Harvesting the Heart

groceries, and he was shocked at how his whole center seemed to soften at the thought.

She was sitting on the floor, with her hands spread over the pages of Gray’s Anatomy as if she were modestly trying to cover the naked musculoskeletal image of a man. At first she did not see him. “Phalanges,” she murmured, reading. She pronounced the clinical names for fingers and toes all wrong, as if it rhymed with fangs, and Nicholas smiled. Then, hearing his footsteps, she jumped to her feet, as though she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t have been doing. “I’m sorry,” she blurted out.

Paige’s cheeks were flushed; her shoulders were shaking. “What are you sorry for?” Nicholas said, tossing his bag onto the couch.

Paige looked around, and following her glance, Nicholas began to see that she’d been doing more than baking cookies. She had cleaned the entire apartment, even scrubbed the hardwood floors, from the looks of things. She had taken the extra quilt out of the linen closet and draped it over the couch, so bright colors like lime and violet and magenta washed over the Spartan room. She had moved the copies of Smithsonian and the New England Journal of Medicine off the coffee table to make room for a Mademoiselle magazine open to a feature on shaping your buttocks. On the kitchen counter was a spray of black-eyed Susans, arranged neatly in a clean-washed peanut butter jar.

These subtle changes took the focus away from the antiques and the sharp edges that had made the place look so formal. In one afternoon, Paige had made his apartment resemble any other lived-in apartment.

“When you took me here last night, I kept thinking that there was something missing. It-I don’t know-it just looked sort of stiff, like you lived in the pages of an Architectural Digest article. I picked the flowers on the edge of the highway,” Paige said nervously, “and since I couldn’t find a vase, I sort of finished the peanut butter.”

Nicholas nodded. “I didn’t even know I had peanut butter,” he said, still gazing around the room. In the entire course of his life, he’d never seen a copy of Mademoiselle in his home. His mother would have died rather than see highway wildflowers on a table instead of her hothouse tea roses. He’d been brought up to believe that quilts were acceptable for hunting lodges but not formal sitting rooms.

When he started medical school, Nicholas had left the decoration of the apartment in his mother’s hands because he hadn’t the time or the inclination, and to no one’s surprise it came out looking very much like the house he’d grown up in. Astrid had bequeathed him an ormolu clock and an ancient cherry dining room table. She’d commissioned her usual decorator to take care of the drapes and the upholstery, specifying the rich hunter-green and navy and crimson fabrics that she felt suited Nicholas. He hadn’t wanted a formal sitting room, but he had never mentioned that to his mother. Aftges amother. er the fact, he didn’t know how to go about changing one into a simple living room. Or maybe he didn’t know how to go about living.

“What do you think?” Paige whispered, so quietly that Nicholas thought he had imagined her voice.

Nicholas walked toward her, wrapped his arms around her. “I think we’re going to have to buy a vase,” he said.

He could feel Paige’s shoulders relax beneath his hands. Suddenly she started talking, the words tumbling out of her mouth. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said, “but I knew it needed something. And then I figured-I’m baking cookies, did you know that?-well, I didn’t know if what I liked would be what you liked, and I started to think about how I’d act if I came home and someone I barely even knew had rearranged my whole house. We don’t really know each other, Nicholas, and I’ve been thinking about that all night too: just when I’ve convinced myself that this is the most right thing in the world, my common sense comes tramping in. What’s your favorite -butter or chocolate chip?”

“I don’t know,” Nicholas said. He was smiling. He liked trying to follow her conversation. It reminded him of a pet rabbit he’d had once that he tried to take for a walk on a leash.

“Don’t tease me,” Paige said, pulling away. She walked into the kitchen and pulled a tray out of the oven. “You’ve never used these cookie sheets,” she said. “The stickers were still on them.”

Nicholas picked up a spatula and lifted a cookie off the sheet, then bounced it from palm to palm as it cooled. “I didn’t know I had them,” he said. “I don’t cook much.”

