Harvesting the Heart

“How do you know that?” I say sulkily, a little upset that she can pin me down so easily.

“Because,” my mother says, “that’s what’s keeping me going.”

I tighten my grip on the arm of Robert’s chair. “Maybe I’m wasting my time,” I say. “Maybe I should just come back now.”

It would be so easy to be someplace where I am wanted, anyplace but here. I pause, waiting for her to take me up on the offer. But instead my mother laughs softly. “Do you know that your first word,” she says, “even before Mama and Dada, was goodbye?”

She’s right. It isn’t going to do me any good to just keep running. I sink back against the chair and close my eyes, trying to picture the hasizn€†irpin stream I jumped with Donegal, the ribbons of clouds lacing the sky. “Tell me what I’m missing,” I say. I listen to my mother speak of Aurora and Jean-Claude, of the sun-bleached paint on the chipped wall of the barn, of a brisk seasonal change that creeps farther up the porch every night. After a while I don’t bother to concentrate on her actual words. I let the sound of her voice wash over me, making itself familiar.

Then I hear her say, “I called your father, you know.”

But I haven’t spoken to my father since I’ve been back, so of course I could not have known. I am certain I’ve heard her wrong. “You what?” I say.

“I called your father. We had a good talk. I never would have called, but you sort of encouraged me. By leaving, I mean.” There is silence for a moment. “Who knows,” she murmurs. “Maybe one day I’ll even see him.”

I look around at the mutated, hunkering shapes of chairs and end tables in the dark library. I rub my hands over my shoulders. I am beginning to feel hope. Maybe, after twenty years, this is what my mother and I can do for each other. It is not the way other mothers and daughters are-we will not talk about seventh-grade boys, or French-braid my hair on a rainy Sunday; my mother will not have the chance to heal my cuts and bruises with a kiss. We cannot go back, but we can keep surprising each other, and I suppose this is better than nothing at all.

Suddenly I really believe that if I stick it out long enough, Nicholas will understand. It’s just a matter of time, and I have a lot of that on my hands. “I’m a volunteer at the hospital now,” I tell my mother proudly. “I work wherever Nicholas works. I’m closer than his shadow.”

My mother pauses, as if she is considering this. “Stranger things have happened,” she says.

Max wakes up screaming, his legs bent close to his chest. When I rub his stomach, it only makes him scream harder. I think that maybe he needs to burp, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem. Finally, I walk around with him perched on my shoulder, pressing his belly flush against me. “What’s wrong?” Astrid says, her head at the nursery doorway.

“I don’t know,” I say, and to my surprise, uttering those words doesn’t throw me into a panic. Somehow I know I will figure it out. “It might be gas.”

Max squeezes up his face and turns red, the way he does when he’s trying to go to the bathroom. “Ah,” I say. “Are you leaving me a present?” I wait until he looks as if he’s finished, and then I pull down his sweatpants to change his diaper. There is nothing inside, nothing at all. “You fooled me,” I say, and he smiles.

I rediaper him and sit him on the floor with a Busy Box, rolling and turning the knobs until he catches on and follows. From time to time he screws up his face again. He seems to be constipated. “Maybe we’ll have prunes for breakfast,” I say. “That ought to make you feel better.”

Max plays quietly with me for a few minut='n€†tes, and then I notice that he isn’t really paying attention. He’s staring off into space, and the curiosity that flames the blue in his eyes seems to have dulled. He sways a little, as if he’s going to fall. I frown, tickle him, and wait for him to respond. It takes a second or two longer than usual, but eventually he comes back to me.

He’s not himself, I think, although I cannot put my finger on what the problem really is. I figure I will watch him closely. I tenderly rub his chunky forearms, feeling a satisfied flutter in my chest. I know my own son, I think proudly. I know him well enough to catch the subtle changes.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called,” I tell my father. “Things have been a little crazy.”

My father laughs. “I had thirteen years with you, lass. I think your mother deserves three months.”

I had written my father postcards from North Carolina, just as I had written Max. I’d told him about Donegal, about the rye rolling over the hills. I told him everything I could on a three-and-a-half-by-five-and-a-half-inch card, without mentioning my mother.

“Rumor has it,” my father says, “you’ve been sleepin’ with the enemy.” I jump, thinking he means Nicholas, and then I realize he is talking about living at the Prescotts’.

I glance at the Faberge egg on the mantel, the Civil War Sharps carbine rifle hanging over the fireplace. “Necessity makes strange bed-fellows,” I say.

I wind the telephone cord around my ankles, trying to find a safe route for conversation. But there is little I have to say, and so much I want to. I take a deep breath. “Speaking of rumors,” I say, “I hear Mom called.”

“Aye.”

My mouth drops open. “That’s it? ‘Aye’? Twenty-one years go by, and that’s all you have to say?”

“I was expectin’ it,” my father says. “I figured if you had the fortune to find her, sooner or later she’d return the favor.”

“The favor?” I shake my head. “I thought you wanted nothing to do with her. I thought you said it was too late.”

For a moment my father is silent. “Paige,” he says finally, “how did you find her to be?”

I close my eyes and sink back on the leather couch. I want to choose my words very carefully. I imagine my mother the way she would have wanted me to: seated on Donegal, galloping him across a field faster than a lie can spread. “She wasn’t what I expected,” I say proudly.

My father laughs. “May never was.”

“She thinks she’s going to see you someday,” I add.

“Does she now,” my father answers, but his thoughts seem very far away. I wonder if he is seeing her the way he did the first time he met her, dressed in her halter top and carrying her practice suitcase. I wonder if he can remember the tremor in his voice when he asked her to marry him, or the flash across her eyes as she said yes, or even the ache in his throat when he knew she was gone from his life.

It may be my imagination, but for the breadth of a moment everything in the room seems to sharpen in focus. The contrasting colors in the Oriental carpet become more striking; the towering windows reflect a devil’s glare. It makes me question if, all this time, I haven’t really been seeing clearly.

“Dad,” I whisper, “I want to go back.”

“God help me, Paige,” my father says. “Don’t I know it.”

Elliot Saget is pleased with my gallery at Mass General. He is so convinced that it is going to win some kind of humanitarian Best of Boston award that he promises me the stars on a silver platter. “Well, actually,” I say, “I’d rather watch Nicholas in surgery.”

I have never seen Nicholas truly doing his job. Yes, I have seen him with his patients, drawing them out of their fear and being more understanding with them than he has been with his own family. But I want to see what all the training is for; what his hands are so skilled at. Elliot frowns at me when I ask. “You may not like it very much,” he says. “Lots of blood and battle scars.”

But I stand my ground. “I’m much tougher than I look,” I say.

And so this morning there will be no picture of Nicholas’s patient tacked to his door. Instead I sit alone in the gallery above the operating suite and wait for Nicholas to enter the room. There are already seven other people: anesthesiologists, nurses, residents, someone sitting beside a complicated machine with coils and tubes. The patient, lying naked on the table, is painted a strange shade of orange.

Nicholas enters, still stretching the gloves on his hands, and all the heads in the room turn toward him. I stand up. There is an audio monitor in the gallery, so I can hear Nicholas’s low voice, rustling behind his paper mask, greeting everyone. He checks beneath the sterile drapes and watches as a tube is set in the patient’s throat. He