Harvesting the Heart (8 page)

Conversations like that in the first hours after he proposed to Paige made Nicholas realize that there was a great deal he still did not know about her. He knew the big things, the sort of things that make up the talk at dinner parties: the name of her high school; how she became interested in drawing; the street she had lived on in Chicago. But he did not know the little details, the things only a lover would know—What had she named the mutt her father made her give back to the animal shelter? Who taught her to throw a sliding curve ball? Which constellations could she pick out in the night sky? Nicholas wanted to know it all. He was filled with a greed that made him wish he could erase the past, oh, six years of his life and relive them with Paige, so he wouldn't feel he was starting in the middle.

“This is all I've got,” Nicholas said to Paige, holding out a box of stale graham crackers. He had sat her down on the black leather couch and turned on the halogen lights. She had not said whether or not she would marry him, a detail that Nicholas had not overlooked. To all intents and purposes, he should have wanted her to pass off his proposal as a joke, since he still wasn't sure what had prompted him to make such a rash statement. But he knew Paige hadn't taken it lightly, and to tell the truth, he wanted to know her answer. God, he was all knotted up inside over the prospect of her laughing in his face, which told him more than he cared to admit.

Suddenly he wanted to get her talking. He figured if she would just stop looking at him as though she'd never seen him before in her life, if she would start telling him about Chicago or quote one of Lionel's little epigrams or introduce any other favorite subject of conversation, then she might happen to mention that, yes, she wouldn't mind being his wife.

“I'm not really hungry,” Paige said. Her eyes roamed the walls of the apartment, the dark shadows of the hallway, and Nicholas began berating himself for scaring the hell out of her. She was only eighteen. No wonder she was shying away. Sure, he wanted to be near her; maybe he could even admit that he was falling for her; but bringing up marriage? He didn't know
where
that idea had come from. Christ, that was like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly.

But he still didn't want to take back the offer.

Paige was looking down at her shoes. “This is weird,” she said. “This just feels so weird.” She twisted her hands in her lap. “I mean, I didn't have to worry about this before. This feeling. I hadn't planned this. You know, when I was just sort of hanging around with you, it wasn‘t—it wasn't—” She looked up, groping for the right words.

“So momentous?” Nicholas filled in.

“Yes.” Paige's face broke into a smile, and she exhaled in one long breath. “You always know what to say,” she said shyly. “That's one of the reasons I like you.”

Nicholas sat beside her on the couch. He stretched his arm around her. “You like me,” he said. “That's a start.”

Paige looked up at him as if she was going to say something, then shook her head.

“Hey,” Nicholas said, tipping up her chin. “Nothing's different. Forget I said anything. I'm still the same guy you told off in the middle of Route 2 a day ago. I'm still the one you can beat the pants off when you play poker.”

“You just happened to mention getting married.”

Nicholas grinned at her. “I did, didn't I?” He tried to sound flip, unconcerned. “That's the way I end a third date.”

Paige leaned her head against his arm. “We haven't even
had
three real dates,” she said. “I can't stop thinking about you—”

“I know.”

“—but I don't even know your middle name.”

“Jamison.” Nicholas laughed. “My mother's maiden name. Now, what else is standing in your way?”

Paige turned up her head to look at him. “And what's my middle name?” she challenged, trying to make her point.

“Marie.” Nicholas took a stab in the dark, trying to buy time to figure out his next counterargument. Then he realized he'd got it right.

Paige was staring at him, her mouth dropped open. “My father used to tell me I'd know when someone was the perfect match for me,” she murmured. “He said God worked it so that you'd always be in the right place at the right time.” Nicholas waited for her to elaborate, but she wrinkled her forehead and stared at the carpet. Then she turned to him. “Why did you ask me?” she said.

There were a million questions wrapped into that one, and Nicholas didn't know how to answer them all. He was still reeling from the fact that, unbidden, her middle name had just materialized in his thoughts. So he said the one thing that popped into his mind. “Because you didn't ask
me,”
he said.

Paige looked up at him. “I really
do
like you,” she said.

He leaned his head back against the couch, determined to have an ordinary conversation, the kind people who've been together forever have all the time. He brought up the weather, and the local sports teams, and then Paige began to gossip about the waitresses at Mercy. Nicholas was soothed by the sound of her voice. He kept asking her questions just to keep her talking. She told him in detail about the angles of her father's face; she told him that she'd once tried to read the dictionary from cover to cover because a classmate told her it would make her smarter, but she'd only got to
N.
She described wading into Lake Michigan at the end of May, so vividly that Nicholas actually shivered and got goose bumps up his arms.

They were lying side by side on the narrow couch when Nicholas asked Paige about her mother. She'd mentioned her at the diner, and from what Nicholas could tell, the elusive Mrs. O'Toole drifted across Paige's consciousness like a shadow from time to time but Paige wasn't willing to share the details. He knew that the woman had left; he knew that Paige had been five; he knew that Paige didn't remember her very well. But she had to have feelings about it. At the very least, she had to have an impression.

“What was your mother like?” Nicholas asked gently, so close his lips were brushing Paige's cheek.

He felt her tense almost instantly. “Supposedly she was like me,” Paige said. “My father said she looked like me.”

“You mean you look like
her,”
Nicholas said, correcting.

“No.” Paige turned and sat up on the end of the couch. “I mean she looked like me. I'm the one that's still around, right? So I'm the one that you should be comparing her to.”

Nicholas didn't argue with that logic, but he sat up and leaned against the opposite end of the couch. He ran his fingers over the smooth black leather. “Did your father ever tell you why she left?”

