Harvesting the Heart Read online

  Nicholas jumped away, and I looked into his eyes. They were ringed gray, surprised and hurt. For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking, Well, good.

  Dr. Thayer blustered into the room, her scrubs flying untied behind her. "So you couldn't wait another month, Paige, eh?"

  She squatted down in front of me, and I was vaguely aware of her fingers probing and flattening and stretching. I wanted to tell her I could wait, that I had been willing to wait the rest of my life rather than actually face this child, but suddenly that was not the truth. Suddenly I just wanted to be free of the throbbing weight, the splitting pain.

  Nicholas braced one of my legs and Noreen braced the other while I pushed. I felt for sure I would crack in two. Noreen held a mirror between my legs. "Here's the head, Paige," she said. "Do you want to feel it?"

  She took my hand and stretched it downward, but I pulled away. "I want you to get it out of me," I cried.

  I pushed and pushed, knowing all the blood in my body was flooding my face, burning behind my eyes and my cheeks. Finally, I sank back against the raised table. "I can't," I whimpered. "I really can't do this."

  Nicholas leaned close to me to whisper something, but what I heard was the muffled conversation between Noreen and Dr. Thayer.

  Something about a special care team, about the baby not coming fast enough now. Then I remembered the books I had read when I was first pregnant. The lungs. At the end of the eighth month, the lungs have just finished development.

  Even if he ever got here, my baby might not be able to breathe.

  "One more time," Dr. Thayer said, and I struggled up and bore down with all the energy I could summon. Quite clearly I could feel the nose, a tiny pointed nose, pressed against the tight seal of my own flesh. Get out, I thought, and Dr. Thayer smiled up at me. "We've got the head," she said.

  After that it all came easily: the shoulders and the thick purple umbilical cord, the long skinny creature that lay, howling, between my legs. It was a boy. In spite of what I knew, I had hoped till this last moment that I would be having a girl. For some reason it still came as a shock. I stared at him, unfolded, wondering how he had ever fit inside. Doctors took him away from me, and Nicholas, who was one of them, followed.

  It was at least a half hour before I got to touch my son. His lungs were pronounced perfect. He was thin but healthy. He had the familiar newborn features: flattened Indian face, dark rat hair, obsidian eyes. His toes curled under, plump like early peas. On his belly was a red birthmark that looked like a funky scribbling of the number twenty-two. "Must be the stamp of the guy who inspected him," Nicholas said.

  Nicholas kissed my forehead, staring at me with his wide-sky eyes, making me regret what I'd said before. "Four hours," he said. "How considerate of you to finish all the hard work in time for me to do my morning rotations."

  "Well, you know," I said, "we aim to please."

  Nicholas touched the baby's open palm, and the fingers curled together like a daisy at sunset. "Four hours is damn fast for a first delivery," he said.

  The question died on my lips: Was this my first? Staring into the demanding face of this son, I thought that maybe, right now, it didn't matter.

  Nearby, Dr. Thayer was completing the medical record. "Last name, Prescott," she verified. "Have you picked a first name?"

  I thought of my mother, May O'Toole, and wondered if she knew in her corner of the world that she had a grandchild. I wondered if the baby might have her eyes, her smile, or her sorrow.

  I turned my face up to Nicholas. "Max," I said. "His name is Max."

  Nicholas went to Mass General to round his patients, and I was left alone with my baby. I held him awkwardly in my arms as he screamed and thrashed and kicked. I felt beaten from the inside; I couldn't move very well, and I wondered if I was the best person for Max right then.

  When I turned on the TV above the bed, Max quieted down. Together we listened to the wind shake the walls of the hospital as the reporters described a world that was falling apart.

  At one point I found Max looking up at me, as if he'd seen the face before but couldn't place it. I inspected him, his wrinkled neck and blotchy cheeks, the bruised color of his eyes. I did not know how this child could possibly have come out of me. I kept waiting to feel that surge of mother love that was supposed to come naturally, the bond that meant nothing could keep me from my baby. But I was looking at a stranger. My throat seemed to swell up with a pain more raw than childbirth, and I recognized it immediately: I just wasn't ready. I could love him, but I had expected another month to prepare. I needed time. And that was the one thing I would not have. "You should know," I whispered, "I don't think I'll be very good at this." He placed his fist against my heart. "You have the upper hand," I told him. "I'm more afraid of you than you are of me."

