Harvesting the Heart

and she was a little overwhelmed, I think, and she cracked under the pressure.” He looked at their blank faces, wondering why he felt he had to make explanations for Paige when he himself couldn’t forgive her. “She never had a mother,” he said.

“Everyone has a mother,” Fay said. “That’s the way it happens.”

“Hers left her when she was five. Last I heard, actually, she was trying to find her. Like that might give her all the answers.”

Fay pulled her son toward her and restrapped the hanging front of his overalls. “Answers, jeez. There aren’t any answers. You should have seen me when he was three months old,” she said lightly. “I had scared away all my friends, and I was almost declared legally dead by my family doctor.”

Nikki sucked in her breath and stared at Nicholas, her eyes wide and liquid with pity. “Still,” she whispered, “to leave your own child.”

Nicholas felt the silence crowding in on him. He didn’t want their stares; he didn’t want their sympathy. He looked at the toddlers, wishing for one of them to start crying, just to break the moment. Even Max was being quiet.

Judy sat down beside Nicholas and balanced Max on her lap. She touched Nicholas’s wrist and lifted his hand to the baby’s mouth. “I think I’ve found out what’s making him such a monster,” she said gently. “There.” She pressed Nicholas’s finger to the bottom of Max’s gums, where a sharp triangle of white bit into his flesh.

Fay and Nikki crowded closer, eager to change the subject. “A tooth!” Fay said, as animated as if Max had been accepted to Harvard; and Nikki added, “He’s just over three months, right? That’s awfully early. He’s in a hurry to grow up; I bet he crawls soon.” Nicholas stared at the downy crown of black hair on his son’s head. He pressed down with his finger, letting Max bite back with his jaws, with his brand-new tooth. He looked up at the sky, a day without clouds, and then let the women run their fingers over Max’s gums… Paige would have wanted to be here, he thought suddenly, and then he felt anger searing through him like a brush fire. Paige should have wanted to be here.

chapter 25

Paige

I had never been there, but this was the way I had pictured Ireland from my father’s stories. Rich, rolling hills the deep green of emeralds; grass thicker than a plush rug, farms notched into the slopes and bordered by sturdy stone walls. Several times I stopped the car, to drink from streams cleaner and colder than I had ever imagined possible. I could hear my father’s brogue in the cascade and the current, and I could not believe the irony: my mother had run away to the North Carolina countryside, a land my father would have loved.

If I hadn’t known better, I would have assumed the hills were virgin territory. Paved roads were the only sign that anyone else had been here, and in the three hours I’d been driving across the state, I hadn’t passed a single car. I had rolled down all the windows so that the air could rush into my lungs. It was crisper than the air in Chicago, lighter than the air in Cambridge. I felt as if I were drinking in the endless open space, and I could see how, out here, someone could easily get lost.

Since leaving Chicago, I had been thinking only of my mother. I ran through every solid memory I’d ever had and froze each of them in my mind like an image from a slide projector, hoping to see something I hadn’t noticed before. I couldn’t come up with an image of her face. It drifted in and out of shadows.

My father had said I looked like her, but it had been twenty years since he’d seen her and eight since he’d seen me, so he might have been mistaken. I knew from her clothes that she was taller and thinner. I knew from Eddie Savoy how she’d spent the past two decades. But I still didn’t think I’d be able to spot her in a crowd.

The more I drove, the more I remembered about my mother. I remembered how she tried to get ahead of herself, making all my lunches for the week on Sunday night and stowing them in the freezer, so that my bologna and my turkey and my Friday tuna fish were never fully thawed by the time I ate them. I remembered that when I was four and got the mumps on only the right side of my face, my mother had fed me half-full cups of Jell-o and kept me in bed half the day, telling me that after all, I was half healthy. I remembered the dreary day in March when we were both worn down by the sleet and the cold, and she had baked a devil’s food cake and made glittery party hats, and together we celebrated Nobody’s birthday. I remembered the time she was in a car accident, how I had come downstairs at midnight to a room full of policemen and found her lying on the couch, one eye swollen shut and a gash over her lip, her arms reaching out to hold me.

