Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

“We can’t get married,” I said, pushing away from him. “I’m only seventeen.” I turned my face up to his, but all I saw in his eyes was a distorted reflection of myself. “I don’t think I can see you anymore,” I said, my voice breaking over the syllables.

I stood up, but Jake still held my hand. I felt the panic building in me, bubbling up and threatening to spill. “Paige,” he said, “we’ll go slowly. I know you better than you know yourself. I know you want what I want.”

“Really?” I whispered, angry that my self-control was slipping away and that he was probably right. “What, exactly, Jake, do you want?”

Jake stood up. “I want to know what you see when you look at me.” His fingers dug into my shoulders. “I want to know your favorite Stooge and the hour you were born and the thing that scares you more than anything else in the world. I want to know,” he said, “what you look like when you fall asleep.” He traced the line of my chin with his finger. “I want to be there when you wake up.”

For a moment I saw the life I might have, wrapped in the laughter of his big family, writing my name beside his in the old family Bible, watching him leave in the morning. I saw all these things I had wished for my whole life, but the images made me tremble. It wasn’t meant to be; I didn’t know the first thing about fitting into such a normal, solid scene. “You aren’t safe anymore,” I whispered.

Jake looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “Neither are you,” he said.

That night, I learned the truth about my parents’ marriage. My father was working in the basement when I came home, still restless and thinking of Jake’s hands. He was bent over his sawhorse worktable, screwing a plastic fitting onto the back of his Medicine Pacifier, which, when finished, would be able to dispense controlled amounts of baby Tylenol and Triaminic.

My father had been everything to me for so long that it did not seem unnatural to ask him questions about falling in love. I was less embarrassed than I was afraid, since I figured he’d think I was speaking up out of guilt and send me off to confession. For a few minutes I watched him, taking in his light-brown hair and the whiskey color of his eyes, his capable, shaping hands. I had always thought I’d fall in love with someone like my father, but he and Jake were very different. Unless you counted the little things-the way they both let me cheat at gin rummy so I could win; the way they carefully weighed my words as if I were the Secretary of State; the fact that when I was miserable, they were the only two people in the world who could make me forget. In my whole life, only when I was with my father or with Jake was I able to believe, as they did, that I was the finest girl in the world.

“How did you know,” I asked my father without any preliminary conversation, “that you were going to marry my mother?”

My father did not look up at me, but he sighed. “I was engaged to somebody else at the time. Her name was Patty-Patty Connelly -and she was the daughter of my parents’ best friends. We all came over to the United States from County Donegal when I was five. Patty and I grew up together-you know, all-American kids. We went swimming naked in those little summer pools, and we got the chicken pox at the same time, and I took her to all our high-school proms. It was expected, Patty and me, you see.”

I came to stand beside him, pulling a length of black electrical tape when he gestured for it. “What about Mom?” I said.

“A month before the wedding, I woke up and asked what in the name of heaven I was doing, throwing my life away. I didn’t love Patty, and I called her and told her the wedding was off. And three hours later she called me back to let me know she’d swallowed about thirty sleeping pills.”

My father sat down on the dusty green sofa. “Quite a turn of the cards, eh, lass?” he said, slipping into the comfort of his brogue. “I had to drive her to the hospital. I waited around until they were done pumping her stomach, and then I turned her over to her parents.” My father rested his head in his hands. “Anyway, I went to a diner across the street from the hospital, and there was your mother. Sitting on one of the counter stools she was, and she had cherry Danish all over her fingers. She had on this little red-checked halter top and white shorts. I don’t know, Paige, I can’t really explain it, but she turned around when I came in, and the second our eyes connected, it was like the world just disappeared.”

I closed my eyes, trying to picture this. I did not believe it was one hundred percent true. After all, I had not heard my mother’s side of the story. “And then what?” I said.

“And then we got married in three months. It wasn’t the easiest thing for your mother. Some of my old deaf aunts called her Patty at the wedding. She got china and crystal and silver picked out by Patty, because people had already bought the gifts when the first wedding was called off.”

My father stood and went back to the pacifier. I stared at his back and remembered that on holidays, when my mothen áwhen my mer served with the rose-wreathed dishes and the gold-leaf goblets, she would get tight-lipped and uncomfortable. I started to wonder what it might have felt like to live your life in a place someone else had carved. I wondered if, had our china been blue-rimmed or geometric, she might have never left.

“And what,” I said, “ever happened to Patty?”

Late that night, I felt my father’s breath at my temple. He was leaning over me, watching me sleep. “This is only the beginning,” he said to me. “I know it isn’t what you want to hear, but he isn’t the one you’ll be with for the rest of your life.”

I heard his words still twisting in the air long after he’d left my room, and I wondered how he had known. A stale wind blew through my open window; I could smell rain. I stood up quickly and dressed in yesterday’s clothes; I moved soundlessly down the stairs and out of the house. I did not have to look back to know that my father was watching me from his bedroom window, his palms pressed to the glass, his head bowed.

The first drops fell, heavy and cold, as I turned the corner away from my home. By the time I was halfway to the Flanagans’ Mobil station, the wind shrieked through my hair and knotted my jacket around me. Rain battered my cheeks and my bare legs, so violent that I might not have found my way if I hadn’t been going there for years.

Jake pulled me in from the storm and kissed my forehead, my eyelids, my wrists. He peeled the soaked coat from my shoulders and wrapped my hair in an old chamois. He did not ask why I had come; I did not ask why he had been there. We fell against the dented side of a Chevy sedan, skimming our hands over each other’s faces to learn the hollows, the curves, and the lines.

Jake led me to a car waiting to be serviced, a Jeep Cherokee 4 × 4 with a broad open compartment in the back. Through the fishbowl rear window of the Jeep, we watched the storm. Jake pulled my shirt over my head and unfastened my bra, moved his tongue from one nipple to the other. He traced his way over my ribs, my stomach, unzipping my skirt and tugging it over my hips. I could feel the rough rug of the car against my legs, and Jake’s hand on my breast, and then I felt the pressure of his lips against the thin film of my underpants. I shivered, amazed that his breath could burn hotter than the ache between my thighs.

When I was naked he knelt beside me and ran his hands over me, units of measure, as if I were something he owned. “You are beautiful,” he said, as quiet as a prayer, and he leaned close to kiss me. He did not stop, not even as he undressed himself or stroked my hair or moved between my legs. I felt as if there were a thousand threads of glass woven in me, a million different colors, and they were stretched so tight that I knew they would snap. When Jake came inside me, my world turned white, but then I remembered to breathe and to move. At the moment when everything shattered, I opened my eyes wide. I did not think about Jake or about that quick sting of pain; I did not think about the heady scent of Marlboros and pomade that clung to the Jeep’s interior. Instead I squinted into the frenzied night sky and I waited for God to strike me down.