Harvesting the Heart (9 page)

“I don't know,” Nicholas said. He was smiling. He liked trying to follow her conversation. It reminded him of a pet rabbit he'd had once that he tried to take for a walk on a leash.

“Don't tease me,” Paige said, pulling away. She walked into the kitchen and pulled a tray out of the oven. “You've never used these cookie sheets,” she said. “The stickers were still on them.”

Nicholas picked up a spatula and lifted a cookie off the sheet, then bounced it from palm to palm as it cooled. “I didn't know I had them,” he said. “I don't cook much.”

Paige watched him taste the cookie. “Neither do I. I guess you should know that, shouldn't you? We'll probably starve within a month.”

Nicholas looked up. “But we'll die happy,” he said. He took a second bite. “These are good, Paige. You're underestimating yourself.”

Paige shook her head. “I once set the oven on fire cooking a TV dinner. I didn't take it out of the box. Cookies are my whole repertoire. But I can do
those
from scratch. You seemed like a butter cookie kind of guy. I tried to remember if you ever ordered chocolate at the diner, and you didn't, I don't think, so you have to be a vanilla person.” When Nicholas stared at her, Paige grinned at him. “The world is divided into chocolate people and vanilla people. Don't you know that, Nicholas?”

“It's that simple?”

Paige nodded. “Think about it. No one ever likes the two halves of a Dixie ice cream cup equally. You either save the chocolate because you like it best, or you save the vanilla. If you're really lucky, you can swap with someone so you get a whole cup of the flavor you like best. My dad used to do that for me.”

Nicholas thought about the kind of day he had just come from. He was still on rotation in Emergency. This morning there had been a six-car pileup on Route 93, and the wounded were brought to Mass General. One had died, one had been in neurosurgery for eight hours, one had gone into cardiac arrest. During lunch a six-year-old girl was brought in, shot through the stomach in a playground when she was caught in the crossfire of two youth gangs. And then, in his apartment, there was Paige. To come home to Paige every day would be a relief. To come home to her would be a blessing.

“I take it you're a chocolate person,” Nicholas said.

“Of course.”

Nicholas stepped forward and put his arms on either side of her, bracing her against the sink. “You can have my half of a Dixie cup anytime,” he said. “You can have anything you want.”

Nicholas had read once of a five-foot-three-inch woman who had lifted an overturned school bus off her seven-year-old daughter. He had watched a 60
Minutes
segment about an unmarried soldier who threw himself on top of a grenade to protect the life of a fellow soldier who had a family waiting back home. Medically, Nicholas could credit this to the sudden adrenaline rush caused by crisis situations. Practically, he knew that some measure of emotional commitment was involved. And he realized, to his surprise, that he would have done such things for Paige. He would swim a channel, take a bullet, trade his life. The idea shook Nicholas, chilled his blood. Maybe it was only fierce protectiveness, but he was beginning to believe it was love.

In spite of himself, in spite of his hasty proposal, Nicholas did not believe in romantic love. He did not believe in being swept off your feet, or in love at first sight—either of which would have accounted for his near-immediate obsession with Paige. When he had lain awake in bed last night, he wondered if the attraction could be based on pity—the boy who had grown up with everything thinking he could light up the life of the girl who had not—but Nicholas had met women of less pedigreed backgrounds before, and none of them had ever affected him so strongly he forgot how to use his voice, how to breathe involuntarily. Those women, the ones Nicholas could win over with a bottle of house Chianti and a disarming smile, usually graced his bed for a week before he felt like moving on. He
could
have done that with Paige; he knew he could have if he'd wanted to. But whenever he looked at her, he wanted to stand beside her, to shield her from the world with the simple, strong heat of his body. She was so much more fragile than she let on.

Paige was sprawled in what was now his living room, thanks to her, reading
Gray's Anatomy
as if it were a murder mystery. “I don't know how you memorize all this stuff, Nicholas,” she said. “I couldn't even do the bones.” She looked up at him. “I tried, you know. I thought if I remembered them all without peeking, I'd impress you.”

“You already impress me,” he said. “I don't care about the bones.”

Paige shrugged. “I'm not impressive,” she said.

Nicholas, lying on the couch, rolled onto his side to look at her. “Are you kidding?” he said. “You left home and got yourself a job and survived in a city you knew nothing about. Christ, I couldn't have done that at eighteen.” He paused. “I don't know if I could do that now.”

“You've never had to,” Paige said quietly.

Nicholas opened his mouth to speak but didn't say anything. He never had to. But he had
wanted
to.

Both of Nicholas's parents had, in some way, changed their circumstances. Astrid, who could trace her lineage to Plymouth Rock, had tried to downplay her Boston Brahmin ties. “I don't see all the fuss about the
Mayflower,”
she had said. “For God's sake, the Puritans were
outcasts
before they got here.” She grew up surrounded by wealth that was so old it had always just been there. Her objections were not to a life of privilege, really, only to the restrictions that came with it. She had no intention of becoming the kind of wife who blended into the walls of a house that defined her, and so, on the day she graduated from Vassar, she flew to Rome without telling a soul. She got drunk and danced at midnight in Trevi fountain, and she slept with as many different dark-haired men as she could until her Visa ran out. Months later, when she was introduced to Robert Prescott at a tailgate party, she almost dismissed him as one of those rich, have-it-all boys with whom her parents were forever throwing her together. But when their eyes met over a cup of spiked cider, she realized that Robert wasn't what he appeared to be. He seethed below the surface with that hell-or-high-water pledge to escape that Astrid recognized running through her own blood. Here was her mirror image—someone trying to get
in
as badly as she was trying to get
out.

