blown open like a flower, while Jake showed me how to remove a tire or how to change the oil. All the while he spoke in the soft, cool voice that reminded me of the ocean I had nevet k T‡r seen. “First you pop the hubcab,” he’d say, as his hands slid down the tire iron. “Then you loosen up the lug nuts.” I would nod and watch him carefully, wondering what I had to do to make him notice me.

I spent months walking a fine line, arranging for my path to cross Jake’s a few times a week without my becoming a pain in the neck. Once, I had got too close. “I can’t get rid of you,” Jake had yelled. “You’re like a rash.” And I had gone home and cried and given Jake a week to realize how empty his life could be without me. When he didn’t call, I did not blame him; I couldn’t. I showed up at the Mobil station as if nothing had happened, and I doggedly followed him from car to car, learning about spark plugs and alternators and steering alignment.

By then I knew that this was my first trial of faith. I had grown up learning of the sacrifices and ordeals others had survived to prove their devotion-Abraham, Job, Jesus Himself. I understood that I was being tested, but I had no doubts about the outcome. I would pay my dues, and then one day Jake would be unable to live without me. I swore by this, and because I had given God no alternative, it gradually became true.

But being Jake’s sidekick was a far cry from being the love of his life. In fact, Jake went out with a different girl every month. I helped him get ready for his dates. I’d lie on my stomach on the narrow bed as Jake picked out three shirts, two ties, worn jeans. “Wear the red one,” I’d tell him, “and definitely not that tie.” I covered my face with a pillow when he dropped the towel from his hips and shrugged into his boxer shorts, and I listened to the slip of cotton over his legs and wondered what he would look like. He let me part his hair with the comb and pat the aftershave on his burning cheeks, so that when he left I would still be surrounded by the strong scent of mint and of man that came from Jake’s skin.

Jake was always late for his dates. He’d tunnel down the stairs of his house, grabbing the keys to his father’s Ford from the pegged knot on the end of the banister. “See you, Flea,” he’d call over his shoulder. His mother would come out of the kitchen with three or four of the younger kids hanging on her legs like monkeys, but she would only just catch the edge of his shadow. Molly Flanagan would turn to me with her heart in her eyes, because she knew the truth. “Oh, Paige,” she’d say, sighing. “Why don’t you stay for dinner?”

When Jake came home from his dates at two or three in the morning, I always knew. I would wake up, miles away from where he was, and see, like a nightmare, Jake pulling his shirt from his jeans and rubbing the back of his neck. We had this connection with each other. Sometimes, if I wanted to talk to him, all I had to do was picture his face, and within a half hour he’d be on my doorstep. “What?” he’d say. “You needed me?” Sometimes, because I felt him calling out, I would phone his house late at night. I’d huddle in the kitchen, curling my bare toes under the hem of my nightgown, dialing in the pencil-thin gleam of the streetlight. Jake answered at the end of the first ring. “Wait till you hear this one,” he’d say, his voice bubbling over with the fading heat of sex. “We’re at Burger King, and she reaches under the table and unzips my fly. Can you believe it?”

And I would swallow. “No,” I’d tell him. “I can’t.”

I had no doubt that Jake loved m ináJake lovee. He told me, when I asked him, that I was his best friend; he sat with me the whole summer I had mononucleosis and read me trivia questions from those Yes & No game books that come with magic pens. One night, over a campfire on the shores of the lake, he had even let me cut his thumb and press it close to mine, swapping blood, so that we’d always have each other.

But Jake shrank away from my touch. Even if I brushed his side, he flinched as if I’d hit him. He never put his arm around my shoulders; he never even held my hand. At sixteen, I was skinny and small, like the runt of a litter. Someone like Jake, I told myself, would never want someone like me.

The year I turned seventeen, things began to change. I was a junior at Pope Pius; Jake-out of high school for two years-worked full time with his father at the garage. I spent my afternoons and my weekends with Jake, but every time I saw him my head burned and my stomach roiled, as if I’d swallowed the sun. Sometimes Jake would turn my way and start to speak: “Flea,” he’d say, but his eyes would cloud over, and the rest of the words wouldn’t come.

It was the year of my junior prom. The sisters at Pope Pius decorated the gymnasium with hanging foil stars and crinkled red streamers. I was not planning to go. If I had asked Jake he would have taken me, but I hated the thought of spending a night I had dreamed of for years with him humoring me. Instead I watched the other girls in the neighborhood take pictures on their front lawns, whirling ghosts in white and pink tulle. When they had left, I walked the three miles to Jake’s house.

Molly Flanagan saw me through the screen door. “Come in, Paige,” she yelled. “Jake said you would be here.” She was in the den, playing Twister with Moira and Petey, the two youngest Flanagans. Her rear end was lifted into the air, and her arms were crossed beneath her. Her heavy bosom grazed the colored dots of the game mat, and between her legs, Moira was precariously reaching for a green corner circle. Ever since I had met her three years before, I had wanted Molly as my own mother. I had told Jake and his family that my mother had died and that my father was still so upset by it, he couldn’t bear to hear her name brought up. Molly Flanagan had patted my arm, and Terence had raised his beer to coast my mother, as was the custom of the Irish. Only Jake realized I was not telling the truth. I had never actually come out and said this, but he knew the corners of my mind so well that from time to time I caught him staring at me, as if he sensed I was holding something back.