Harvesting the Heart (34 page)

Nicholas regarded his mother with all the cold reserve she'd proudly bred into him. He pulled a snapshot of Max from his pocket and tossed it onto the table, on top of a print of a turbaned man with a face as old as honesty. “I'm sure it isn't as good as yours,” Nicholas said, staring down into the startled blue eyes of his son. When they'd taken that picture, Paige had stood behind Nicholas with a white sock pulled onto her hand. She had drawn eyes on the top of it and a long forked tongue and had hissed and made rattlesnake noises, pretending to bite Nicholas's ear. In the end, Max had smiled after all.

Nicholas pulled his arm away from his mother's touch. He knew he could not stand there much longer without giving in. He would reach for his mother, and by erasing the space between them, he would be wiping clean a slate listed with grievances that were already starting to fade. He took a deep breath and stood tall. “At one point you weren't ready to be part of my family.” He stepped back, digging his heel into the melting fossil sunset of one Moab print. “Well,
I'm
not ready now.” And he turned and disappeared through the shifting black curtain of the darkroom, leaving an outlined glow in the dim crimson light like the unrelenting face of a ghost.

“I went today.”

“I know.”

“How did you know?”

“You haven't said three words to me since you got home. You're a million miles from here.”

“Well, only about ten miles. Brookline's not so far. But you're just a Chicago girl; what could you know?”

“Very funny, Nicholas. So what did they say?”

“She.
I wasn't going to go when my father was home. I went during my lunch break today.”

“I didn't know you got lunch breaks—”

“Paige, let's not start this again.”

“So—what did she say?”

“I don't remember. She wanted to know more. I left her a picture.”

“You didn't talk to her? You didn't sit down and have tea and crumpets and all that?”

“We're not British.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, we did not sit down and have tea. We didn't sit down at all. I was there for ten minutes, tops.”

“Was it very hard? ... Why are you looking at me like that? What?”

“How can you do it? You know, just cut to the heart of the matter like that?”

“Well,
was
it?”

“It was harder than putting together a heart-lung. It was harder than telling the parents of a three-year-old that their kid just died on the operating table. Paige, it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.”

“Oh, Nicholas.”

“Are you going to turn off that light?”

“Sure.”

“Paige? Do we have a copy of that picture I left at my parents'?”

“The one of Max we got with the sock snake?”

“Yeah. It's a good picture.”

“I can get a copy. I have the negative somewhere.”

“I want it for my office.”

“You don't have an office.”

“Then I'll put it in my locker.... Paige?”

“Mmm?”

“He's a pretty attractive kid, isn't he? I mean, on the average, I don't think babies are quite as good-looking. Is that a pretentious thing to say?”

“Not if you're his father.”

“But he's handsome, isn't he?”

“Nicholas, love, he looks exactly like you.”

chapter
18

I
was reading an article about a woman who had a bad case of the postpartum blues. She swung from depression to exhilaration ; she had trouble sleeping. She became slovenly, wild-eyed, and agitated. She began to have thoughts about hurting her baby girl. She called these thoughts The Plan and told them, in fragments, to her co-workers. Two weeks after she began having these ideas, she came home from work and smothered her eight-month-old daughter with a couch pillow.

She had not been the only one. There was a woman before her who killed her first two babies within days of their births and who tried to kill the third before authorities stepped in. Another woman drowned her two-month-old and told everyone he'd been kidnapped. A third shot her son. Another ran her baby over with her Toyota.

This apparently was a big legal battle in the United States. Women accused of infanticide in England during the first year after birth could be charged only with manslaughter, not murder. People said it was mental illness: eighty percent of all new mothers suffered from the baby blues; one in a thousand suffered from postpartum psychosis; three percent of those who suffered from psychosis would kill their own children.

I found myself gripping the magazine so tightly that the paper ripped. What if I was one of them?

I turned the page, glancing at Max in his playpen. He was gumming a plastic cube that was part of a toy too advanced for his age. No one ever sent us age-appropriate baby gifts. The next article was a self-help piece.
Make a
list, the article suggested,
of all the things you can do.
Supposedly after fashioning such a list, you'd feel better about yourself and your abilities than when you started. I flipped over the grocery list and picked up a dull pencil. I looked at Max.
I can change a diaper.
I wrote it down, and then the other obvious things:
I
can
measure formula. I can snap Max's outfits without screwing up. I can sing him to sleep.
I began to wonder what talents I had that had nothing to do with my baby. Well, I could draw and sometimes see into people's lives with a simple sketch. I could bake cinnamon buns from scratch. I knew all 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. Somewhere, 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 my 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.