Harvesting the Heart Read online

  And so it was that on that Sunday I opened my eyes already disappointed, to hear my father tugging his suitcase down the hall and my mother whispering goodbye and reminding him to call us later, after we got home from Saint Christopher's, to tell us how it went.

  The morning started the way it always did. My mother made me breakfast--my favorite today, apple pancakes in the shape of my initials. She laid my pink lace last-year Easter dress on the foot of my bed. But when the time came to leave for Mass, my mother and I stepped into one of those perfect April days. The sun was as filling as a kiss, and the air held the promise of freshly mowed grass. My mother smiled and took my hand and headed up the street, away from Saint

  Christopher's. "On a day like this," she said, "God

  didn't mean for us to rot away indoors."

  It was the first time that I realized my mother had a second life, one that had nothing at all to do with my father. What I had always assumed was spirituality was really just the side effect of the energy that hovered around her like a magnetic field. I discovered that when my mother wasn't bending to someone else's whims, she could be a completely different person.

  We walked for blocks and blocks, coming closer to the lake, I knew, by the way the wind hung in the air. It became unseasonably warm as we walked, reaching into the high seventies, maybe even eighty. She let go of my hand as we came to the white walls of the Lincoln Park Zoo, which prided itself on its natural habitats. Instead of keeping the animals locked in, they cleverly kept the people out. There were few fences or concrete barriers. What kept the giraffes penned was a wide-holed grate that their legs would have slipped through; what kept the zebras in were gulleys too wide to leap. My mother smiled at me. "You'll love it here," she said, making me wonder if

  she came often, and if so, whom she brought instead of me.

  We were drawn to the polar bear exhibit simply because of the water. The free-form rocks and ledges were painted the cool blue of the Arctic, and the bears stretched in the sun, too warm in their winter fur.

  They slapped their paws at the water, which, my mother said, was just thirty-three degrees. There were two females and a cub. I wondered what the relationship was.

  My mother waited until the cub couldn't take the heat anymore, and then she pulled me down a few shadowed steps to the underwater viewing lounge, where you could see into the underwater tank through a window of thick plexiglass. The cub swam right toward us, sticking its nose against the plastic. "Look, Paige!" my mother said. "It's

  kissing you!" She held me up to the window so that I could get a closer look at the sad brown eyes and the slippery whiskers. "Don't you wish you could be in there?" my mother said, putting me down and dabbing at my forehead with the hem of her skirt. When I did not answer her, she began to walk back up into the heat, still talking quietly to herself. I followed her; what else could I do? "There are many places," I heard her whisper, "I'd like to be."

  Then she got an inspiration. She found the nearest totem pole directional sign and dragged me toward the elephants. African and Indian, they were two different breeds but similar enough to live in the same zoo space. They had wide bald foreheads and paper-thin ears, and their skin was folded and soft and spread with wrinkles, like the saggy, mapped neck of the old black woman who came to clean Saint

  Christopher's. The elephants shook their heads and swatted at gnats with their trunks. They followed each other from one end of their habitat to the other, stopping at trees and examining them as if they'd never seen them before. I looked at them and wondered what it would be like to have one eye on each side of my body. I didn't know if I'd like not being able to see things head-on.

  A moat separated us from the elephants. My mother sat down on the hot concrete and pulled off her high heels. She was not wearing

  stockings. She hiked up her dress and waded into the knee-high water.

  "It's lovely," she said, sighing. "But don't you come

  in, Paige. Really, I shouldn't be doing this. Really, I could get in trouble." She splashed me with the water, little bits of grass and dead flies sticking to the white lace collar of my dress. She sashayed and stomped and once almost lost her footing on the smooth bottom. She sang tunes from Broadway shows, but she made up her own lyrics, silly things about firm pachyderms and the wonder of Dumbo.

  When the zoo guard came up slowly, unsure of how to confront a grown woman in the elephant moat, my mother laughed and waved him away. She stepped out of the water with the grace of an angel and sat down on the concrete again. She pulled on her pumps, and when she stood, there was a dark oval on the ground where her damp bottom had been.

  She told me with the serious demeanor she'd used to tell me the Golden Rule that sometimes one had to take chances.

  Several times that day I found myself looking at my mother with a strange tangle of feelings. I had no doubt that when my father called, she would tell him we'd been at Saint Christopher's and that it had been just as it always was. I loved being part of a conspiracy. At one point I even wondered if the girlfriend I'd been seeing night after night in my dreams was really just my own mother. I thought of how convenient and wonderful that might be.

  We sat on a low bench beside a lady who was selling a cloud of banana balloons. My mother had been reading my thoughts. "Today,"

  she said, "today let's say I'm not your mother. Today I'll just be May. Just your friend May." And of course I didn't argue,

  because this was what I had been hoping anyway, and besides, she wasn't acting like my mother, at least not the one I knew. We told the man cleaning out the ape cage our white lie, and although he did not look up from his work, one large, ruddy gorilla came forward and stared at us, a very human exhaustion in her eyes, which seemed to say, Yes, I believe you.

  The last place we visited in the Lincoln Park Zoo was the penguin and seabird house. It was dark and smelled of herring and was fully enclosed. It sat partially under the ground to maintain its cool temperature. The viewing area was a twisty hallway with windows exposing penguins behind thick glass. They were striking in

  their formal wear, and they tap-danced like society men on floes of white ice. "Your father," May said, "looked no

  different than that at our wedding." She leaned in close to the glass. "In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to pick one groom from the next. They're all the same, you know." And I said I did, even

  though I had no idea what she was talking about.

  I left her staring at a penguin that had slipped into the water

  belly-up to do rolling, slow-motion calisthenics. I disappeared around a bend, pulled toward the other half of the house, where the puffins were. I didn't know what a puffin was, but I liked the way the word sounded: soft and squashed and a little bit bruised, the way your lips looked after you'd eaten wild blackberries. It was a long, narrow walkway, and my eyes had not adjusted to the lack of

  light. I took very tiny steps, because I did not know where I was going, and I held my hands in front of me like a blind man. I walked for what felt like hours, but I could not find those puffins, or the sliver of silver daylight near the door, or even the places where I had already been. My heart swelled up into my throat. I knew the way you know these things that I was going to scream or to cry or to sink to my knees and become invisible forever. For some reason I was not surprised when, in total darkness, my fingers found the comforting shape of May, who

  turned back into my mother, and she wrapped her arms around me. I never understood how she wound up in front of me, since I'd left her with the penguins and I hadn't seen her pass. My mother's hair fell like a dark curtain over my eyes and tickled my nose. Her breath echoed against my cheek. Black shadows wrapped around us like an artificial night, but my mother's voice seemed solid, like something I could grab for support. "I thought I'd never find you," my mother said, words I held on to and breathed like a litany for the rest of my life.

  chapter 6

  Nicholas

  Nicholas was having a he