Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

I had a sudden memory of my mother the night before she disappeared from my life. She wore a pale-peach bathrobe and fuzzy bunny slippers. She sat on the edge of my bed. “You know I love you, Paige-boy,” she said, because she thought I was asleep. “Don’t you let anyone tell you otherwise.”

I laid my hand on my son’s back, smoothing out his ragged breathing. “I love you,” I said, tracing the letters of his name on his cotton playsuit. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Max woke up smiling. I was leaning over his crib, as I had been for the hour he’d been asleep, praying for the first time since he was born that he’d wake up soon. “Oh, sweetie,” I said, reaching for his chubby fingers.

I changed his diaper and took out his little bathtub. I sat him in it fully clothed but filled the basin with Baby Magic and warm water. Then I washed off his face and his arms where they were still splattered from the nosebleed. I changed his outfit, rinsing the old one as best I could and hanging it over the shower rod to dry.

I gave him the breast instead of the bottle he’d never finished, figuring he deserved a little pampering. I cuddled him close, and he smiled and rubbed his cheek against me. “You don’t remember a thing, do you?” I said. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the couch. “Thank heaven.”

Max was so g yoÑ€saiood-natured for the rest of the afternoon that I knew God was punishing me. I wallowed in my guilt, tickling Max’s belly, blowing wet kisses onto his fat thighs. When Nicholas came home, a knot tightened in my stomach, but I did not get up off the floor with the baby. “Paige, Paige, Paige!” Nicholas sang, stepping into the hallway. He sashayed into the living room with his eyes half closed. He’d been on call for thirty-six straight hours. “Don’t mention the words Mass General to me-don’t even say the word heart. For the next twenty-four glorious hours I’m going to sleep and eat greasy food and be a sloth right here in my own house.” He walked down the hall toward the stairs, his voice trailing behind. “Did you get to the cleaners?” he called.

“No,” I whispered. I had an excuse this time for not leaving the house, but he wouldn’t want to hear it.

Nicholas reappeared in the living room, holding his shirt by the collar. His good mood had vanished. He’d asked me to go to the dry cleaners two days ago, but I hadn’t felt comfortable taking Max by myself, and Nicholas hadn’t been home to watch him, and I didn’t know how to even begin to find a baby-sitter. “It’s a good thing I have off tomorrow, then, since this is the last goddamned clean shirt I had. Come on, Paige,” he said, his eyes turning dark. “You can’t possibly be busy every minute of the day.”

“I was thinking,” I said, not looking up, “that maybe you’d watch the baby while I go to the laundry and grocery shopping.” I swallowed. “I was kind of waiting for you to get home.”

Nicholas glared at me. “This is the first break I’ve had in thirty-six hours and you want me to watch Max?” I did not say anything. “For Christ’s sake, Paige, it’s my only day off in the past two weeks. You’re here every single goddamned day.”

“I can wait till you take a nap,” I suggested, but Nicholas was already starting back down the hall.

I held Max’s little fists in my hands and braced myself for what I knew was to come. Nicholas ran down the stairway with Max’s bloody outfit, wet, wrapped around his fingers. “What the hell is this?” Nicholas said, his voice hot and low.

“Max had an accident,” I said as calmly as I could. “A nosebleed. I didn’t mean to do it. The diaper fell-” I looked up at Nicholas, at the storm in his eyes, and I started to cry again. “I twisted around for a second-well, not even; more like half a second-to get it, and Max rolled the wrong way and hit his nose on the table-”

“When,” Nicholas said, “were you planning on telling me?”

He crossed the room in three long strides and picked Max up roughly. “Be careful,” I said, and Nicholas made a strange sound in the back of his throat.

His eyes swept the kidney-shaped bruises below Max’s eyes, the traces of blood on the pads of his nose. He looked at me for a moment, as if he were piercing through to my soul and knew I was marked for hell. He clutched the baby tighter in his arms. “You go,” he said quietly. “I’ll take care of Max.”

His words, and the acd lÑ€er cusation behind them, stung me as violently as a slap to the face. I stood and walked to the bedroom, collecting the heap of Nicholas’s shirts. I pulled them into my arms, feeling their sleeves wrap and bind my wrists. I pulled my purse and my sunglasses from the kitchen table, and then I stood in the doorway of the living room. Nicholas and Max looked up at the same time. They sat together on the pale couch, looking as if they were carved from the same block of marble. “I didn’t mean to,” I whispered, and then I turned away.

At the cash machine, I was crying so hard that I didn’t realize I had pressed the wrong buttons until a thousand dollars came out, instead of the hundred I needed for grocery shopping and prepayment on Nicholas’s shirts. I did not bother to redeposit it. Instead I tore out of the fire zone I’d parked in, rolled down all the windows, and headed to the nearest highway. It felt good to hear the wind scream in my ears and lighten the weight of my hair. The band in my chest began to ease, and my headache was disappearing. Maybe, I thought, what I needed all along was a little time alone. Maybe I just needed to get away.

The supermarket’s flashing sign appeared at the horizon. And it struck me then that Nicholas was right to doubt me, to hold Max as far away from me as he could. Here I was smiling into the rushing air, thinking about my freedom, when just hours before I had watched my child bleed because of my own carelessness.

There had to be something wrong with me, deep down, that made me to blame for Max’s fall. There had to be something that made me such an incompetent mother. Maybe it was the same reason my own mother had left-she was afraid of what more she could do wrong. It was possible that Max was better off the way he was, in the solid, strong arms of his father. It was possible that given the option, Max would do better with no mother at all.

At the very least, this much was true: I was no good to Max, or to Nicholas, the way I was right now.

As I drove straight past the market, the plan began to form in my head. I wouldn’t be gone for long, just for a little while. Just until I had got a full night’s sleep, and I felt good about myself and about being Max’s mother, and I could make a long self-help list of all the things I could do, without running out of ideas. I would come back with all the answers; I would be a whole new person. I would call Nicholas in a few hours and tell him my idea, and he would agree and say in his calm, brook-steady voice, “Paige, I think it’s just what you need.”

I started to laugh, my spirit bubbling up from where it had been buried deep inside. It was really so easy. I could keep driving and driving and pretend that I had no husband, no baby. I could keep going and never look back. Of course I would go back, as soon as I had my life in order again. But right now, I deserved this. I was taking back the time I had been cheated of.

I drove faster than I’d ever driven in my life. I ran my fingers through my hair and grinned until the wind cracked my lips. My cheeks grew flushed and my eyes stung from the brisk rush of the air. One by one, I tossed Nicholas’s shirts out the window, leaving behind on the highway a trail of white, yellow, pink, powder blue, like a fine string of pale scattered pearls.