Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

Dr. Thayer came into the room in a burst of rustling paper. “Paige!” she said, as if she was surprised to see me there. “How are you feeling?”

She motioned me to a stool, where I could sit and talk to her before getting up on the table and into the humiliating position of an internal exam. “I’m all right,” I said.

Dr. Thayer flipped open my file and scribbled some notes. “No pain? No trouble with nursing?”

“No,” I told her. “No trouble at all.”

She turned to Max, who slept in his carrier on the floor as though he were always an angel. “He’s wonderful,” she said, smiling up at me.

I stared at my son. “Yes,” I said, feeling that choke again at the back of my throat. “He is.” Then I put my head in my hands and started to cry.

I sobbed until I couldn’t catch my breath, and I thought for sure I would wake up Max, but when I lifted my head he was still sleeping peacefully on the floor. “You must think I’m crazy,” I whispered.

Dr. Thayer put her hand on my arm. “I think you’re like every other new mother. What you’re feeling is perfectly normal. Your body has just been through a very traumatic experience, and it needs time to heal, and your mind needs to get adjusted to the fact that your life is going to change.”

I reached across her for a tissue. “I’m awful with him. I don’t know how to be a mother.”

Dr. Thayer glanced at the baby. “Looks like you’re doing fine to me,” she said, “although you might not have needed the sweatshirt and the sweater.”

I winced, knowing that I had done something wrong again and hating myself for it. “How long does it take?” I asked, a thousand questions at once. How long before I know what I’m doing? How long before I feel like myself again? How long before I can look at him with love instead of fear?

Dr. Thayer helped me over to the examination table. “It will take,” she said, “the rest of your life.”

I still had silver lines on my cheeks when Dr. Thayer left, memories I couldn’t wash away of acting like a fool in front of her. I walked out of the office without saying goodbye to the waiting pregnant women or to Mary, who called after me even as the door was closing. I lugged Max to the parking lot, his carrier becoming heavier with each step. The diaper bag cut into my shoulder, and I had a pain in my back from leaning heavily to one side. Max still slept, a miracle, and I found myself praying to the Blessed Mother, figuring she of all holy “Lo±€cutsaints would understand. Just one more half hour, I silently begged, and then we’ll be home. Just one more half hour and he can wake up and I’ll feed him and we’ll go back to our normal routine.

The parking attendant in the lot was a teenager with skin as black as pitch and teeth that gleamed in the sun. He carried a boom box on his shoulder. I gave him my validated ticket, and he handed me my keys. Very carefully, I opened the passenger door and secured the seat belt around Max’s carrier. I shut the door more quietly than I would have imagined possible. Then I moved around to my side of the car.

At the moment I opened the door, the attendant switched on his radio. The hot pulse of rap music split the air as powerfully as a summer storm, rocking the car and the clouds and the pavement. The boy nodded his head and shuffled his feet, hip-hop dancing between the orange parking lines. Max opened his eyes and shrieked louder than I had ever heard him yell.

“Sssh,” I said, patting his head, which was sweaty and red from the band of the sweater’s hood. “You’ve been such a good boy.”

I put the car in drive and started out of the lot, but that only made Max cry louder. He’d slept so long I had no doubt he was starving, but I didn’t want to feed him here. If I could just get him home, everything would be all right. I curved around the line of parked cars and came to the driveway that led out to the street. Max, purpled with effort, began to choke on his own sobs.

“Dear God,” I said, slamming the car into park and unfastening the seat belt around Max’s carrier. I pulled my shirt out of my slacks and hoisted it up around my neck, fumbling with my bra to bare a breast. Max stiffened as I lifted him and held his hot little body against mine. The rough wool of his sweater chafed my skin; his fingers clawed at my ribs. Now I began to cry, and tears splashed onto the face of my son, running over his own tears and falling somewhere between his sweater and sweatshirt. The parking attendant swore at me and started to walk over to the car. I quickly pulled my shirt down over Max’s face, hoping that I wouldn’t smother him. I did not unroll the window. “You’re blocking my driveway,” the boy said, his lips twisted and angry against the hot glass.

The rap music throbbed in my head. I turned away from the boy, and I pulled Max tighter against me. “Please,” I said, closing my eyes. “Please leave me alone.”

Dr. Thayer had told me to do something for myself. So when Max went to sleep at eight, I decided I’d take a long, hot bath. I found the baby monitor the Fogertys had given us, and I set it up in the bathroom. Nicholas wasn’t due home until ten, and Max would probably sleep until midnight. I was going to be ready when my husband came home.

Nicholas and I had not made love since I was just five months pregnant, that night when it had hurt and I told him to stop. We never spoke about it-Nicholas didn’t like to talk about things like that-and as I got bigger and more uncomfortable, I cared less and less. But I needed him now. I needed to know that my body was more than a birthing machine, a source of food. I needed to hear that I was beautiful. I needed to feel Nicholas’s hands on me.

I ran the bathwater, stopping it three times because I thought I had heard Max making sounds. In the corner of the medicine cabinet I found a lilac bath cube, and I watched it disintegrate in the water. I pulled my sweatshirt over my head and shrugged my shorts off and stood in front of the mirror.

My body had become foreign. Strange-I was still expecting to see the big curve of my stomach, the heavy lines of my thighs. But this thinner body wasn’t the way it used to be, either. I was mapped with purple lines. My skin was the color of old parchment and seemed to be stretched just as tight. My breasts were low and full, my belly soft and bowed. I had become someone else.

I told myself Nicholas would still like what he saw. After all, the changes were because I had borne his child. Surely there was something beautiful in that.

I slipped into the steaming water and ran my hands up and down my arms, over my feet and between my toes. I nodded off for a little while, catching myself as my chin went underwater. Then I stood and toweled dry and walked to the kitchen absolutely naked, leaving soft damp footprints on the seamless carpet.

I had set a bottle of wine to chill, and I took it from the refrigerator and brought it into the bedroom with two thick blue water glasses. Then I rummaged in my drawers for the white silk sheath I had worn on our wedding night, the only piece of sexy lingerie I had. I pulled it over my head, but it stuck at my chest-I’d never considered that it might not fit. By wriggling and tugging, I managed to get it over me, but it stretched at the bust and the hips as if I’d been poured into it. My stomach was highlighted, a soft white bowl.

I heard Nicholas’s car crunch into the driveway. Dizzy, I ran around the bedroom, turning off the lights. I smiled to myself-it would be like the first time all over again. Nicholas opened the front door quietly and climbed the stairs, pausing for a moment at our bedroom door. He pushed it open and stared at me where I sat on the center of the bed. My knees were tucked underneath me, my hair fell into my eyes. I wanted to say something to him, but my breath caught. Even with his loosened tie, his five o’clock shadow, and his hunched shoulders, Nicholas was the most striking man I had ever seen.