Then I remembered the March before she left, Ash Wednesday. In kindergarten, we had a half day of school, but the Tribune was still open. My mother could have hired the baby-sitter to take care of me until she came home, or told me to wait next door at the Manzettis’. But instead she’d come up with the idea that we would go out to lunch and then make afternoon Mass. She had announced this over the dinner table and told my father that I was smart enough to take the bus all by myself. My father stared at her, not believing what he had heard, and then finally he grabbed my mother’s hand and pressed it to the table, hard, as if he could make her see the truth through the pain. “No, May,” he’d said, “she’s too young.”

But well after midnight, the door to my room opened, and in the slice of light that fell across my bed I saw the shadow of my mother. She came in and sat in the dark and pressed into my hand twenty cents, bus fare. She held out a route map and a flashlight and made me repeat after her: Michigan and Van Buren Street, the downtown local. One, two, three, four stops, and Mommy will be there. I said it over and over until it was as familiar as my bedtime prayers. My mother left the room and let me go to sleep. At four in the morning, I awoke to find her face inches away from mine, her breath hot against my lips. “Say it,” she commanded, and my mouth formed the words that my brain could not hear, stuffed as it was with sleep. Michigan and Van Buren Street, I murmured. The downtown local. I opened my eyes wide, surprised by how well I had learned. “That’s my girl,” my mother said, cupping my cheeks in her hands. She pressed a finger to my lips. “And don’t tell your daddy,” she whispered.

Even I knew the value of a secret. Through breakfast, I avoided my father’s gaze. When my mother dropped me off at the school gates, her eyes flashed, feverish. For a moment she looked so different that I thought of Sister Alberta’s lectures on the devil. “What’s it all for,” my mother said to me, “without the risk?” And I had pressed my face against hers to kiss her goodbye the way I always did, but this time I whispered against her cheek: One, two, three, four stops. And you’ll be there.

I had swung my feet back and forth under my chair that morning, and I colored in the pictures of Jesus outside the lines because I was so excited. When Sister let us out at the bell, blessing us in a stream of rushed words, I turned to the left, the direction I never went. I walked until I came to the corner of Michigan and Van Buren and saw the pharmacy my mother had said would be there. I stood underneath the Metro sign, and when the big bus sighed int he±€†o place beside the curb, I asked the driver, “Downtown local?”

He nodded and took my twenty cents, and I sat in the front seat as my mother had said, not looking beside me because there could be bums and bad men and even the devil himself. I could feel hot breath on my neck, and I squeezed my eyes shut, listening to the roll of the wheels and the lurch of the brakes and counting the stops. When the door opened for the fourth time, I bolted from my seat, peeking into the one beside mine just that once, to see only blue vinyl and the lacy grate of the air conditioner. I stepped off the bus and waited for the knot of people to clear, shielding my eyes from the sun. My mother knelt, her arms open, her smile red and laughing and wide. “Paige-boy,” she said, folding me into her purple raincoat. “I knew you’d come.”

I had asked a man with spare tufts of gray hair, who’d been sitting on a milk can at the side of the road, if he’d heard of Farleyville. “Yuh,” he said, pointing in front of me. “You almost there now.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe you’ve heard of a salon called Bridal Bits?”

The man scratched his chest through his worn chambray shirt. He laughed, and he had no teeth. “A sa-lon,” he said, mocking my words. “I don’t know ’bout that.”

The corners of my mouth turned down. “Could you just tell me where it is?”

The man grinned at me. “If it be the same place I’m thinking of, and I’m bettin’ it ain‘t, then you want to take the first right at the ’baccy field and keep goin’ till you see a bait shop. It’s three miles past that, on the left.” He