Harvesting the Heart

chapter 19

The thick sateen curtains at Ruby’s House of Fate blocked out The hot midday sun. Ruby herself, a mountain of copper flesh, the hot midday sun. Ruby herself, a mountain of copper flesh, sat across from me. She held my hands in her own. Her cheeks reddened, her chins trembled. Suddenly her thick eyelids opened, to reveal startling green eyes that had, just minutes before, been brown. “Girl,” Ruby said, “yo’ future is yo’ past.”

I had come to Ruby’s House of Fate out of hunger. Driving all day away from Cambridge had brought me to Pennsylvania-to Amish country. For a time I had parked the car and watched the neat black buggies, the fresh-capped girls. Something told me to keep on driving, in spite of the burning in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was now almost eight o’clock at night. So I had continued west, and at the outskirts of Lancaster I discovered Ruby. Her little row house was marked by a big billboard in the shape of a palm, covered with glittering moons and gold stars. RUBY’S HOUSE OF FATE, the sign read. YOUR PLACE TO FIND ANSWERS.

I wasn’t certain what my questions were, but that didn’t seem important. I wasn’t a believer in astrology, but that also seemed to be beside the point. Ruby answered the door as if she had been expecting me. I was confused. What was a black woman doing reading fortunes in Amish country? “You’d be amazed,” she said, as if I had spoken aloud. “So many people pass through.”

Ruby did not tear her green eyes from mine. I had been driving aimlessly all day, but at Ruby’s words I suddenly realized where I was headed. “I’m going to Chicago?” I asked softly, for confirmation, and Ruby grinned.

I tried to pull away from her grasp, but she held fast to my hand. She rubbed her smooth thumb over my palm and spoke quietly in a language I did not understand. “You’ll find her,” she said, “but she isn’t what you think she is.”

“Who?” I asked, although I knew she meant my mother.

“Sometimes,” she said, “bad blood skips a generation.”

I waited for her to explain, but she released my hand and cleared her throat. “That’ll be twenty-five,” she said, and I rummaged through my purse. Ruby walked me outside, and I swung open the hot, heavy door of the car. “You need to call him too,” she said, and by the time I looked up at her, she was gone.

“Nicholas?” I pulled at the collar of my shirt and ran my fingers over the smooth silk scarf from Astrid, trying to escape the phone booth’s heat.

“My God, Paige. Are you hurt? I called the supermarket-I called six of them, because I didn’t know where you’d gone, and I tried the nearest gas stations. Was y g Pgn=there an accident?”

“Not really,” I said, and I heard Nicholas draw in his breath. “How’s the baby?” I asked, feeling tears prick the back of my throat. It was strange; for almost three months, all I’d thought about was getting away from Max, and now I couldn’t stop thinking about him. He was always in the corner of my mind, clouding my vision, his gummy fists reaching toward me. I actually missed him.

“The baby’s fine. Where are you? When are you coming home?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”

“You’re where?” In the background, I heard Max start to cry, and then the sounds became louder, so I knew Nicholas was jiggling the baby in his arms.

“I was headed to the Stop & Shop, and I kind of kept going. I just need a little time-”

“Well, hey, Paige, so does the rest of the free world, but we don’t just up and run away!” Nicholas was yelling; I held the receiver away from my ear. “Let me get this straight,” he said, “you left us on purpose?”

“I didn’t run away,” I insisted. “I’m coming back.”

“When?” Nicholas demanded. “I have a life, you know. I have a job to get back to.”

I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the glass of the phone booth. “I have a life too.”

Nicholas did not answer, and for a moment I thought he’d hung up, but then I heard Max babbling in the background. “Your life,” Nicholas said, “is right here. Not in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”

What I wanted to tell him was: I’m not ready to be a mother. I can’t even be your wife, not until I patch together the pieces of my own life and fill in all the holes. I will come home, and we’ll pick up where we left off. I won’t forget you; I love you. But what I said to Nicholas was: “I’ll be back soon.”

Nicholas’s voice was hoarse and low. “Don’t bother,” he said, and he slammed down the phone.

I drove all night and all day, and by 4:00 P.M. I was on the Loop, heading into Chicago. Knowing that my father wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours, I headed toward the old art supply store I used to go to. It felt strange driving through the city. When I had been here last, I had no car; I had always been escorted. At a stoplight I thought about Jake-the angles of his face and the rhythm of his breathing. Once, that was all it had taken to make him appear. I drove carefully when the light turned green, expecting him to be on the next street corner, but I was mistaken. That telepathy had been severed years ago by Jake, who knew we could never go back.

The owner of the art store was Indian, with the smooth brown skin of an onion. He recognized me right away. “Missy O’Toole,” he said, fy"Ñ€ghthis voice running over my name like a river. “What can I get for you?” He clasped his hands in front of himself, as if I had last stepped into the store a day or two before. I did not answer him at first. I walked to the carved statues of Vishnu and Ganesh, running my fingers over the cool stone elephant’s head. “I’ll need some conté sticks,” I whispered, “a newsprint pad, and charcoal.” The words came so easily, I might as well have been seventeen again.

He brought me what I had asked for and held out the conté sticks for my approval. I took them into my palm as reverently as I’d taken the Host at Communion. What if I couldn’t do it anymore? It had been years since I’d drawn anything substantial.

“I wonder,” I said to the man, “if maybe you would let me draw you.”

Pleased, the man settled himself between the Hindu sculptures of the Preserver of Life and the God of Good Fortune. “What better place for me to be sitting myself,” he chattered. “If you please, missy, this place would be very good, very good indeed.”

I swallowed hard and picked up the newsprint pad. With hesitant lines I drew the oval of the man’s face, the fierce glitter of his eyes. I used a white conté stick for relief shading, creating a fine web of wrinkles at his temples and his chin. I mapped the age of his smile and the slight swell of his pride. When I finished, I stepped away from the pad and observed it critically. I was a little off on the likeness, but it was good enough for a first try. I peered into the background and the shadows of his face, expecting to see one of my hidden pictures, but there was nothing except for the calm brush of charcoal. Maybe I had lost my other talent, and I thought that this might not be so bad.

“Missy, you have finished? You do not want to keep such work all to yourself.” The man scurried toward me and beamed at my sketch. “You will leave it here for me, yes?”

I nodded. “You can have it. Thank you.”

I handed him the sketch, and a twenty to pay for the supplies, but he waved me away. “You give me a gift,” he said, “I give you one in return.”

I drove to the lake and parked illegally. Carrying my pad and my box of charcoal under my arm, I went to sit on the shore. It was a cool day, and not many people were in the water, just some children with bubble floats around their waists, whose mothers watched with lioness stares in case they drifted away. I sat on the edge of the water and brought Max to mind, trying to conjure a clear enough image to draw him. When I couldn’t, I was shocked. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t catch in his eyes the way he looked at the world, the way everything was a series of first times. And without that, a picture of Max just wasn’t a picture of Max. I tried to imagine Nicholas, but it was the same. His fine aquiline nose, the thick sheen of his hair-they appeared and receded in waves, as if I were looking at him lying on the bottom of a rippled pond. When I touched the charcoal to the paper, nothing happened at all. It struck me how strong the slam of that phone might have been. As Jake had done once before, it was possible that Nicholas had broken all of our connections.

Determined not to start crying, I stared across the="Ñ€lase dappled surface of the lake and began to move the charcoal over the blank page. Diamonds of sunlight and shifting currents appeared. Even though the picture was black and white, you could clearly see how blue the water was. But as I continued, I realized that I was not drawing Lake Michigan at all. I was drawing the ocean, the Caribbean ring that banded Grand Cayman Island.

When I was twelve I had gone with my father to Grand Cayman for an Invention Convention. He used up most of our savings for the plane ticket and the rental condo. He was setting up a booth of rocks, the fake ones he’d created that held a secret compartment for a key and could be placed on the dirt right outside your front door just in case. The convention lasted for two days, during which I was left at the condo to roam the beach. I made snow angels in the white sand and I snorkeled around the reefs and dove to grab at fire-colored coral and neon-streaked angelfish. The third day, our last, my father sat on a chaise longue on the beach. He didn’t want to go into the water with me, because, he said, he’d barely even seen the sun. So I went in alone, and to my surprise, a sea turtle came swimming beside me. It was two feet long and had a tag under its armpit. It had black beaded eyes and a leathery smile; its shell was curved down like a topaz horizon. It seemed to grin at me, and then it swam away.

I followed. I was always a few strokes behind. Finally, when the turtle disappeared behind a wall of coral, I stopped. I floated on my back and rubbed the stitch in my side. When I opened my eyes, I was at least a mile away from where I’d started.

I breast-stroked back, and by that time my father was frantic. He asked where I’d gone, and when I told him he said it had been a stupid thing to do. But I went into the ocean again anyway, hoping to find that sea turtle. Of course it was a big ocean and the turtle was long gone, but I had known-even at twelve-that I had to take the chance.

I laid down the drawing. A familiar breathlessness came when I finished the sketch, as if I’d had a spirit channeling through me and was only just returning now. In the middle of Lake Michigan I’d drawn that vanishing turtle. Its back was made up of a hundred hexagons. And very faintly, in every single polygon, I had drawn my mother.

I knew before I even turned onto my old block that I would not be staying long enough to remember all the things about my childhood that I’d trapped in some dark corner of my mind. I would not be able to remember the bus route to the Institute of Art. I would not have time to recall the name of the Jewish bakery with fresh onion bagels. I would stay only until I had gathered the information I needed to find my mother.

I realized that in a way I’d always been trying to find her. Except I hadn’t been chasing her; she’d been chasing me. She was always there when I looked over my shoulder, reminding me of who I was and how I got to be that way. Until today I had believed she was the reason I had lost Jake, the reason I’d run from Nicholas, the reason I’d left Max. I saw her at the root of every mistake I’d ever made. But now I wondered if she really was the enemy. After all, I seemed to be following in her footsteps. She had run away too, and maybe if I knew her reasons I’d understand mine. For all I knew, my mother could be just like me.

I walked up the steps to my childhood home, my feet falling into the sunken brick patterns. Behind me lay Chicago, winking at dusk and spread like a destiny. I knocked on the front door for the first time in eight years.

My father opened it. He was shorter than I remembered, and his hair, streaked with gray, fell over his eyes. “May,” he whispered, frozen. “A mhuírnán.”

My love. He had spoken in Gaelic, which he almost never did, an endearment I remembered him saying to my mother. And he had called me by my mother’s name.

I did not move. I wondered if this was an omen. My father blinked several times and took a step backward, and then he stared at me again. “Paige,” he said, shaking his head as if he still could not believe it was me. My father held out his hands and, with them, everything he could offer. “Lass,” he said, “you’re the image of your mother.”

chapter 20

Who the hell did she think she was? She picked up and vanished for hours, and then she phoned from goddamned Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and all the time that he’d been pacing and calling hospital emergency rooms she’d been running away. In one fell swoop, Paige had overturned his entire life. This was not the way Nicholas liked things. He liked neat sutures, very little bleeding, OR schedules that did not waver. He liked organization and precision. He did not enjoy surprises, and he hated being shocked.

He was not sure whom he was more pissed off at: Paige, for running away, or himself, for not seeing it coming. What kind of woman was she, anyway, to abandon a three-month-old baby? A shudder ran across Nicholas’s shoulders. Surely this was not the woman he’d fallen in love with eight years ago. Something had happened, and Paige was not what she used to be.

This was inexcusable.

Nicholas glanced at Max, still chewing on the piece of telephone cord that dipped into his playpen. He picked up the telephone and called the twenty-four-hour emergency number of the bank. Within minutes he’d put a hold on his assets, frozen his checking account, and revoked Paige’s charge cards. This made him smile, with a feeling of satisfaction that snaked all the way down to his belly. She wasn’t going to get very far.

Then he called Fogerty’s office at the hospital, expecting to leave a message for Alistair to call him later that evening. But to Nicholas’s surprise, it was Fogerty’s brusque, icy voice that answered the phone. “Well, hello,” he said, when he heard Nicholas. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

“Something’s come up,” Nicholas said, swallowing the bitterness that lodged in his mouth. “It seems that Paige is gone.”

Alistair didn’t respond, and then Nicholas realized he probably thought Paige was dead. “She’s left, I mean. She just sort of picked up and disappeared. Temporary insanity, I think.”

There was silence. “Why are you telling me this, Nicholas?”

Nicholas had to think about that. Why was he calling Fogerty? He turned to watch Max, who had rolled onto his back and was biting his own feet. “I need to do something with Max,” Nicholas said. “If I have surgery tomorrow I’ll need someone to watch him.”

“Perhaps the past seven years haven’t clarified my position at the hospital for you,” Fogerty said. “I’m the head of cardiothoracic, not day care.”

“Alistair-”

“Nicholas,” Fogerty said, “this is your problem. Good night.” And he hung up the phone.

Nicholas stared at the receiver in his hand in disbelief. He had less than twelve hours to find a baby-sitter. “Shit,” he said, rummaging through the kitchen drawers. He tried to find an address book of Paige’s, but there seemed to be nothing around. Finally, tucked against the microwave, he found a thin black binder. He opened it and riffled through the pages, alphabetically thumb-indexed. He looked for unfamiliar female names, friends of Paige’s he might prevail upon. But there were only three numbers: Dr. Thayer, the obstetrician; Dr. Rourke, the pediatrician; and Nicholas’s beeper number. It was as if Paige didn’t know anyone else.

Max began to cry, and Nicholas realized he hadn’t changed the baby’s diaper since Paige disappeared. He carried him into the nursery, holding him away from his chest as if he might get soiled. Nich olas pulled at the crotch of the playsuit until the snaps all freed themselves, and then he untaped the disposable diaper. He went to reach for another and was holding it in the air, trying to determine if the little Mickey and Donald faces went in the front or the back, when he felt something warm strike him. A thin arc of urine jetted from between Max’s kicking legs and soaked Nicholas’s neck and collar.

“God damn you,” Nicholas said, looking squarely at his son but speaking to Paige. He loosely tacked on the new diaper and left the playsuit to hang free, unwilling to bother with the snaps. “We’re going to feed you,” Nicholas said, “and then you’re going to sleep.”

Nicholas didn’t realize until he reached the kitchen that Max’s primary source of food was hundreds of miles away. He seemed to remember Paige mentioning formula. He put Max into the high chair wedged into a corner of the kitchen and pulled cereals, pasta, and canned fruit from the cabinets in an effort to find the Enfamil.

It was a powdered mix. He knew something should be sterilized, but there wasn’t time for that now. Max was starting to cry, and without even checking him, Nicholas put the water up to boil and found three empty plastic bottles that he assumed were clean. He read the back of the Enfamil bucket. One scoop for every two ounces. Surely in this kitchen he could find a measuring cup.

He looked under the sink and over the refrigerator. Finally, under a collection of spatulas and slotted spoons he found one. He tapped his foot impatiently, willing the teakettle to whistle. When it did he poured eight kedá€r tounces of water into each bottle and added four scoops of powder. He did not know that a baby Max’s age could not finish an eight-ounce bottle in one sitting. All that Nicholas cared about was getting Max fed, getting Max to go to sleep, and then crawling into bed himself.

Tomorrow he’d find a way to keep Max at the hospital with him. If he showed up at the OR with a baby on his shoulder, someone would give him a hand. He couldn’t think about it now. His head was pounding, and he was so dizzy he could barely stand.

He stashed two bottles in the refrigerator and took the third to Max. Except he couldn’t find Max. He’d left him in the high chair, but suddenly he was gone. “Max,” Nicholas called. “Where’d you go, buddy?” He walked out of the kitchen and ran up the stairs, so wiped out he half expected his son to be standing at the bathroom sink, shaving, or in the nursery getting dressed for a date. Then he heard the cries.

It had never occurred to him that Max couldn’t sit up well enough to go into a high chair. What the hell was the thing doing in the kitchen, then? Max had slipped down in the seat until his head was wedged under the plastic tray. Nicholas tugged at the tray, unsure which latch would release it, and finally pulled hard enough to dislodge the whole front section. He tossed it across the room. As soon as he picked up his son, the baby quieted, but Nicholas couldn’t help noticing the red welted pattern pressed into Max’s cheek by the screws and grooves of the high chair.

“I only left him for half a second,” Nicholas muttered, and in the back of his mind he heard Paige’s soft, clear words: That’s all it takes. Nicholas hiked the baby higher on his shoulder, hearing Max’s muffled sigh. He thought about the nosebleed and the way Paige’s voice shook when she told Nicholas about it. Half a second.

He took the baby into the bedroom and fed him the bottle in the dark. Max fell asleep almost immediately. When Nicholas realized that the baby’s lips had stopped moving, he pulled away the bottle and adjusted Max so that he was cradled in his arms. Nicholas knew that if he stood up to bring Max to his crib, he’d wake up. He had a vision of Paige nursing Max in bed and falling asleep. You don’t want him to get used to sleeping here, he’d told her. You don’t want to create bad habits. And she’d stumble into the nursery, holding her breath so the baby wouldn’t wake.

Nicholas unbuttoned his shirt with one hand and settled a pillow under the arm that held Max. He closed his eyes. He was bone tired; he felt worse after taking care of Max than he did after performing open-heart surgery. There were similarities: both required quick thinking, both required intense concentration. But he was good at one, and as for the other, well, he didn’t have a clue.

