Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

I handed him the sketch, and a twenty to pay for the supplies, but he waved me away. “You give me a gift,” he said, “I give you one in return.”

I drove to the lake and parked illegally. Carrying my pad and my box of charcoal under my arm, I went to sit on the shore. It was a cool day, and not many people were in the water, just some children with bubble floats around their waists, whose mothers watched with lioness stares in case they drifted away. I sat on the edge of the water and brought Max to mind, trying to conjure a clear enough image to draw him. When I couldn’t, I was shocked. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t catch in his eyes the way he looked at the world, the way everything was a series of first times. And without that, a picture of Max just wasn’t a picture of Max. I tried to imagine Nicholas, but it was the same. His fine aquiline nose, the thick sheen of his hair-they appeared and receded in waves, as if I were looking at him lying on the bottom of a rippled pond. When I touched the charcoal to the paper, nothing happened at all. It struck me how strong the slam of that phone might have been. As Jake had done once before, it was possible that Nicholas had broken all of our connections.

Determined not to start crying, I stared across the="Ñ€lase dappled surface of the lake and began to move the charcoal over the blank page. Diamonds of sunlight and shifting currents appeared. Even though the picture was black and white, you could clearly see how blue the water was. But as I continued, I realized that I was not drawing Lake Michigan at all. I was drawing the ocean, the Caribbean ring that banded Grand Cayman Island.

When I was twelve I had gone with my father to Grand Cayman for an Invention Convention. He used up most of our savings for the plane ticket and the rental condo. He was setting up a booth of rocks, the fake ones he’d created that held a secret compartment for a key and could be placed on the dirt right outside your front door just in case. The convention lasted for two days, during which I was left at the condo to roam the beach. I made snow angels in the white sand and I snorkeled around the reefs and dove to grab at fire-colored coral and neon-streaked angelfish. The third day, our last, my father sat on a chaise longue on the beach. He didn’t want to go into the water with me, because, he said, he’d barely even seen the sun. So I went in alone, and to my surprise, a sea turtle came swimming beside me. It was two feet long and had a tag under its armpit. It had black beaded eyes and a leathery smile; its shell was curved down like a topaz horizon. It seemed to grin at me, and then it swam away.

I followed. I was always a few strokes behind. Finally, when the turtle disappeared behind a wall of coral, I stopped. I floated on my back and rubbed the stitch in my side. When I opened my eyes, I was at least a mile away from where I’d started.

I breast-stroked back, and by that time my father was frantic. He asked where I’d gone, and when I told him he said it had been a stupid thing to do. But I went into the ocean again anyway, hoping to find that sea turtle. Of course it was a big ocean and the turtle was long gone, but I had known-even at twelve-that I had to take the chance.

I laid down the drawing. A familiar breathlessness came when I finished the sketch, as if I’d had a spirit channeling through me and was only just returning now. In the middle of Lake Michigan I’d drawn that vanishing turtle. Its back was made up of a hundred hexagons. And very faintly, in every single polygon, I had drawn my mother.

I knew before I even turned onto my old block that I would not be staying long enough to remember all the things about my childhood that I’d trapped in some dark corner of my mind. I would not be able to remember the bus route to the Institute of Art. I would not have time to recall the name of the Jewish bakery with fresh onion bagels. I would stay only until I had gathered the information I needed to find my mother.

I realized that in a way I’d always been trying to find her. Except I hadn’t been chasing her; she’d been chasing me. She was always there when I looked over my shoulder, reminding me of who I was and how I got to be that way. Until today I had believed she was the reason I had lost Jake, the reason I’d run from Nicholas, the reason I’d left Max. I saw her at the root of every mistake I’d ever made. But now I wondered if she really was the enemy. After all, I seemed to be following in her footsteps. She had run away too, and maybe if I knew her reasons I’d understand mine. For all I knew, my mother could be just like me.

I walked up the steps to my childhood home, my feet falling into the sunken brick patterns. Behind me lay Chicago, winking at dusk and spread like a destiny. I knocked on the front door for the first time in eight years.

My father opened it. He was shorter than I remembered, and his hair, streaked with gray, fell over his eyes. “May,” he whispered, frozen. “A mhuírnán.”

My love. He had spoken in Gaelic, which he almost never did, an endearment I remembered him saying to my mother. And he had called me by my mother’s name.

I did not move. I wondered if this was an omen. My father blinked several times and took a step backward, and then he stared at me again. “Paige,” he said, shaking his head as if he still could not believe it was me. My father held out his hands and, with them, everything he could offer. “Lass,” he said, “you’re the image of your mother.”

Who the hell did she think she was? She picked up and vanished for hours, and then she phoned from goddamned Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and all the time that he’d been pacing and calling hospital emergency rooms she’d been running away. In one fell swoop, Paige had overturned his entire life. This was not the way Nicholas liked things. He liked neat sutures, very little bleeding, OR schedules that did not waver. He liked organization and precision. He did not enjoy surprises, and he hated being shocked.

He was not sure whom he was more pissed off at: Paige, for running away, or himself, for not seeing it coming. What kind of woman was she, anyway, to abandon a three-month-old baby? A shudder ran across Nicholas’s shoulders. Surely this was not the woman he’d fallen in love with eight years ago. Something had happened, and Paige was not what she used to be.

This was inexcusable.

Nicholas glanced at Max, still chewing on the piece of telephone cord that dipped into his playpen. He picked up the telephone and called the twenty-four-hour emergency number of the bank. Within minutes he’d put a hold on his assets, frozen his checking account, and revoked Paige’s charge cards. This made him smile, with a feeling of satisfaction that snaked all the way down to his belly. She wasn’t going to get very far.

Then he called Fogerty’s office at the hospital, expecting to leave a message for Alistair to call him later that evening. But to Nicholas’s surprise, it was Fogerty’s brusque, icy voice that answered the phone. “Well, hello,” he said, when he heard Nicholas. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

“Something’s come up,” Nicholas said, swallowing the bitterness that lodged in his mouth. “It seems that Paige is gone.”

Alistair didn’t respond, and then Nicholas realized he probably thought Paige was dead. “She’s left, I mean. She just sort of picked up and disappeared. Temporary insanity, I think.”

There was silence. “Why are you telling me this, Nicholas?”

Nicholas had to think about that. Why was he calling Fogerty? He turned to watch Max, who had rolled onto his back and was biting his own feet. “I need to do something with Max,” Nicholas said. “If I have surgery tomorrow I’ll need someone to watch him.”