  At Brigham and Women's, one of the options for new mothers was partial rooming-in. The baby could stay with you all day, and at night when you were ready to go to sleep, a nurse would roll the

  cabinet over the fridge, into the never-used ice bucket that held her forbidden packs of cigarettes. My father did not know she smoked--

  I realized this even though I was a baby, since she went to great pains to hide the cigarettes and she acted guilty when she lit one and she sprayed the air with cinnamon freshener after she'd flushed the ashes and the butt down the toilet. I don't know why she hid her smoking from him; maybe, like most other things, it was a game for her to play.

  She pulled one from the wrinkled pack and lit it, drawing in deeply. When she exhaled she stared at me, sitting on the linoleum with my blocks and my favorite doll. It was a cloth one, with practice snaps and zippers and buttons, strategically placed through ten wrappings of bright cotton clothes. I could do everything but the shoelaces.

  Cigarette ashes dropped on my doll. I looked up and saw a perfect red ring left by my mother's lipstick, just above the V of her fingers.

  "Two weeks," she said, nodding at the orange tree. "That

  thing'll be dead in two weeks." She stubbed the cigarette out in the sink and sighed, and then she pulled me up by the hands. "See here, Paige-boy," she said, using her pet name for me. She

  settled me on her hip. "I'm no good at taking care of things,"

  she whispered confidentially, and then she began to hum.

  "Supercalifragilisticexpiali-docious," she sang, whirling

  me around and around in a fast, stomping polka. I giggled as we flushed the evidence away. I wondered just how much I knew about my mother that my father never would have guessed.

  The wheels of the bassinet throbbed in my head, and I knew Max was coming long before the night nurse arrived. He was screaming. "Hard to believe they were worried about his lungs," she said, holding him out to me. For a moment I did not reach for him. I stared angrily at this greedy thing, who had twice in one night taken me away from all I had left of my mother.

  chapter 14

  Paige

  evenings at the Flanagans', clapping along as Jake's father sang old Gaelic songs and the littlest children hopped and jigged. I was accepted at RISD, and Jake took me out to dinner to celebrate. Later that night, when we wrapped the heat of our bodies around each other like a blanket, Jake told me he would wait for me through college, or grad school, or the rest of my life.

  In May I came down with the flu. It was strange, because the bug had passed around the school in early January, but I had all the same symptoms. I was weak and chilled, and I could not keep anything down. Jake brought me heather he'd picked from the side of the road and sculptures he made with wire and old Coke cans at work. "You look like hell," he said, and he leaned down to kiss me.

  "Don't," I warned him. "You'll catch it."

  Jake had smiled. "Me?" he said. "I'm invincible."

  On the fifth morning I had the flu, I stumbled into the bathroom to throw up, and I heard my father walking by the door. He paused, and then he went down the stairs. I looked into the mirror for the first tim
e in days, and I saw the thin, drawn face of a ghost: pale cheeks, red eyes, cracks at the corners of my mouth. And that's when I knew I was pregnant.

  Because I was not sick, I forced myself to get dressed in my school uniform, and I went down to the kitchen. My father was eating cornflakes, staring at the bare wall as if there were something there he could see. "I'm better, Dad," I announced.

  My father lifted his eyes, and I saw a flicker of something-- relief?--as he gestured to the other chair. "Eat something," he said, "or you'll blow away."

  I smiled and sat down, trying to block out the smell of the cereal. I concentrated on my father's voice, laced with the sounds of his homeland. One day, Paige, he used to say, we'll be takin' you to Ireland. It's the only place on God's great earth where the air is pure as fine crystal and the hills are a green magic carpet, streaked with blue-jewel streams. I reached for the cornflakes and ate several out of the box, knowing I had learned the lesson he hadn't: there was no going back.