This was all Paige’s fault. If it was her idea of some stupid little lesson, she wasn’t going to get away with it. Nicholas didn’t care if he never saw Paige again. Not after she’d pulled this stunt.

Out of nowhere, he remembered being eleven years old, his lip split by a bully in a playground fight. He had lain on the ground until the other kids left, but he would not let them see him cry. Later, when he’d told his parents about it, his mother had held her hand against his cheek and abyá€He smiled at him.

He would not let Paige see him cry, or complain, or be in any way inconvenienced. Two could play the same game. And he’d do what he did to that bully-he’d ignored him so completely in the days following the fight that other children began to follow Nicholas’s lead, and in the end the boy had come to Nicholas and apologized, hoping he’d win back his friends.

Of course, that was a kids’ competition. This was his life. What Paige had done was somewhere beyond forgiveness.

Nicholas expected to toss and turn, racked by black thoughts of his wife. But he was asleep before he reached the pillow. He did not remember, the next morning, how quickly sleep had come. He did not remember the dream he had of his first Christmas with Paige, when she’d given him the children’s game Operation! and they’d played for hours. He did not remember the coldest part of the night, when out of pure instinct Nicholas had pulled his son closer and given him his heat.

chapter 21

My mother’s clothes didn’t fit. They were too long in the waist and tight at the chest. They were made for someone taller and thinner. When my father brought up the old trunk filled with my mother’s things, I had held each musty scrap of silk and cotton as if I were touching her own hand. I pulled on a yellow halter top and seersucker walking shorts, and then I peeked into the mirror. Reflected back was the same face I’d always seen. This surprised me. By now my mother and I had grown so similar in my mind, I believed in some ways I had become her.

When I came back down to the kitchen, my father was sitting at the table. “This is all I have, Paige,” he said, holding up the wedding photo I knew so well. It had sat on the night table beside my father’s bed my whole life. In it, my father was looking at my mother, holding her hand tightly. My mother was smiling, but her eyes betrayed her. I had spent years looking at that photo, trying to figure out what my mother’s eyes reminded me of. When I was fifteen, it had come to me. A raccoon trapped by headlights, the minute before the car strikes.

“Dad,” I said, running my finger over his younger image, “what about her other stuff? Her birth certificate and her wedding ring, old photos, things like that?”

“She took them. It isn’t as if she died, you know. She planned leavin’, right on down to the last detail.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee and offered some to him. He shook his head. My father moved uncomfortably in his chair; he did not like the topic of my mother. He hadn’t wanted me to look for her-that much was clear-but when he saw how stubborn I was about it, he said he’d do what he could for me. Still, when I asked him questions, he wouldn’t look up at me. It was almost as if after all these years he blamed himself.

“Were you happy?” I said quietly. Twenty years was a long time, and I had been only five. Maybe there had been arguments I hadn’t heard behind sealed bedroom doors, or a physical blow that had been regretted eve fa d‡n as it found its mark.

“I was very happy,” my father said. “I never would have guessed May was goin’ to leave us.”

The coffee I’d been drinking seemed suddenly too bitter to finish. I poured it down the sink. “Dad,” I said, “how come you never tried to find her?”

My father stood up and walked to the window. “When I was very little and we were livin’ in Ireland, my own father used to cut the fields three times each summer for haying. He had an old tractor, and he’d start on the edge of one field, circlin’ tighter and tighter in a spiral until he got almost dead center. Then my sisters and I would run into the grass that still stood and we’d chase out the cottontails that had been pushed to the middle by the tractor. They’d come out in a flurry, the lot of them, jumpin’ faster than we could run. Once -I think it was the summer before we came over here-I caught one by the tail. I told my da I was going to keep it like a pet, and he got very serious and told me that wouldn’t be fair to the rabbit, since God hadn’t made it for that purpose. But I built a hutch and gave it hay and water and carrots. The next day it was dead, lyin’ on its side. My father came up beside me and said that some things were just meant to stay free.” He turned around and faced me, his eyes brilliant and dark. “That,” he said, “is why I never went lookin’ for your mother.”

I swallowed. I imagined what it would be like to hold a butterfly in your hands, something bejeweled and treasured, and to know that despite your devotion it was dying by degrees. “Twenty years,” I whispered. “You must hate her so much.”

“Aye.” My father stood and grasped my hands. “At least as much as I love her.”

My father told me that my mother was born Maisie Marie Renault, in Biloxi, Mississippi. Her father had tried to be a farmer, but most of his land was swamp, so he never made much money. He died in a combine accident that was heavily questioned by the insurance company, and when she was widowed, Maisie’s mother sold the farm and put the money in the bank. She went to Wisconsin and worked for a dairy. Maisie began calling herself May when she was fifteen. She finished high school and got a job in a department store called Hersey’s, right on Main Street in Sheboygan. She had stolen her mother’s emergency money from the crock pot, bought herself a linen dress and alligator pumps, then told the personnel director at Hersey’s that she was twenty-one and had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin. Impressed by her cool demeanor and her smart outfit, they put her in charge of the makeup department. She learned how to apply blusher and foundation, how to make eyebrows where there were none, how to make moles disappear. She became an expert in the art of deception.

May wanted her mother to move to California. Years of leading the cows to the milking machines had chapped her mother’s hands and permanently bent her back. May brought home pictures of Los Angeles, where lemons could grow in your backyard and where there wasn’t any snow. Her mother refused to go. And so at least three times a year, May would start to run away.

She would take all her money out of the bank and pack her bag with only the most importbe ñ€.Chicago. Now, that’s farther than you went the last time.

It was on one of these excursions to Chicago that she met my father in a diner. Maybe she’d never finished her journey because she just needed an extra push. Well, that’s what my father gave her. She used to tell the neighbors that the day she laid eyes on Patrick O’Toole, she knew she was looking at her destiny. Of course she never mentioned if that was good or bad.

She married my father three months after she met him at the diner, and they moved into the little row house I would grow up in. That was 1966. She took up smoking and became addicted to the color TV they had bought with the money they got at their wedding. She watched The Beverly Hillbillies and That Girl and told my father repeatedly that her calling was to be a script writer. She practiced, writing comic routines on the backs of the brown paper grocery bags when she’d unpacked the week’s food. She told my father that one day she was going to hit it big.

Because she thought she had to start somewhere, she took a job at the Tribune, writing the obituaries. When she found out that year that she was pregnant, she insisted on keeping the job, saying she’d go back after she had her maternity leave, because they needed the money.

She took me to the office with her three times a week, and the other two days I was watched by our next-door neighbor, an old woman who smelled of camphor. My father said May was good as a mother, but she never talked to me like I was a baby or did baby things like play patty-cake or hide-and-seek. When I was only nine months old, my father had come home to find me sitting at the threshold of the front door, wearing a diaper and a string of pearls, my eyes and lips colored with violet eye shadow and rouge. My mother had come running out of the living room, laughing. “Doesn’t she look perfect, Patrick?” she’d said, and when my father shook his head, all the life had gone out of her eyes. Things like that happened often when I was a baby. My father said she was trying to make me grow up faster so she’d have a good, close friend.

May left us without saying goodbye on May 24, 1972. My father said that what bothered him most about my mother’s disappearance was that he hadn’t seen it coming. He’d been married to her for six years, and he’d known so many details: the order in which she removed her makeup at night, the salad dressings she hated, the shifting color of her eyes when she needed to be held. But she had completely surprised him. For a while he bought the Los Angeles papers at an international newsstand, thinking she would certainly show up in Hollywood writing sitcoms and he’d get wind of it. But as the years went on, he began to suspect this: Surely anyone who could vanish without a trace could have been lying all those years. My father believed that the whole time they were married, she’d been getting together a plan. He resolved that if she ever did come back he wouldn’t let her in, because he had been wounded beyond repair. Unfortunately, he still found himself wondering from time to time if she was alive, if, mñ€d tshe was all right. It was not that he expected to find word of her anymore; he had lost his faith in love. After all, it had been twenty years. If she appeared on his doorstep, she’d have been no more than a stranger.

My father came into my bedroom that night when the stars were starting to lose themselves in the yawn of the morning. “You’re awake, aren’t you,” he said, his brogue thick from a lack of sleep.

“You knew I would be,” I said. He sat down, and I took his hand in my own and looked up at him. Sometimes I could not believe all he had done for me. He had tried so hard.

“What will you do when you find her?” he said.

I sat up, pulling the covers with me. “I may not ever get that far,” I said. “It’s been twenty years.”

“Oh, you’ll find her, all right,” he said. “That’s the way it should be.” My father was a great believer in Fate, which he had twisted to mean Divine Wisdom. As far as he was concerned, if God meant for me to find May Renault, I would find her. “When you do find her, though, you shouldn’t be tellin’ her things she doesn’t need to know.” I stared at him, unsure of what he meant. “It’s too late, Paige,” he said.

Then I realized that maybe for the past two days I had been harboring a rosy image of my father, my mother, and me all living again under this roof in Chicago. My father was letting me know that wouldn’t happen, not on his end. And I knew that it couldn’t happen on my end, either. Even if my mother packed her bags and followed me home, my home was no longer Chicago. My home was miles away, with a very different man.

“Dad,” I said, pushing away the thought, “tell me a story again.” I had not heard my father’s stories in years, not since I was fourteen and decided I was too old to thrill to the exploits of muscled Black Irish folk heroes possessing wit and ingenuity.

My father smiled at my request. “I suppose you’ll be wantin’ a love story,” he said, and I laughed.

“There aren’t any,” I said. “There are only love stories gone wrong.” The Irish had a story for every infidelity. Cuchulainn-the Irish equivalent to Hercules-was married but seduced every maiden in Ireland. Angus, the handsome god of love, was the son of Dagda -king of the gods-and a mistress, Boann, while her husband was away. Deirdre, forced to marry the old king Conchobhar to avoid a prophecy of nationwide sorrow, eloped instead with a handsome young warrior named Naoise to Scotland. When messengers tracked and found the lovers, Conchobhar had Naoise killed and commanded Deirdre to marry him. She never smiled again, and eventually she dashed her brains out on a rock.

I knew all these stories and their embellishments well enough to tell them to myself, but all of a sudden I wanted to be tucked under the covers in my childhood bedroom, listening to the tumbling brogue of my father’s voice as he sang me the stories of his homeland. I settled under my blankets and closed my eyes. “Tell me the story of Dechtire,” I whispered.

My father placed his cool hand on my forehead. “‘Twas always your favorite,” he said. He lifted his chin and stared out at the sun coming over the edge of the buildings across the street. “Well, Cuchulainn was no ordinary Irishman, and he had no ordinary birth. His mother was a beautiful woman named Dechtire, with hair as bright as king’s gold and eyes greener than rich Irish rye. She was married to an Ulster chieftain, but she was too beautiful to escape the notice of the gods. And so one day she was turned into a bird, an even more beautiful creature than she had been before. She had feathers white as snow and wore a wreath braided from the pink clouds of mornin’; only her eyes were that same emerald green. She flew with fifty of her handmaidens to an enchanted palace on a lush isle in the sky, and there she sat, surrounded by her women, rufflin’ and settlin’ her wings.

“So nervous she was at first that she did not notice that she had been changed back into the beautiful woman she had been; nor did she notice the sun god, Lugh, standing before her and fillin’ up her sky. When she turned her head and looked at him, at the rays of light spillin’ from him in a bright halo, she immediately fell in love. She lived there with Lugh for many years, and there she bore him a son-Cuchulainn himself-but she eventually took her boy and went back home.”

I opened my eyes, because this was the part I liked best, and even before my father said it, I realized for the first time as an adult why this story had always held such power for me.

“Dechtire’s chieftain husband, who had spent years starin’ into the sky and just waitin’, welcomed her back, because after all, you never really stop lovin’ someone, now, and he raised Cuchulainn as his own.”

In all the years I had been listening, I had pictured my mother as Dechtire and myself as Cuchulainn, victims of Fate living together on a magical glittering isle. And yet I had also seen the wisdom of the waiting Ulster chieftain. I had never stopped thinking that maybe one day my mother was coming back to us too.

My father finished and patted my hand. “I’ve missed you, Paige,” he said. He stood up then and left. I blinked at the pale ceiling. I wondered what it was like to have the best of both worlds. I wondered what it might be like to feel the smooth tiles of the sun god’s palace beneath my running feet, to grow up in his afterglow.

Armed with the wedding photo and all of my mother’s history, I waved goodbye to my father and got into my car. I waited until he disappeared behind the peach door curtain, and then I sank my head against the wheel. Now what was I going to do?

I wanted to find a detective, someone who wouldn’t laugh at me for picking up a missing persons search twenty years after the fact. I wanted to find someone who wouldn’t charge me too much. But I didn’t have the slightest idea where to look.

As I drove down the street, Saint Christopher’s loomed on my left. I had not been into a church in eight years; Max hadn’t even been baptized. This had surprised Nicholas at the time. “I thought you were just a lapsed Catholic,” he said, and I told him I no longer believed in God. “We wañ€ eill,” he had said, raising his eyebrows. “For once we see eye to eye.”

I parked the car and pulled myself up the smooth stone steps of the church. Several older women were in the left aisle, waiting for a confessional to become vacant. As the minutes passed, the curtains drew back one at a time, spitting out sinners who had yet to cleanse their souls.

I walked down the central aisle of the church, the one I’d always believed I’d walk down as a bride. I sat in the first pew. The stained glass cast a rippled puddle at my feet, the dappled image of John the Baptist. I frowned at it, wondering how I had seen only the splendor of the blues and greens when I was growing up, how I never noticed that the window really blocked out the sun.

I had given up my religion, just as I told Nicholas, but that didn’t mean it had given up on me. It was a two-way street: just because I chose not to pray to Jesus and the Virgin Mary didn’t mean they were going to let me go without a fight. So even though I didn’t attend Mass, even though I hadn’t been to confession in almost a decade, God was still following me. I could feel Him like a whisper at my shoulder, telling me it wasn’t as easy as I thought to renounce my faith. I could hear Him smiling gently when, in moments of crisis-like Max’s nosebleed-I automatically called out to Him. It only made me angrier to know that no matter how forcefully I pushed Him out of my head, I had little choice in the matter. He was still charting my course; He was still pulling the strings.

I knelt, thinking I should look the part, but I did not let prayers form on my lips. Almost directly in front of me was the statue of the Virgin I’d wreathed as May Queen.

The mother of Christ. There aren’t that many blessed women in Catholicism, so when I was a child she was my idol. I always prayed to her. And like every other little Catholic girl, I figured that if I was perfectly good for the twelve or so years left in my childhood, I’d grow up to be just like her. Once on Halloween I had even dressed up as her, wearing a blue mantle and a heavy cross, but nobody knew who I was supposed to be. I imagined Mary to be very peaceful and very beautiful-after all, God had chosen her to bear His son. But the thing I loved best about her was that her place in heaven was guaranteed simply because she’d been the mother of someone very special, and sometimes I’d borrow her from Jesus, pretending that she was sitting on the edge of my bed at night, asking me what I’d done in school that day.

I seemed to know so much about mothers in the abstract. I remembered when I had learned during a social studies unit in fifth grade that baby monkeys, given the choice, picked terry-cloth figures to cling to, rather than wire ones. Once, in a doctor’s waiting room, I had read of coyotes, who howl if their cubs get lost, knowing they will find their way home by the signal. I wondered if Max would be able to find safety in my voice. I wondered if after all these years I’d be able to pick out my mother’s.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a familiar priest heading toward the altar. I did not want to be recognized and shamed into penance. I ducked my head and pushed past him in the aisle, shivering as my shoulder caught the strength of his faith.

I drove away from Saint Christoph liñ€verer’s to the place where I knew I’d have to go before I left to find my mother. Even as I approached the Mobil station, I could see him from a distance. Jake was handing a credit card back to a buttoned-down lawyer type, taking care not to brush his blackened hand against his customer’s. The man drove away in his Fiat, leaving a space for me.

Jake did not move as I pulled my car up beside the unleaded tank and got out. “Hello,” I said. He clenched and then unclenched his fingers. He was wearing a wedding band, and this made my stomach burn, even though I was wearing one too. It was all right for me to go on, but I somehow had expected Jake to be just the way he had been when I left.

I swallowed and put on my brightest smile. “Well,” I said, “I can tell you’re overwhelmed to see me.”

Jake spoke then, his voice running and low as I had remembered it. “I didn’t know you were back,” he said.

“I didn’t know I was coming.” I took a step away from him, shielding my eyes from the sun. The façade of the garage had been updated with fresh paint and a sign that said, “Jake Flanagan, Proprietor.” I turned back to Jake.

“He died,” Jake said quietly, “three years ago.”

The air between us was humming, but I kept my distance. “I’m sorry,” I said. “No one told me.”

Jake looked at the car, which was dusty from its long drive. “How much do you want?” he said, lifting the nozzle from its cradle.

I stared at him blankly. He unscrewed the cap. “Oh, the car,” I said. “Fill it.”

Jake nodded and started the pump. He leaned against the hot metal door, and I watched his hands, restrained in their strength. Grease had settled into the creases in his palms, the way it used to. “What are you doing now?” he asked. “Still drawing?”

I smiled at the ground. “I’m an escape artist,” I said.

“Like Houdini?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but the knots and cuffs are stronger.”

Jake didn’t look at me when the pump switched off. He held out his hand, and I gave him my credit card.

