Harvesting the Heart (59 page)

“Paige,” the voice says. “I can't
tell
you how glad I am to find you.”

“It's not what you think,” I say, hedging, while I try to figure out who is on the other end.

“Aren't you coming to see Max? He's been waiting all day.”

Astrid. Who else would call? I don't have any friends in this city. “I—I don't know,” I say. “I'm cleaning the house.”

“Nicholas didn't say that you'd moved back in,” she says.

“I haven't.”

“Paige,” Astrid says, her voice as sharp as the edges of her black-and-white stills. “We need to have a little talk.”

She is waiting for me at the front door with Max. He's dressed in Osh-Kosh overalls and is wearing the tiniest Nike sneakers I have ever seen. “Imelda has coffee waiting for us in the parlor,” she says, handing Max over to me. She turns and walks into the imposing hall, expecting me to follow.

The parlor, just a room full of toys now, is much less intimidating than it was the first time I was there with Nicholas. If the rocking horse and the Porta-Crib had been there eight years ago, I wonder if things would have turned out this way. I set Max down on the floor, and he immediately gets onto his hands and his knees, rocking back and forth. “Look,” I say, breathless. “He's going to crawl!”

Astrid hands me a cup and saucer. “Not to burst your bubble, but he's been doing that for two weeks. He can't seem to figure out the coordination.” I watch Max bounce for a while; I accept cream and sugar. “I have a proposition for you,” Astrid says.

I look up, a little afraid. “I don't know,” I say.

Astrid smiles. “You haven't even heard it yet.” She moves a fraction of an inch closer to me. “Listen. It's freezing these nights, and I know you can't stay much longer on your lawn. God only knows how long it's going to take my stubborn son to come to his senses. I want you to move in here. Robert and I have discussed it; we have more rooms than a small hotel. Now, out of deference to Nicholas, I'll have to ask you to leave during the day, so that Max is still in my care—he's a bit uptight about you being around him, as you've probably noticed. But I don't see why every now and then you and I and Max might not just cross paths.”

I gape at Astrid, my mouth hanging open. This woman is offering me a gift. “I don't know what to say,” I murmur, tugging my gaze away to rest on Max on the floor. A million things are running through my mind:
There has to be a catch. She's worked something out with Nicholas, something to prove that I'm an unfit mother, something to keep me even further away from Max. Or else she wants something in return. But what could I possibly give her?

“I know what you're thinking,” Astrid says. “Robert and I
owe
you. I was wrong in believing that you and Nicholas shouldn't be married. You're just what Nicholas needs, even if he's too stupid to realize it himself. He'll come around.”

“I'm not what Nicholas needs,” I say, still looking at Max.

Astrid leans forward so that her face is inches from mine and I am forced to turn to her. “You listen to me, Paige. Do you know what my first reaction was when Nicholas told me you'd left? I thought,
Hallelujah!
I didn't think you had it in you. When Nicholas brought you here originally, it wasn't your past or your life-style that I objected to. I won't speak for Robert, although he's far beyond that now. I wanted someone for Nicholas who had determination and tenacity—someone with a little bit of pluck. It rubs off, you know. But all I saw when I first looked at you was someone who idolized him, someone who tagged at his heels like a puppy and was willing to put her whole life in his hands. I didn't think you had the gumption to stand up in the wind, much less in a marriage. But he's had you running around for years at his beck and call, and finally you've given him a reason for pause. What you've gone through is not, in the long run, a tragedy—just a hiccup. You both will survive, and there will be two or three other little Maxes and a string of graduations and weddings and grandchildren. You're a fighter, every bit as much as Nicholas. I'd say, actually, that you're a very even match.” She puts down her coffee cup and takes mine too. “Imelda is making up the room,” she says. “Shall we go take a look?”

Astrid stands, but I do not. I knot my hands together in my lap and wonder if this is really what I want to do. It's going to make Nicholas furious. It's going to backfire in my face.

Max is making loud slurping noises and chewing on something that looks like a card. “Hey,” I say, pulling it out of his hand. “Should you have this thing?” I wipe off the saliva and hand Max a different toy. Then I notice what I am holding. It is a key ring that holds three laminated photographs, eight-by-ten glossies. I know they are Astrid's work. The first is a picture of Nicholas giving his half-smile, his mind miles away. The second is a picture of Max taken about two months ago. I find myself staring at it greedily, drinking in the subtle changes that I have missed. Then I flip to the last card. It is a picture of me, fairly recent, although I don't know how Astrid could have taken it. I am sitting at an outdoor café at Faneuil Hall. I may even have been pregnant. I have a distant look in my eyes, and I know that even then I was plotting my escape.

“Mama,” Max says, reaching for the card that I hold. On the back, written in permanent marker in Astrid's handwriting, is the word he's just spoken.

Imelda is just smoothing the bedspread when Astrid leads me into what will be my room. “Señora Paige,” she says, smiling at me and then at Max when he grabs her long, dark braid. “This one, he has a bit of the devil in him,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “It comes from his father's side of the family.”

Astrid laughs and opens an armoire. “You can keep your things here,” she says, and I nod and look around. The room is simple by Prescott standards. It is furnished with a pale-peach sofa and a canopy bed; its sheets are the shades of a rainy Arizona sunset. The floor-length window curtains are Alençon lace, held back by brass pineapples. The mirror is an antique cheval glass and matches the armoire. “Is this all right?” Astrid asks.

I sink down on the bed and place Max next to me, rubbing his belly. I will miss the wet stars and the hydrangeas, but this will be just fine. I nod at her, and then I shyly stand and pass her the baby. “I think these were your terms,” I say quietly. “I'll be back later.”

