Harvesting the Heart

prologue

Nicholas won’t let me into my own house, but I have been watching my family from a distance. So even though I’ve been camping out on the front lawn, I know exactly when Nicholas takes Max into the nursery to change his diaper. The light switches on-it’s a little dinosaur lamp that has a shade printed with prehistoric bones-and I see the silhouette of my husband’s hands stripping away the Pampers.

When I left three months ago, I could have counted on one hand the number of times Nicholas had changed a diaper. But after all, what did I expect? He had no choice. Nicholas has always been a master at emergency situations.

Max is babbling, strings of syllables that run together like bright beads. Curious, I stand up and climb the low branches of the oak that stands closest to the house. With a little bit of effort, I can pull myself up so that my chin is level with the sill of the nursery. I have been in the dark for so long that when the yellow light of the room washes over me, I keep blinking.

Nicholas is zipping up Max’s blanket sleeper. When he leans close, Max reaches up, grabs his tie, and stuffs it in his mouth. It is when Nicholas pulls the tie away from our son that he sees me at the window. He picks up the baby and deliberately turns Max’s face away. He strides over to the window, the only one close enough to look into, and stares at me. Nicholas does not smile, he does not speak. Then he pulls the curtains closed, so that all I can see is a line of balloons and ponies and elephants playing trombones-all the smiling images I painted and prayed to when I was pregnant, hoping fairy tales could calm my fears and guarantee my son a happy childhood.

On this night when the moon is so white and heavy that I cannot sleep without fearing I will be crushed, I remember the dream that led me to my missing mother. Of course I know now that it was not a dream at all, that it was true, for whatever that is worth. It is a memory that started coming after Max was born-the first night after his delivery, then the week we brought him home-sometimes several times a night. More often than not, I would be picturing this memory when Max awakenand„ed, demanding to be fed or changed or taken care of, and I am embarrassed to say that for many weeks I did not see the connection.

The watermarks on the ceiling of my mother’s kitchen were pale and pink and shaped like purebred horses. There, my mother would say, pointing over our heads as she held me on her lap, can you see the nose? the braided tail? We called each other’s attention to our horses daily. At breakfast, while my mother unloaded the dishwasher, I’d sit on the Formica countertop and pretend the fine china chime of bowl against mug was a series of magical hoofbeats. After dinner, when we sat in the dark, listening to the bump and grind of the laundry in the double-stacked washer and dryer, my mother would kiss the crown of my head and murmur the names of places our horses would take us: Telluride, Scarborough, Jasper. My father, who at that time was an inventor moonlighting as a computer programmer, would come home late and find us asleep, just like that, in my mother’s kitchen. I asked him several times to look, but he could never see the horses.

When I told this to my mother, she said that we’d just have to help him. She held me high on her shoulders one day as she balanced on a low stool. She handed me a black marker with the powerful scent of licorice and told me to trace what I saw. Then I colored the horses with the crayons from my Wal-Mart 64-pack-one brown with a white star, one a strawberry roan, two bright orange-dappled Appa loosas. My mother added the muscular forelegs, the strain of the backs, the flying jet manes. Then she pulled the butcher-block table to the center of her kitchen and lifted me onto it. Outside, summer hummed, the way it does in Chicago. My mother and I lay beside each other, my small shoulder pressed to hers, and we stared up at these stallions as they ran across the ceiling. “Oh, Paige”-my mother sighed peacefully-“look at what we’ve accomplished.”

At five, I did not know what “accomplished” meant, nor did I understand why my father was furious and why my mother laughed at him. I just knew that the nights after my mother had left us I would lie on my back on the kitchen table and try to feel her shoulder against mine. I would try to hear the hills and valleys of her voice. And when it had been three full months, my father took whitewash and rolled it across the ceiling, erasing those purebreds inch by lovely inch, until it looked as if the horses, and even my mother, had never been there.

The light in the bedroom flashes on at 2:30 A.M., and I have a little surge of hope, but it goes off as quickly as it was turned on. Max is quiet, no longer waking three or four times a night. I shimmy out of the sleeping bag and open the trunk of my car, fish through jumper cables and empty diet Coke cans until I find my sketch pad and my conté sticks.

