Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

I start to move my pencil restlessly over a fresh page, and not daring to meet Astrid’s eyes, I tell her the truth. The words come fresh as a new wound, and once again I can clearly smell the Magic Markers in my tiny hand; feel my mother’s fingers close around my ankles for balance on the stool. I can sense my mother’s body pressed beside mine as we watch our unfettered stallions; I can remember the freedom of assuming-just knowing -that she would be there the next day, and the next.

“I wish my mother had been around to teach me how to draw,” I say, and then I fall silent. My pencil has stopped flying over the page, and as I stare at it, Astrid’s hand comes to cover mine where it lies. Even as I am wondering what has made me say these things to her, I hear myself speak again. “Nicholas was lucky,” I say. “I wish I’d had someone like you around when I was growing up.”

“Nicholas was doubly lucky, then.” Astrid shifts closer to me on the grass and slips her arms around my shoulders. It feels awkward -not like my mother’s embrace, which I fit into so neatly by the summer’s end. Still, before I can stop myself, I lean toward Astrid. She sighs against my hair. “She didn’t have a choice, you know.” I close my eyes and shrug, but Astrid will not leave it be. “She’s no different from me,” Astrid says, and then she hesitates. “Or you.”

Instinctively I pull away, putting the reason of distance between us. I open my mouth to disagree, but something stops me. Astrid, my mother, myself. I picture, like a collage, the grinning rows of white frames on Astrid’s contact sheets; the dark press of hoofprints in my mother’s fields; the line of men’s shirts I’d flung from the car on the day I had to leave. The things we did, we did because we had to. The things we did, we did because we had a right to. Still, we each left markers of some kind-a public trail that either led others to us or became, one day, the road upon which we returned.

I exhale slowly. God, I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in days. To win over Nicholas, I may be fighting a force that is greater than myself, but I’m beginning to see that I’m part of a force that is greater than myself. Maybe I do have a chance after all.

I smile at Astrid and pick up the pencil again, quickly fashioning on paper the naked knot of branches that hangs above Astrid’s head. She peers at the pad, then up at the tree, and then she nods. “Can you do me?” she asks, settling herself back in a pose.

I rip the top sheet off my pad and start to draw the slopes of Astrid’s face, the gray strands laced with the gold in her hair. With her bearing and her expression, she should have been a queen.

The shadows of the peach tree color her face with a strange scroll-work that reminds me of the insides of confessionals at Saint Christope="ဆher’s. The leaves that are starting to fall dance across my pad. When I am finished, I pretend that my pencil is still moving just so I can see what I have really drawn, before Astrid has a chance to look.

In each leaf-patterned shadow of her face, I have drawn a different woman. One looks to be African, with a thick turban wrapped around her head and gold hoops slicing her ears. One has the bottomless eyes and the black roped hair of a Spanish puta. One is a bedraggled girl, no older than twelve, who holds her hands against her swollen, pregnant belly. One is my mother; one is myself.

“Remarkable,” Astrid says, lightly touching each image. “I can see why Nicholas was impressed.” She cocks her head. “Can you draw from memory?” I nod. “Then do one of yourself.”

I have done self-portraits before but never on command. I do not know if I can do it, and I tell her this. “You never know until you try,” Astrid chides, and I dutifully turn to a blank page. I start with the base of my neck, working my way up the lines of my chin and my jaw. I stop for a second and see it is all wrong. I tear it off and turn to the next page, start at the hairline, working down. Again, I have to begin all over. I do this seven times, making each drawing a little more complete than the last. Finally, I put the pencil down and press my fingers against my eyes. “Some other time,” I say.

But Astrid is leafing through the discarded drawings I’ve ripped off the pad. “You’ve done better than you think,” she says, holding them out to me. “Look.” I riffle through the papers, shocked that I didn’t see this before. On every one, even the pictures made of threadbare lines, instead of myself I have drawn Nicholas.

For the past three days Nicholas has been the talk of the hospital, and it’s all because of me. In the morning when he arrives, I help ready his patient for surgery. Then I sit on the floor in front of his office in my pale pinafore and draw the portrait of the person he is operating upon. They are simple sketches that take only minutes. Each shows the patient far away from a hospital, in the prime of his or her life. I have drawn Mrs. Comazzi as a dance hall girl, which she was in the forties; I have drawn Mr. Goldberg as a dapper pin-striped gangster; I have drawn Mr. Allen as Ben-Hur, robust and perched on his chariot. I leave them taped to the door of the office, usually with a second picture, of Nicholas himself.

At first I drew Nicholas as he was at the hospital, on the telephone or signing a release form or leading a gaggle of residents into a patient’s room. But then I started to draw Nicholas the way I wanted to remember him: singing “Sweet Baby James” over Max’s bassinet, teaching me how to pitch a Wiffle ball, kissing me on the swan boat in front of everyone. Every morning at about eleven, Nicholas does the same thing. He comes back to his office, curses at the door, and rips both pictures off. He stuffs the one of himself in the trash can or his upper desk drawer, but he usually takes the one I’ve done of the patient and brings that during the postoperative checkup. I was offering magazines to Mrs. Comazzi when he gave the picture to her. “Oh, my stars,” she exclaimed. “Look at me. Look at me!” And Nich olas, in spite onte d‡f himself, smiled.

Rumors spread fast through Mass General, and everyone knows who I am and when I leave the drawings. At ten-forty, before Nicholas arrives, a crowd starts to gather. The nurses drift upstairs on their coffee break to see if they can figure out the likeness and to make cracks about the Dr. Prescott I tend to draw, the one they never see. “Jeez,” I heard one profusionist say, “I wouldn’t have guessed he even owned casual clothes.”

I hear Nicholas’s footsteps coming down the hall, quick and clipped. He is still wearing his scrubs, which might mean something has gone wrong. I start to scoot out of his way, but I am stopped by an unfamiliar voice. “Nicholas,” the man says.

Nicholas stops, his hand on the doorknob. “Elliot,” he says, more a sigh than a word. “Look,” he says, “it’s been a pretty bad morning. Maybe we can talk later.”

Elliot shakes his head and holds up a hand. “Didn’t come here to see you. I came to see what the fuss is with the artwork. Your door is becoming the hospital gallery.” He looks down at me and beams. “Scuttlebutt has it that the phantom artist here is your wife.”

Nicholas pulls the blue paper cap off his head and leans back against the door, closing his eyes. “Paige, Elliot Saget. Elliot, Paige. My wife.” He exhales slowly. “For now.”

If memory serves me right, Elliot Saget is the chief of surgery. I stand quickly and offer my hand. “A pleasure,” I say, smiling.

Elliot pushes Nicholas out of the way and stares at the picture I’ve done of Mr. Olsen, Nicholas’s morning surgery. Next to him is the image of Nicholas singing karaoke at an Allston bowling alley, something that to my knowledge he has never tried but that probably would do him good. “Quite a talent,” he says, looking from the picture to Nicholas and back again. “Why, Nicholas, she almost makes you seem as human as the rest of us.”