Harvesting the Heart (7 page)

“Mother,” Nicholas said, “not everyone is interested in Nepal.”

“Well, not everyone is interested in orthopedic surgery, either, darling, but we all listened very politely.” Astrid turned toward Paige, who was staring at the head of a tremendous buck poised above the door leading into the kitchen. “It's awful, isn't it?”

Paige swallowed. “It's just that I can't see you—”

“It's Dad's,” Nicholas interrupted, winking at her. “Dad's a hunter. Don't get them started,” he warned. “They don't always see eye to eye.”

Astrid blew a kiss to the opposite end of the table, where Robert Prescott sat. “That awful thing got me my own darkroom in the house,” she said.

“Fair trade,” Robert called, saluting his wife with a fork-speared potato.

Paige turned her head from Nicholas's mother to Nicholas's father and then back again. She felt lost in the easy volley between them. She wondered how Nicholas had ever managed to get noticed while growing up. “Paige, dear,” Astrid said, “where did you meet Nicholas?”

Paige toyed with her silverware, seizing her salad fork; something only Nicholas noticed. “We met at work,” Paige said.

“So you're a ...” Astrid left the sentence hanging, waiting for Paige to fill in
medical student, or registered nurse, or even lab technician.

“Waitress,” Paige said flatly.

“I see,” said Robert.

Paige watched Astrid Prescott's warmth curl in around her, retreating like tentacles; she saw the hooded look Astrid passed to her husband:
She's not what we expected.
“Actually,” Paige said, “I doubt you do.”

Nicholas, whose stomach had been in knots since they sat down to dinner, did something else forbidden to Prescotts: he laughed out loud. His mother and father looked at him, but he only turned to Paige and gave her a smile. “Paige is a fabulous artist,” he said.

“Oh?” Astrid said, leaning forward to offer Paige a second chance. “What an admirable hobby for a young lady. You know, that's how it all began for me.” She snapped her fingers, and a maid appeared, whisking away her empty plate. Astrid leaned forward, placing her tanned elbows on the fine linen cloth. She smiled smoothly, but the light did not quite reach her eyes. “Where did you go to college, dear?”

“I didn't,” Paige said evenly. “I was going to go to RISD, but something came up.” She pronounced the name of the school as an acronym, as it was known.

“Riz-dee,” Robert repeated coolly, staring at his wife. “Haven't heard much about that one.”

“Nicholas,” Astrid said sharply, “how is Rachel?”

Nicholas saw Paige's face fall at the mention of another woman, one whose name she'd never heard before. He crumpled his napkin into a ball and stood up. “Why do you care, Mother?” he said. “You never have before.” He moved to Paige's chair and pulled it out, lifting her by her shoulders until she was standing. “I'm sorry,” Nicholas said, “but I'm afraid we have to go.”

In the car, they drove in circles. “What the hell was that all about?” Paige demanded when he'd finally reached a major highway. “Am I some kind of pawn or something?”

Nicholas did not answer her. She stared at him for a few minutes with her arms crossed, but finally sank back against the seat.

As soon as Nicholas reached the outskirts of Cambridge, she opened the door of the car. He came to a sudden stop. “What are you doing?” he asked, incredulous.

“I'm getting out. I can walk the rest of the way.” She stood up, the moon looming behind her, soaking into the edge of the Charles River like a bloodstain. “You know, Nicholas,” Paige said, “you sure aren't what I thought you were.”

And as she walked away, a muscle throbbed along the edge of Nicholas's jaw.
She's just like the rest of them,
he thought, and just to prove her wrong, he sped past her on Route 2, screaming like a madman, shrieking until he thought his lungs would burst.

The next day Nicholas was still seething. He met Rachel after her anatomy class and suggested they go for coffee. He knew a place, he said, where they do portraits of you while you eat. It was a bit of a hike, all the way across the river, but it was relatively close to his apartment, for afterward. And then he walked beside her to the car, counting the stares of other men as they took notice of Rachel's honey hair, her soft curves. At the door of the diner, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her hard.

“Well,” Rachel said, smiling. “Welcome back.”

He led her to the booth he always took, and she almost immediately disappeared to the bathroom. He couldn't see Paige, which made him angry. After all, why else had he come? He was still questioning himself when she came up behind him. She was as quiet as a breeze, and he would not have sensed her if not for the clean scent of pears and willows he had come to know her by. When she stood in front of him, her eyes were wide and tired. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to piss you off.”

“Who's pissed?” Nicholas said, grinning, but he distinctly felt the pinching of his heart, and he began to wonder if this was what cardiac patients always tried to describe.

At that point Rachel came out and slid into the booth across from Nicholas. “I'm sorry,” Paige said, “but this booth is taken.”

“Yes, I know,” Rachel said coolly. She looked at Nicholas and then glared at Paige. She reached across the table and took Nicholas's hand, weaving her fingers through his with the quiet power of possession.

Nicholas couldn't have planned it better, but he didn't expect it to hurt quite so much. It wasn't that Paige stood rooted before him, her lips parted, as if she hadn't heard correctly. It was that when she turned, Nicholas did not see disappointment or betrayal. Instead, he realized she was looking at him, still, as if he were mythic. “What did you come here for?” she asked.

