Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

Nicholas had come into my life on a white stallion, had handed me his heart, and had offered me the palace and the ball gown and the gold ring. He had given me what every little girl wanted, what I had long given up hope of having. He could not be blamed just because no one ever mentioned that once you closed the storybook, Cinderella still had to do laundry and clean the toilet and take care of the crown prince.

An image of Max flooded the space in front of me. His eyes were wide open as he rolled from belly to back, and a smile split his face in two when he realized he was seeing the world from a whole different angle. I was beginning to understand the wonder in that, and it was better late than never. I stared at Jake, and I knew what was the greatest difference: with Jake I had taken a life; with Nicholas I had created one.

Jake opened his eyes one at a time just as I was finishing his portrait. He turned onto his side. “Paige,” he said, looking down, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

I looked squarely at him. “Yes, you should have. It’s okay.” Now that his eyes were open, I sketched in his pale, glowing pupils and the tiger’s stripe of gold around them.

“I had to make sure,” he said. “I just had to make sure.” Jake tipped down the edge of my pad so that he could see. “You’ve gotten so much better,” he said. He ran his fingers along the edge of the charcoal, too light to smudge.

“I’ve just gotten older,” I said. “I guess I’ve seen more.” Together we stared at the penciled lines of surprise he ‘€†in his eyes, the beating heat of the sun reflecting off the white page. He took my hand and touched my fingers to a spot on the paper where damp curls met the nape of his neck. There I had drawn, in silhouette, a couple embracing. In the distance, reaching toward the woman, was a man who looked like Nicholas; reaching toward the man was a girl with Ellen’s face.

“It worked out the way it should have,” Jake said.

He put his hand on my shoulder, and all I felt was comfort. “Yes,” I murmured. “It has.”

We sat on Eddie Savoy’s throw pillows, poring through a soiled manila folder that pieced together the past twenty years of my mother’s life. “Piece of cake,” Eddie said, picking his teeth with a letter opener. “Once I figured out who she was, she was a cinch to track down.”

My mother had left Chicago under the name Lily Rubens. Lily had died three days before; my mother had written the obituary for the Tribune. She was twenty-five, and she’d died-according to my mother’s words-of a long, painful illness. My mother had copies of her Social Security card, driver’s license, even a birth certificate from the Glenwood Town Hall. My mother had not gone to Hollywood. She’d somehow gotten to Wyoming, where she’d worked for Billy DeLite’s Wild West Show. She had been a saloon dancer until Billy DeLite himself spotted her cancan and talked her into playing Calamity Jane. According to Billy’s fax, she’d taken to riding and target shooting as if she’d been doing it since she was a tadpole. Five years later, in 1977, she disappeared in the middle of the night with the most talented rodeo cowboy in the Wild West show and most of the previous day’s earnings.

Eddie’s records blanked out here for a while, but they picked up again in Washington, D.C., where my mother worked for a while doing telemarketing surveys for consumer magazines. She saved up enough commission money to buy a horse from a man named Charles Crackers, and because she was living in a Chevy Chase condo at the time, she boarded the horse at his stable and came to ride three times a week.

The pages went on to record my mother’s move from Chevy Chase to Rockville, Maryland, and then a switch of jobs, including a brief stint at a Democratic senator’s campaign office. When the senator didn’t win reelection, she sold her horse and bought a plane ticket to Chicago, which she did not use at the time.

In fact, she hadn’t traveled for pleasure at all over the past twenty years, except once. On June 10, 1985, she did come to Chicago. She stayed at the Sheraton and signed in as Lily Rubens. Eddie watched over my shoulder as I read that part. “What happened on June tenth?” he said.

I turned to Jake. “My high school graduation.” I tried to remember every detail: the white gowns and caps all the girls of Pope Pius had worn, the blazing heat of the sun burning the metal rims of our folding chairs, Father Draher’s commencement address about serving God in a sinful world. I tried to see the hazy faces of the audience seated on the bleachers of the playing field, but it had been too long ago. The day after graduation, I left home. My mother had come back to see me grow up, and she had almost missed me.

Eddie Savoy waited until I came to the last page of the report. “She’s been here for the last eight years,” he said, pointing to the circle on the map of North Carolina. “Farleyville. I couldn’t get no address, though, not in her name, and there ain’t a phone listing. But this here’s the last recorded place of employment. It was five years ago, but something tells me that in a town no bigger than a toilet stall, you ain’t gonna have any trouble tracking her down.” I looked at the scribbled humps of Eddie’s shorthand. He grimaced and then sat down behind his low desk. He held out a piece of ripped paper on which he’d written “Bridal Bits” and a phone number. “It’s some boutique, I guess,” he said. “They knew her real well.”

I thought about my mother, apparently single except for that rodeo cowboy, and wondered what would compel her to move to the hills of North Carolina to work in a bridal salon. I imagined her walking around the tufts of Alençon lace, the thin blue garters and the satin beaded pumps, touching them as if she had a right to wear them. When I looked up, Jake was pumping Eddie Savoy’s hand. I dug into my wallet and pulled out his four-hundred-dollar fee, but Eddie shook his head. “It’s already been taken care of,” he said. Jake led me outside and didn’t say a word as we settled into our respective seats in my car. I drove slowly down the rutted road that led to Eddie’s, spraying bits of gravel left and right and flustering the chickens that had gathered in front of the fender. I pulled over less than a hundred yards from Eddie’s and put my head down on the steering wheel to cry.

Jake pulled me into his arms, awkwardly twisting my body around the center console. “Now what do I do?” I said.

He ran his hands over my ponytail, tugging just a little. “You go to Farleyville, North Carolina,” he said.

Finding her had been the easy part. I was terrified of meeting my mother, a woman I’d remade in the image of myself. I didn’t know what was worse: stirring up memories that might make me hate her at first sight, or finding out that I was exactly like her, destined to keep running, too unsure of myself to be somebody’s mother. That was the risk I was taking. In spite of what I had promised myself or pleaded to Nicholas, if I really had turned out like May O’Toole, I might never feel whole enough to go home.

I looked up at Jake, and the message was clear in my eyes. He smiled gently. “You’re on your own now.”

I remembered the last time he’d said that to me, silently, in slightly different words. I lifted my chin, resolved. “Not for long,” I said.

When her voice came over the line, crackling at the edges, the bottom dropped out of Nicholas’s world. “Hello, Nicholas,” Paige said. “How are you?”