Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

I stood up abruptly, grabbing a tiv›Ñ€†owel and sloshing water all over the floor in my hurry. “I don’t think so,” I murmured, and I threw open the bathroom door. I ran to my little-girl room, letting the steam steal down the hall to veil my image from my mother.

When I first woke up, before I was fully conscious, I thought that they were at it again. I could so clearly hear in my imagination the voices of my mother and father attacking, tangling, retreating.

They were not fights; they were never really fights. They were triggered by the simplest things: a burned soufflé, a priest’s sermon, a supper my father came home to late. They were only half-arguments, started by my mother and quelled by my father. He never picked up the gauntlet. He’d let her scream and accuse, and then, when the sobs came, his soft words would cover her like a soft blanket.

It didn’t scare me. I used to lie in bed and listen to the scene that had been replayed so many times I knew the dialogue by heart. Slam: that was my mother at the bedroom door, and seconds later it would open again, once my father came upstairs. In the months after my mother left, when I was doing my remembering, I thought of the arguments and I added the pictures I could never see, fashioning them like actors in a grainy black-and-white film. So, for example, here I envisioned my parents back-to-back, my mother tugging a brush through her hair and my father unbuttoning his shirt. “You don’t understand,” my mother said, her words always hitched and high, always the same. “I can’t do it all. You expect me to do everything.”

“Sssh, May,” my father murmured. “You take it so hard.” I imagined him turning to her and grasping her shoulders, like Bogart in Casablanca. “Nobody expects anything.”

“Yes you do,” my mother screamed, and the bed creaked as she stood. I could hear her pacing, footsteps like rain. “I can’t do anything right, Patrick. I’m tired. I’m just bone-tired. Dear God, I just wish -I want-”

“What do you want, á mhuírnán?”

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be here.”

Then she would start crying, and I would listen to the gentle sounds that drifted through the wall: the butterfly kisses and the slip of my father’s hands over my mother’s skin and the charged quiet that I later learned was the sound of making love.

Sometimes there were variations-like when my mother begged my father to go away with her, just the two of them, sailing in a dugout canoe to Fiji. Another time she scratched and clawed at my dad and made him sleep on the couch. Once she said that she still believed the world was flat and that she was hanging at the edge.

My father was an insomniac, and after these episodes he’d get up in the dead of the night and creep down to his workshop. As if on cue, I’d tiptoe out of my room, and I would crawl under the covers of their big bed. It was like that in our family; someone was always filling in for someone else. I’d press my cheek against my mother’s back and hear her murmur my name, and I held her so cltirÑ€†ose my own body trembled with her fear.

I had heard the cries again tonight; that’s what made me wake so suddenly. But my father’s voice was missing. For a moment I couldn’t place the crowded wallpaper, the intruding moon. I slipped out of bed and turned in at the bathroom, then I redirected myself and walked till I stood at the threshold of my mother’s room.

I hadn’t dreamed it. She was curled beneath the covers, her fists pressed to her eyes. She was crying so hard she couldn’t catch her breath.

I shifted from one foot to the other, nervously wringing the sleeve of my nightshirt. I just couldn’t do it. After all, so much had happened. I wasn’t a four-year-old child, and she was no more than a stranger. She was practically nothing to me.

I remembered how I had flinched at her touch this afternoon, and how annoyed I had been when she took my arrival as easily as she’d take an afternoon tea. I remembered seeing my face reflected in her eyes when she was talking about my father. I considered the room, that god-awful room, that she had had waiting for me.

Even as I crossed the floor I was listing all the reasons I shouldn’t. You don’t know her. She doesn’t know you. She shouldn’t be forgiven. I crawled under the covers. With a sigh that unraveled the years, I put my arms around my mother and willingly slid back to where I’d started.

Nicholas Prescott was already unofficially engaged to Paige O’Toole when they went out on their fourth date. Nicholas picked her up at that waitress Doris’s apartment, a small flea-ridden building in Porter Square. He’d left a message while she was working, telling her to wear something along the lines of haute couture because he was taking her to the top that night. He did not know that she spent an hour asking Doris, the neighbors, and finally the reference librarian at the Boston Public Library what haute couture meant.

She was wearing a simple black sleeveless sheath. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a loose knot; her eyes were wide and luminescent. Her shoes were fake alligatorskin, with spike heels-the kind of shoes his college friends had called fuck-me pumps-although with someone like Paige wearing them, that term would never have come to mind.

At the end of their other three dates, Nicholas had gone no further than gently cupping her breasts, and from her quiet trembling he knew that was enough. In spite of the fact that she’d run away from home, that she was not college educated, and that she was a waitress in a diner, to Nicholas, Paige O’Toole was as chaste as they came. When he pictured her, he thought of the image of Psyche from the White Rock ginger ale label, a girl-woman kneeling on a boulder, staring at her reflection as if she was surprised to see it in the water below. The way Paige was shy to smile, the instinctive habit she had of covering her body when Nicholas touched her-it all added up. They had never spoken of it; Nicholas wasn’t like that. But he believed in the strength of coincidence, and surely there was a reason he had been in Mercy when she had beg he T‡un to work there: Paige did not know it, but she had been waiting for him all her life.

“You look wonderful,” Nicholas said, kissing the spot below her left ear. They were waiting for the elevator.

Paige smoothed her hands over the dress, tugging as if it didn’t fit her like a second skin. “This is Doris’s,” she admitted. “I didn’t have any couture, so we went through her closet. Would you believe this is from 1959? We spent the whole afternoon taking in the seams.”

“And the shoes?” The bell rang, and Nicholas took Paige’s elbow to lead her into the elevator.

Paige looked straight at him, challenging. “I bought them. I figured I deserved something new.”

Nicholas was sometimes surprised by the fury she held in check. When she believed she was right, she would fight to the end to make you see her side, continuing emphatically even after she had proof that she was wrong.

When the elevator touched ground level, Nicholas waited for Paige to step out first, as he’d been taught in eighth grade. But when she didn’t, he turned to face her, and he saw again the expression she often had when looking at Nicholas. It was as if he filled up her entire world; as if there was nothing he could do wrong. “What is it?” Nicholas said, taking her hand.

Paige shook her head. “It’s just you.” She took two steps and then looked back at him, smiling. “If you had lived in Chicago, you would have passed me on the street.”