  The cornflakes tasted like cardboard, and I kept staring at my father, wondering exactly how much he knew. My eyes began to swim with tears. I had been his biggest hope. He would be so ashamed.

  I went through the motions of school that day like rituals, numbly going to my classes and taking notes from teachers I did not hear. Then I walked slowly to Jake's garage. He was bent over the hood of a Toyota, changing spark plugs. When he saw me, he smiled and wiped his hands on his jeans. In his eyes I could see the rest of my life. "You're all better," he said.

  "That," I told him, "isn't quite true."

  I did not need parental consent for an abortion, but I did not want my father to know what I had done, so I committed the greatest sin of my life one hundred miles away from my hometown. Jake had found the name of a clinic in Racine, Wisconsin--far enough from Chicago that no one would recognize us or pass along rushed whispers. We would drive there early on Thursday, June 3, the first available appointment. When Jake had told me of the wait, I had stared at him in disbelief. "How many people," I whispered, "could there possibly be?"

  The hardest part was surviving the weeks between when I first knew and when we left for Racine. Jake and I did not make love, as if this was our punishment. We'd go outside every night, and I would sit in the valley of his legs, and Jake would cross his hands over my stomach as if there were something he could truly feel.

  The first night, Jake and I had walked for miles. "Let's get married," he said to me, for the second time in my life.

  But I did not want to enter a marriage because of a child. Even if Jake and I wanted to marry someday, a baby would have changed the entire reason behind it. After every argument and every petty disagreement in years to come, we would both blame the child that brought us into the mess. And besides, I was going to college. I was going to be an artist. This was the reason I gave Jake. "I'm only eighteen," I said. "I can't be a mother now." I did not add the other reason that ran through my mind: I don't know if I ever can be one.

  Jake had swallowed hard and turned away. "We'll have others," he said, resigning himself. He lifted his face to the sky, and I knew that traced among the stars, he saw--as I did--the face of our unborn child.

  On the morning of June 3 I got up before six o'clock and slipped out of the house. I walked down the street to Saint Christopher's, praying that I wouldn't see Father Draher, or an altar boy who went to Pope Pius. I knelt in the last pew and whispered to my twelve-week-old baby. "Sweetheart," I murmured, "Love. My darling." I said all the things I never would get to say.

  I did not enter a confessional, remembering my old friend Priscilla Divine and her knowing voice: "There are certain things you just don't tell a priest." Instead I silently recited a string of Hail Marys, until the words all ran together and I couldn't distinguish the syllables in my mind from the sound of my pain.

  Jake and I did not touch on the way to Racine. We passed thick rolling farmland and fat spotty Holsteins. Jake followed the directions the woman on the phone had given him, sometimes pronouncing the names of the highways out loud. I unrolled the window and closed my eyes into the wind, still seeing the rush of green, black, and white; the flat, level land and its ornaments, tassels of new corn.

  The small gray building had very little to mark it for what it was. The entrance was at the back, so Jake helped me out of the car and led me around the corner. Surrounding the front door was an angry, snaking cord of picketers. They wore black raincoats splashed with red, and they carried looming signs that said murder. As they saw Jake and me they thronged about us, crying out gibberish I could not understand. Jake put his arm around me and pushed me through the door. "Jesus Christ," he said.

  The tired blond woman who served as a receptionist asked me to fill out my personal information on a white card. "You pay up front," she said, and Jake removed his wallet and, from it, three hundred dollars he'd taken from the cash register at his father's garage the night before. An advance, he'd called it, and he'd told me not to worry.

  The woman disappeared for a moment. I looked around the white walls of the room. They were free of posters; there was only a handful of dated magazines for people to read. The waiting area held at least twenty people--mostly women--all looking as if they'd stumbled in by mistake. In the corner was a small paper carton filled with plastic blocks and Sesame Street dolls, just in case, but there were no children to play with them.

  "We're a little backed up today," the blond woman said, returning with a pink information sheet for me. "If you want to take a walk or something, it will be at least two hours."