I had to buy these on the road; I couldn’t even begin to tell you where in my house I buried the originals when it became clear to me that I could not attend art school and also take care of Max. But I started sketching again when I was running away. I drew stupid things: the Big Mac wrappers from my lunch; a Yield sign; pennies. Then, although I was rusty, I tried people-the checkout girl at the minimart, two kids playing stickball. I drew images of Irish heroes and gods I’d been told of my whole life. And little by little, the second sight I’ve always had in my fingers began to come back.

I have never been an ordinary artist. For as long as I can remember, I’ve made sense of things on paper. I like to fill in the spaces and give color to the dark spots. I sketch images that run so close to the edges of the page, they are in danger of falling off. And sometimes things are revealed in my drawings that I do not understand. Occasionally I will finish a portrait and find something I never meant to draw hidden in the hollow of a neck or the dark curve of an ear. I am always surprised when I see the finished products. I have sketched things I should not know, secrets that haven’t been revealed, loves that weren’t meant to be. When people see my pictures, they seem fascinated. They ask me if I know what these things mean, but I never do. I can draw the image, but people have to face their own demons.

I do not know why I have this gift. It doesn’t come with every picture I draw. The first time was in the seventh grade, when I drew a simple Chicago skyline in art class. But I had covered the pale clouds with visions of deep, empty halls and gaping doors. And in the corner, nearly invisible, was a castle and a tower and a woman in the window with her hands pressed to her heart. The sisters, disturbed, called my father, and when he saw the drawing he turned white. “I didn’t know,” he said, “that you remembered your mother so well.”

When I came home and Nicholas would not let me in, I did the next best thing-I surrounded myself with pictures of my husband and my son. I sketched the look on Nicholas’s face when he opened the door and saw me; I sketched Max where he sat in Nicholas’s arms. I taped these two on the dashboard of my car. They are not technically good, but I have captured the feeling, and that is something.

Today, while I was waiting for Nicholas to come home from the hospital, I drew from memory. I did sketch after sketch, using both sides of the paper. I now have more than sixty pictures of Nicholas and Max.

I am working on a sketch I began earlier this night, and I am so wrapped up in it that I don’t see Nicholas until he steps onto the front porch. He is haloed in soft white light. “Paige?” he calls. “Paige?”

I move in front of the porch, to a spot where he can see me. “Oh,” Nicholas says. He rubs his temples. “I just wanted to see if you were still here.”

“I’m still here,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Nicholas crosses his arms. “Well,” he says, “it’s a little late for that.” I think for a moment he is going to storm inside, but he pulls his robe tighter around himself and sits down on the porch step. “What are you doing?” he says, pointing to my sketch pad.

“I’ve been working on you. And Max,” I say. I show him one of the sketches I did earlier.

“That’s good,” he says. “You always were good at that.”

I cannot remember the last time I heard Nicholas giving me credit for something, anything, a job well done. He looks at me for a second, and he almost lets his guard down. His eyes are tired and pale. They are the same color blue as mine.

In just that second, looking at Nicholas, I can see a younger man who dreamed of getting to the top, who used to come home and heal in my arms when one of his patients died. I can see, reflected, the eyes of a girl who used to believe in romance. “I’d like to hold him,” I whisper, and at that Nicholas’s stare turns dark and shuttered.

“You had your chance,” he says. He stands and goes into our house.

By moonlight, I work on my sketch. The whole time, I am wondering whether Nicholas is having trouble sleeping, too, and how angry he’ll be tomorrow when he’s not one hundred percent. Maybe because my attention is divided, my picture turns out the way it does. It’s all wrong. I have captured the likeness of Max-his sticky fists, his spiky velvet hair-but something is completely off. It takes me a few minutes to figure it out. This time, instead of drawing Max with Nicholas, I have drawn him with me. He sits in the curve of my arm, grabbing for my hair. To an outsider, the picture would be fine. But hidden in the purple hollow of Max’s outstretched palm is a faint woven circle of leaves and latticework. And in its center I’ve drawn the image of my running mother, who holds, like an accusation, the child I did not have.