I had expected the familiar physical jolt that had always flared between us when our fingers touched. But nothing happened. Nothing at all. I wasn’t looking for passion, and I knew I wasn’t in love with Jake. I was married to Nicholas. I was where I was supposed to be. But somehow I expected there to be a little something left from before. I looked into Jake’s face, and his aqua eyes were cool and reserved. Yes, he seemed to be saying, between us, it is over.

When he came back a minute later, he asked if I’d come into the office for a moment. My heart caught; maybe he was going to say something to me or let down his guard. But he took me to the machirenñ€ cane that validated credit cards. My American Express card had been rejected. “That’s impossible,” I murmured, and I handed him a Visa. “Try this.”

The same thing happened. Without asking Jake’s permission, I picked up the telephone and dialed the emergency 800 number on the back of my credit card. The operator informed me that Nicholas Prescott had voided his old Visa card and that a new one, with a new number, was being sent to his address. I put the receiver down on the counter and shook my head. “My husband,” I said. “He just cut me off.”

I mentally ran through the amount of cash I had left, the chances of my checks being accepted out-of-state. What if I didn’t have enough to find my mother? What if I could find her but then was too broke to get to her? Suddenly Jake’s arm was around my shoulders. He led me to a worn orange plastic window seat. “I’m gonna move your car,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” I closed my eyes and slipped into the familiar feeling. This time, I told myself, Jake would be able to rescue me.

When he came back he sat beside me. There was gray in his hair now, just at the temples, and it still hung over his eyes and curled at the edges of his ears. He lifted my chin, and in his touch I felt that easy camaraderie I had felt when I was his favorite little sister. “So, Paige O’Toole,” he said, “what brings you back to Chicago?”

As he drew the outline I filled in with chiseled images and stories the past eight years of my life. I had just told him about Max falling off the couch and getting a nosebleed, when the glass door jingled and a young woman came in. She had dark, exotic skin and eyes that tilted up. She was wearing a tie-died cotton jumper, and she carried a big bag of Fritos in her left hand. “Dinner!” she sang, and then she saw Jake sitting with me. “Oh.” She smiled. “I can wait out back.”

Jake stood and wiped his hands on his jeans. He put his arm around the woman’s shoulders. “Paige,” he said, “this is my wife, Ellen.”

Ellen’s dark eyes opened wider at the sound of my name. I waited a second, expecting a flare of jealousy to streak her smile. But she just took a step forward and held out her hand. “After all these years of hearing about you, it’s nice to finally meet you,” she said, and I could see it in her gaze-she was being honest. She slipped her arm around Jake’s waist and squeezed lightly, hooking her thumb into the belt loop of his jeans. “How about I leave the Fritos,” she said. “I’ll catch up with you at home.” And as easily as she’d interrupted, she disappeared.

When she left the small glass business office, taking with her the halo of energy that hovered around her, the air seemed to be sucked away as well. “Ellen and I have been married for five years,” Jake said, staring after her. “She knows about everything. We can’t-” His voice tripped, and then he started again. “We haven’t been able to have any kids yet.” I turned away; I did not trust myself to meet his eyes. “I love her,” he said softly, watching her drive onto Franklin.

“I know.”

Jake squatted down on the floor in front of me. He picked up my left hand and rubbed his thumb over my wedding band, leaving a stripe of grease that he did not try to eras

I tilted back my head and thought about the days when Jake would be getting ready for a date with another girl; all the nights I had eaten with his family and pretended that I really belonged and spun such complicated tales about my mother’s death that I sometimes wrote them down just to keep track. I remembered Terence Flanagan’s buckled grin as he pinched his wife’s backside while she served the potatoes. I remembered Jake coming to me after midnight, to dance in the moonlit kitchen. I thought of Jake’s arms around me as he carried me to my bedroom, still bleeding from the loss of a life. I thought of his face coming in and out of my pain; of the impossible ties he cut to say goodbye. “I’ve run away,” I whispered to Jake, “again.”

chapter 22

“This is the deal,” Nicholas said, juggling Max on his hip and the diaper bag on his shoulder. “I’ll pay you whatever you ask. I’ll do everything in my power to get you off the next two graveyard shifts. But you’ve got to watch my kid.”

LaMyrna Ratchet, the nurse on duty in orthopedics, twisted a strawberry-blond curl around her finger. “I don’t know, Dr. Prescott,” she said. “I could get in a shitload of trouble for this.”

Nicholas gave her his most winning smile. He was watching the heavy clock above her head, which said that even if he left right now he’d be fifteen minutes late to surgery. “I’m trusting you with my son, LaMyrna,” he said. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a patient waiting. I’ll bet you can figure something out.”

LaMyrna chewed on a fingernail and finally reached out for Max, who grabbed at her Coke-bottle glasses and her stringy hair. “He doesn’t cry, does he?” she called after Nicholas, who was running down the hall.

“Oh, no,” Nicholas yelled over his shoulder. “Not a bit.”

Nicholas had arrived at the hospital at five in the morning, a half hour earlier than usual. He’d actually had the pleasure of waking up his son, who had awakened him three times during the night to drink and to be changed. Max, still half asleep, had fussed the whole time Nicholas tried to jam him into a fuzzy yellow playsuit. “Yeah, well,” he’d said, “how do you like it?”

Nicholas had expected to put Max in whatever sort of staff day care the hospital had, but there was no damn program on site. If Nicholas wanted to use Mass General’s child care facility, he’d have to drive to fucking Charlestown, and-as if that weren’t inconvenient enough-it didn’t open until 6:30 A.M., when Nicholas would already be scrubbing for surgery. He’d asked the OR nurses to watch Max, but they had looked at him as though he had two heads. They couldn’t, they said, not when at least six times a day there was no one behind the desk because of short staffing. They suggested the general patient floors, but the only nurses on the early shift were bleary from being up all night, and Nicholas didn’t quite trust them. So he’d headed up to the orthopedics floor, and he’d found LaMyrna, a homely girl with a good heart whom he remembered from his internship.

“Dr. Prescott,” he heard, and he whipped around. He’d missed the door to the operating suite, that’s how exhausted he was. The nurse held the swinging door for him. He turned on the steaming water in the industrial sinks, scouring under his fingernails until the pads of his fingers were pink and raw. When he pushed his way backward into the operating suite, he saw that everyone else had been waiting.

Fogerty leaned closer to the unconscious patient. “Mr. Brennan,” he said, “it seems Dr. Prescott has decided to grace us with his presence after all.” He turned toward Nicholas and then toward the door. “What,” he said, “no stroller? No Porta-Crib?”

Nicholas pushed him out of the way. “Just when did you develop a sense of humor, Alistair?” he said. He turned to the head OR nurse. “Prep him.”

He was tired and sweating and badly needed a shower, but the only thing in his mind when he finished surgery was Max. He knew he needed to round his patients; he hadn’t a clue about his schedule for tomorrow. He rode up five flights in the cool green elevator. Maybe he’d go home today, and Paige would be there, and this would have been a lousy nightmare.

LaMyrna Ratchet was nowhere to be found. Nicholas stuck his head into the back room at the nurses’ station, but no one seemed to know whether she was still on duty. Nicholas began to peer into different patient rooms. He poked through a bouquet of balloons because he thought he saw a short white skirt, but LaMyrna was not in the room. The patient, a woman of about fifty, clung to Nicholas’s arm. “No more blood,” she cried. “Don’t let them take no more blood.”

LaMyrna was not in any of the patient rooms. Nicholas even checked the women’s staff bathroom, startling a couple of nurses and a female resident, but LaMyrna was not at the sink. He ducked down, peering at the shoes in the stalls. He called her name.

Finally, he went back to the nurses’ station in the center of the orthopedic floor. “Look,” he said, “this nurse has disappeared, and she’s taken my baby.”

An unfamiliar nurse handed him a pink telephone message note that had been folded like a Chinese football. “Why didn’t you say so?” the woman said.

Dr. Prescott, the note read, I had to leave because my shift was over and they told me you were still in OR so I left Mike with the people in the volunteer lounge. LaMyrna.

Mike?

Nicholas couldn’t even remember where the volunteer lounge was. They had built it sometime during his residency; it was a general meeting area with lockers and a sign-in sheet for the candy stripers and older hospital volunteers. He asked for directions at the hospital’s front desk. “I can take you,” a girl said. “I’m on my way there.”

She was no older than sixteen and wore a jeans jacket with an airbrushed rendering of Nirvana on the back. She carried a He €†small Eddie Bauer refrigerated cold-pack, and her peppermint-stick uniform protruded from a plain white tote bag. She saw Nicholas staring at the bag. “I wouldn’t be caught dead leaving school in it,” she said, and she cracked a gum bubble, loud.

There was no one in the volunteer lounge. Nicholas ran his fingers over the page of signed-in volunteers, but found nothing to indicate that one of them was watching a baby. Then, propped in the corner, he saw his diaper bag.

Nicholas sagged against the wall, flooded with relief. “How do I find out what candy stripers are on what rotations?” The girl looked at him blankly. “Where do you all work?”

The girl shrugged. “Check the front of the book,” she said, flipping to the sign-in page. He saw a list of volunteers, organized by the day they worked and their staff assignments. There were at least thirty volunteers in the hospital at that moment. Nicholas pinched the bridge of his nose. He could not do this. He just could not do this.

He left the volunteer lounge with the diaper bag on his shoulder and for the first time noticed a secretary sitting at the makeshift desk outside. “Dr. Prescott,” she said, smiling up at him.

He did not question how she knew his name; many people at the hospital had heard about the wunderkind of cardiac surgery. “Have you seen a baby?” he said.

The woman pointed down the hall. “Dawn had him, last I saw. She took him to the cafeteria. They didn’t need her so badly in ambulatory care today.”

Nicholas heard Max’s laughter before he saw him. Beyond the thick line of residents and nurses and sullen hospital visitors waiting to be served, he spotted his son’s spiky black hair through hazy red cubes of jello. When he reached the table where a candy striper was bouncing Max on her knee, he dropped the diaper bag. The girl was feeding his three-month-old son an ice cream bar.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he yelled, grabbing his son away. Max reached his hand toward the ice cream, but then realized his father had returned and burrowed his sticky face into the neck of Nicholas’s scrubs.

“You must be Dr. Prescott,” the girl said, unruffled. “I’m Dawn. I’ve been with Max since noon.” She opened the diaper bag and held up the one bottle Nicholas had brought to the hospital, now bone dry. “He finished this at ten this morning, you know,” she chided. “I had to take him to the milk bank.”

Nicholas had a fleeting image of Holsteins, wearing pearls and cat’s-eye glasses, acting as tellers and counting out cash. “The milk bank,” he repeated, and then he remembered. In the preemie pediatric ward, new mothers pumped their own milk for strangers’ babies born too early.

He assessed the girl again. She was smart enough to find food for Max; hell, she had even known he was hungry, which he couldn’t tell for sure. He sat down across from her at the table, and she folded the remains of the ice cream sandwich into a napkin. “He liked it,” she said defensively. “A little bit can’t hurt him, not once he’s hit tdia€†hree months.”

Nicholas stared at her. “How do you know these things?” he asked. Dawn looked at him as if he were crazy. Nicholas leaned forward conspiratorially. “How much do you make for candy striping?”

“Money? We don’t make money. That’s why we’re called volunteers.”

Nicholas grabbed her hand. “If you come back tomorrow, I’ll pay you. Four bucks an hour, if you’ll watch Max.”

“I don’t candy-stripe on Thursdays. Only on Mondays and Wednesdays. I have band on Thursdays.”

“Surely,” Nicholas said, “you have friends.”

Dawn stood up and shied away from the two of them. Nicholas held his hand out in the air as if that might stop her. He wondered what he looked like through her eyes: a weary, mussed surgeon, sweaty and wild-eyed, who probably wasn’t even holding his baby the right way. He wondered what was the right way.

For a second, Nicholas thought he was going to lose control. He saw himself breaking down, his face in his hands, sobbing. He saw Max rolling to the floor and striking his head on the beveled edge of the chair. He saw his career destroyed, all his colleagues turning their heads away in embarrassment. His only salvation was the girl in front of him, an angel half his age. “Please,” he murmured to Dawn. “You don’t understand what it’s like.”

Dawn held her arms out for Max and tugged the diaper bag onto her thin shoulder. She put her hand on the back of Nicholas’s neck. The hand was gloriously cool, like a waterfall, and gentle as a breath. “Five bucks,” she said, “and I’ll see what I can do.”

chapter 23

If Jake hadn’t been with me, I would have run from Eddie Savoy’s without ever going inside. His office was thirty miles outside Chicago, in the heartland of the country. The building was little more than a brown weathered shack attached to a chicken farm. The stench of droppings was overpowering, and there were feathers stuck to the wheels of my car when I got out. “Are you sure?” I asked Jake. “You know this guy?”

Eddie Savoy burst out of the door at that point, knocking it off its hinges. “Flan-man!” he yelled, wrapping Jake in a bear hug. They broke away and did some funny handshake that looked like two birds mating.

Jake introduced me to Eddie Savoy. “Paige,” he said, “me and Eddie were in the war together.”

“The war,” I repeated.

“The Gulf War,” Eddie said proudly. His voice was as rough as a grindstone.

I turned to Jake. The Gulf War? He had been in the army? The sun slanted off his cheekbones and lightened his eyes so that they fonurnedv›‹ jake="Jake" i="I" how="how" had="had" flanagan="Flanagan" about="about"›

When I told Jake about leaving Nicholas and Max, and then about wanting to find my mother, I’d expected him to be surprised -maybe even angry, since I’d been telling him all those years that my mother had died. But Jake just smiled at me. “Well,” he said, “it’s about time.” I could tell by the brush of his hands that he had known all along. He told me he had a friend who might be able to help, and then he asked one of his mechanics to watch the station.

Eddie Savoy was a private investigator. He’d been getting started in the business, working as a lackey for another detective, and then he’d joined the army when the war broke out in the Persian Gulf. When he came back he felt he’d had enough of taking orders; he started his own agency.

He led us into a small room that looked as if it had been a meat storage refrigerator in a different life. We sat on the floor on tasseled Indian cushions, and Eddie sat across from us, behind a low parsons bench. “Hate chairs,” he explained. “They do things to my back.”

He was not much older than Jake, but his hair was completely white. It had been shaved in a crew cut and stood away from his scalp as if each individual piece was very frightened. He had no mustache but the beginnings of a beard, which also seemed to stick straight out from his chin. He reminded me of a tennis ball. “So you haven’t seen your ma for twenty years,” he said, tugging the old wedding photo from my hand.

“No,” I said, “and I’ve never tried to find her before.” I leaned closer. “Do I have a chance?”

Eddie leaned back and pulled a cigarette out of his sleeve. He struck a match against his low desk and drew in deeply. When he spoke, his words came out in smoke. “Your mother,” he said to me, “did not disappear off the face of the earth.”

Eddie told me it was all in the numbers. You couldn’t escape your numbers, not for that long a time. Social Security, Registry of Motor Vehicles, school records, work records. Even if people intentionally changed their identity, eventually they’d collect a pension or welfare, or file taxes, and the numbers would lead you to them. Eddie told me how the previous week he’d found in half a day the kid a mother gave up for adoption.

“What if she’s changed her Social Security number?” I said. “What if her name isn’t May anymore?”

Eddie smirked. “If you change your Social Security number, it’s recorded as being changed. And the address and age of the person changing the number is listed too. You can’t just walk in and get someone else’s, either. So if your mother is using someone else’s number-say her own mom’s-we’ll still be able to find her.”

Eddie took down the family history that I knew. He was particularly concerned about genetic illnesses, because he had just wrapped up a missing persons case that involved diabetes. “This woman’s whole family has the sugar,” he says, “so I chase her for three years and I know she’s in Maine, but I can’t get the exact location. And then I figure she’s about the age all her relatives start dying. So I call up eveiv ‘€†ry hospital in Maine and see what patients have the sugar. Sure enough, there she is, getting her last rites.”

I swallowed, and Eddie reached across the table and took my hand. His skin felt like a snake’s. “It’s very difficult to disappear,” he said. “It’s all a matter of public records. The hardest people to find are the ones who live in tenements, because they move around a lot. But then you get them through welfare.”

I had an image of my mother on welfare, living on the streets, and I winced. “What if my mother isn’t my mother anymore?” I asked. “It’s been twenty years. What if she’s found a new identity?”

Eddie blew smoke rings that expanded and settled around my neck. “You know, Paige,” he said, pronouncing my name Pej, “people just ain’t creative. If they get a new identity, they do something stupid like flip their first and middle names. They use their maiden names or the last name of their favorite uncle. Or they spell their same name different or change one digit in their Social Security number. They aren’t willing to completely give up what they’re leaving behind.” He leaned forward, almost whispering. “Of course, the really sharp ones get a whole new image. I found a guy once who’d taken a new identity by striking up a conversation at a bar with a fellow who looked like him. He got the other guy to compare IDs, just for kicks, and he memorized the number on the driver’s license and then got himself a copy by saying it had been stolen. It ain’t so hard to become someone else. You look in the local papers and find the name of someone who died within the past week who was about your own age. That gives you a name and an address. Then you go to the place where the death occurred, and it’s on public record, and bingo, you got a date of birth. Then you go to Social Security and make up a wacko story about your wallet being filched and you get a new card with this new name-the death records are usually slow in getting over to Social Security, so nothing seems out of the ordinary. And then you pull the same shit at the RMV and you get a new driver’s license…” He shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette on the floor. “The thing is, Paige, I know all this stuff. I got connections. I’m one step ahead of your mother.”

