Harvesting the Heart

the words to “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” I could swim half a mile without getting too tired; at least I used to be able to do that. I could list the names of most of the cemeteries in Chicago; I knew how to splice electrical cords; I understood the difference between principal and interest payments on our mortgage. I could get to Logan Airport via the T. I could fry an egg and flip it in the pan without a spatula. I could make my husband laugh.

The doorbell rang. I stuffed the list into my pocket and tucked Max under my arm, especially unwilling to leave him alone after reading that piece on killer mothers. The familiar brown suit and cap of the UPS man was visible through the thin stained-glass pane of the door. “Hello,” I said. “It’s nice to see you again.”

The UPS man had come very other day since Nicholas mentioned to his mother that she had a grandson. Big boxes filled with Dr. Seuss books, Baby Dior clothing, even a wooden hobbyhorse, were sent in an effort to buy Max’s-and Nicholas’s-love. I liked my UPS man. He was young and he called me ma’am and he had soft brown eyes and a moony smile. Sometimes when Nicholas was on call he was the only adult I’d see for days. “Maybe you’d like to have some coffee,” I said. “It’s still pretty early.”

The UPS man grinned at me. “Thanks, ma‘am,” he said, “but I can’t, not on company time.”

“Oh,” I said, stepping back from the threshold. “I see.”

“It must be tough,” he said.

I blinked up at him. “Tough?”

“With a baby and all. My sister just had one and she used to be a teacher and she says one little monster is worse than a hundred and twenty seventh graders in springtime.”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose it is.”

The UPS man hoisted the box into our living room. “Need help opening it?”

“I can manage.” I shrugged and gave a small smile. “Thanks, though.”

He tipped his worn brown hat and disappeared through the open doorway. I listened to the squat truck chug down the block, and then I set Max on the floor next to the box. “Don’t go anywhere,” I said. I backed my way into the kitchen, and then I ran to get a knife. When I came into the living room again, Max had pushed himself up on his hands, like the Sphinx. “Hey,” I said, “that’s pretty good.” I flushed, pleased that I had finally seen a developmental marker before Nicholas.

Max watched as I cut the twine around the box and pulled out the staples. He caught a length of string in his fist and tried to work it into his mouth. I laid the knife beside the couch and pulled out of the box a little stool with cut-out yellow letters that spelled MAX and could be removed like a jigsaw puzzle. “Love, Grandma and Grandpa,” read the note. Somewhere1emN€ouc, Max had another grandpa and possibly another grandma. I wondered if he’d ever meet either.

I stood up to throw away the box, but a smaller, flat pink box caught my eye. It had been packed in the bottom of the larger one. I broke the gold-foil seals at its sides and opened it to reveal a beautiful silk scarf printed with linked brass horse bits and braided reins and U-shaped silver shoes. “For Paige,” the card said, “because not only the baby deserves gifts. Mother.” I thought about this. Astrid Prescott was not my mother; she never would be. For a moment my breath caught, and I wondered if it was possible that my real mother, wherever she was, had sent me this beautiful scarf through the Prescotts. I rumpled the thin silk and held it to my nose, breathing in the fragrance of a fine boutique. It was from Astrid, I knew that, and inside I was fluttering because she had thought of me. But just for today, I was going to pretend this had come from the mother I never got to know.

Max, who could not crawl, had wriggled himself over to the knife. “Oh, no you don’t,” I said, lifting him by his armpits. His feet kicked a mile a minute, and little bubbles of spit formed at the corners of his mouth. Standing, I held him to my chest, one arm out like a dance partner. I whirled into the kitchen, humming a Five Satins song, watching his unsteady head bob left and right.

We watched the bottle heat up in the saucepan-the only bottle of formula Max got each day, because in some ways I was still afraid that the La Leche woman would come back and find out and point a damning finger at me. I tested the liquid on my hand. We danced back to the couch in the living room and turned on Oprah, then I gently placed him on a pillow across the couch.