Paige watched him taste the cookie. “Neither do I. I guess you should know that, shouldn’t you? We’ll probably starve within a month.”

Nicholas looked up. “But we’ll die happy,” he said. He took a second bite. “These are good, Paige. You’re underestimating yourself.”

Paige shook her head. “I once set the oven on fire cooking a TV dinner. I didn’t take it out of the box. Cookies are my whole repertoire. But I can do those from scratch. You seemed like a butter cookie kind of guy. I tried to remember if you ever ordered chocolate at the diner, and you didn’t, I don’t think, so you have to be a vanilla person.” When Nicholas stared at her, Paige grinned at him. “The world is divided into chocolate people and vanilla people. Don’t you know that, Nicholas?”

“It’s that simple?”

Paige nodded. “Think about it. No one ever likes the two halves of a Dixie ice cream cup equally. You either save the chocolate because you like it best, or you save the vanilla. If you’re really lucky, you can swap with someone so you get a whole cup of the flavor you like best. My dad used to do that for me.”

Nicholas thought about the kind of day he had just come from. He was still on rotation in Emergency. This morning there had been a six-car pileup on Route 93, and the wounded were brought to Mass General. One had died, onesiz ad died, had been in neurosurgery for eight hours, one had gone into cardiac arrest. During lunch a six-year-old girl was brought in, shot through the stomach in a playground when she was caught in the crossfire of two youth gangs. And then, in his apartment, there was Paige. To come home to Paige every day would be a relief. To come home to her would be a blessing.

“I take it you’re a chocolate person,” Nicholas said.

“Of course.”

Nicholas stepped forward and put his arms on either side of her, bracing her against the sink. “You can have my half of a Dixie cup anytime,” he said. “You can have anything you want.”

Nicholas had read once of a five-foot-three-inch woman who had lifted an overturned school bus off her seven- year-old daughter. He had watched a 60 Minutes segment about an unmarried soldier who threw himself on top of a grenade to protect the life of a fellow soldier who had a family waiting back home. Medically, Nicholas could credit this to the sudden adrenaline rush caused by crisis situations. Practically, he knew that some measure of emotional commitment was involved. And he realized, to his surprise, that he would have done such things for Paige. He would swim a channel, take a bullet, trade his life. The idea shook Nicholas, chilled his blood. Maybe it was only fierce protectiveness, but he was beginning to believe it was love.

In spite of himself, in spite of his hasty proposal, Nicholas did not believe in romantic love. He did not believe in being swept off your feet, or in love at first sight-either of which would have accounted for his near-immediate obsession with Paige. When he had lain awake in bed last night, he wondered if the attraction could be based on pity-the boy who had grown up with everything thinking he could light up the life of the girl who had not-but Nicholas had met women of less pedigreed backgrounds before, and none of them had ever affected him so strongly he forgot how to use his voice, how to breathe involuntarily. Those women, the ones Nicholas could win over with a bottle of house Chianti and a disarming smile, usually graced his bed for a week before he felt like moving on. He could have done that with Paige; he knew he could have if he’d wanted to. But whenever he looked at her, he wanted to stand beside her, to shield her from the world with the simple, strong heat of his body. She was so much more fragile than she let on.

Paige was sprawled in what was now his living room, thanks to her, reading Gray’s Anatomy as if it were a murder mystery. “I don’t know how you memorize all this stuff, Nicholas,” she said. “I couldn’t even do the bones.” She looked up at him. “I tried, you know. I thought if I remembered them all without peeking, I’d impress you.”

“You already impress me,” he said. “I don’t care about the bones.”

Paige shrugged. “I’m not impressive,” she said.

Nicholas, lying on the couch, rolled onto his side to look at her. “Are you kidding?” he said. “You left home and got yourself a job and survived in a city you knew nothing about. Christ, I couldn’t have done that at eighteen.” He paused. “vin ae pausedI don’t know if I could do that now.”