Harvesting the Heart Read online

  Max watched as I cut the twine around the box and pulled out the staples. He caught a length of string in his fist and tried to work it into his mouth. I laid the knife beside the couch and pulled out of the box a little stool with cut-out yellow letters that spelled max and could be removed like a jigsaw puzzle. "Love, Grandma and Grandpa," read the note. Somewhere, Max had another grandpa and possibly another grandma. I wondered if he'd ever meet either.

  I stood up to throw away the box, but a smaller, flat pink box caught my eye. It had been packed in the bottom of the larger one. I broke the gold-foil seals at its sides and opened it to reveal a beautiful silk scarf printed with linked brass horse bits and braided reins and U-shaped silver shoes. "For Paige," the card said, "because not only the baby deserves gifts. Mother." I thought about this. Astrid Prescott was not my mother; she never would be. For a moment my breath caught, and I wondered if it was possible that my real mother, wherever she was, had sent me this beautiful scarf through the Prescotts. I rumpled the thin silk and held it to my nose, breathing in the fragrance of a fine boutique. It was from Astrid, I knew that, and inside I was fluttering because she had thought of me. But just for today, I was going to pretend this had come from the mother I never got to know.

  Max, who could not crawl, had wriggled himself over to the knife. "Oh, no you don't," I said, lifting him by his armpits. His feet kicked a mile a minute, and little bubbles of spit formed at the corners of his mouth. Standing, I held him to my chest, one arm out like a dance partner. I whirled into the kitchen, humming a Five Satins song, watching his unsteady head bob left and right.

  We watched the bottle heat up in the saucepan--the only bottle of formula Max got each day, because in some ways I was still afraid that the La Leche woman would come back and find out and point a damning finger at me. I tested the liquid on my hand. We danced back to the couch in the living room and turned on Oprah, then I gently placed him on a pillow across the couch.

  I liked to feed Max this way, because when I held him in my arms he could smell the breast milk and sometimes he refused to take the bottle. He wasn't a stupid little thing; he knew the real McCoy. I'd prop him on the pillow and tuck a cloth burping diaper under his chin to catch the runoff; then I'd even have a free hand to flip through channels with the remote or to scan the pages of a magazine.

  Oprah had on women who had been pregnant and given birth without even knowing they'd been carrying a child. I shook my head at the screen. "Max, my boy," I said, "where could she even find six people like this?" One woman was saying that she had had a child already and then one night she felt a little gassy and she went to lie down in bed and ten minutes later she realized a squalling infant was between her legs. Another woman nodded her head; she'd been in the back seat of her friend's van and all of a sudden she just gave birth through her underwear and her shorts, and the baby was lying on the floor mat. "How couldn't they feel it kicking?" I said out loud. "How couldn't they notice a contraction?"

  Max lifted his chin, and the diaper-bib fell to the floor, twisting over my leg to land behind me. I sighed and turned away for half a second to grab it, and that was when I heard the hard crack of Max's head striking the side of the coffee table as he rolled off the couch and onto the floor.

  He lay on the pale-beige carpet, scant inches from the knife I'd used to cut the twine of the box. His arms and legs were flailing, and he was facedown. I could not breathe. I lifted him into my arms, absorbing his screams into the shallows of my bones. "Oh, God," I said, rocking him back and forth tightly as he howled with pain. "Dear God."

  I lifted my head to see if Max was quieting down, and then I saw the blood, staining my shirt and a corner of the beautiful new scarf. My baby was bleeding.

  I put him on the pale couch, not caring, running my fingers over his face and his neck and his arms. The blood was coming out of his nose. I had never seen so much blood. He didn't have any other cuts; he must have fallen face-first onto the hard oak of the table. His cheeks were puffed and beet red; his fists beat the air with the fury of a warrior. He would not stop bleeding. I did not know what to do.

  I called the pediatrician, the number etched into my heart. "Hello," I said, breathless, over Max's cries. "Hello? No, I can't be put on hold--" But they cut me off. I pulled the phone into the kitchen, still trying to rock my child, and picked up Dr. Spock's book. I looked up Nosebleeds in the index. Get on the phone, I thought. This is a goddamned emergency. I have hurt my child. There ... I read the whole paragraph, and at the end it said to tilt him forward so he wouldn't choke on the blood. I positioned Max and watched his face get even redder, his cries louder. I curled him into my shoulder again and wondered how I had done it wrong.

  "Hello?" A voice returned to the pediatrician's line.

  "Oh, God, please help me. My baby just fell. He's bleeding through his nose, and I can't make it stop--"

  "Let me get you a nurse," the woman said.

  "Hurry," I shouted into the phone, into Max's ear.

  The nurse told me to tilt Max forward, just like Dr. Spock said, and to hold a towel to his nose. I asked her if she'd hang on, and then I tried that, and this time the bleeding seemed to ebb. "It's working," I yelled into the receiver, lying on its side on the kitchen table. I picked it up. "It's working," I repeated.

  "Good," the nurse told me. "Now, watch him for the next couple of hours. If he seems content, and if he's eating all right, then we don't need to see him."

  At this, a flood of relief washed through me. I didn't know how I'd ever manage to get him to the doctor by myself. I could barely make it out of the neighborhood with him yet.

  "And check his pupils," the nurse continued. "Make sure they aren't dilated or uneven. That's a sign of concussion."

  "Concussion," I whispered, unheard over Max's cries. "I didn't mean to do it," I told the nurse.

  "Of course," the nurse assured me. "No one does."

  When I hung up the phone, Max was still crying so hard that he'd begun to gag on his sobs. I was shaking, rubbing his back. I tried to sponge the clotted blood around his nostrils so that he'd be able to breathe. Even after he was cleaned, faint red blotches remained, as if he'd been permanently stained. "I'm so sorry, Max," I whispered, my words rattling in my throat. "It was just a second, that's all I turned away for; I didn't know that you were going to move that fast." Max's cries waned and then became louder again. "I'm so sorry," I said, repeating the words like a lullaby. "I'm so sorry."

  I carried him to the bathroom and ran the faucet and let him peek into the mirror--all the things that usually calmed him down. When Max didn't respond, I sat down on the toilet lid and rocked him closer. I had been crying too, high keening notes that tore through my body and ripped shrilly through Max's screams. It took me a moment to realize that suddenly I was the only one making a sound.

  Max was still and quiet on my shoulder. I stood and moved to the mirror, afraid to look. His eyes were closed; his hair was matted with sweat. His nose was plugged with dried sienna blood, and two bruises darkened his skin just beneath his eyes. I shivered with the sudden thought: I was just like those women. I had killed my child.

  Still hiccuping with sobs, I carried Max to the bedroom and placed him on the cool blue bedspread. I sighed with relief: his back rose and fell; he was breathing, asleep. His face, though brutally marked, held the peace of an angel.

  I put my face into my hands, trembling. I had known that I wouldn't be a very good mother, but I assumed that my sins would be forgetfulness or ignorance. I didn't know I would hurt my own son. Surely anyone else would have lifted the baby to retrieve the diaper. I was too stupid to think of it. And if I had done it once, it could happen again.

  I had a sudden memory of my mother the night before she disappeared from my life. She wore a pale-peach bathrobe and fuzzy bunny slippers. She sat on the edge of my bed. "You know I love you, Paige-boy," she said, because she thought I was asleep. "Don't you let anyone tell you otherwise."

  I laid my