Harvesting the Heart Read online

  My mother wrote these obituaries at home, sitting at the kitchen table. She used to complain about deadlines, which she said was pretty funny, given her business. When the articles were printed, she clipped them neatly and stored them in a photo album. I used to wonder what would happen to that album if we all died in a fire; whether the police would think my mother had been a sick serial killer. But my mother insisted on keeping a record of her work, which she left behind, anyway, the day she disappeared.

  My mother would make a weekly list of the important names she wrote about. Then on Saturday, her day off, we'd go to the closest cemeteries, looking for the freshly turned earth that marked the newest interments. My mother would kneel in front of the graves of these people she hardly knew, still without headstones. She would sift the fine brown dirt through her fingers like a sieve. "Paige," she'd say, throwing back her shoulders, "take a deep breath. What can you smell?"

  I would look around and see the lilac bushes and the forsythia, but I wouldn't take a deep breath. There was something about being in the cemetery that made me monitor my breathing, as if without warning I might find that I'd run out of air.

  Once, my mother and I sat under the red shade of a Japanese maple, having visited the former Mary T. French, a public librarian. We had eaten barbecued chicken and potato salad and had wiped our fingers on our skirts, devil-may-care. Then my mother had stretched out across an old grassy grave, resting her head on a flat marker. She patted her thighs, encouraging me to lie down as well.

  "You're going to crush him," I said, very serious, and my mother obligingly moved to the side. I sat down beside her and put my head in her lap and let the sun wash over my closed eyes and my smile.

  My mother's skirt blew about, whipping the edge of my neck. "Mommy," I said, "where do you go when you're dead?"

  My mother took a deep breath, one that made her body puff like a cushion. "I don't know, Paige," she said. "Where do you think you go?"

  I ran my hand over the cool grass to my right. "Maybe they're all underground, looking up at us."

  "Maybe they're in heaven, looking down," my mother said.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the sun until bursts of color exploded, orange and yellow and red, like fireworks. "What's heaven like?" I said.

  My mother had rolled to her side, sliding me off her lap. "After sticking out life," she had said, "I hope it's whatever you want it to be."

  It struck me as I moved through this Cambridge graveyard that my own mother could be in heaven now. If there was a heaven; if she had died. I wondered if she was buried in a state where it never snowed, if she was in a different country. I wondered who came to lay lilies at her grave and who had commissioned the inscription. I wondered if her obituary would mention that she was the devoted mother of Paige O'Toole.

  I used to ask my father why my mother left, and he told me over and over the same thing: "Because she wanted to." As the years went by he said it with less bitterness, but that didn't make the words any easier to believe. The mother I imagined over the years, the one with the shy smile and the full skirts, who had the power to heal scrapes and bruises with a kiss and who could tell bedtime stories like Scheherazade, would not have left. I liked to think my mother was pulled away by forces greater than herself. Maybe it was some international intrigue she was involved in, and the final chapter meant trading her own identity to protect her family. For a time I wondered if she was half of a pair of fated lovers, and I almost forgave her running from my father if it meant being with the man who held her heart. Maybe she was just restless. Maybe she was looking for someone she had lost.

  I ran my hands over the smooth graves, trying to picture the face of my mother. Finally, I came to a flat marker, and I lay down with my head upon it, crossing my hands over the life in my belly, staring at the ice in the sky. I stretched out on the frozen ground until it seeped into my bones: the rain, the cold, these ghosts.

  More than anything else in the world, my mother had hated opening the refrigerator and finding the juice pitcher empty. It was always my father's fault; I was too little to pour for myself. It wasn't as though my father did it on purpose. His mind was usually on other things, and since it wasn't a priority, he never checked to see how low the lemonade was when he stuck it back inside the Frigidaire. Three times a week, at least, I would find my mother standing in the slice of cold air from the open refrigerator, waving the blue juice pitcher. "What is so damned difficult about mixing a can of frozen Minute Maid?" she would yell. She'd stare at me. "What am I supposed to do with a half inch of juice?"

  It was a simple little mistake, which she fashioned into a crisis, and if I had been older I might have suspected the larger illness for the symptoms, but as it happened I was five, and I didn't know any better. I'd follow her as she tramped down the stairs to accost my father in his workshop, brandishing the pitcher and crying and asking nobody in particular what she had done to deserve a life like this.

  The year that I was five was the first time I was truly conscious of Mother's Day. I had made cards before, sure, and I suppose I even had my name tacked onto a present that my dad had bought. But that year I wanted to do something that was straight from the heart. My father suggested making a painting, or a box of homemade fudge, but that wasn't the kind of gift I wanted to give. Those other things might have made my mother smile, but even at five I knew that what she really needed was something to take the ragged edge off the pain.

  I also knew I had an ace up my sleeve--a father who could make anything my mind conjured up. I sat on the old couch in his workshop one night late in April, my knees folded up, my chin resting on them. "Daddy," I said, "I need your help." My father had been gluing rubber paddles onto a cogwheel for some contraption that measured chicken feed. He stopped immediately and faced me, giving me his complete attention. He nodded slowly while I explained my idea--an invention that would register when the lemonade in the pitcher needed to be refilled.

  My father leaned forward and held both my hands. "Are you sure that's the kind of thing your mother would be wantin'?" he asked. "Not a handsome sweater, or some perfume?"

  I shook my head. "I think she wants something . . ." My voice trailed off as I struggled to pick the right words. "She wants something to make her stop hurting."

  My father looked at me so intently that I thought he was expecting me to say more. But he squeezed my hands and tipped his head closer, so our brows were touching. When he spoke, I could smell his sweet breath, laced with the flavor of Wrigley's gum. "So," he said, "you've been seein' it too."

  Then he sat on the couch beside me and pulled me onto his lap. He smiled, and it was so contagious I could feel my legs already bouncing up and down. "I'm thinkin' of a sensor," he said, "with some kind of alarm."

  "Oh, Daddy, yes!" I agreed. "One that keeps ringing and ringing and won't let you get away with just sticking the pitcher back."

  My father laughed. "I've never invented something before that will mean more work for me." He cupped my face in his palms. "But it's worth it," he said. "Aye, well worth it."

  My father and I worked for two weeks in a row, from right after dinner until my bedtime. We'd run to the workshop and try out buzzers and alarms, electronic sensors and microchips that reacted to degrees of wetness. My mother would knock from time to time on the door that led to the basement. "What are you two doing?" she'd call. "It's lonely up here."

  "We're making a Frankenstein monster," I'd cry out, pronouncing the long, strange word the way my father had told me to. My father would start banging hammers and wrenches around on the workbench, making an awful racket. "It's an unsightly mess down here,

  May," he'd yell, laughter threaded through his voice like a gold filament. "Brains and blood and gore. You wouldn't want to see this."

  She must have known. After all, she never did come down, in spite of her gentle threats. My mother was like a child in that respect. She never peeked early for her Christmas presents or tried to eavesdrop on conversa