Nicholas cleared his throat, and Rachel kicked him under the table. “Rachel heard about the pictures and would like to have one done.”

Paige nodded and left to get a pad. She sat at the front of the booth on a little stool, holding the pad tilted up the way she always did so the picture would be a surprise when she was finished. She drew clean, quick strokes and blended with her thumb, and as she drew, other diners peeked over her shoulder and laughed and whispered. When she finished, she threw the pad in front of Nicholas and walked into the kitchen. Rachel turned it over. There was her hair, her glittering eyes, and even the gist of her lovely features, but quite clearly the picture was that of a lizard.

Although he was scheduled to be on call that night at the hospital, Nicholas did something he had never done before: he phoned in sick. Then he grabbed a bite at McDonald's and walked through Harvard Square after the sun went down. He sat on a brick wall on the corner of Brattle and watched a juggler with flaming torches, wondering if the guy worried about what might happen. Nicholas put a faded dollar bill in the case of a jazz guitarist, and he stood at the window of a toy store, where stuffed alligators wearing rain slickers tumbled in tinfoil puddles. When it was five to eleven, he walked to Mercy, wondering what he would do if Doris or Marvela or anyone other than Paige was locking up that night. He realized that he would just keep walking, then, until he found her.

Paige was emptying the ketchup bottles when he came in. Over her head, taped to the wall, was the picture of Rachel as a lizard. “I like it,” he said, making her jump.

In spite of herself, Paige smiled a little. “I'm sure I've lost us one customer,” she said.

“So what,” Nicholas said. “You made
me
come back.”

“And just what do I get?” Paige said.

Nicholas smiled. “Whatever you want.”

Many years later, when Nicholas thought of that exchange, he realized he shouldn't have made promises he couldn't have kept. But he did believe that no matter what Paige wanted, he could be it. He had a feeling about this, a feeling that all Paige really needed was him, not his trappings and not his success, and that was so new to Nicholas that he felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders. He pulled Paige closer and saw her stiffen and then relax. He kissed her ear, her temple, the corner of her mouth. In her hair he smelled bacon and waffles, but also sunshine and September, and he wondered how he could be thinking the things he was.

When she put her arms around him, as if she was testing the water, he put his hands on her waist and felt the hint of her hips below. “Is Lionel still here?” he whispered, and when she shook her head he took the keys from her pocket and locked the front door, turned off the light. He sat on one of the counter stools and pulled Paige to stand between his legs, and he kissed her, letting his hands run from her neck to her breasts to her belly. Softly he kissed her, this child-woman, and when he stroked her thighs and she tensed, he had to smile.
She must be a virgin,
he realized, and he was overwhelmed by a sudden thought:
I want to be her first. I want to be the only one.
“Marry me,” he said, as surprised as she was by the words. He wondered if this was the way his luck would run out; if his career would start its disintegration, if this would be the first downslide to the avalanche. But he held Paige and decided that the hollow in his heart was just the fanning of love. Nicholas marveled at the luck of finding someone who so needed his security, never considering that although the dangers could be different, maybe he needed to be protected too.

chapter
3

W
hen Nicholas was four years old, his mother taught him about trusting strangers. She sat him down and told him twenty times in a row not to speak to someone on the street unless it was a friend of the family; not to take the hand of just anyone to cross the street; never, under any circumstances, to get into someone's car. Nicholas remembered fidgeting on the chair and wishing he could be outside; he'd wanted to check the tin of beer he'd left overnight on the porch to catch slugs. But his mother would not let him leave, would not let him even take a break for the bathroom—not until Nicholas could repeat, verbatim, her lesson. And by that time, Nicholas had conjured images of dark, stinking phantoms wearing ratty black capes, hiding in cars and in the creases of the sidewalk and in the alleys between stores, waiting to pounce on him. When his mother finally told him he could go outside to play, he'd chosen to remain indoors. For weeks after that, when the postman rang the doorbell, he had hidden beneath the couch.

Although he had got over his fear of strangers, he had never forgotten the consequences, which made Nicholas the one person in a group to stand off to the side. He could be charming if the situation called for it, but he was more likely to feign interest in a frieze on the ceiling than to be drawn into a conversation with people he didn't know. In some individuals this was passed off as shyness; but in someone of Nicholas's background and stature and classic features, it seemed more like aloof conceit. Nicholas found he didn't mind the label. It gave him time to size up a situation and to respond more intelligently than those who spoke too quickly.

None of which explained why he impulsively asked Paige O'Toole to marry him, or why he gave her the spare key to his apartment even before hearing her answer.

They walked from Mercy to his apartment in total silence, and Nicholas was starting to hate himself. Paige wasn't acting like Paige. He'd ruined it, whatever it was that he had liked about her. Nicholas was so nervous he couldn't fit the key into the door, and he didn't know what he was nervous about. When she stepped into the apartment he held his breath until he heard her say quietly, “My room was never this neat.” And then he relaxed and leaned against the wall. He answered, “I could learn to live messy.”