I thought about my mother’s obituaries; how easy it would have been for her to find someone close to her age who had died. I thought of how connected she got to those people, how she’d visit the graves as if they were old friends. “What are you going to do first?” I asked.

“I’m gonna start with the scraps of the truth. I’m gonna take all this information you gave me and the picture, and I’m gonna walk around your neighborhood in Chicago, seeing if anyone remembers her. Then I’m gonna run a driver’s license check and a Social Security check. If that don’t work, I’m gonna look up twenty-year-old obit pages of the Trib. And if that don’t work, I’m gonna dig in my brain and ask myself, ‘Where the hell can I turn now?’ I’m gonna hunt her down and get an address for you. And then if you want I’ll go to her house and I’ll get her garbage before the town picks it up and I’ll be able to tell you anything you want to know about her: what she eats for breakfast, what she gets in the mail, if she’s married or livin’ with someone, if she has kids.”

I thought of my mother holding another baby, a different daughter. “I don’t think that will be necessary,” I whispered.

Eddie stood up, letting us know the meeting was over. “Fifty bucks an hour is my fee,” he said, and I paled. I couldn’t possibly afford to pay him for more than three days.

Jake stepped up behind me. “That’s fine,” he said. He squeezed my shoulder, and his words fell softly behind my ear. “Don’t worry about it.”

I left Jake waiting in the car and called Nicholas from a pay phone on the way back to Chicago. It rang four times, and I was thinking about what kind of message I could leave, when Nicholas answered, hurried and breathless. “Hello?”

“Hello, Nicholas,” I said. “How are you?”

There was a beat of silence. “Are you calling to apologize to me?”

I clenched my fists. “I’m in Chicago now,” I said, trying to keep my voice from wavering. “I’m going to find my mother.” I hesitated and then asked what was on my mind, what I couldn’t get off my mind. “How’s Max?” I said.

“Apparently,” Nicholas said, “you don’t give a damn.”

“Of course I do. I don’t understand you, Nicholas. Why can’t you just think of this as a vacation, or a visit to my father? I haven’t been back here in eight years. I told you I’d come home.” I tapped my foot against the pavement. “It’s just going to take a little longer than I thought.”

“Let me tell you what I did today, dear,” Nicholas said, his voice icy and restrained. “After getting up with Max three times during the night, I took him to the hospital this morning. I had a quadruple bypass scheduled, which I almost didn’t complete because I couldn’t stay on my feet. Someone could have died because of your need for a-what did you call it?-a vacation. And I left Max with a stranger because I didn’t have any idea who else could baby-sit for him. And you know what? I’m doing this all again tomorrow. Aren’t you jealous, Paige? Don’t you wish you were me?” The static on the line grew as Nicholas fell silent. I had never thought about all that; I had just left. Nicholas’s voice was so bitter that I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. “Paige,” he said, “I don’t want to see your face again.” And then he hung up.

I leaned my forehead against the side of the telephone booth and took deep breaths. Out of nowhere, that list I had written of my accomplishments just days before came to mind. I can change a diaper. I can measure formula. I can sing Max to sleep. I closed my eyes. I can find my mother.

I walked out of the phone booth, shading my eyes from the judgment of the sun. Jake grinned at me from the passenger seat of my car. “How’s Nicholas?” he asked.

“He misses me,” I said, forcing a smile. “He wants me to come home.”

In honor of my return to Chicago, Jake took what he called a wellof ‘€†-deserved vacation, and insisted I spend time with him while Eddie Savoy found my mother. So the next morning I drove to Jake and Ellen’s apartment, which was across the street from where Jake’s mother still lived. It was an unassuming little brick building, with a cast-iron fence around the tiny blotched yard. I rang the bell and was buzzed in.

Even before I reached Jake’s apartment, on the first floor, I knew which one was his. The familiar smell of him-green spring leaves and honest sweat-seeped through the cracks of the old wooden door. Ellen opened it, startling me. She held a spatula in her hand and wore an apron that said across her chest, KISS MY GRITS. “Jake says Eddie’s going to find your mother,” she said, not even bothering with “hello.” She drew me in with her excitement. “I bet you can’t wait. I can’t imagine not seeing my mother for twenty years. I wonder how long it-”

“Jeez, El,” Jake said, coming down the hall. “It’s not even nine o’clock.” He had just showered. His hair was still dripping at the ends, leaving little pockmarks on the carpet. Ellen reached over and made a part with her spatula.

The apartment was nearly bare, dotted with mismatched sofas and armchairs and an occasional plastic cube table. There weren’t many knickknacks, except for a few grade-school art class ceramic candy bowls, probably made years before by Jake’s siblings, and a statuette of Jesus on the Cross. But the room was warm and homey and smelled like popcorn and overripe strawberries. It looked happily wrapped and comfortably lived-in. I thought about my Barely White kitchen, my skin-colored leather couch, and I was ashamed.

Ellen had made French toast for breakfast, and fresh-squeezed orange juice and corned beef hash. I hovered at the edge of the speckled Formica table, looking at all the food. I hadn’t made breakfast in years. Nicholas left at four-thirty in the morning; there wasn’t time for a spread like this. “When do you have to get up to do all this?” I asked.

Jake curled his arm around Ellen’s waist. “Tell her the truth,” he said, and then he looked up at me. “Breakfast is all Ellen can do. My mother had to teach her how to turn on the oven when we got married.”

“Jake!” Ellen slapped his hand away, but she was smiling. She slipped a piece of French toast onto a plate for me. “I told him he’s more than welcome to move back home, but then he’d have to do his own laundry again.”

I was mesmerized by them. They made it look so easy. I could not remember the last time there had been a gentle touch or a relaxed conversation between Nicholas and me. I couldn’t remember if Nicholas and I had ever been like this. Things had happened so quickly for us, it was as though our whole relationship had been fast-forwarded. I wondered for a moment what might have happened if I had married Jake. I pushed that thought away. I had given my life to Nicholas, and we could have been like this, I knew we could, if Nicholas had been around just a little more. Or if I had given him something to stick around for.

I watched Jake pull Ellen onto his lap and kiss her senseless, as if I weren’t even there. He caught my eye. “Flea,” he said, grinning, “you aren’t going to watch, are you?”

“For God’s sake,” I said, smiling back at Jake. “What’s a girl got to do to get breakfast in this house?” I stood up and opened the refrigerator, looking for the maple syrup. I watched Jake and Ellen from behind the door. I saw their tongues meet. I promise you this, Nicholas, I thought. Once I get my act together, I’m going to make it up to you. I’m going to fall in love with you all over again. I’m going to make you fall in love with me.

Ellen left for work minutes later, without eating anything she’d prepared. She worked for an advertising agency downtown, in Relocation. “When people move to different branches in the country,” she had said, “I get them started all over again.” She draped a long multicolored scarf over her shoulders and kissed Jake on the neck and waved to me.

Over the next two days, Jake and I went food shopping together, ate lunch together, watched the evening news. I spent all day with him, waiting to hear from Eddie Savoy. At seven o‘clock, when Ellen came home, I would get up off her sofa and turn Jake over to her. I’d drive home to my father’s, sometimes pulling off into a dark, rustling alley to imagine what they were doing.

The third day I was in Chicago, the temperature soared to one hundred degrees. “Get yourself to the lake,” the morning radio DJ said when I was on my way over to Jake’s place. When I opened his door, he was standing in the middle of the living room in his boxer shorts, packing a wicker basket. “It’s a picnic kind of day,” he said, and he held up an orange Tupperware bowl. “Ellen made three-bean salad,” he told me, “and she left you a bathing suit to borrow.”

I tried on Ellen’s bathing suit, feeling very uncomfortable in the bedroom where Jake slept with his wife. There was nothing on the white walls except the old sampler that had hung over Jake’s childhood bed, with the Irish blessing that he had left in my knapsack when I walked away from my life. Most of the room was taken up by an enormous four-poster bed, carved out of golden oak. Each post depicted a different scene from the Garden of Eden: Adam and Eve in a gentle embrace; Eve biting into the forbidden fruit; the Fall from Grace. The serpent wound itself over the fourth post, which I was using to balance myself as I stepped into Ellen’s maillot. I looked into the mirror and smoothed my hands over the places where my bust did not fill up the cups and where the material strained at my waist, thicker because of Max. I wasn’t the slightest bit like Ellen.

In the corner of the mirror I saw Jake come to stand in the doorway. His eyes lingered on my hands as I traced them over my body, lost and unnatural in his wife’s clothing. Then he looked up and held my reflection, as if he was trying to say something but could not find the words. I turned away to break the spell, and put my hand on the serpent’s carved neck. “This is some bed,” I said.

Jake laughed. “Ellen’s mom gave it to us as a wedding gift. She hates me. I think this was her way of telling me to go to hell.” He walked to a chipped armoire in the corner of the room and took out a T-shirt, tossing it to me. It hung to the middle of my thighs. “You all set?” he said, but he was already leaving.

Jake and I parked in the lot for a private golf club and walked beneath the highway overpass to the shores of Lake Michigan. He had pulled the wicker basket and a cooler of be th‘€†er out of the trunk, and as I was about to lock it up, I pulled out my sketch pad and conté sticks on impulse.

In early July, the lake was still cold, but the humidity and the heat rolling off its surface softened the shock of wading in. My ankles throbbed and then little by little became numb. Jake splashed by me, diving in headfirst. He surfaced about six feet away and tossed his hair, spraying me with tiny iced drops that made my breath catch. “You’re a wimp, Flea,” he said. “You move out East and look what happens.”

I thought about Memorial Day the year before, when it was unseasonably hot and I had begged Nicholas to take me to the beach in Newburyport. I’d waded into the water, ready to swim. The ocean was no more than fifty degrees, and Nicholas had laughed and said it never gets swimmable until the end of August. He’d practically carried me back up the beach, and then he held his warm hands over my ankles until my teeth stopped chattering.

Jake and I were the only ones on the beach, because it was barely nine in the morning. We had the whole lake to ourselves. Jake did the butterfly and then the backstroke, and he purposely came close so that he’d splash me. “I think you should move back here permanently,” he said. “What the hell. Maybe I’ll just never go back to work.”

I sank into the water. “Isn’t that the beauty of being the owner, though? You can delegate responsibility and walk away and still make a profit.”

Jake dove under and stayed there for so long I began to get worried. “Jake,” I whispered. I splashed around with my hands to clear the deep water. “Jake!”

He grabbed my foot and pulled hard, and I didn’t even have a chance to take a breath before I went under.

I came to the surface, sputtering and shivering, and Jake smiled at me from several feet away. “I’m going to kill you,” I said.

Jake dipped his lips to the water and then stood up and spurted a fountain. “You could,” he said, “but then you’d have to get wet again.” He turned and started to swim farther away from the shore. I took a deep breath and went after him. He had always been a better swimmer; I was out of breath by the time I reached him. Gasping, I grabbed at his bathing suit and then at the slippery skin of his back. Jake treaded water with one hand and held me under the armpit with the other. He was winded too. “Are you okay?” he said, running his eyes over my face and the cords of my neck.

I nodded; I couldn’t really speak. Jake supported both of us until my breathing came slow and even. I looked down at his hand. His thumb was pressed so tightly against my skin that I knew it would leave a mark. The straps of Ellen’s bathing suit, too long to begin with, had fallen off my shoulders, and the fabric sagged, leaving a clear line of vision down my chest. Jake pulled me closer, scissor-kicking between my own legs, and he kissed me.

It was no more than a touch of our lips, but I pushed away from Jake and began swimming as hard as I could back to the shore, terrified. It was not what he had done that scared me so; it was what was missing. There had been no fire, no brutal passion, n aw‘€†othing like what I remembered. There had been only the quiet beat of our pulses and the steady lap of the lake.

I was not upset that Jake was no longer in love with me; I’d known that since the day I took a bus east and started my second life. But I had always wondered What if?, even after I was married. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Nicholas; I just assumed a little piece of me would always love Jake. And maybe that was what had me so shaken: I knew now that there was no holding on to the past. I was tied, and always would be, to Nicholas.

I lay down on the towel Jake had brought and pretended to be asleep when he came out of the water and dripped over me. I did not move, although I wanted to sprint miles down the beach, tearing over the hot sand until I couldn’t breathe. Running through my mind were the words of Eddie Savoy: I’m gonna start with the scraps of the truth. I was starting to see that the past might color the future, but it didn’t determine it. And if I could believe that, it was much easier to let go of what I’d done wrong.

When Jake’s steady breathing told me he had fallen asleep, I sat up and opened my sketch pad to a fresh page. I picked up my conté stick and drew his high cheekbones, the flush of summer across his brow, the gold stubble above his upper lip. There were so many differences between Jake and Nicholas. Jake’s features held a quiet energy; Nicholas’s had power. I had waited forever for Jake; I got Nicholas in a matter of days. When I pictured Jake I saw him standing beside me, at eye level, although he really had half a head on me. Nicholas, though-well, Nicholas had always seemed to me to be twenty feet tall.

Nicholas had come into my life on a white stallion, had handed me his heart, and had offered me the palace and the ball gown and the gold ring. He had given me what every little girl wanted, what I had long given up hope of having. He could not be blamed just because no one ever mentioned that once you closed the storybook, Cinderella still had to do laundry and clean the toilet and take care of the crown prince.

An image of Max flooded the space in front of me. His eyes were wide open as he rolled from belly to back, and a smile split his face in two when he realized he was seeing the world from a whole different angle. I was beginning to understand the wonder in that, and it was better late than never. I stared at Jake, and I knew what was the greatest difference: with Jake I had taken a life; with Nicholas I had created one.

Jake opened his eyes one at a time just as I was finishing his portrait. He turned onto his side. “Paige,” he said, looking down, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

I looked squarely at him. “Yes, you should have. It’s okay.” Now that his eyes were open, I sketched in his pale, glowing pupils and the tiger’s stripe of gold around them.

“I had to make sure,” he said. “I just had to make sure.” Jake tipped down the edge of my pad so that he could see. “You’ve gotten so much better,” he said. He ran his fingers along the edge of the charcoal, too light to smudge.

“I’ve just gotten older,” I said. “I guess I’ve seen more.” Together we stared at the penciled lines of surprise he ‘€†in his eyes, the beating heat of the sun reflecting off the white page. He took my hand and touched my fingers to a spot on the paper where damp curls met the nape of his neck. There I had drawn, in silhouette, a couple embracing. In the distance, reaching toward the woman, was a man who looked like Nicholas; reaching toward the man was a girl with Ellen’s face.

“It worked out the way it should have,” Jake said.

He put his hand on my shoulder, and all I felt was comfort. “Yes,” I murmured. “It has.”

We sat on Eddie Savoy’s throw pillows, poring through a soiled manila folder that pieced together the past twenty years of my mother’s life. “Piece of cake,” Eddie said, picking his teeth with a letter opener. “Once I figured out who she was, she was a cinch to track down.”

My mother had left Chicago under the name Lily Rubens. Lily had died three days before; my mother had written the obituary for the Tribune. She was twenty-five, and she’d died-according to my mother’s words-of a long, painful illness. My mother had copies of her Social Security card, driver’s license, even a birth certificate from the Glenwood Town Hall. My mother had not gone to Hollywood. She’d somehow gotten to Wyoming, where she’d worked for Billy DeLite’s Wild West Show. She had been a saloon dancer until Billy DeLite himself spotted her cancan and talked her into playing Calamity Jane. According to Billy’s fax, she’d taken to riding and target shooting as if she’d been doing it since she was a tadpole. Five years later, in 1977, she disappeared in the middle of the night with the most talented rodeo cowboy in the Wild West show and most of the previous day’s earnings.

Eddie’s records blanked out here for a while, but they picked up again in Washington, D.C., where my mother worked for a while doing telemarketing surveys for consumer magazines. She saved up enough commission money to buy a horse from a man named Charles Crackers, and because she was living in a Chevy Chase condo at the time, she boarded the horse at his stable and came to ride three times a week.

The pages went on to record my mother’s move from Chevy Chase to Rockville, Maryland, and then a switch of jobs, including a brief stint at a Democratic senator’s campaign office. When the senator didn’t win reelection, she sold her horse and bought a plane ticket to Chicago, which she did not use at the time.

In fact, she hadn’t traveled for pleasure at all over the past twenty years, except once. On June 10, 1985, she did come to Chicago. She stayed at the Sheraton and signed in as Lily Rubens. Eddie watched over my shoulder as I read that part. “What happened on June tenth?” he said.

I turned to Jake. “My high school graduation.” I tried to remember every detail: the white gowns and caps all the girls of Pope Pius had worn, the blazing heat of the sun burning the metal rims of our folding chairs, Father Draher’s commencement address about serving God in a sinful world. I tried to see the hazy faces of the audience seated on the bleachers of the playing field, but it had been too long ago. The day after graduation, I left home. My mother had come back to see me grow up, and she had almost missed me.

