Harvesting the Heart Read online

  I read a "Dear Abby" column years ago in which a man had written about having an affair with his secretary. It had been over for years, but he had never told his wife, and although they had a happy marriage, he felt he should reveal what had happened. I was surprised by Abby's answer. You're opening a can of worms, Abby wrote. What she does not know she cannot be hurt by.

  I do not know how long I can wait. I would never take Max and flee in the night, like I know Nicholas is thinking. I couldn't do it to Max, and I especially couldn't do it to Nicholas. Being with Max for three months has softened him around the edges. The Nicholas I left in July would never have crept around a corner on his hands and knees, pretending to be a grizzly bear to entertain his son. But practically, I cannot keep sleeping on the front lawn. It's mid-October, and already the leaves have come off the trees. We've had a frost at night. Soon there will be snow.

  I walk to Mercy, hoping to get a cup of coffee from Lionel. The first familiar face is Doris's, and she drops two blue-plate specials at a booth and comes to hug me. "Paige!" She cries into the kitchen pass-through: "Paige is back again!"

  Lionel runs in front and makes a big show of sitting me at the counter on a cracked red stool. The diner is smaller than I have remembered it, and the walls are a sickly shade of yellow. If I did not know the place, I would not feel comfortable eating here. "Where's that precious baby?" Marvela says, leaning in front of me so that her earbobs sway against the edges of my hair. "You got to have pictures, at least."

  I shake my head and gratefully accept the cup of coffee that Doris brings. Lionel ignores the small line that has formed by the cash register and sits down beside me. "That doctor boy of yours came in here some months back. Thought you'd up and run off, and come to us for help." Lionel stares straight at me, and the line of his jagged scar darkens with emotion. "I tell him you ain't that kind of person," he says. "I know these things."

  He looks for a moment as if he is going to hug me, but then he remembers himself and hoists his frame off the neighboring stool. "What you lookin' at?" he snaps at Marvela, who is wringing her hands beside me. "We got us a business, sweet pea," he says to me, and he stomps toward the cash register.

  When the waitresses and Lionel have settled back into their routines, I let myself look around. The menus haven't changed, though the prices have. They have been rewritten on tiny fluorescent stickers. The men's bathroom is still out of order, as it was the last day I had worked there. And tacked above the cash register, dangling above the counter, are all the portraits I drew of the customers.

  I cannot believe Lionel hasn't thrown them out. Surely some of the people have died by now. I scan the portraits: Elma the bag lady; Hank the chemistry professor; Marvela and Doris and Marilyn Monroe; Nicholas. Nicholas. I stand up, and then I crawl onto the countertop to get a closer look. I crouch with my hands pressed against Nicholas's portrait, feeling the stares of the customers. Lionel and Marvela and Doris, true friends, pretend they do not notice.

  I remember this one very well. In the background I had drawn the face of a little boy, sitting in a twisted tree and holding the sun. At first I thought I'd drawn my favorite Irish legend, the one about Cuchulainn leaving the sun god's palace when his mother went home to her original husband. I did not understand why I would have drawn this particular scene, something from my own childhood, on Nicholas's portrait, but I thought it had something to do with my running away. I had stared at the drawing, and I imagined my father telling me the story while he smoked a bayberry pipe. At the time, I could easily see my father's hands, studded with glue and bits of twine from his workshop, waving in the air as he mimicked the passage of Cuchulainn back to ordinary earth. I wondered if Cuchulainn missed that other life.

  Months afterward, when Nicholas and I were sitting in the diner and looking at his portrait, I told him the story of Dechtire and the sun god. He laughed. When I'd drawn it he had seen something completely different in the picture. He said he'd never even heard of Cuchulainn, but that as a kid he believed that if he climbed high enough he could truly catch the sun. I guess, he said, in a way, we all do.

  I unlock the house and spend a full hour pulling dirty socks and Onesies and fuzzy blanket sleepers from unimaginable places: the microwave, the wine rack, a soup tureen. When I have gathered a pile of laundry, I start a wash. In the meantime I dust the living room and the bedroom and scrub the white counters in the bathroom. I scour the toilet and vacuum the skin-colored rugs and try my best to get the jelly stains off the ivory tiles in the kitchen. I change the sheets on the bed and the ones in Max's crib, and I empty his diaper pail and spray perfume into the carpet so that some of the smell is masked. All the while, the TV is on, tuned to the soap operas I watched when my mother's ankle was first broken. I tell Devon to leave her husband and I cry when Alana's baby is stillborn and I watch, riveted, a love scene between a rich girl named Leda and Spider, a street-smart hustler. I am just setting the table for two when the telephone rings, and out of force of habit, I pick it up.

  "Paige," the voice says. "I can't tell you how glad I am to find you."

  "It's not what you think," I say, hedging, while I try to figure out who is on the other end.

  "Aren't you coming to see Max? He's been waiting all day." Astrid. Who else would call? I don't have any friends in this city. "I--I don't know," I say. "I'm cleaning the house."

  "Nicholas didn't say that you'd moved back in," she says. "I haven't."

  "Paige," Astrid says, her voice as sharp as the edges of her black-and-white stills. "We need to have a little talk."

  She is waiting for me at the front door with Max. He's dressed in Osh-Kosh overalls and is wearing the tiniest Nike sneakers I have ever seen. "Imelda has coffee waiting for us in the parlor," she says, handing Max over to me. She turns and walks into the imposing hall, expecting me to follow.

  The parlor, just a room full of toys now, is much less intimidating than it was the first time I was there with Nicholas. If the rocking horse and the Porta-Crib had been there eight years ago, I wonder if things would have turned out this way. I set Max down on the floor, and he immediately gets onto his hands and his knees, rocking back and forth. "Look," I say, breathless. "He's going to crawl!"

  Astrid hands me a cup and saucer. "Not to burst your bubble, but he's been doing that for two weeks. He can't seem to figure out the coordination." I watch Max bounce for a while; I accept cream and sugar. "I have a proposition for you," Astrid says.

  I look up, a little afraid. "I don't know," I say.

  Astrid smiles. "You haven't even heard it yet." She moves a fraction of an inch closer to me. "Listen. It's freezing these nights, and I know you can't stay much longer on your lawn. God only knows how long it's going to take my stubborn son to come to his senses. I want you to move in here. Robert and I have discussed it; we have more rooms than a small hotel. Now, out of deference to Nicholas, I'll have to ask you to leave during the day, so that Max is still in my care--he's a bit uptight about you being around him, as you've probably noticed. But I don't see why every now and then you and I and Max might not just cross paths."

  I gape at Astrid, my mouth hanging open. This woman is offering me a gift. "I don't know what to say," I murmur, tugging my gaze away to rest on Max on the floor. A million things are running through my mind: There has to be a catch. She's worked something out with Nicholas, something to prove that I'm an unfit mother, something to keep me even further away from Max. Or else she wants something in return. But what could I possibly give her?

  "I know what you're thinking," Astrid says. "Robert and I owe you. I was wrong in believing that you and Nicholas shouldn't be married. You're just what Nicholas needs, even if he's too stupid to realize it himself. He'll come around."

  "I'm not what Nicholas needs," I say, still looking at Max.

  Astrid leans forward so that her face is inches from mine and I am forced to turn to her. "You listen to me, Paige. Do you know what my first reaction was when Nicholas told me