Harvesting the Heart

“I’d like to make a collect call,” I told the operator. I was whispering although Nicholas was nowhere nearby. We were supposed to meet at the office of the justice of the peace in twenty minutes, but I told him I had to run an errand for Lionel. I was trying not to touch the grimy glass of the booth with my good pink suit. I tapped the edge of the pay phone with my finger. “Say it’s Paige.”

It took ten rings, and the operator was just suggesting I try again later, when my father picked up. “Hello,” he said, and his voice reminded me of his cigarettes, True, and their cool gray package.

“Collect call from Paige. Do you accept?”

“Yes,” my father said. “Oh, sure, yes.” He waited a second, I suppose to be certain the operator got off the line, and then he called my name.

“Dad,” I told him, “I’m still in Massachusetts.”

“I knew you’d be callin’ me, lass,” my father said. “I’ve been thinkin’ about you today.”

My hope jumped at that. If I didn’t listen too closely, I could almost ignore the thickness wrapped around his words. Maybe Nicholas and I would visit him. Maybe one day he wouit qe day heuld visit me.

“I found a photo of you this mornin‘, stuck behind my router. D’you remember the time I took you to that pettin’ zoo?” I did, but I wanted to hear him talk. I hadn’t realized until then how much I missed my father’s voice. “You were so lookin’ forward to seein’ the sheep,” he said, “the wee lambs, because I’d told you about the farm in County Donegal. You couldn’a been more than six, I figure.”

“Oh, I know the photo,” I exclaimed, suddenly remembering the image of myself hugging the fleece of a dun- colored lamb.

“I’d be surprised if you didn’t,” my father said. “The way you got the wind knocked out of you that day! You went into that pen as brave as Cuchulainn himself with a palm full of feed, and every llama and goat and sheep in the place came runnin’ over to you. Knocked you flat on your back, they did.”

I frowned, remembering it as though it were yesterday. They had come from all sides like nightmares, with their hollow, dead eyes and their curved yellow teeth. There had been no way out; the world had closed in around me. Now, under my wedding suit, I broke out in a light sweat; I thought how much I felt like that, again, today.

My father was grinning; I could hear it. “What did you do?” I asked.

“What I always did,” he said, and I listened to his smile fade. “I picked you up. I came and got you.”

I listened to all the things I wanted and needed to say to him racing through my mind. In the silence I could feel him wondering why he hadn’t come to get me in Massachusetts; why he hadn’t picked up the pieces and smoothed it over and made it better. I could sense him running through everything we had said to each other and everything we hadn’t, trying to find the thread that made this time different.

I knew, even if he didn’t. My father’s God preached forgiveness, but did he?

Suddenly all I wanted to do was take away the pain. It was my sin; it was one thing for me to feel the guilt, but my father shouldn’t have to. I wanted to let him know that he wasn’t responsible, not for what I had done and not for me. And since he wouldn’t believe I could take care of myself-never would, not now-I told him there was someone else to take care of me. “Dad,” I said, “I’m getting married.”

I heard a strange sound, as if I had knocked the wind out of him. “Dad,” I repeated.

“Yes.” He drew in his breath. “Do you love him?” he asked.

“Yes,” I admitted. “Actually, I do.”

“That makes it harder,” he said.

I wondered about that for a moment, and then when I felt I was going to cry, I covered the mouthpiece with my hand and closed my eyes and counted to ten. “I didn’t want to leave you,” I said, the same words I spoke every time I called. “It wasn’t the way I thought thin wa qhought tgs would happen.”

Miles away, my father sighed. “It never is,” he said.

I thought about the easy days, when he would bathe me as a child and wrap me in my long-john pajamas and comb the tangles from my hair. I thought about sitting on his lap and watching the bluest flames in the fireplace and wondering if there was any finer thing in the world.

“Paige?” he said into the silence. “Paige?”

I did not answer all the questions he was trying to ask. “I’m getting married, and I wanted you to know,” I said, but I was certain he could hear the fear in my voice as loudly as I could hear it in his.

It built up in my stomach and my chest, the feeling, as if I were spiraling into myself. I could feel Nicholas holding back, tensed like a puma, until I was ready. I wrapped my arms and my legs around Nicholas, and, together, we came. I loved the way he arched his neck and exhaled and then opened his eyes as though he wasn’t quite sure where he was and how he had got there. I loved knowing I had done that to him.

Nicholas cupped my face in his hands and told me he loved me. He kissed me, but instead of passion I felt protection. He pulled us onto our sides, and I curled myself in the hollow of his chest and tasted his skin and his sweat. I tried to burrow closer. I did not close my eyes to sleep, because I was waiting, as I had the last time I’d been with a man, for God to strike me down.

Nicholas brought me violets, two huge bunches, still misted and swollen with the spray of a florist. “Violets,” I said, smiling. “For faithfulness.”

“Now, how do you know that?” Nicholas said.

“That’s what Ophelia says, anyway, in Hamlet,” I told him, taking the bunches and holding them in my left hand. I had a quick vision of the famous painting of Ophelia, where she floats faceup in a stream, dead, her hair swirled around her and tangled with flowers. Daisies, in fact. And violets.

The justice of the peace and a woman whom he introduced only as a witness were standing in the center of a plain room when we walked in. I think Nicholas had told me the man was a retired judge. He asked us to spell and pronounce our names, and then he said “Dearly beloved.” The entire thing took less than ten minutes.

I did not have a ring for Nicholas and I started to panic, but Nicholas pulled from his suit pocket two bright gold bands and handed the larger one to me. He looked at me, and I could clearly read his eyes: 1 didn’t forget. I won’t forget anything.

Within a few minutes I began to cry. It was not that I was hurt, which Nicholas thought, or that I was happy or disillusioned. It was because Iold qs becaus had spent the past eight weeks with a hole in my heart. I had even started to hate myself a little. But in making love with Nicholas, I discovered that what had been missing was replaced. Patchwork, but still, it was better. Nicholas had the ability to fill me.

Nicholas kissed the tears off my cheeks and stroked my hair. He was so close that we were breathing the same square of air. And as he stirred beside me again, I began to erase my past until almost all I could remember was whatever I had told Nicholas, whatever he wanted to believe. “Paige,” he said, “the second time is even better.” And reading into this, I moved astride him and eased him inside me and started to heal.

chapter 5

Paige

The best of the several memories I have of my mother involved the betrayal of my father. It was a Sunday, which had meant for as long as I’d been alive that we would be going to Mass. Every Sunday, my mother and my father and I would put on our best outfits and walk down the street to Saint Christopher‘s, where I would listen to the rhythmic hum of prayers and watch my mother and my father receive Communion. Afterward we’d stand in the sun on the worn stone steps of the church, and my father’s hand would rest warm on my head while he talked to the Morenos and the Salvuccis about the fine Chicago weather. But this particular Sunday, my father had left for O’Hare before the sun came up. He was flying to Westchester, New York, to meet with an eccentric old millionaire in hopes of promoting his latest invention, a polypropylene pool float that hung suspended by wires in the middle of