Harvesting the Heart (45 page)

With his hand still touching the warm metal of the door handle, he turned back to face his mother. She and Max were standing in the doorway, dwarfed by the enormity of the house behind them. Meeting his mother had been fairly simple after all the tentative phone conversations. But in all that time, Robert Prescott hadn't even been mentioned. Nicholas had no idea if his father would be thrilled to see the child who would carry on his name, or if he would disown Max as effortlessly as he had disowned his son. He had no idea what his father was like anymore. “What will Dad say?” he whispered.

His mother could not possibly have heard him at such a distance, but she seemed to understand his question. “I imagine,” she said, stepping into a neat square of the brilliant afternoon, “he'll say, ‘Hello, Max.' ”

Nothing could have surprised Nicholas more than the scene that met him when he arrived at his parents' close to midnight to pick up the baby. Filling the parlor was a tumbled clutter of educational toys, a Porta-Crib, a playpen, a baby swing. A big green quilt with a dinosaur head sewn on to its corner was spread across the floor. A panda mobile replaced the trailing spider plant that had hung over the piano. Stacked on the piano, beside the foam pad Nicholas had placed there earlier for diapering, was the largest vat of A&D ointment Nicholas had ever seen and a carton of Pampers. And in the middle of it all was Nicholas's father-taller than he remembered and thinner too, with a shock of now-white hair—asleep on the spindled sofa, with Max curled over his chest.

Nicholas drew in his breath. He had anticipated many things about this first meeting with his father: awkward silence, condescension, maybe even a shred of hate. But Nicholas had not expected his father to be so old.

He stepped back quietly to close the door to the room, but his foot tripped over a jangling terry-cloth ball. His father's eyes opened, bright and alert. Robert Prescott did not sit up, knowing that would wake Max. But he did not tear his gaze away from his son.

Nicholas waited for his father to say something—anything. He remembered the first time he'd lost a crew race in high school, after a three-year winning streak. There had been seven other rowers in the boat, and Nicholas had known that the six-man wasn't pulling hard during the power tens. In no way was it Nicholas's fault the race was lost. But he had taken it that way, and when he met his father after the race, he had hung his head, waiting for the accusations. His father had said nothing, nothing at all, and Nicholas had always believed that stung more than any words his father could have uttered. “Dad,” Nicholas said quietly, “how's he been?”

Not
How have
you
been,
not
What have I missed in your life.
Nicholas figured that if he kept the conversation limited to Max, the ache that rounded the bottom of his stomach might go away. He clenched his fists behind his back and looked into his father's eyes. There were shadows there that Nicholas could not read, but there were also promises.
Too much has happened; I will not bring it up,
Robert seemed to say.
And neither will you.

“You've done well,” Robert said, stroking Max's hunched shoulders. Nicholas raised his eyebrows. “We never stopped asking questions about you, Nicholas,” he said gently. “We always kept tabs.”

Nicholas remembered Fogerty's tight-lipped grin when he saw him enter the hospital today at noon without Max. “Oh,” he had bellowed past Nicholas in the hall.
“Si sic omnia!”
Then he had come up to Nicholas, paternally gripping his shoulders with a strong arm. “I take it, Dr. Prescott,” Fogerty said, “that you are once again of sound mind in sound body and that we won't have a repeat of that ridiculous debacle.” Fogerty lowered his voice. “You are my protégé, Nicholas,” he said. “Don't fuck up a sure thing.”

Nicholas's father was well known in the Boston medical community; it wouldn't have been hard for him to track his son's quick rise in the cardiothoracic hierarchy at Mass General. Still, it unnerved Nicholas. He wondered what his father had asked. He wondered whom he had approached and who had been willing to answer.

Nicholas cleared his throat. “Was he good?” he repeated, gesturing toward Max.

“Ask your mother,” Robert said. “She's in her darkroom.”

Nicholas walked down the corridor to the Blue Room, where the circular black-curtained entrance to his mother's workplace was. He had just parted the first curtain when he felt the warm brush of his mother's fingers. He jumped back.

“Oh, Nicholas,” Astrid said, pressing her hand to her throat. “I think I scared you as much as you scared me.” She was carrying two fresh prints, still smelling faintly of fixer. She waved them, one in each hand, helping them to dry.

“I saw Dad,” Nicholas said.

“And?”

Nicholas smiled. “And nothing.”

Astrid laid the two prints on a nearby table. “Yes,” she said, scanning them with her critical eyes, “it's amazing how several years can soften even the hardest heads.” She stood up and groaned, kneading her hands into the small of her back. “Well, my grandson was as good as gold,” she said. “You noticed we went shopping? A wonderful baby store in Newton, and then I
had
to go to F. A. O. Schwarz. Max didn't cry the whole time. Really rose to the occasion.”

Nicholas tried to imagine his son sitting quietly in his infant seat, watching the rush of colors fly past a car window, and stretching his arms toward the panorama of toys at F. A. O. Schwarz. But in his experience, Max had never gone more than an hour without pitching a fit. “Maybe it's me,” he murmured.

“Did you say something?” Astrid said.

Nicholas pinched the bridge of his nose. It had not been an easy day: a quadruple bypass, and then he got word that his last heart transplant patient had rejected the organ. He had a valve replacement at seven the next morning; if he was lucky—if Max was cooperative —he could get about five hours of sleep.

“I took some pictures of Max,” Nicholas heard his mother say. “Quite a good little subject—he likes the flash of the light meter. Here.” She thrust one of the photographs toward Nicholas.

He had never understood how his mother did it. He was too impatient for photography. He relied on an autofocus camera, and he could usually get a person's image without cutting off the top of the head. But his mother not only recorded a moment; she also stole its soul. Max's downy blue-black hair capped his head. One hand was held out in front of him, reaching toward the camera, and the other was draped across the gray plastic edge of his infant seat, devil-may-care. But it was his eyes that really made the picture. They were wide and amused, as if someone had just told him he was going to have to stay in this world for a good deal longer.