Robert Prescott had been born without a dime and, apparently, without a father. He had sold magazines door to door to pay his way through Harvard. Now, thirty years later, he had honed his image to a point where he had such financial holdings no one dared remember if it was old money or new. He loved his acquired status; he liked the combination of his own glossy, crystalline tastes butted up against Astrid's cluttered seventh-generation antiques. Robert understood the part well—acting stuffy and bored at dinner parties, cultivating a taste for port, obliterating the facts of his life that could incriminate. Nicholas knew that even if his father couldn't convince himself he'd been to the manner born, he believed he rightfully belonged there, and that was just as good.

There had been a bitter argument once, when his father insisted Nicholas do something he had no inclination to do—the actual circumstances now forgotten: probably escorting someone's sister to a debutante ball or giving up a Saturday game of neighborhood baseball for formal dancing lessons. Nicholas had stood his ground, certain his father would strike him, but in the end Robert had sunk into a wing chair, defeated, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You would play the game, Nicholas,” he had said, sighing, “if you knew there was something to lose.”

Now that he was older, Nicholas understood. Truth be told, as much as he fantasized about living the simple life of a lobster fisherman in Maine, he enjoyed the perks of his station too much to turn his back and walk away. He liked being on a first-name basis with the governor, having debutantes leave their lace bras on the back seat of his car, getting admitted to college and medical school without even a half second of self-doubt or worry about his chances. Paige might not have grown up the same way, but still, she'd left
something
behind. She was a study in contrasts: as fragile as she seemed on the outside, she still had the kind of confidence it took to make a clean break. Nicholas realized that he had less courage in his whole body than Paige had in her little finger.

Paige looked up from the anatomy book. “If I quizzed you, would you know every little thing?”

Nicholas laughed. “No. Yes. Well, it depends on what you ask me.” He leaned forward. “But don't tell anyone, or I'll never get my degree.”

Paige sat up, cross-legged. “Take my medical history,” she said. “Isn't that good practice? Wouldn't that help you?”

Nicholas groaned. “I do it about a hundred times a day,” he said. “I could do it in my sleep.” He rolled onto his back. “Name? Age? Date of birth? Place of birth? Do you smoke? Exercise? Do you or does anyone in your family have a history of heart disease... diabetes ... breast cancer. Do you or does anyone in your family ...” He let his words trail off, and then he slid off the couch to sit next to Paige. She was looking into her lap. “I'd have a little problem with a medical history, I guess,” she said. “If it's
my
medical history, why do you focus on everyone else in my family?”

Nicholas reached for her hand. “Tell me about your mother,” he said.

Paige jumped to her feet and picked up her purse. “I've got to go,” she said, but Nicholas grabbed her wrist before she could move away.

“How come every time I mention your mother you run away?”

“How come every time I'm with you you bring it up?” Paige stared down at him and then tugged her wrist free. Her fingers slipped over Nicholas's until their hands rested tip to tip. “It's no big mystery, Nicholas,” she said. “Did it ever occur to you that I have nothing to tell?”

The dim light of Nicholas's green-shaded banker's lamp cast shadows of him and of Paige on the opposite wall, images that were nothing more than black and white and were magnified, ten feet tall. In the shadow, where you couldn't see the faces, it almost looked as if Paige had reached out her hand to help Nicholas up. It almost looked as if she were the one supporting him.

He pulled her down to sit next to him, and she didn't really resist. Then he cupped his hands together and fashioned a shadow alligator, which began to eat its way across the wall. “Nicholas!” Paige whispered, a smile running across her face. “Show me how you do it!” Nicholas folded his hands over hers, twisting her fingers gently and cupping her palms just so until a rabbit was silhouetted across the room. “I've seen it done before,” she said, “but no one ever showed me how.”

Nicholas made a serpent, a dove, an Indian, a Labrador. With each new image, Paige clapped, begged to be shown the position of the hands. Nicholas couldn't remember the last time someone had got so excited about shadow animals. He couldn't remember the last time he'd made them.

She couldn't get the beak right on the bald eagle. She had the head down pat, and the little open knot for the eye, but Nicholas couldn't mold her fingers just so for the hook in the beak. “I think your hands are too small,” he said.

Paige turned his hands over, tracing the life lines of his palms. “I think yours are just right,” she said.

Nicholas bent his head to her hands and kissed them, and Paige watched their silhouette, mesmerized by the movement of his head and the sleek outline of his nape and the spot where his shadow melted into hers. Nicholas looked up at her, his eyes dark. “We never finished your medical history,” he said, and he slid his palms up her rib cage.

Paige leaned her head into his shoulder and closed her eyes. “That's because I don't have a history,” she said.

“We'll skip that part,” Nicholas murmured. He pressed his lips against her throat. “Have you ever been hospitalized for major surgery?” he said. “Say, a tonsillectomy?” He kissed her neck, her shoulders, her abdomen. “An appendectomy?”

“No,” Paige breathed. “Nothing.” She lifted her head as Nicholas grazed her breasts with his knuckles.

Nicholas swallowed, feeling as though he were seventeen all over again. He wasn't going to do something he'd regret. After all, it wasn't as if she'd done this before. “Intact,” he whispered. “Perfect.” He lowered his hands, still shaking, to Paige's hips and pushed her back several inches. He brushed her hair away from her eyes.

Paige made a sound that started low in her throat. “No,” she said, “you don't understand.”