Eddie Savoy waited until I came to the last page of the report. “She’s been here for the last eight years,” he said, pointing to the circle on the map of North Carolina. “Farleyville. I couldn’t get no address, though, not in her name, and there ain’t a phone listing. But this here’s the last recorded place of employment. It was five years ago, but something tells me that in a town no bigger than a toilet stall, you ain’t gonna have any trouble tracking her down.” I looked at the scribbled humps of Eddie’s shorthand. He grimaced and then sat down behind his low desk. He held out a piece of ripped paper on which he’d written “Bridal Bits” and a phone number. “It’s some boutique, I guess,” he said. “They knew her real well.”

I thought about my mother, apparently single except for that rodeo cowboy, and wondered what would compel her to move to the hills of North Carolina to work in a bridal salon. I imagined her walking around the tufts of Alençon lace, the thin blue garters and the satin beaded pumps, touching them as if she had a right to wear them. When I looked up, Jake was pumping Eddie Savoy’s hand. I dug into my wallet and pulled out his four-hundred-dollar fee, but Eddie shook his head. “It’s already been taken care of,” he said. Jake led me outside and didn’t say a word as we settled into our respective seats in my car. I drove slowly down the rutted road that led to Eddie’s, spraying bits of gravel left and right and flustering the chickens that had gathered in front of the fender. I pulled over less than a hundred yards from Eddie’s and put my head down on the steering wheel to cry.

Jake pulled me into his arms, awkwardly twisting my body around the center console. “Now what do I do?” I said.

He ran his hands over my ponytail, tugging just a little. “You go to Farleyville, North Carolina,” he said.

Finding her had been the easy part. I was terrified of meeting my mother, a woman I’d remade in the image of myself. I didn’t know what was worse: stirring up memories that might make me hate her at first sight, or finding out that I was exactly like her, destined to keep running, too unsure of myself to be somebody’s mother. That was the risk I was taking. In spite of what I had promised myself or pleaded to Nicholas, if I really had turned out like May O’Toole, I might never feel whole enough to go home.

I looked up at Jake, and the message was clear in my eyes. He smiled gently. “You’re on your own now.”

I remembered the last time he’d said that to me, silently, in slightly different words. I lifted my chin, resolved. “Not for long,” I said.

chapter 24

When her voice came over the line, crackling at the edges, the bottom dropped out of Nicholas’s world. “Hello, Nicholas,” Paige said. “How are you?”

Nicholas had been changing Max, and he had carried him to the phone in the kitchen with his snaps all undone. He placed the baby on the kitchen table, cradling his head on a stack of napkins. At the cadence of his wife’s voice, he had suddenly becohatnter"andme very still. It was as if the air had stopped circulating, as if the only motion was the quick kick of Max’s legs and the insistent pounding of blood behind Nicholas’s ears. Nicholas tucked the phone in the crook of his neck and laid the baby facedown on the linoleum. He pulled the cord as far as it could stretch. “Are you calling to apologize to me?”

When she didn’t answer at first, his mouth became dry. What if she was in trouble? He had cut off her money. What if she’d had a problem with the car, had had to hitchhike, was running away from some lunatic with a knife? “I’m in Chicago,” Paige said. “I’m going to find my mother.”

Nicholas ran his hand through his hair and almost laughed. This was a joke. This did not happen to real people. This was something you’d see on the Sunday Movie of the Week or read about in a True Confessions magazine. He had always known that Paige was haunted by her mother; she was so guarded when speaking about her that she gave herself away. But why now?

When she didn’t say anything, Nicholas stared out the tiny kitchen window and wondered what Paige was wearing. He pictured her hair, loose and framing her face, rich with the colors of autumn. He saw the ragged pink tips of her bitten fingernails and the tiny indentation at the base of her neck. He opened the refrigerator and let the cool gust of air clear her image from his mind. He did not care. He simply would not let himself.

When he heard her ask about Max, his anger started to boil again. “Apparently you don’t give a damn,” he said, and he walked back toward Max, planning to slam down the phone. She was babbling about how long she’d been away from Chicago, and suddenly Nicholas was so tired he could not stand. He sank into the nearest chair and thought of how today could possibly have been the worst day of his life. “Let me tell you what I did today, dear,” Nicholas said, biting off each word as if it were a bitter morsel. “After getting up with Max three times during the night, I took him to the hospital this morning. I had a quadruple bypass scheduled, which I almost didn’t complete because I couldn’t stay on my feet.” He spit out the rest of his words, barely even hearing them himself. “Someone could have died because of your need for a-what did you call it?-a vacation.” He held the receiver away from his mouth. “Paige,” he said softly, “I don’t want to see your face again.” And closing his eyes, he put the phone back in its cradle.

When the phone rang again, minutes later, Nicholas picked it up and yelled right into it, “Goddammit, I’m not going to say it again.”

He paused long enough to catch his breath, long enough for Alistair Fogerty’s control to snap on the other end of the line. The sharp edge of his voice made Nicholas take a step backward. “Six o’clock, Nicholas. In my office.” And he hung up.

By the time Nicholas drove back to the hospital, he had a splitting headache. He had forgotten to bring a pacifier, and Max had yelled the entire way. He trudged up the stairs to the fifth floor, the administrative wing, because the elevator from the parking garage was broken. Fogerty was in his office, systematically spitting into the spider plants that edged his window. “Nicholas,” he said, “and, of course, Max. How could I forget? Everywhere Dr. Prescott goes, the little Prescott isn’t far behind.”

Nicholas continued to look at the potted plant that Alistair had been leaning over. “Oh,” Fogerty said, dismissing his actions with a wave of his hand. “It’s nothing. For unexplained reasons, my office flora react favorably to sadism.” He stared at Nicholas with the predatory eyes of a hawk. “What we are here to talk about, however, is not me, Nicholas, but you.”

Nicholas had not known what he was going to say until that moment. But before Alistair could open his mouth about the hospital not being a day care facility to meet Nicholas’s whims, he sat in a chair and settled Max more comfortably on his lap. He didn’t give a damn about what Alistair had to tell him. The son of a bitch didn’t have a heart. “I’m glad you wanted to see me, Alistair,” he said, “since I’ll be taking a leave of absence.”

“A what?” Fogerty stood and moved closer to Nicholas. Max giggled and reached out his hand toward the pen in Fogerty’s lab coat pocket.

“A week should do it. I can have Joyce reschedule my planned surgeries; I’ll double up the next week if I have to. And the emergencies can be handled by the residents. What’s-his-name, that little skunky one with the black eyes-Wollachek-he’s decent. I won’t expect pay, of course. And”-Nicholas smiled-“I’ll come back better than ever.”

“Without the infant,” Fogerty added.

Nicholas bounced Max on his knee. “Without the infant.”

Saying it all out loud lifted a tremendous pressure from Nicholas’s chest. He had no idea what he’d do in the span of a week, but surely he could find a nanny or a full-time sitter to stay in the house. At the very least, he could figure Max out-which cry meant he was hungry and which meant he was tired; how to keep his undershirts from riding up to his armpits; how to open the portable stroller. Nicholas knew he was grinning like an idiot, and he didn’t give a damn. For the first time in three days, he felt on top of the world.

Fogerty’s mouth contorted into a black, wiry line. “This will not reflect well upon your record,” he said. “I had expected more from you.”

I had expected more from you. The words brought back the image of his father, standing over him like an impenetrable basilisk and holding out a prep school physics exam bearing the only grade lower than an A that Nicholas had received in his whole life.

Nicholas grabbed Max’s leg so tightly that the baby started to cry. “I’m not a goddamned machine, Alistair,” he yelled. “I can’t do it all.” He tossed the diaper bag over his shoulder and walked to the threshold of the office. ALISTAIR FOGERTY, it said on the door. DIRECTOR, CARDIOTHORACIC SURGERY. Maybe Nicholas’s name would never make it to that door, but that wasn’t going to change his mind. You couldn’t put the cart before the horse. “I’ll see you,” he said quietly, “in a week.”

Nicholas sat in the park, surrounded by mothers. It was the third day he’d come, and he was triumphant. Not only had he discovered how to open the portable sidn¡€†troller; he’d figured out a way to hook on the diaper bag so that even when he lifted Max out, it wouldn’t tip over. Max was too little to go into the sandbox with the other kids, but he seemed to like the sturdy infant swings. Nikki, a pretty blond woman with legs that went on forever, smiled up at him. “And how’s our little Max doing today?” she said.

Nicholas didn’t understand why Paige wasn’t like these three women. They all met in the park at the same time and talked ani matedly about stretch marks and sales on diapers and the latest gastrointestinal viruses running through the day care centers. Two of them were on maternity leave, and one was staying home with the kids until they went to school. Nicholas was fascinated by them. They could see with the backs of their heads, knowing by instinct when their kid had swatted another in the face. They could pick out their own child’s cry from a dozen others. They effortlessly juggled bottles and jackets and bibs, and their babies’ pacifiers never fell to the dirt. These were skills, Nicholas believed, that he could never learn in a million years.

The first day he’d brought Max, he had been sitting alone on a chipped green bench, watching the women across the way spoon sand over the bare legs of the toddlers. Judy had spoken to him first. “We don’t get many dads,” she had said. “And never on weekdays.”

“I’m on vacation,” Nicholas had replied uncomfortably. Max then let forth a burp that shook his entire body, and everyone laughed.

That first day, Judy and Nikki and Fay had set him straight about day care and nanny services. “You can’t buy good help these days,” Fay had said. “A British nanny-and that’s the one you want-they take six months to a year to get. And even so, didn’t you see Donahue? The ones with the highest references could still drop your kid on the head or abuse her or God knows what.”

Judy, who was going back to work in a month, had found a day care center when she was six months pregnant. “And even then,” she had said, “I was only on a waiting list.”

And so Nicholas’s week was almost up, and he still didn’t know what to do with the baby when Monday came. On the other hand, it had been worth it-these women had taught him more about his own son in the span of three days than he had ever hoped to know. When Nicholas went home from the park, he almost felt as if he was in control.

Nicholas pushed Max higher on the swing, but he was whining. He’d been crabby for the past three days. “I called your baby-sitter,” he told Nikki, “but she’s got a summer job as a counselor and said she can’t sit for me until the end of August, when camp lets out.”

“Well, I’ll keep asking around for you,” Nikki said. “I bet you can find somebody.” Her little girl, a thirteen-month-old with wispy strawberry-blond bangs, fell on her face in the sandbox and came up crying. “Oh, Jessica.” Nikki sighed. “You’ve got to figure out this walking thing.”

He liked Nikki best. She was funny and smart, and she made being a mother seem as easy as chewing gum. Nicholas pulled Max out of the swing and sat down on the edge of the sandbox, letting Max squish the sand through his toes. Max looked up at Judy and began to scream. Shent.¡€† held out her hands. “Let me,” she said.

Nicholas nodded, secretly thrilled. He was amazed when people asked to hold the baby. He would have given him to a complete stranger, the way he’d been acting these past few days; that’s how big a relief it was to see him in someone else’s arms. Nicholas traced his initials in the soft, cool sand and, from the corner of his eye, watched Max perched over Judy’s shoulder.

“I fed him cereal for the first time yesterday,” Nicholas said. “I did it the way you said, mostly formula, but he kept pushing out his tongue like he couldn’t figure out what a spoon was. And no matter what you told me, he did not sleep through the night.”

Fay smiled. “Wait till he’s having more than a teaspoon a day,” she said. “Then come back so I can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

Judy walked toward them, still bouncing Max. “You know, Nich olas, you’ve really come along. Hell, if you were my husband, I’d kiss your feet. Imagine having someone who could take care of the kids and not ask every three minutes why they’re crying.” She leaned close to Nicholas and batted her eyelashes, smiling. “You give me a sign, and I’ll get a divorce lawyer.”

Nicholas smiled, and the women fell quiet, watching their children overturn plastic buckets and build free-form castles. “Tell me if this bothers you,” Nikki said hesitantly. “I mean, we haven’t really known you very long, and we barely know anything about you, but I have this friend who’s divorced, with a kid. and I was wondering if sometime you might… you know…

“I’m married.” The words came so quickly to Nicholas’s lips that they surprised him more than the mothers. Fay, Judy, and Nikki exchanged a look. “My wife… she isn’t around.”

Fay smoothed her hand over the edge of the sandbox. “We’re sorry to hear that,” she said, assuming the worst.

“She’s not dead,” Nicholas said. “She sort of left.”

Judy came to stand behind Fay. “She left?”

Nicholas nodded. “She took off about a week ago. She, well, she wasn’t very good at this-not like you all are-and she was a little overwhelmed, I think, and she cracked under the pressure.” He looked at their blank faces, wondering why he felt he had to make explanations for Paige when he himself couldn’t forgive her. “She never had a mother,” he said.

“Everyone has a mother,” Fay said. “That’s the way it happens.”

“Hers left her when she was five. Last I heard, actually, she was trying to find her. Like that might give her all the answers.”

Fay pulled her son toward her and restrapped the hanging front of his overalls. “Answers, jeez. There aren’t any answers. You should have seen me when he was three months old,” she said lightly. “I had scared away all my friends, and I was almost declared legally dead by my family doctor.”

Nikki sucked in her breath and stared at Nicholas, her eyes wide and liquid with pity. “Still,” she whispered, “to leave your own child.”

Nicholas felt the silence crowding in on him. He didn’t want their stares; he didn’t want their sympathy. He looked at the toddlers, wishing for one of them to start crying, just to break the moment. Even Max was being quiet.

Judy sat down beside Nicholas and balanced Max on her lap. She touched Nicholas’s wrist and lifted his hand to the baby’s mouth. “I think I’ve found out what’s making him such a monster,” she said gently. “There.” She pressed Nicholas’s finger to the bottom of Max’s gums, where a sharp triangle of white bit into his flesh.

Fay and Nikki crowded closer, eager to change the subject. “A tooth!” Fay said, as animated as if Max had been accepted to Harvard; and Nikki added, “He’s just over three months, right? That’s awfully early. He’s in a hurry to grow up; I bet he crawls soon.” Nicholas stared at the downy crown of black hair on his son’s head. He pressed down with his finger, letting Max bite back with his jaws, with his brand-new tooth. He looked up at the sky, a day without clouds, and then let the women run their fingers over Max’s gums… Paige would have wanted to be here, he thought suddenly, and then he felt anger searing through him like a brush fire. Paige should have wanted to be here.

chapter 25

I had never been there, but this was the way I had pictured Ireland from my father’s stories. Rich, rolling hills the deep green of emeralds; grass thicker than a plush rug, farms notched into the slopes and bordered by sturdy stone walls. Several times I stopped the car, to drink from streams cleaner and colder than I had ever imagined possible. I could hear my father’s brogue in the cascade and the current, and I could not believe the irony: my mother had run away to the North Carolina countryside, a land my father would have loved.

If I hadn’t known better, I would have assumed the hills were virgin territory. Paved roads were the only sign that anyone else had been here, and in the three hours I’d been driving across the state, I hadn’t passed a single car. I had rolled down all the windows so that the air could rush into my lungs. It was crisper than the air in Chicago, lighter than the air in Cambridge. I felt as if I were drinking in the endless open space, and I could see how, out here, someone could easily get lost.

Since leaving Chicago, I had been thinking only of my mother. I ran through every solid memory I’d ever had and froze each of them in my mind like an image from a slide projector, hoping to see something I hadn’t noticed before. I couldn’t come up with an image of her face. It drifted in and out of shadows.

My father had said I looked like her, but it had been twenty years since he’d seen her and eight since he’d seen me, so he might have been mistaken. I knew from her clothes that she was taller and thinner. I knew from Eddie Savoy how she’d spent the past two decades. But I still didn’t think I’d be able to spot her in a crowd.

The more I drove, the more I remembered about my mother. I remembered how she tried to get ahead of herself, making all my lunches for the week on Sunday night and stowing them in the freezer, so that my bologna and my turkey and my Friday tuna fish were never fully thawed by the time I ate them. I remembered that when I was four and got the mumps on only the right side of my face, my mother had fed me half-full cups of Jell-o and kept me in bed half the day, telling me that after all, I was half healthy. I remembered the dreary day in March when we were both worn down by the sleet and the cold, and she had baked a devil’s food cake and made glittery party hats, and together we celebrated Nobody’s birthday. I remembered the time she was in a car accident, how I had come downstairs at midnight to a room full of policemen and found her lying on the couch, one eye swollen shut and a gash over her lip, her arms reaching out to hold me.

Then I remembered the March before she left, Ash Wednesday. In kindergarten, we had a half day of school, but the Tribune was still open. My mother could have hired the baby-sitter to take care of me until she came home, or told me to wait next door at the Manzettis’. But instead she’d come up with the idea that we would go out to lunch and then make afternoon Mass. She had announced this over the dinner table and told my father that I was smart enough to take the bus all by myself. My father stared at her, not believing what he had heard, and then finally he grabbed my mother’s hand and pressed it to the table, hard, as if he could make her see the truth through the pain. “No, May,” he’d said, “she’s too young.”

But well after midnight, the door to my room opened, and in the slice of light that fell across my bed I saw the shadow of my mother. She came in and sat in the dark and pressed into my hand twenty cents, bus fare. She held out a route map and a flashlight and made me repeat after her: Michigan and Van Buren Street, the downtown local. One, two, three, four stops, and Mommy will be there. I said it over and over until it was as familiar as my bedtime prayers. My mother left the room and let me go to sleep. At four in the morning, I awoke to find her face inches away from mine, her breath hot against my lips. “Say it,” she commanded, and my mouth formed the words that my brain could not hear, stuffed as it was with sleep. Michigan and Van Buren Street, I murmured. The downtown local. I opened my eyes wide, surprised by how well I had learned. “That’s my girl,” my mother said, cupping my cheeks in her hands. She pressed a finger to my lips. “And don’t tell your daddy,” she whispered.