I liked to feed Max this way, because when I held him in my arms he could smell the breast milk and sometimes he refused to take the bottle. He wasn’t a stupid little thing; he knew the real McCoy. I’d prop him on the pillow and tuck a cloth burping diaper under his chin to catch the runoff; then I’d even have a free hand to flip through channels with the remote or to scan the pages of a magazine.

Oprah had on women who had been pregnant and given birth without even knowing they’d been carrying a child. I shook my head at the screen. “Max, my boy,” I said, “where could she even find six people like this?” One woman was saying that she had had a child already and then one night she felt a little gassy and she went to lie down in bed and ten minutes later she realized a squalling infant was between her legs. Another woman nodded her head; she’d been in the back seat of her friend’s van and all of a sudden she just gave birth through her underwear and her shorts, and the baby was lying on the floor mat. “How couldn’t they feel it kicking?” I said out loud. “How couldn’t they notice a contraction?”

Max lifted his chin, and the diaper-bib fell to the floor, twisting over my leg to land behind me. I sighed and turned away for half a second to grab it, and that was when I heard the hard crack of Max’s head striking the side of the coffee table as he rolled off the couch and onto the floor.

He lay on the pale-beige carpet, scant inches from the knife I’d used to cut the twine of the box. His arms and legs were flailing, and he was facedown. I could not breathe. I lifted him into my arms, absorbing his screams into the shallows of rryN€ifemy bones. “Oh, God,” I said, rocking him back and forth tightly as he howled with pain. “Dear God.”

I lifted my head to see if Max was quieting down, and then I saw the blood, staining my shirt and a corner of the beautiful new scarf. My baby was bleeding.

I put him on the pale couch, not caring, running my fingers over his face and his neck and his arms. The blood was coming out of his nose. I had never seen so much blood. He didn’t have any other cuts; he must have fallen face-first onto the hard oak of the table. His cheeks were puffed and beet red; his fists beat the air with the fury of a warrior. He would not stop bleeding. I did not know what to do.

I called the pediatrician, the number etched into my heart. “Hello,” I said, breathless, over Max’s cries. “Hello? No, I can’t be put on hold-” But they cut me off. I pulled the phone into the kitchen, still trying to rock my child, and picked up Dr. Spock’s book. I looked up Nosebleeds in the index. Get on the phone, I thought. This is a goddamned emergency. I have hurt my child. There… I read the whole paragraph, and at the end it said to tilt him forward so he wouldn’t choke on the blood. I positioned Max and watched his face get even redder, his cries louder. I curled him into my shoulder again and wondered how I had done it wrong.

“Hello?” A voice returned to the pediatrician’s line.

“Oh, God, please help me. My baby just fell. He’s bleeding through his nose, and I can’t make it stop-”

“Let me get you a nurse,” the woman said.

“Hurry,” I shouted into the phone, into Max’s ear.

The nurse told me to tilt Max forward, just like Dr. Spock said, and to hold a towel to his nose. I asked her if she’d hang on, and then I tried that, and this time the bleeding seemed to ebb. “It’s working,” I yelled into the receiver, lying on its side on the kitchen table. I picked it up. “It’s working,” I repeated.

“Good,” the nurse told me. “Now, watch him for the next couple of hours. If he seems content, and if he’s eating all right, then we don’t need to see him.”

At this, a flood of relief washed through me. I didn’t know how I’d ever manage to get him to the doctor by myself. I could barely make it out of the neighborhood with him yet.

“And check his pupils,” the nurse continued. “Make sure they aren’t dilated or uneven. That’s a sign of concussion.”

“Concussion,” I whispered, unheard over Max’s cries. “I didn’t mean to do it,” I told the nurse.

“Of course,” the nurse assured me. “No one does.”

When I hung up the phone, Max was still crying so hard that he’d begun to gag on his sobs. I was shaking, rubbing his back. I tried to sponge the clotted blood around his nostrils so that he’d be able to breathe. Even aftet='N€tilr he was cleaned, faint red blotches remained, as if he’d been permanently stained. “I’m so sorry, Max,” I whispered, my words rattling in my throat. “It was just a second, that’s all I turned away for; I didn’t know that you were going to move that fast.” Max’s cries waned and then became louder again. “I’m so sorry,” I said,