Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

He looked at me and exhaled. “I’ve had a really long day, Paige,” he said quietly.

My fingers clenched on the comforter. “Oh,” I said.

Nicholas sat on the edge of the bed. He slipped a finger underneath the thin strap of the negligee. “Where did you get this thing?” he said.

I looked up at him. “That’s what you said the first time I wore it,” I said.

Nicholas swallowed and turned away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s really late, and I have to be at the hospital by-”

“It’s only ten,” I told him. I unknotted his tie and pulled it from around his neck. “It’s been a very long time,” I said quietly.

For a moment I saw something in Nicholas-some little spark, something that lit his eyes from inside. He brushed his hand across my cheek and touched his lips to mine. Then he stood up.

“I need to shower,” he said.

He left me sitting on the bed while he went into the bathroom. I counted to ten, and then I lifted my head and stood up. I walked to the bathroom, where the shower was already running. Nicholas was leaning into the stall to adjust the temperature of the water.

“Please,” I whispered, and he jolted around as if he were hearing a ghost. The steam rose between us. “You don’t know what it’s like for me,” I said.

The mirrors fogged over and the bathroom clouded, so that when Nicholas spoke, his word seemed to sink in the weight of the air. “Paige,” he said.

I took a step toward him and tilted my head for a kiss. In the background, over the monitor, I could hear Max sighing in his sleep.

Nicholas slipped the negligee over my head. He placed his hands on my waist and skimmed his fingers over my ribs. At his touch, I moaned and stretched toward him. A thin arc of milk sprayed from my nipple onto the dark hair of his chest.

I stared down at myself, angry at my body for its betrayal. When I turned to Nicholas, I expected him to ignore what had happened, maybe to make a joke; I was not prepared for what I saw in his eyes. He took a step away from me, and his gaze roved up and down my body with horror. “I just can’t,” he said, almost choking. “Not yet.”

He touched my cheek and then he quickly kissed my forehead, as if he had to get it over with before he changed his mind. He stepped into the shower, and I listened for a while to the quiet symphony of the falling water and the soap sliding over his shoulders and his thighs. Then I pulled the pool of satin from my feet, held it up to cover me, and walked into the bedroom.

I put on the oldest, softest nightgown I had, one that buttoned down the front and had small panda bears printed all over it. As I stepped into the hallway, Nicholas turned off the water in the shower. I carefully twisted the doorknob of the nursery, pitch black inside. Nicholas would not come for me. Not tonight. I felt my way through the dark in the room, holding on to the air as though it were something tangible. I stepped around the large stuffed red ostrich Marvela had sent, and I skimmed my hands over the terry-cloth top of the changing table. Stumbling, I hit my shin against the sharp edge of the rocker, knowing the sticky slip of my foot came from my own blood. I settled down to count Max’s even breaths and waited for my son to call me.

You’re going to be late again? I don’t understand why you can’t arrange to be home just a little bit more.” “Paige, don’t be ridiculous. I don’t make my hours.”

“But you don’t know what it’s like here, all day and all night, with him. At least you get to leave your office.”

“Do you know what I’d give to come home one night and not hear you bitching about the kind of day you’ve had?”

“Pardon me, Nicholas, but I don’t get too many other visitors to complain to.”

“No one tells you to sit in the house.”

“No one helps me when I leave it.”

“Paige, I’m going to bed. I have to get up early.”

“You always have to get up early. And you’re the one that counts, of course, because you’re the one with the job.”

“Well, you’re doing something just as important. Consider this your job.”

“I do, Nicholas. But it wasn’t supposed to be.”

The first thing that struck Nicholas was how many trees were already in bloom. He’d lived on this block for eighteen years of his life, but it had been so long since he’d even seen it that he assumed the Japanese maples and the crab apple trees formed their wide mauve awnings over the front yard at the end of June. He sat for a few minutes in the car, thinking about what he would say and how he would say it. He ran his fingers over the smooth polished wood of the stick shift, feeling instead the cool leather of a baseball, the soft inner pouch of his childhood mitt. His mother’s Jaguar was parked in the driveway.

Nicholas had not been to his parents’ home in eight years, not since the night when the Prescotts had made clear what they thought of his choice of Paige as a wife. He had been bitter enough to cut off his contact with his parents for a year and a half, and then a Christmas card had come from Astrid. Paige had left it with the bills for Nich olas to see, and when he did he had turned it over and over in his hands like an ancient relic. He’d run his fingertips over the neat block lettering of his mother’s print, and then he had glanced up to see Paige across the room, trying to look as if she didn’t care. For her benefit he’d thrown away Astrid’s card-but the next day, from the hospital, he had called his mother.

Nicholas told himself he was not doing it because he forgave them, or because he thought they were right about Paige. In fact, when he spoke to his mother-twice a year now, on Christmas and on her birthday-they did not mention Paige. They did not mention Robert Prescott, either, because Nicholas vowed that in spite of the curiosity that drew him to his mother, he would never forget the image of his father bearing down on Paige eight years before, when she sat unsettled and engulfed by a wing chair.

He didn’t tell Paige about these calls. Nicholas was inclined to believe that since his mother had never in eight years even asked about his wife, his parents had not changed their original impression of Paige. The Prescotts seemed to be. PÁ€s iwaiting for Paige and Nicholas to have a falling-out, so they could point fingers and say “I told you so.” Oddly enough, Nicholas never took this personally. He spoke to his mother just to keep hanging by a filial thread; but he divided his life into pre-Paige and post-Paige. Their conversations concentrated on Nicholas’s life up till the fateful argument, as if days instead of years had passed. They spoke about the weather, about Astrid’s treks, about Brookline’s curbside recycling program. They did not mention his specialization in cardiac surgery, the purchase of his house, Paige’s pregnancy. Nicholas did not offer any information that might widen the rift that still spread between them.

It didn’t help to be sitting in front of his childhood home, however, and be thinking that all those years ago, his parents just might have had a point. Nicholas felt he’d been defending Paige forever, but he was beginning to forget why. He was starving, because Paige didn’t make his lunch anymore. She was often awake at four-thirty in the morning, but usually Max was attached to her. Sometimes-not often-he blamed the baby. Max was the easiest target, the demanding thing that had taken his wife like a body snatcher and left in her place the sullen, moody woman he now shared a home with. It was hard to blame Paige herself. Nicholas would look into her eyes, raring for an argument, but all that gazed back at him was that vacant sky-stare, and he’d swallow his anger and taste raw pity.