Even I knew the value of a secret. Through breakfast, I avoided my father’s gaze. When my mother dropped me off at the school gates, her eyes flashed, feverish. For a moment she looked so different that I thought of Sister Alberta’s lectures on the devil. “What’s it all for,” my mother said to me, “without the risk?” And I had pressed my face against hers to kiss her goodbye the way I always did, but this time I whispered against her cheek: One, two, three, four stops. And you’ll be there.

I had swung my feet back and forth under my chair that morning, and I colored in the pictures of Jesus outside the lines because I was so excited. When Sister let us out at the bell, blessing us in a stream of rushed words, I turned to the left, the direction I never went. I walked until I came to the corner of Michigan and Van Buren and saw the pharmacy my mother had said would be there. I stood underneath the Metro sign, and when the big bus sighed int he±€†o place beside the curb, I asked the driver, “Downtown local?”

He nodded and took my twenty cents, and I sat in the front seat as my mother had said, not looking beside me because there could be bums and bad men and even the devil himself. I could feel hot breath on my neck, and I squeezed my eyes shut, listening to the roll of the wheels and the lurch of the brakes and counting the stops. When the door opened for the fourth time, I bolted from my seat, peeking into the one beside mine just that once, to see only blue vinyl and the lacy grate of the air conditioner. I stepped off the bus and waited for the knot of people to clear, shielding my eyes from the sun. My mother knelt, her arms open, her smile red and laughing and wide. “Paige-boy,” she said, folding me into her purple raincoat. “I knew you’d come.”

I had asked a man with spare tufts of gray hair, who’d been sitting on a milk can at the side of the road, if he’d heard of Farleyville. “Yuh,” he said, pointing in front of me. “You almost there now.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe you’ve heard of a salon called Bridal Bits?”

The man scratched his chest through his worn chambray shirt. He laughed, and he had no teeth. “A sa-lon,” he said, mocking my words. “I don’t know ’bout that.”

The corners of my mouth turned down. “Could you just tell me where it is?”

The man grinned at me. “If it be the same place I’m thinking of, and I’m bettin’ it ain‘t, then you want to take the first right at the ’baccy field and keep goin’ till you see a bait shop. It’s three miles past that, on the left.” He shook his head as I stepped back into the car. “You said Farleyville,” he said, “di‘n’t you?”,

I followed his directions, messing up only once, and that was because I couldn’t tell a tobacco from a corn field. The bait shop was nothing but a shack with a crude fish painted on a wooden sign in front of it, and I wondered why people would come all the way out here to buy wedding gowns. Surely Raleigh would be a better place. I wondered if my mother’s shop was secondhand or wholesale, how it could even stay in business.

The only building three miles down on the left was a neat pink cement-block square, without a sign to herald it. I stepped out of the car and pulled at the front door, but it was locked. The big show window was partially lit by the setting sun, which had come up behind me as I drove, to wash over the tops of the tobacco plants like hot lava. I peered inside, looking for a seed-pearl headpiece or a fairy-tale princess’s gown. I couldn’t see beyond the showcase itself, and it took me a minute to realize that set proudly behind the glass was a finely stitched saddle with gleaming stirrups, a furry halter, a spread wool blanket with the woven silhouette of a stallion. I squinted and then I moved back to the door, to the handwritten sign I hadn’t noticed the first time. BRIDLES & BITS, it said. CLOSED.

I sank to the ground in front of the threshold and drew up my knees. I rested my head against them. All this time, all these miles, and I’d come for nothing. My thoughts came in waves: my mother wasn’t working her up±€†e; she was supposed to be at a completely different kind of store; I was going to have Eddie Savoy’s head. Pink clouds stretched across the sky like fingers, and at that moment the final streak of sun left in the day lit the inside of the tack shop. I had a clear view of the mural on the ceiling. It matched like a twin the ceiling I remembered, the one I’d painted with my mother and had lain beneath for hours, hoping that those fast-flying horses might champion us far away.

chapter 26

A strid Prescott was sure she was seeing a ghost. Her hand was still frozen on the brass door handle where she’d pulled it open, silently cursing because Imelda had disappeared in search of the silver polish and so Astrid had been disturbed from her study. And consequently she’d come face-to-face with the same ghost that had haunted her for weeks, after making it perfectly clear that the past was not to be forgiven. Astrid shook her head slightly. Unless she was imagining it, standing on the threshold were Nicholas and a black-haired baby, both of them frowning, both of them looking like they might break down and cry.

“Come in,” Astrid said smoothly, as if she’d seen Nicholas more than once during the past eight years. She reached toward the baby, but Nicholas shrugged the diaper bag off his shoulder and gave it to her instead.

Nicholas took three resounding steps into the marble hall. “You should know,” he said, “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t at the end of my rope.”

Nicholas had been awake most of the night, trying to come up with an alternate plan. He’d been on unpaid leave for a full week, and in spite of his best efforts, he hadn’t found quality day care for his son. The British nanny service had laughed when he said he needed a woman within six days. He had almost hired a Swiss au pair-going so far as to leave her with the baby while he went grocery shopping-but he’d returned home to find Max wailing in his playpen while the girl entertained some biker boyfriend in the living room. The reputable child care centers had waiting lists until 1995; he didn’t trust the teenage daughters of his neighbors who were looking for summer employment. Nicholas knew that if he was going to return to Mass General as scheduled, the only option open to him was to swallow his pride and go back to his parents for help.

He knew his mother wouldn’t turn him away. He’d seen her face when he’d first told her of Max. He’d lay odds she kept the photo of Max-the one he had left behind-right in her wallet. Nicholas pushed past his mother into the parlor, the same room he’d pulled Paige from indignantly eight years before. He found his eyes roaming over the damask upholstery, the burnished wood tables. He waited for his mother’s questions, and then the accusations. What had his parents been able to see that he’d been so blind to?

He put Max down on the rug and watched him roll over and over until he landed beneath the sofa, reaching for a thin carved leg. Astrid hovered uneasily at the door for a moment and then put on her widest diplomat’s smile. She had charmed Idi Amin into granting her free press access to Uganda; surely this couldn’t be any more difficult. She sat down on a Louis XIV love seat, which afforded her the best view of Max. “It’s so good to see you, N wi to l chicholas,” she said. “You’ll be staying for lunch?”

Nicholas did not take his eyes off his son. Astrid watched her son, too large for the chair he sat upon, and realized he did not look right in this room at all. She wondered when that had happened. Nicholas shifted his gaze to his mother, a challenge. “Are you busy?” he asked.

Astrid thought about the photographs spread across her study, the old Ladakhi women with heavy feather necklaces, the bare brown children playing tag in front of ancient Buddhist monasteries. She had been writing the introduction to her latest book of photos, centering on the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. She was three days late on her deadline already, and her editor was going to call first thing Monday morning to badger her again. “As a matter of fact,” Astrid said, “I haven’t a thing to do all day.”

Nicholas sighed so gently that even his mother did not notice. He sank against the stiff frame of the chair, thinking of the blue-and-white-striped overstuffed love seats Paige had found at a fire sale for the living room in their old apartment. She had sweet-talked a drummer she met on the street outside the diner into helping her bring the couches home in his van, and then she spent three weeks asking Nicholas whether they were too much sofa for such a little room. Look at those elephant legs, she had said. Aren’t they all wrong? “I need your help,” Nicholas said softly.

Whatever hesitation Astrid might still have had, whatever warnings she had been trying to heed to go slowly, all of that shattered when Nicholas spoke. She stood and walked over to her son. Silently, she folded him in her arms and rocked back and forth. She had not held Nicholas like this since he was thirteen and had taken her aside after she’d embraced him at a school soccer match and told her he was too old for that.

Nicholas did not try to push her away. His arms came up to press against the small of her back; and he closed his eyes and wondered where his mother, brought up with afternoon tea parties and Junior League balls, had got all her courage.

Astrid brought iced coffee and a cinnamon ring and let Nicholas eat, while she kept Max from chewing on the fireplace tools and loose electrical cords. “I don’t understand,” she said, smiling down at Max. “How could she have left?”

Nicholas tried to remember a time when he would have defended Paige to the end, railed at his mother and his father, and sacrificed his right arm before letting them criticize his wife. He opened his mouth to make an excuse, but he could not think of one. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.” He ran his finger around the edge of his glass. “I can’t even tell you what the hell she was thinking, to be honest. It’s like she had this whole different agenda that she never bothered to mention to me. She could have said something. I would have-” Nicholas broke off. He would have what? Helped her? Listened?

“You wouldn’t have done a damn thing, Nicholas,” Astrid said pointedly. “You’re just like your father. When I fly off for a shoot, it takes him three days to notice I’m gone.”

“This isn’t my fault,” Nicholas shouted. “Don’t blame this on me.”

Astrid shrugged. “You’re putting words in my mouth. I was only wondering what reasons Paige gave you, if she’s planning on coming back, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t give a damn,” Nicholas muttered.

“Of course you do,” Astrid said. She picked up Max and bounced him on her lap. “You’re just like your father.”

Nicholas put his glass down on the table, taking a small amount of satisfaction in the fact that there was no coaster and that it would leave a ring. “But you aren’t like Paige,” he said, “You would never have left your own child.”

Astrid pulled Max closer, and he began to suck on her pearls. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t think about it,” she said.

Nicholas stood abruptly and took the baby out of his mother’s arms. Nothing was going the way he had planned. His mother was supposed to have been so overwhelmed with gratitude to see Max that she wouldn’t ask these questions, that she would beg to watch her grandson for the day, the week, whatever. His mother was not supposed to make him think about Paige, was not supposed to take her goddamned side. “Forget it,” he said. “We’re going. I thought you’d be able to understand what I was getting at.”

Astrid blocked his exit. “Don’t be an idiot, Nicholas,” she said. “I know exactly what you’re getting at. I didn’t say Paige was right for leaving, I just said I’d considered it a couple of times myself. Now give me that gorgeous child and go fix hearts.”

Nicholas blinked. His mother pulled the baby out of his arms. He hadn’t told her his plan; hadn’t even mentioned that he needed her to baby-sit while he worked. Astrid, who had started to carry Max back to the parlor, turned around and stared at Nicholas. “I’m your mother,” she said by way of explanation. “I know how you think.”

Nicholas closed the top of the baby grand piano and spread out the plastic foam pad from the diaper bag, forming a makeshift changing table. “I use A &D on him,” he said to Astrid. “It keeps him from getting diaper rash, and powder dries out his skin.” He explained when Max ate, how much he took, the best way to keep him from spitting strained green beans back in your face. He brought in Max’s car seat/carrier and said it would work for a nap. He said that if Max decided to sleep at all, it would be between two and four.

He left Astrid his beeper number in case of emergency. She and Max walked him to the door. “Don’t worry,” she said, touching Nicholas’s sleeve. “I’ve done it before. And I did a damn good job.” She reached up to kiss Nicholas on the cheek, remembering the change in course her life had taken on the day her once-little son was able to look her in the eye.

Nicholas set off down the slate path, unencumbered. He did not turn back to wave to Max or even bother to kiss him goodbye. He rolled the muscles bunched in his shoulders from the cutting straps of the diaper bag and the uneven weight of an eighteen-pound baby. He was amazed at how much he knew about Max, how much he’d been able to tell his mother about the routii›mÁ€†ne. He began to whistle and was so proud of his accomplishments that he didn’t even think about Robert Prescott until he reached his car.

With his hand still touching the warm metal of the door handle, he turned back to face his mother. She and Max were standing in the doorway, dwarfed by the enormity of the house behind them. Meeting his mother had been fairly simple after all the tentative phone conversations. But in all that time, Robert Prescott hadn’t even been mentioned. Nicholas had no idea if his father would be thrilled to see the child who would carry on his name, or if he would disown Max as effortlessly as he had disowned his son. He had no idea what his father was like anymore. “What will Dad say?” he whispered.

His mother could not possibly have heard him at such a distance, but she seemed to understand his question. “I imagine,” she said, stepping into a neat square of the brilliant afternoon, “he’ll say, ‘Hello, Max.’ ”

Nothing could have surprised Nicholas more than the scene that met him when he arrived at his parents’ close to midnight to pick up the baby. Filling the parlor was a tumbled clutter of educational toys, a Porta-Crib, a playpen, a baby swing. A big green quilt with a dinosaur head sewn on to its corner was spread across the floor. A panda mobile replaced the trailing spider plant that had hung over the piano. Stacked on the piano, beside the foam pad Nicholas had placed there earlier for diapering, was the largest vat of A &D ointment Nicholas had ever seen and a carton of Pampers. And in the middle of it all was Nicholas’s father-taller than he remembered and thinner too, with a shock of now-white hair-asleep on the spindled sofa, with Max curled over his chest.

Nicholas drew in his breath. He had anticipated many things about this first meeting with his father: awkward silence, condescension, maybe even a shred of hate. But Nicholas had not expected his father to be so old.

He stepped back quietly to close the door to the room, but his foot tripped over a jangling terry-cloth ball. His father’s eyes opened, bright and alert. Robert Prescott did not sit up, knowing that would wake Max. But he did not tear his gaze away from his son.

Nicholas waited for his father to say something-anything. He remembered the first time he’d lost a crew race in high school, after a three-year winning streak. There had been seven other rowers in the boat, and Nicholas had known that the six-man wasn’t pulling hard during the power tens. In no way was it Nicholas’s fault the race was lost. But he had taken it that way, and when he met his father after the race, he had hung his head, waiting for the accusations. His father had said nothing, nothing at all, and Nicholas had always believed that stung more than any words his father could have uttered. “Dad,” Nicholas said quietly, “how’s he been?”

Not How have you been, not What have I missed in your life. Nicholas figured that if he kept the conversation limited to Max, the ache that rounded the bottom of his stomach might go away. He clenched his fists behind his back and looked into his father’s eyes. There were shadows there that Nicholas could not read, but there were also promises. Too much has happened; I will not bring it up, Robert seemed to say. And nt="Á€†either will you.

“You’ve done well,” Robert said, stroking Max’s hunched shoulders. Nicholas raised his eyebrows. “We never stopped asking questions about you, Nicholas,” he said gently. “We always kept tabs.”

Nicholas remembered Fogerty’s tight-lipped grin when he saw him enter the hospital today at noon without Max. “Oh,” he had bellowed past Nicholas in the hall. “Si sic omnia!” Then he had come up to Nicholas, paternally gripping his shoulders with a strong arm. “I take it, Dr. Prescott,” Fogerty said, “that you are once again of sound mind in sound body and that we won’t have a repeat of that ridiculous debacle.” Fogerty lowered his voice. “You are my protégé, Nicholas,” he said. “Don’t fuck up a sure thing.”

Nicholas’s father was well known in the Boston medical community; it wouldn’t have been hard for him to track his son’s quick rise in the cardiothoracic hierarchy at Mass General. Still, it unnerved Nicholas. He wondered what his father had asked. He wondered whom he had approached and who had been willing to answer.

Nicholas cleared his throat. “Was he good?” he repeated, gesturing toward Max.

“Ask your mother,” Robert said. “She’s in her darkroom.”

Nicholas walked down the corridor to the Blue Room, where the circular black-curtained entrance to his mother’s workplace was. He had just parted the first curtain when he felt the warm brush of his mother’s fingers. He jumped back.

“Oh, Nicholas,” Astrid said, pressing her hand to her throat. “I think I scared you as much as you scared me.” She was carrying two fresh prints, still smelling faintly of fixer. She waved them, one in each hand, helping them to dry.

“I saw Dad,” Nicholas said.

“And?”

Nicholas smiled. “And nothing.”

Astrid laid the two prints on a nearby table. “Yes,” she said, scanning them with her critical eyes, “it’s amazing how several years can soften even the hardest heads.” She stood up and groaned, kneading her hands into the small of her back. “Well, my grandson was as good as gold,” she said. “You noticed we went shopping? A wonderful baby store in Newton, and then I had to go to F. A. O. Schwarz. Max didn’t cry the whole time. Really rose to the occasion.”

Nicholas tried to imagine his son sitting quietly in his infant seat, watching the rush of colors fly past a car window, and stretching his arms toward the panorama of toys at F. A. O. Schwarz. But in his experience, Max had never gone more than an hour without pitching a fit. “Maybe it’s me,” he murmured.

“Did you say something?” Astrid said.

Nicholas pinched the bridge of his nose. It had not been an easy day: a quadruple bypass, and then he got word that his last heart transplant patient had rejected the organ. He had a val›

“I took some pictures of Max,” Nicholas heard his mother say. “Quite a good little subject-he likes the flash of the light meter. Here.” She thrust one of the photographs toward Nicholas.

He had never understood how his mother did it. He was too impatient for photography. He relied on an autofocus camera, and he could usually get a person’s image without cutting off the top of the head. But his mother not only recorded a moment; she also stole its soul. Max’s downy blue-black hair capped his head. One hand was held out in front of him, reaching toward the camera, and the other was draped across the gray plastic edge of his infant seat, devil-may-care. But it was his eyes that really made the picture. They were wide and amused, as if someone had just told him he was going to have to stay in this world for a good deal longer.

