Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

A strid Prescott was sure she was seeing a ghost. Her hand was still frozen on the brass door handle where she’d pulled it open, silently cursing because Imelda had disappeared in search of the silver polish and so Astrid had been disturbed from her study. And consequently she’d come face-to-face with the same ghost that had haunted her for weeks, after making it perfectly clear that the past was not to be forgiven. Astrid shook her head slightly. Unless she was imagining it, standing on the threshold were Nicholas and a black-haired baby, both of them frowning, both of them looking like they might break down and cry.

“Come in,” Astrid said smoothly, as if she’d seen Nicholas more than once during the past eight years. She reached toward the baby, but Nicholas shrugged the diaper bag off his shoulder and gave it to her instead.

Nicholas took three resounding steps into the marble hall. “You should know,” he said, “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t at the end of my rope.”

Nicholas had been awake most of the night, trying to come up with an alternate plan. He’d been on unpaid leave for a full week, and in spite of his best efforts, he hadn’t found quality day care for his son. The British nanny service had laughed when he said he needed a woman within six days. He had almost hired a Swiss au pair-going so far as to leave her with the baby while he went grocery shopping-but he’d returned home to find Max wailing in his playpen while the girl entertained some biker boyfriend in the living room. The reputable child care centers had waiting lists until 1995; he didn’t trust the teenage daughters of his neighbors who were looking for summer employment. Nicholas knew that if he was going to return to Mass General as scheduled, the only option open to him was to swallow his pride and go back to his parents for help.

He knew his mother wouldn’t turn him away. He’d seen her face when he’d first told her of Max. He’d lay odds she kept the photo of Max-the one he had left behind-right in her wallet. Nicholas pushed past his mother into the parlor, the same room he’d pulled Paige from indignantly eight years before. He found his eyes roaming over the damask upholstery, the burnished wood tables. He waited for his mother’s questions, and then the accusations. What had his parents been able to see that he’d been so blind to?

He put Max down on the rug and watched him roll over and over until he landed beneath the sofa, reaching for a thin carved leg. Astrid hovered uneasily at the door for a moment and then put on her widest diplomat’s smile. She had charmed Idi Amin into granting her free press access to Uganda; surely this couldn’t be any more difficult. She sat down on a Louis XIV love seat, which afforded her the best view of Max. “It’s so good to see you, N wi to l chicholas,” she said. “You’ll be staying for lunch?”

Nicholas did not take his eyes off his son. Astrid watched her son, too large for the chair he sat upon, and realized he did not look right in this room at all. She wondered when that had happened. Nicholas shifted his gaze to his mother, a challenge. “Are you busy?” he asked.

Astrid thought about the photographs spread across her study, the old Ladakhi women with heavy feather necklaces, the bare brown children playing tag in front of ancient Buddhist monasteries. She had been writing the introduction to her latest book of photos, centering on the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. She was three days late on her deadline already, and her editor was going to call first thing Monday morning to badger her again. “As a matter of fact,” Astrid said, “I haven’t a thing to do all day.”

Nicholas sighed so gently that even his mother did not notice. He sank against the stiff frame of the chair, thinking of the blue-and-white-striped overstuffed love seats Paige had found at a fire sale for the living room in their old apartment. She had sweet-talked a drummer she met on the street outside the diner into helping her bring the couches home in his van, and then she spent three weeks asking Nicholas whether they were too much sofa for such a little room. Look at those elephant legs, she had said. Aren’t they all wrong? “I need your help,” Nicholas said softly.

Whatever hesitation Astrid might still have had, whatever warnings she had been trying to heed to go slowly, all of that shattered when Nicholas spoke. She stood and walked over to her son. Silently, she folded him in her arms and rocked back and forth. She had not held Nicholas like this since he was thirteen and had taken her aside after she’d embraced him at a school soccer match and told her he was too old for that.

Nicholas did not try to push her away. His arms came up to press against the small of her back; and he closed his eyes and wondered where his mother, brought up with afternoon tea parties and Junior League balls, had got all her courage.

Astrid brought iced coffee and a cinnamon ring and let Nicholas eat, while she kept Max from chewing on the fireplace tools and loose electrical cords. “I don’t understand,” she said, smiling down at Max. “How could she have left?”

Nicholas tried to remember a time when he would have defended Paige to the end, railed at his mother and his father, and sacrificed his right arm before letting them criticize his wife. He opened his mouth to make an excuse, but he could not think of one. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.” He ran his finger around the edge of his glass. “I can’t even tell you what the hell she was thinking, to be honest. It’s like she had this whole different agenda that she never bothered to mention to me. She could have said something. I would have-” Nicholas broke off. He would have what? Helped her? Listened?

“You wouldn’t have done a damn thing, Nicholas,” Astrid said pointedly. “You’re just like your father. When I fly off for a shoot, it takes him three days to notice I’m gone.”

“This isn’t my fault,” Nicholas shouted. “Don’t blame this on me.”

Astrid shrugged. “You’re putting words in my mouth. I was only wondering what reasons Paige gave you, if she’s planning on coming back, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t give a damn,” Nicholas muttered.

“Of course you do,” Astrid said. She picked up Max and bounced him on her lap. “You’re just like your father.”

Nicholas put his glass down on the table, taking a small amount of satisfaction in the fact that there was no coaster and that it would leave a ring. “But you aren’t like Paige,” he said, “You would never have left your own child.”

Astrid pulled Max closer, and he began to suck on her pearls. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t think about it,” she said.

Nicholas stood abruptly and took the baby out of his mother’s arms. Nothing was going the way he had planned. His mother was supposed to have been so overwhelmed with gratitude to see Max that she wouldn’t ask these questions, that she would beg to watch her grandson for the day, the week, whatever. His mother was not supposed to make him think about Paige, was not supposed to take her goddamned side. “Forget it,” he said. “We’re going. I thought you’d be able to understand what I was getting at.”

Astrid blocked his exit. “Don’t be an idiot, Nicholas,” she said. “I know exactly what you’re getting at. I didn’t say Paige was right for leaving, I just said I’d considered it a couple of times myself. Now give me that gorgeous child and go fix hearts.”

Nicholas blinked. His mother pulled the baby out of his arms. He hadn’t told her his plan; hadn’t even mentioned that he needed her to baby-sit while he worked. Astrid, who had started to carry Max back to the parlor, turned around and stared at Nicholas. “I’m your mother,” she said by way of explanation. “I know how you think.”