“Come for supper,” Astrid says. “I know Robert will want to see you.”

She follows me down the steps and leads me to the front door. Max whimpers and reaches out when I start to leave, and she gives him to me for a moment. I trace the whorl of hair on the back of Max's head and squeeze the spare flesh of his upper arms. “Why are you on my side?” I ask.

Astrid smiles. In the fading light, in just that instant, she reminds me of my mother. Astrid takes back my baby. “Why shouldn't I be?” she says.

“Robert,” Astrid Prescott says as we walk into the dining room, “you remember Paige.”

Robert Prescott folds his newspaper and his reading glasses and stands up from his seat. I hold out my hand, but he ignores it and, after a moment's hesitation, sweeps me into his arms. “Thank you,” he says.

“For what?” I whisper, unsure of what I've done now.

“For that kid,” he tells me, and he smiles. I realize that in all the time I was taking care of Max, those were words Nicholas never said.

I sit down, but I am too nervous to eat the soup or the salad that Imelda brings from the kitchen. Robert sits at one end of the enormous table, Astrid at the other, and I am somewhere in between. There is an empty place setting across from me, and I stare at it anxiously. “It's just for balance,” Astrid says when she sees me looking. “Don't worry.”

Nicholas has already come for Max. He has a twenty-four-hour shift coming up and wanted to get to sleep early, according to Astrid. Usually during dinner, Max sits in a high chair next to Robert, who feeds him pieces of Parker House rolls.

“Nicholas hasn't told us very much about your trip,” Robert says, making it sound as if I've been on the
QE2
for a holiday.

I swallow hard and wonder how much I can say without incriminating myself. After all, these
are
Nicholas's parents, however nice they are being. “I don't know if Nicholas ever told you,” I say hesitantly. “I grew up without my mother. She left us when I was five, and somehow, when I wasn't doing a very good job taking care of Max, I figured if I could find her I'd automatically know how to do it all right.”

Astrid clucks. “You did a fine job,” she says. “In fact, you did all the hard work. You nursed, didn't you? Yes, I remember Nicholas found that out the hard way when Max was weaned in a day. We never bothered when you all were children. In our circles, nursing wasn't the proper thing to do.”

Robert turns away and picks up the thread of the conversation. “Ignore Astrid,” he says, smiling. “She sometimes spends weeks and months in huts without any other humans. She has a lot of practice talking only to herself.”

“And sometimes,” Astrid says pleasantly from the other end of the table, “I go away and I can't tell the difference between talking to myself and dinner conversation with you.” She stands and walks toward Robert. She leans over him until he turns toward her. “Have I told you today that I love you?” she says, kissing his forehead.

“No, as a matter of fact,” Robert says.

“Ah.” Astrid pats his cheek. “So you
have
been listening.” She looks up at me and grins. “I'm going to see what's happened to our steak.”

It turns out that Robert Prescott actually knows of Donegal, my mother's horse. Well, not really of Donegal, but of his sire, the one with bloodlines to Seattle Slew. “She does this all by herself?” he asks.

“She rents space from a larger farm, and she has some kid come in to help her muck stalls,” I say. “It's a beautiful place. So much green, and there are the mountains right behind her—it's a nice place to live.”

“But you didn't stay,” Robert points out.

“No,” I say. “I didn't.”

At that moment, when the conversation is starting to fit a little too tightly around me, Astrid comes back through the swinging door to the kitchen. “Another five minutes,” she says. “Would you believe that after twenty years of living with us, Imelda still doesn't know that you like your steak burned to a crisp?”

“Well done,” Robert says.

“Yes,” Astrid says, laughing. “I
am
good, aren't I?”

Watching them, I feel my stomach tighten. I would never have expected this kind of warmth to exist between Nicholas's parents, and it makes me realize what I missed as a child. My father wouldn't remember how my mother prefers her steak; my mother couldn't tell you my father's favorite color or breakfast cereal. I had never seen my mother stand behind my father in the kitchen to kiss him upside down. I had never seen the jigsaw puzzle their hands made when they fit together, like Robert's and Astrid's, as if they'd been cut for each other.

The night that Nicholas asked me to marry him at Mercy, I did not really know him at all. I knew that I wanted his attention. I knew that he commanded respect wherever he went. I knew that he had eyes that took my breath away, the shifting color of the sea. I said yes because I thought he'd be able to help me forget, about Jake, and the baby, and my mother, and Chicago. And in the long run I had blamed him because he lived up to all my expectations, making me forget about my old self so well that I panicked and ran again.

I said yes to Nicholas, but I did not know that I really wanted to marry him until the night we ran out of his parents' house after the argument about the marriage. That was the first time I noticed that in addition to my needing Nicholas, Nicholas needed me. Somehow I'd always just pictured him as the hero, the accessory to my plan. But that night, Nicholas had wavered beneath his father's words and turned his back on his family. Suddenly the man who had the world wrapped around his little finger found himself in absolutely unfamiliar territory. And to my surprise, it turned out to be a road
I
had traveled. For the first time in my life, someone needed my experience. It made me feel the way nothing ever had before.

That wasn't something that went away easily.

As I watch Astrid and Robert for the remainder of the meal, I think of all the things I know about Nicholas. I know that he absolutely will not eat squid or snails or mussels or apricot jam. I know that he sleeps on the right side of the bed and that no matter what precautions I take, the top sheet always becomes untucked on his side. I know that he won't come within a mile of a martini. I know that he folds his boxer shorts in half to fit into his dresser. I know that he can smell the rain a day before it comes, that he can sense snow by the color of the sky. I know that nobody else will ever know him as I do.