Nicholas was impressed. He had seen his mother capture the pain of grieving military widows, the horror of maimed Romanian orphans, even the rapture and calm piety of the Pope. But this time she had done something truly amazing: she had taken Nicholas’s own son and trapped him in time, so that at least here he would never grow up. “You’re so damn good,” he murmured.

Astrid laughed. “That’s what they tell me.”

Something twitched at the back of Nicholas’s mind. He had been just as impressed by Paige, by her haunted drawings and the secrets that spilled out of her like prophecies she couldn’t seem to control. Paige, like his mother, did not just capture an image. Paige drew directly from the heart.

“What is it?” Astrid asked. “You’re a million miles away.”

“It’s nothing,” Nicholas said. What had happened to Paige’s art stuff? He hadn’t been able to move three feet in the apartment without tripping over a spray fixative or crushing a box of charcoal. But Paige hadn’t really drawn in years. He had once complained because she’d hung her sketches over the curtain rod of the shower while the fixative was drying. He remembered watching her from behind, when she didn’t know he was there, marveling as her fingers flew over the smooth vanilla paper to coax images out of hiding.

Astrid held out the other photo she had carried from her darkroom. “Thought you might like this too,” she said. She passed him a candid portrait, and for a moment the dim light in the room caught only the white glare of the damp photographic paper. Then he realized he was staring at Paige.

She was sitting at a table, looking at something off to the left. It was a black-and-white, but Nicholas could clearly see the color of her hair. When he envisioned Cambridge, he pictured it as the shade of Paige’s hair-deep and rich, the red of generations.

“How did you get this?” he whispered. Paige’s hair was shorter here, just to her shoulders, not long as it had been when she’d met Astrid years before. This was a recent photo.

“I saw her once in Boston, and I couldn’t resie hÁ€†st. I took it with a telephoto lens. She never saw me.” Astrid moved closer to Nicholas and touched her finger to the top of the photograph. “Max has her eyes.”

Nicholas did not know why he hadn’t noticed it before; it was so obvious. It wasn’t the shape or the color as much as the demeanor. Like Max, Paige was looking at something Nicholas could not see. Like Max, her expression was one of blameless surprise, as if she had just been told she was going to have to stay for a while longer.

“Yes,” Astrid said, pulling the photo of Max to sit beside the one of Paige. “Definitely his mother’s eyes.”

Nicholas tucked the picture of Paige behind the one of Max. “Let’s hope,” he said, “that’s all he inherits from her.”

chapter 27

Fly By Night Farm was not really a farm at all. In fact, it was part of a larger complex called Pegasus Stables, and that was the only sign visible from the road. But when I had parked the car and wandered past the lazy stream and the dancing paddocked horses, I noticed the small carved maple plaque: FLY BY NIGHT. LILY RUBENS, PROPRIETOR.

That morning, the woman who owned the tack shop with my mother’s horses running across the ceiling had given me directions. My mother had painted the mural eight years before, when she first moved to Farleyville. She had traded her commission for a used saddle and something called draw reins. Lily was well known on the circuit, according to this woman. In fact, when people came for lesson referrals, she always pointed them toward Fly By Night.

I walked into the cool, dark stable, kicking at a tuft of straw with my feet. When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I found myself just inches away from a horse, its fermenting breath hot on my ear. I put my hand against the wire mesh gate that separated the horse’s stall from the main aisle of the stable. The horse whinnied, and its jaundiced teeth curved around the chain links, trying to bite at the flesh of my palm. As its lips brushed my skin, they left behind a green slime that smelled faintly of hay.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a voice said, and I whipped around. “But then again, I am you, and you are me, and that’s the beauty.” A kid no older than eighteen stood propped on a strange skinny rake beside a wheelbarrow piled with manure. He wore a T-shirt colored by a fading portrait of Nietzsche, and his dirty-blond hair was pulled away from his face. “Andy’s a biter,” he said, coming forward to stroke the horse’s nose.

He disappeared as quickly as he’d come, behind the cage door of a different stall. The barn was about half filled with horses, each of them different from the others. There was a chestnut, with hair the same shade as mine; a bay, with a coarse black mane. There was a white Thoroughbred, straight out of a fairy tale; and one tremendous, majestic horse hovering in the shadows, the color of a pitch-dark night.

I walked the length of the aisle, passing the boy, who was heaving wet tufts of hay into the wheelbarrow. It was I f D‡clear that my mother was not in this barn, and I sighed in relief. I turned to a small table at the end of the aisle. It held a wooden chest and-of all things-an Astrid Prescott photo desk calendar, opened to the current date. I ran my fingers over the misty image of Mount Kilimanjaro, wondering why my mother couldn’t have escaped the way Nicholas’s mother had-months at a time, but always with a promise to return. Sighing, I turned to the facing page. Neatly lettered beside the printed hours were female names: Brittany, Jane, Anastasia, Merleen. The handwriting was my mother’s.

I remembered it from before, although when she left I hadn’t been able to read it. I remembered the way her letters all sloped to the left, in spite of the fact that every other written word I’d ever seen leaned a little to the right. After all, that’s what the sisters taught me later in penmanship class. Even when she wrote, my mother bucked the system.

I did not know what I planned to do once I had found her. I did not have a speech ready. On the one hand, I wanted to stare her down and yell at her, one minute for every year since she’d left me. On the other hand, I wanted to touch her, to feel that the substance of her skin was as warm as mine. I wanted to believe I had grown up like her, in spite of the circumstances. I wanted this so badly it hurt, but I knew better than to hedge my bets. After all, I was not sure if, when it came down to it, I would throw myself into her arms or spit at her feet.

I became aware of the blood in my body, which surged down my arms, down my sides. When I remembered well enough how to move again, I pushed through the fear that hung like a net and walked to the boy in the stall. “Excuse me,” I said. “I don’t mean to bother you.”

He did not look up at me or break his rhythmic shoveling. “What are you,” he said, “but a speed bump on the autobahn of life?”

I did not know if he expected an answer, so I took a step into the stall, feeling the damp, soft hay give way under my heel. “I’m looking for Lily Rubens,” I said, trying out her name on my tongue. “I’ve come to see Lily Rubens.”

The boy shrugged. “She’s around,” he said. “Check the ring.”

The ring. The ring. I nodded to the boy’s back and walked down the stable’s aisle again, staring at the telephone tucked against the wall and waiting a moment for magic to happen. What did he mean by the ring?

I slipped out of the dark barn and stepped into such bright sun that for a moment the world was only white. Then I saw the brook, running on this side of the stable as well, and a big metal hangar that reminded me of a roller-skating rink in Skokie that had been turned into a flea market. Right beside the barn I had been in was another barn, and down the bend of a little hill was a third barn, built into the slope of a terraced field. There were two gravel paths, which split to either side of the hangar. One seemed to go across a field where a big horse was bucking, and the other sidelined the little brook. I took a deep breath and set off down that one.

The path forked again at a sturdy wooden fence. It either continued up a heathered hill or let you through a gate into a big oval littered with fences and bahayÑ€†rs and redwood barricades. Riding along the edge of the oval, toward me, was a woman on a horse. I could not see her face, but she was tall and thin and seemed to know what she was doing. The horse shook his head from left to right. “Jeez, Eddy,” she said as she came by me, “take it easy. Everyone’s got to deal with the bugs. You think you’ve got a monopoly on them?”

I listened carefully, trying to remember my mother’s voice, but I honestly wouldn’t have been able to pick it out from others. This could be my mother-if I could just see her face. But she had rounded the curve and was now riding away from me. The only other person there was a man, kind of short, wearing jeans and a big polo shirt and a tweed newsboy’s cap. I could not hear his voice, but he was calling out to the woman riding.

The woman kicked the horse, and he began flying around the edge of the track. He jumped a thick blue wall, and then another high rail, and suddenly he was coming a hundred miles an hour directly toward me. I could hear the heavy breath of the rider and see the flared nostrils of the horse as he thundered closer. He wasn’t going to stop. He was going to take the gate next, and I was right in his way.

I crouched down and covered my head with my arms just as the horse came to a dead halt inches in front of me. His heavy head was above the gate, his nose grazed my fingers. In the background, the man called something out. “Yes,” the woman said, looking down at me. “It was the best line yet, but I think we’ve scared someone half to death.” She smiled at me, and I could see that her hair was blond and her eyes were brown and that her shoulders were much wider than any I’d ever seen on a woman; that she wasn’t my mother at all.

I mumbled an apology and headed up the other fork of the path. It opened into a vast field that was sprinkled with buttercups and wild daisies, with grass growing higher than my thighs. Before I saw them, I heard the rhythm of their hooves-da da dum, da da dum-two horses tearing across the field as if they were being chased by the devil. They jumped a brook and ran up to the fenced edge of the pasture. They lowered their heads to graze, their tails switching back and forth in metronome time like the long swinging hair of exotic dancers.

By the time I returned, there was no one riding in the little oval. I headed back toward the barn where that boy had been, figuring I could ask for better directions. As I walked up the hill, I saw the man who had been calling out the things I couldn’t hear, holding tight to a thick leather strap that was clipped to Eddy’s halter. He held a dripping sponge in his other hand, but as soon as he touched it to Eddy’s flank, the horse twisted away violently. I kept my distance, half hidden. The man dripped the sponge over the horse’s back, and again it bucked to the left. The man dropped the sponge and lightly whipped the horse twice across the neck with the strap, then tucked it over the nose and through the muzzle of the halter. The horse quieted and bowed his head, and the man began to talk softly, running his hand over the horse’s spine.

I decided to ask this man about my mother, so I stepped forward. He put down the sponge and lifted his head, but his back was to me. “Excuse me,” I said quietly, and he spun around so fast that his hat came off and a thick tumble of dark-red hair fell down.

This was not a majumÑ€†n. This was my mother.

She was taller than I was, and leaner, and her skin was the color of honey. But her hair was like mine, and her eyes were like mine, and there was no mistaking it. “Oh, my God,” she said.

The horse snorted over her shoulder, and water dripped off his mane to form a puddle on my mother’s shirt. She did not seem to notice. “I’m Paige,” I said, stiffly, and impulsively I held out my hand to shake hers. “I’m, um, your daughter.”

My mother began to smile, and it melted her from her head to her feet, making her able to move again. “I know who you are,” she said. She did not take my hand. She shook her head and knotted her fingers around the leather lead. She fidgeted, scuffing the toes of her boots in the loose gravel. “Let me get rid of Eddy,” she said. She pulled on the lead and then stopped to turn back to me. Her eyes were huge and pale, the eyes of a beggar. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said.

I followed a few steps behind the horse she led. She disappeared into a stall-the one the boy had been cleaning-and slid the halter off the horse’s head. She stepped out, latched the mesh gate, and hung the leather contraption on a nail pegged to the right of the stall. “Paige,” she said, breathing my name as if it were forbidden to speak aloud.

She reached toward me and touched her palm to my shoulder. I could not help it; I shivered and stepped back. “I’m sorry,” I said, looking away.

At that moment the boy who had been working the stable earlier appeared out of nowhere. “I’m done for the day, Lily,” he said, although it was only noon.

My mother dragged her gaze away from me. “Josh,” she said, “this is Paige. My daughter, Paige.”

Josh nodded at me. “Cool,” he said. He turned to my mother. “Aurora and Andy need to be brought in. I’ll see you tomorrow. Although,” he said, “tomorrow is just the flip side of today.”

As he walked down the long aisle of the barn, my mother turned to me. “He’s a little bit Zen,” she said, “but he’s all I can afford right now.”

Without another word, my mother walked out of the barn and headed down the gravel path toward the field that ran to the left. When she reached the field she propped her elbows against the wooden gate and watched the horse at the far end. Even at this distance he was one of the largest horses I had ever seen. He was sleek and sable-colored, with the exception of his two front legs. They turned pure white halfway down, as if he’d only just stepped into heaven. “How did you find me?” my mother asked nonchalantly.

“You didn’t make it easy,” I snapped. I was fuming. My mother didn’t seem the tiniest bit put out by my appearance. I was more rattled than she was. Sure, there had been that shock of surprise, but now she was acting cool and relaxed, as if she’d known I was coming. This was not the way I’d thought she would be. I realized that at the very least, I’d expected her to be curious. At the very most, I had wanted her to care.

I turned to her, waiting for a splinter of real recognition to hit me-some gesture or smile or even the lilt of her voice. But this was an entirely different woman from the one who had left me when I was five years old. I had spent the past few days-the past twenty years-conjuring up comparisons between us, making assumptions. I knew we would bear a resemblance to each other. I knew that we had both been driven away from out homes, although I didn’t know why she had left. I imagined that I would meet her and she would reach out her arms for me and there I would be, in the place where I always knew I would fit best. I imagined that we would sound the same, walk the same, think the same. But this was her world, and I knew nothing about it. This was her life, and it had gone smoothly without me around. The truth was that I barely knew her when she left and that I did not know her now. “A friend of mine introduced me to a private eye, and he tracked you to Bridles & Bits,” I said, “and then I saw the ceiling.”

“The ceiling,” my mother whispered, her thoughts far away. “Oh-the ceiling. Like Chicago.”

“Just like,” I said, my words clipped and bitten.

My mother turned abruptly. “I didn’t mean to leave you, Paige,” she said. “I only meant to leave.”

I shrugged as if I did not care at all. But something sparked inside me. I thought of Max’s round little face and flat chin, and of Nicholas, pulling me against the hot line of his chest. I had not meant to leave them; I had only meant to leave. I wasn’t running away from them; I was only running away. I peered at my mother from the corner of my eye. Maybe this went deeper than appearances. Maybe, after all, we had more in common than it seemed.

As if she knew I needed proof, my mother whistled to the horse at the far end of the field. He exploded toward us, running at a breakneck pace, but slowed as he approached my mother. Gentling, he circled until he was calm. He nodded and tossed his head, and then he leaned down and nuzzled my mother’s hand.

He was easily the most beautiful animal I had ever seen. I wanted to draw him, but I knew I’d never be able to capture his energy on paper. “This is my best show horse,” my mother said. “Worth over seventy-five thousand dollars. This whole thing”-here she swept her hand across the vast farm-“my lessons and my training and everything else I do, is just to support him, so I can show him on weekends. We show in the elite shows, and we’ve even come in first in our division.”

I was impressed, but I did not understand why she was telling me this now when there were so many other things that needed to be said. “I don’t own this land,” my mother continued, slipping the halter over the horse’s head. “I rent from Pegasus Stables. I rent my house and my trailer and my truck from them. This horse is just about the only thing I can really say is mine. Do you understand?”

“Not really,” I said impatiently, stepping back as the horse lifted his head to dodge a fly.

“This horse is named Donegal,” my mother said, and the word brought back what it always had-the name of the county in Ireland where my father had been born, the place he never stopped telling us hiÑ€†about when I was little. Tumbling clover like emeralds; stone chimneys brushing the clouds; rivers as blue as your mother’s eyes.

I remembered Eddie Savoy saying that people can’t ever wholly give up what they’ve left behind. “Donegal,” I repeated, and this time as my mother held out her arms, I stepped into their quiet circle, amazed that the vague wisps of old memories could crystallize into such warmth, such flesh and blood.

“I spent years hoping you would come,” my mother said. She led me up the steps to the farmer’s porch of the small white clapboard house. “I used to watch the little girls walk down to the stable for their lessons, and I kept thinking, This one will pull off her riding helmet, and it’s going to be Paige.” At the screen door, she turned to me. “It never was, though.”

My mother’s house was clean and neat, almost Spartan. The porch was empty, except for a white wicker rocking chair, which blended into the background paint, and a bright-pink hanging begonia. The front hall had a faded Oriental runner and a thin maple table, on top of which was a set of Shaker boxes. To the right was a tiny living room; to the left, a staircase. “I’ll get you settled in,” my mother said, although I had never said I would be staying. “But I’ve got some lessons this afternoon, so I won’t be around much.”

She took me up to the second floor. Straight ahead at the top of the staircase was the bathroom, and the bedrooms were to the right and the left. She turned to the right, but I got a glimpse of her own room-pale and breezy, with gauze curtains billowing over the white of the bed.

When I stepped into the doorway of the other room, I drew in my breath. The wallpaper was a busy tumble of huge pink flowers. The bed was a frothy canopy, and on a chest against the wall were two porcelain dolls and a stuffed green clown. It was the room of a little girl. “You have another daughter,” I said. It wasn’t a question really, but a statement.

“No.” My mother walked forward and brushed the cool cheek of one of the dolls. “One of the reasons I decided to lease this stable was because of this room. I kept thinking how much you would have liked it here.”

I looked around the room at the sugar-candy decoration, the suffocating wallpaper. I wouldn’t have liked it as a child. I thought about my bedroom at home in Cambridge, which I didn’t like, either, with its milk-colored carpet, the near-white walls. “I was eighteen when you got this place,” I pointed out. “A little old for dolls.”

My mother shrugged easily. “You were kind of stuck in my mind at five years old,” she said. “I kept thinking I’d go back and get you, but I couldn’t do that to your father, and besides, if I went back I knew it would be to stay. Before I knew it, you were all grown up.”

“You came to my graduation,” I said, sitting down on the bed. It was a hard mattress, unforgiving.

“You saw me?”

I shook my head.ve Ñ€† “Private eye,” I said. “Very thorough.”