Nicholas watched the color drain from Paige's face. And almost as quickly, a flush of red worked its way up her neck and into her cheeks. Paige stood. “Do you want to marry me or my family?” she said. She stared at Nicholas, who was speechless, for several seconds, and then she smiled so openly that her dimples showed and the honesty of it reached all the way into her eyes. “I'm just tired,” she said. “I didn't mean to yell at you. But I really have to go home.”

Nicholas helped her into her coat and drove her to Doris's apartment. He parked at the curb and clenched his hands on the steering wheel while Paige fished in her bag for the key. He was so intent on silently reviewing Paige's comments about her mother that he almost did not hear her speaking. He had frightened her away by asking her to marry him, and then just when she was warming up to him again, he'd blown it by asking about her mother. She had been so flustered by that one stupid question. Was there something she wasn't telling him? A Lizzie Borden kind of story? Was her mother crazy, and was she unwilling to mention that just in case Nicholas thought it might be hereditary? Or was Nicholas crazy himself, for trying to convince his conscience that this gaping hole in Paige's past couldn't really matter in the long run?

“Well,” Paige said, facing him. “It's been some night, hasn't it?” When Nicholas didn't look at her, she turned her gaze to her lap. “I won't hold you to it,” she said softly. “I know you didn't mean it.”

At that, Nicholas turned and pressed his own spare key into Paige's palm. “I want you to hold me to it,” he said.

He pulled Paige into his arms. “When will you be home tomorrow?” she whispered against his neck. He could feel her trust opening like a flower and passing through her fingertips to the places where she touched him. She tilted her head up, expecting his kiss, but he only pressed his lips gently to her forehead.

Surprised, Paige drew back and looked at Nicholas as if she were studying him for a portrait. Then she smiled. “I'll think about your question,” she said.

Paige was waiting for him the next day when he got home from the hospital, and things between them were back to normal. He knew it before he even opened the door, because the smell of butter cookies was seeping over the threshold, into the hall. He also knew that when he'd left that morning, his refrigerator had held little more than a moldy banana loaf and a half jar of relish. Paige had obviously walked all the way here with groceries, and he was shocked at how his whole center seemed to soften at the thought.

She was sitting on the floor, with her hands spread over the pages of
Gray's Anatomy
as if she were modestly trying to cover the naked musculoskeletal image of a man. At first she did not see him. “Phalanges,” she murmured, reading. She pronounced the clinical names for fingers and toes all wrong, as if it rhymed with
fangs,
and Nicholas smiled. Then, hearing his footsteps, she jumped to her feet, as though she'd been caught doing something she shouldn't have been doing. “I'm sorry,” she blurted out.

Paige's cheeks were flushed; her shoulders were shaking. “What are you sorry for?” Nicholas said, tossing his bag onto the couch.

Paige looked around, and following her glance, Nicholas began to see that she'd been doing more than baking cookies. She had cleaned the entire apartment, even scrubbed the hardwood floors, from the looks of things. She had taken the extra quilt out of the linen closet and draped it over the couch, so bright colors like lime and violet and magenta washed over the Spartan room. She had moved the copies of
Smithsonian
and the
New England Journal of Medicine
off the coffee table to make room for a
Mademoiselle
magazine open to a feature on shaping your buttocks. On the kitchen counter was a spray of black-eyed Susans, arranged neatly in a clean-washed peanut butter jar.

These subtle changes took the focus away from the antiques and the sharp edges that had made the place look so formal. In one afternoon, Paige had made his apartment resemble any other lived-in apartment.

“When you took me here last night, I kept thinking that there was something missing. It—I don't know—it just looked sort of stiff, like you lived in the pages of an
Architectural Digest
article. I picked the flowers on the edge of the highway,” Paige said nervously, “and since I couldn't find a vase, I sort of finished the peanut butter.”

Nicholas nodded. “I didn't even know I had peanut butter,” he said, still gazing around the room. In the entire course of his life, he'd never seen a copy of
Mademoiselle
in his home. His mother would have died rather than see highway wildflowers on a table instead of her hothouse tea roses. He'd been brought up to believe that quilts were acceptable for hunting lodges but not formal sitting rooms.

When he started medical school, Nicholas had left the decoration of the apartment in his mother's hands because he hadn't the time or the inclination, and to no one's surprise it came out looking very much like the house he'd grown up in. Astrid had bequeathed him an ormolu clock and an ancient cherry dining room table. She'd commissioned her usual decorator to take care of the drapes and the upholstery, specifying the rich hunter-green and navy and crimson fabrics that she felt suited Nicholas. He hadn't wanted a formal sitting room, but he had never mentioned that to his mother. After the fact, he didn't know how to go about changing one into a simple living room. Or maybe he didn't know how to go about living.

“What do you think?” Paige whispered, so quietly that Nicholas thought he had imagined her voice.

Nicholas walked toward her, wrapped his arms around her. “I think we're going to have to buy a vase,” he said.

He could feel Paige's shoulders relax beneath his hands. Suddenly she started talking, the words tumbling out of her mouth. “I didn't know what to do,” she said, “but I knew it needed
something.
And then I figured—I'm baking cookies, did you know that?—well, I didn't know if what
I
liked would be what you liked, and I started to think about how
I'd
act if I came home and someone I barely even knew had rearranged my whole house. We don't really know each other, Nicholas, and I've been thinking about that all night too: just when I've convinced myself that this is the most right thing in the world, my common sense comes tramping in. What's your favorite —butter or chocolate chip?”