  Jake nodded, and because we'd been told to, we shuffled outside again. This time the picketers cleared a path for us and started to cheer, assuming we'd changed our minds. We hurried out of the parking lot and walked three blocks before Jake turned to me. "I don't know anything about Racine," he said. "Do you?"

  I shook my head. "We could walk in circles," I said, "or we could just go straight and keep track of the time."

  But the clinic was in a strange area, and though Racine wasn't all that big a town, we walked for what seemed like miles and all we saw were sectioned farms and a waste-water treatment plant and fields empty of cows. Finally, I pointed to a small fenced-in area.

  The little playground was oddly misplaced in the middle of this town; we hadn't seen any houses. It had a string of swings, the cloth kind that hugged your bottom when you sat down. There was a jungle gym and monkey bars and a hexagon of painted wood that you could spin like a merry-go-round. Jake looked at me and smiled for the first time that day. "Race you," he said, and he started to run toward the swings.

  But I couldn't. I was so tired. I had been told not to eat anything that morning, and anyway, just being there made me feel as heavy as lead. I walked slowly, carefully, as if I had something to protect, and I picked a swing next to Jake's. He was pumping as high as he could; the entire metal frame seemed to shake and hump, threatening to come loose from the ground. Jake's feet grazed the low, flat clouds, and he kicked at them. Then, when he'd gone higher than I'd thought possible, he jumped from the swing in midair, arching his back and landing, scuffed, in the sand. He looked up at me. "Your turn," he said.

  I shook my head. I wanted his energy; God, I wanted to put this behind me and do what he had just done. "Push me," I said, and Jake came to stand behind me, pressing his hands at the small of my back every time I returned to him. He pushed me so forcefully that for a moment I was suspended horizontally, grasping the chains of the swing, staring into the sun. And before I knew it, I was on my way back down.

  Jake climbed on the monkey bars, hanging from his knees and scratching his armpits. Then he put me on the merry-go-round. "Hold on," he said. I pressed my face into the smooth green surface of the wood, feeling the sheen of warm paint against my cheek. Jake spun the merry-go-round, faster and faster. I lifted my head but felt my neck get whipped by the force, and I laughed, dizzy, trying to search out Jake's face. But I couldn't make sense of anything, so I tucked my head back d
own against the wood. My insides were spinning, and I did not know which way was up. I heard Jake's labored breathing, and I laughed so hard that I crossed the fine line and started to cry.

  I did not feel anything, except the hot lights of the clean white room and the cool hands of a nurse and the distant suck and tug of instruments. In recovery, they gave me pills and I drifted in and out of sleep. When I came to, a pretty young nurse was standing next to me. "Is there someone here with you?" she asked, and I thought, Not anymore.

  Much later, Jake came to me. He did not say a word. He leaned down and kissed my forehead, the way he used to from time to time before we became lovers. "Are you okay?" he asked.

  It was when he spoke that I saw it: the image of a child, hovering just over his shoulder. I saw it as clearly as I saw Jake's face. And I knew by the storm of his eyes that he saw the same thing near me. "I'm fine," I said, and I realized then that I would have to get away.

  When we arrived at my house, my father was not yet home; we had planned it this way. Jake helped me up to bed and sat on the edge of the comforter and held my hand. "I'll see you tomorrow," he said, but he made no move to go.

  Jake and I had always been able to say things without words. I knew he heard it in the silence too: We would not see each other tomorrow. We would not see each other ever again; and we would not get married and we would not have other children, because every time we looked at each other the memory of this would be staring back at us. "Tomorrow," I echoed, forcing the word past the lump in my throat.

  I knew that somewhere God was laughing. He had taken the other half of my heart, the one person who knew me better than I knew myself, and He had done what nothing else could do. By bringing us together, He had set into motion the one thing that could tear us apart. That was the day I lost my religion. I knew that I could no longer pass away in a state of grace, no longer make it to heaven. If there was a Second Coming, Jesus would no longer die for my sins. But suddenly, compared to everything I had been through, it didn't matter much at all.