Nicholas was impressed. He had seen his mother capture the pain of grieving military widows, the horror of maimed Romanian orphans, even the rapture and calm piety of the Pope. But this time she had done something truly amazing: she had taken Nicholas's own son and trapped him in time, so that at least here he would never grow up. “You're so damn good,” he murmured.

Astrid laughed. “That's what they tell me.”

Something twitched at the back of Nicholas's mind. He had been just as impressed by Paige, by her haunted drawings and the secrets that spilled out of her like prophecies she couldn't seem to control. Paige, like his mother, did not just capture an image. Paige drew directly from the heart.

“What is it?” Astrid asked. “You're a million miles away.”

“It's nothing,” Nicholas said. What had happened to Paige's art stuff? He hadn't been able to move three feet in the apartment without tripping over a spray fixative or crushing a box of charcoal. But Paige hadn't really drawn in years. He had once complained because she'd hung her sketches over the curtain rod of the shower while the fixative was drying. He remembered watching her from behind, when she didn't know he was there, marveling as her fingers flew over the smooth vanilla paper to coax images out of hiding.

Astrid held out the other photo she had carried from her darkroom. “Thought you might like this too,” she said. She passed him a candid portrait, and for a moment the dim light in the room caught only the white glare of the damp photographic paper. Then he realized he was staring at Paige.

She was sitting at a table, looking at something off to the left. It was a black-and-white, but Nicholas could clearly see the color of her hair. When he envisioned Cambridge, he pictured it as the shade of Paige's hair—deep and rich, the red of generations.

“How did you get this?” he whispered. Paige's hair was shorter here, just to her shoulders, not long as it had been when she'd met Astrid years before. This was a recent photo.

“I saw her once in Boston, and I couldn't resist. I took it with a telephoto lens. She never saw me.” Astrid moved closer to Nicholas and touched her finger to the top of the photograph. “Max has her eyes.”

Nicholas did not know why he hadn't noticed it before; it was so obvious. It wasn't the shape or the color as much as the demeanor. Like Max, Paige was looking at something Nicholas could not see. Like Max, her expression was one of blameless surprise, as if she had just been told she was going to have to stay for a while longer.

“Yes,” Astrid said, pulling the photo of Max to sit beside the one of Paige. “Definitely his mother's eyes.”

Nicholas tucked the picture of Paige behind the one of Max. “Let's hope,” he said, “that's all he inherits from her.”

chapter
27

F
ly By Night Farm was not really a farm at all. In fact, it was part of a larger complex called Pegasus Stables, and that was the only sign visible from the road. But when I had parked the car and wandered past the lazy stream and the dancing paddocked horses, I noticed the small carved maple plaque: FLY BY NIGHT. LILY RUBENS, PROPRIETOR.

That morning, the woman who owned the tack shop with my mother's horses running across the ceiling had given me directions. My mother had painted the mural eight years before, when she first moved to Farleyville. She had traded her commission for a used saddle and something called draw reins. Lily was well known on the circuit, according to this woman. In fact, when people came for lesson referrals, she always pointed them toward Fly By Night.

I walked into the cool, dark stable, kicking at a tuft of straw with my feet. When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I found myself just inches away from a horse, its fermenting breath hot on my ear. I put my hand against the wire mesh gate that separated the horse's stall from the main aisle of the stable. The horse whinnied, and its jaundiced teeth curved around the chain links, trying to bite at the flesh of my palm. As its lips brushed my skin, they left behind a green slime that smelled faintly of hay.

“I wouldn't do that if I were you,” a voice said, and I whipped around. “But then again, I am you, and you are me, and that's the beauty.” A kid no older than eighteen stood propped on a strange skinny rake beside a wheelbarrow piled with manure. He wore a T-shirt colored by a fading portrait of Nietzsche, and his dirty-blond hair was pulled away from his face. “Andy's a biter,” he said, coming forward to stroke the horse's nose.

He disappeared as quickly as he'd come, behind the cage door of a different stall. The barn was about half filled with horses, each of them different from the others. There was a chestnut, with hair the same shade as mine; a bay, with a coarse black mane. There was a white Thoroughbred, straight out of a fairy tale; and one tremendous, majestic horse hovering in the shadows, the color of a pitch-dark night.

I walked the length of the aisle, passing the boy, who was heaving wet tufts of hay into the wheelbarrow. It was clear that my mother was not in this barn, and I sighed in relief. I turned to a small table at the end of the aisle. It held a wooden chest and—of all things—an Astrid Prescott photo desk calendar, opened to the current date. I ran my fingers over the misty image of Mount Kilimanjaro, wondering why my mother couldn't have escaped the way Nicholas's mother had—months at a time, but always with a promise to return. Sighing, I turned to the facing page. Neatly lettered beside the printed hours were female names: Brittany, Jane, Anastasia, Merleen. The handwriting was my mother's.

I remembered it from before, although when she left I hadn't been able to read it. I remembered the way her letters all sloped to the left, in spite of the fact that every other written word I'd ever seen leaned a little to the right. After all, that's what the sisters taught me later in penmanship class. Even when she wrote, my mother bucked the system.

I did not know what I planned to do once I had found her. I did not have a speech ready. On the one hand, I wanted to stare her down and yell at her, one minute for every year since she'd left me. On the other hand, I wanted to touch her, to feel that the substance of her skin was as warm as mine. I wanted to believe I had grown up like her, in spite of the circumstances. I wanted this so badly it hurt, but I knew better than to hedge my bets. After all, I was not sure if, when it came down to it, I would throw myself into her arms or spit at her feet.