My mother sat down beside me. “I spent ten hours in Raleigh-Durham, trying to make up my mind about getting on that plane. I could, then I couldn’t. I even sat down on one flight and ran off before they closed the door.”

“But you came,” I said, “so why didn’t you try to talk to me?”

My mother stood up and smoothed away the wrinkles on the bedspread so that it looked as though she’d never sat down. “I didn’t go there for you,” she said. “I went there for me,”

My mother checked her watch. “Brittany’s coming at two-thirty,” she said. “Cutest little kid you’ve ever seen, but she’s never going to make it as a rider. Feel free to come down and watch, if you like.” She looked around as if something were missing. “You have a bag?”

“Yes,” I said, knowing that even if I wanted to I could not make myself stay at a motel. “It’s in my car.”

My mother nodded and started to walk out, leaving me on the bed. “There’s food in the fridge if you’re hungry, and be careful because the toilet lever sticks a little, and if you need me in a hurry there’s a sticker on the phone with a number that goes straight to Pegasus’s barn, and they can get me.”

It was so easy to talk to her. It came effortlessly; I could have been doing it forever. I supposed I had, but she hadn’t been answering. Still, I wondered how she could be this matter-of-fact, as if I were the kind of visitor she got every day. Just thinking about her made a headache come behind my eyes. Maybe she knew better and was doing this to skip all the gutted history in between. When you don’t keep looking back, it’s that much easier not to trip and fall.

My mother stopped at the threshold of the door and held her hand against the wooden frame. “Paige,” she said, “are you married?”

A sharp pain ran straight down my spine, a sick ache that came from her being able to talk about phone lines and lunch but not knowing the things a mother is supposed to know. “I got married in 1985,” I told her. “His name is Nicholas Prescott. He’s a cardiac surgeon.”

My mother raised her eyebrows at this and smiled. She started to walk out of the room. “And,” I called after her, “I have a baby. A son, Max. He’s three months old.”

My mother stopped, but she did not turn around. I might even have imagined the quiet tremble of her shoulders. “A baby,” she murmured. I knew what was going through her mind: A baby, and you left him behind, and once upon a time I left you. I lifted my chin, waiting for her to turn around and admit to the cycle, but she didn’t. She shifted her weight until she was moving down the stairs, humbled and silent, with the parallel lines of our past running cluttered through her mind.

She was standing in the center of the oval-the ring-and a girl on a pony danced around her. “Transitions, Brf tÑ€†ittany,” she called. “First you’re going to take him to a trot. Squeeze him into it; don’t lean forward. Sit up, sit up, push those heels down.” The girl was leggy and small. Her hair hung in a thick blond tail from beneath the black riding helmet. I leaned against the rail where I’d stood earlier, watching the squat brown horse jaunt its way around in a circle.

My mother walked to the edge of the ring and adjusted one of the redwood rails so that it was lower to the ground. “Feel when he’s going too fast and too slow,” she yelled. “You need to ride every step. Now I want you to cross the diagonal… Keep stretching down in your heels.”

The girl steered the horse-at least I thought she did-coming out of the corner and making an X across the ring. “Okay, sitting trot,” my mother called. The girl stopped bouncing up and down and sat heavy in the saddle, wiggling a little from side to side with every step of the horse. “Half seat!” my mother called, and the girl bounced up once, freezing in the position that held her out of the saddle, hanging on to the horse’s mane for dear life. My mother saw me and waved. “Let’s cross the diagonal again, and you’re going to go right over this cavalletti,” she said. “Ride him right into the woods.” She crouched down, her voice tense and her body coiled, as if she could will the horse to do it correctly. “Eyes up, eyes up… leg, leg, leg!” The horse did a neat hop over the low rail and slowed down to a quiet walk. The little girl stretched her legs out in front of her, feet still in the stirrups. “Good girl,” my mother called, and Brittany smiled. “We can end with that.”

A woman had come up beside me. She pulled out her checkbook. “Are you taking lessons with Lily?” she asked, smiling.

I did not know how to answer. “I’m thinking about it,” I said.

The woman scrawled a signature and ripped off the check. “She’s the best there is around here.”

Brittany had dismounted, neatly sliding off the saddle. She walked up to the fence, leading the horse by the reins. My mother glanced at me, looking from my head to my shoulders to my walking shorts and sneakers. “Don’t worry about tacking Tony down,” she said. “I think I need him for another lesson.” She held out her hands for the reins and watched as Brittany and her mother disappeared up the hill toward the barn.

“My three-thirty has the flu,” she said, “so how’d you like a lesson for free?”

I thought of the horse that morning taking the jumps with the power of a locomotive, and then I looked at this little horse. It had long dark eyelashes and a white patch on its forehead in the shape of Mickey Mouse. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not the type.”

“I never was, either,” my mother said. “Just try it. If you don’t feel comfortable, you can get off.” She led me toward the little redwood rail and paused, holding the horse’s reins. “If you really want to know about me, you should try riding. And if you really want me to know about you, I can learn a hell of a lot just by watching you in the saddle.”

I held the horse’s reins while my mother adjusted the stirrup lengths and pointed out the"›‹Ñ€† names of things: blanket, pad, and English saddle; bit, bridle, martingale, girth, reins. “Step on the cavalletti,” my mother said, and I looked at her blankly. “The red thing,” she said, kicking the rail with her foot. I stepped onto it with my right foot and then tucked my left foot into the stirrup. “Hang on to the mane and swing yourself over. I’m holding Tony; he isn’t going anywhere ”

I knew as soon as I was sitting that I looked ridiculous. A little girl might have looked cute on a pony, but I was a fully grown woman. I was certain my legs almost touched the ground. I might as well have been riding a burro. “You’re not going to kick him,” my mother said. “Just urge him into walking.”

I touched my foot gently to the horse’s flanks, but nothing happened. So I did it again, and the horse shot off, bouncing me from left to right until I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around its neck. “Sit up!” my mother yelled. “Sit up and pull back.” I summoned all my strength and did what she said, sighing when the horse slowed to a quiet walk that barely jogged me at all. “Never lean forward,” my mother said, smiling, “unless you’re planning to gallop.”

I listened to my mother’s calm directions, letting all the words run together and feeling the simple meter of the horse’s movements and the scratch of its hide against my bare calves. I was amazed at the power I had. If I pushed my right leg against Tony’s side, he moved to the left. If I pushed my left leg against him, he moved right. He was completely under my control.

When my mother urged the horse to a trot by clucking at him, I did what she said. I kept my shoulders, my hips, and my heels in a straight line. I posted up and down, letting the horse’s rhythm lift me out of the saddle and holding the beat until the next hoof fell. I kept my back erect and my hands quiet on Tony’s withers. I was completely out of breath when she told me to sit back and let the horse walk, and I turned to her immediately. It wasn’t until then that I saw how much I wanted her approval.

“That’s enough for today,” she said. “Your legs are going to kill you tonight.”

She held the reins while I slid out of the saddle, patting Tony on the side of his neck. “So what do you know about me now that you didn’t know before?” I asked.

My mother turned, her hands on her hips. “I know that at least twice during that half hour you pictured yourself galloping across a field. And that if you had fallen the first time Tony pulled away a little fast, you would have got right back on. I know you’re wondering what it’s like to jump, and I know that you’re more of a natural at this than you think.” She tugged on the reins so that the horse separated us. “All in all,” she said, “I can see that you are very much like me.”

It was my job to make the salad. My mother was simmering spaghetti sauce, her hands on her hips in front of the old stove. I glanced around the neat kitchen, wondering where I would find a salad bowl, tomatoes, vinegar.

“The lettuce is on the bottom shelf,” my mother said, her back to me.

Ñ€†iv height="1em" width="1em" align="justify"›I stuck my head into the refrigerator, pushing past nectarines and Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers to find the head of iceberg lettuce. My father believed you could tell a lot about people from their kitchens. I wondered what he’d have to say about this one.

I started to peel the leaves off the lettuce and rinse them in the sink, and looked up to find my mother watching me. “Don’t you core it?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You know,” my mother said. “Take the core out.” She rammed the heel of the lettuce against the counter and neatly twisted it out. The lettuce fell open in a series of petals. “Your father never taught you that?” she said lightly.

My spine straightened at the criticism. No, I wanted to tell her. He was too busy doing other things. Like guaranteeing my moral conscience, and showing me how to trust other people, and letting me in on the unfair ways of the world “As a matter of fact,” I said quietly, “he did not.”

My mother shrugged and turned back to the stove. I began tearing the lettuce into a bowl, ripping it furiously into tiny pieces. I peeled a carrot and diced a tomato. Then I stopped. “Is there anything you don’t take?” I asked. My mother looked up. “In your salad, I mean.”

“Onion,” she said. She hesitated. “What about you?”

“I eat everything,” I told her. I chopped cucumber, thinking how ridiculous it was that I did not know what vegetables my own mother would eat in a tossed salad. I couldn’t prepare her coffee, either, or conjure her shoe size, or tell a stranger which side of the bed she slept on. “You know,” I said, “if our lives had been a little different, I wouldn’t be asking these things.”

My mother did not turn around, but her hand stopped stirring the sauce for the span of a breath. “Our lives weren’t a little bit different, though, were they?” she said.

I stared at her back until I could not stand it anymore. Then I threw the carrots, the tomatoes, and the cucumber into the bowl, while the rough anger and the disappointment pressed back-to-back and settled heavy on my chest.

We ate on the porch, and afterward we watched the sun go down. We drank cold peach wine coolers from cognac glasses that still had price stickers on their bottoms. My mother pointed out the mountains in the background, which rose in swells so close they seemed within reach. I concentrated on physical things: the bones of our knees, the curve of our calves, the placement of freckles, all so similar. “When I first moved here,” my mother said, “I used to wonder if it was at all like Ireland. Your father was always saying he’d take me there, but it never happened.” She paused. “I miss him very much, you know.”

I stared at her, softening. “He told me you were married three months after you’d met.” I took a large gulp of wine and smiled tentatively. “It was love at first sight, he said.”

My mother leaned back her head so that her throat was straight and white and vulnerable. “It could have been,” she said. “I can’t remember all that well. I know I couldn’t wait to get out of Wisconsin, and then Patrick magically appeared, and I always felt a little sorry that he had to suffer when I found out it hadn’t been about Wisconsin at all.”

I saw this as my lead-in. “When I was little,” I said, “I used to dream up these scenarios that had made you leave. I figured once that you were connected to a gang and you’d slipped up and they threatened the safety of your family. And another time I figured that you maybe had fallen in love with someone else and run off with him.”

“There was someone else,” my mother said frankly, “but it was after I left, and I never loved him. I wasn’t going to take that away from Patrick too.”

I put the glass down beside me, tracing its edge with my fingertip. “What made you leave, then?” I asked.

My mother stood up and rubbed her upper arms. “Damn mosquitoes,” she said. “I swear they’re here all year. I’m going to check on the barn.” She started to turn away. “You can stay or you can come.”

I stared at her, astonished. “How can you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Just change the subject like that?” I hadn’t come all this distance just to be pushed farther away. I walked down the two steps of the porch until we were standing eye-to-eye. “It’s been twenty years, Mom,” I said. “Isn’t it a little late to be dodging the question?”

“It’s been twenty years, dear,” my mother shot back. “What makes you think I remember the answer?” She broke her stare, looking down at her shoes, and then she sighed. “It was not the mob, and it was not a lover. It wasn’t anything like that at all. It was something much more normal.”

I lifted my chin. “You still haven’t given me a reason,” I said, “and you are far from what is considered normal. Normal people do not vanish in the middle of the night and never speak to their families again. Normal people do not spend two decades using a dead person’s name. Normal people do not meet their daughter for the first time in twenty years and act like it’s an ordinary visit.”

My mother took a step back, anger and pride making violet slashes in her eyes. “If I had known you were coming,” she said, “I would have taken my goddamned red carpet out of storage.” She started off toward the barn, and then she stopped and faced me. When she spoke, her voice was more gentle, as if she’d realized too late what she had said. “Don’t ask me why I left, Paige, until you can tell yourself why you left.”

Her words burned, flaming my cheeks and my throat. I watched her slip up the hill toward the barn.

I wanted to run after her and tell her it was her fault that I’d left; that I knew I had to take this opportunity to learn all thareÑ€†e things I had never learned from her: how to look pretty; how to hold a man; how. to be a mother. I wanted to tell her that I never would have left my husband and my child under any other circumstances and that, unlike her, I was going back. But I had a feeling that she would have laughed at me and said, Yes, that’s the way it begins. And I had a feeling that I would not be telling the complete truth.

I had left before I had any inkling that I wanted to find my mother. I had left without giving my mother a second thought. No matter what I had brainwashed myself to believe by now, I hadn’t even considered going to Chicago until I was several hundred miles away from my home. I needed to see her; I wanted to see her-I understood what had prompted me to hire Eddie Savoy. But it was only after I’d left Max and Nicholas that I thought of coming here. It wasn’t the other way around. The truth was that even if my mother had lived just down the street, I would have wanted to get away.

Back then I had blamed it on Max’s nosebleed-but that had just been the spark that set off the fire. The real reason was that my confusion ran too deep to sort out at home. I had to go. I didn’t have any other choice. I didn’t leave out of anger, and I didn’t want to leave forever-just long enough. Long enough to feel that I wasn’t doing it all wrong. Long enough to feel that I mattered, that I was more than a necessary extension of Max’s or Nicholas’s life.

I thought of all the magazine articles I’d read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, See how lucky you are? But it had been gnawing at me inside, that part that didn’t quite fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn’t it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?

I saw a light flash on in the barn, and all of a sudden I knew why my mother had left.

I went up to the bathroom and undressed. I ran hot water in the claw-footed tub and thought about how good it would feel on the clenched muscles of my thighs. Riding had made me aware of places on my body that I hadn’t known existed. I brushed my teeth and stepped neatly into the tub. I leaned my head back against the enamel rim, closed my eyes, and tried to will away thoughts of my mother.

Instead I pictured Max, who would be exactly three and a half months old the next day. I tried to remember the milestones he should have been reaching now, according to that First Year book Nicholas had brought me. Solid foods, that was the only one I could remember, and I wondered what he thought of bananas, applesauce, strained peas. I tried to imagine his tongue pushing out against a spoon, that unfamiliar object. I smoothed one hand over the other and tried to remember his silky powdered touch.

When I opened my eyes, my mother was standing over the bathtub, wearing a yellow wrapper. I tried to cross my arms over my chest and to twist my legs, but it was too small a tub. A flush of embarrassment ran from my belly up to my cheeks. “Don’t,” she said. “You’ve turned out quite beautiful.”

I stood up abruptly, grabbing a tiv›Ñ€†owel and sloshing water all over the floor in my hurry. “I don’t think so,” I murmured, and I threw open the bathroom door. I ran to my little-girl room, letting the steam steal down the hall to veil my image from my mother.

When I first woke up, before I was fully conscious, I thought that they were at it again. I could so clearly hear in my imagination the voices of my mother and father attacking, tangling, retreating.

They were not fights; they were never really fights. They were triggered by the simplest things: a burned soufflé, a priest’s sermon, a supper my father came home to late. They were only half-arguments, started by my mother and quelled by my father. He never picked up the gauntlet. He’d let her scream and accuse, and then, when the sobs came, his soft words would cover her like a soft blanket.

It didn’t scare me. I used to lie in bed and listen to the scene that had been replayed so many times I knew the dialogue by heart. Slam: that was my mother at the bedroom door, and seconds later it would open again, once my father came upstairs. In the months after my mother left, when I was doing my remembering, I thought of the arguments and I added the pictures I could never see, fashioning them like actors in a grainy black-and-white film. So, for example, here I envisioned my parents back-to-back, my mother tugging a brush through her hair and my father unbuttoning his shirt. “You don’t understand,” my mother said, her words always hitched and high, always the same. “I can’t do it all. You expect me to do everything.”

“Sssh, May,” my father murmured. “You take it so hard.” I imagined him turning to her and grasping her shoulders, like Bogart in Casablanca. “Nobody expects anything.”

“Yes you do,” my mother screamed, and the bed creaked as she stood. I could hear her pacing, footsteps like rain. “I can’t do anything right, Patrick. I’m tired. I’m just bone-tired. Dear God, I just wish -I want-”

“What do you want, á mhuírnán?”

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be here.”

Then she would start crying, and I would listen to the gentle sounds that drifted through the wall: the butterfly kisses and the slip of my father’s hands over my mother’s skin and the charged quiet that I later learned was the sound of making love.

Sometimes there were variations-like when my mother begged my father to go away with her, just the two of them, sailing in a dugout canoe to Fiji. Another time she scratched and clawed at my dad and made him sleep on the couch. Once she said that she still believed the world was flat and that she was hanging at the edge.

My father was an insomniac, and after these episodes he’d get up in the dead of the night and creep down to his workshop. As if on cue, I’d tiptoe out of my room, and I would crawl under the covers of their big bed. It was like that in our family; someone was always filling in for someone else. I’d press my cheek against my mother’s back and hear her murmur my name, and I held her so cltirÑ€†ose my own body trembled with her fear.

I had heard the cries again tonight; that’s what made me wake so suddenly. But my father’s voice was missing. For a moment I couldn’t place the crowded wallpaper, the intruding moon. I slipped out of bed and turned in at the bathroom, then I redirected myself and walked till I stood at the threshold of my mother’s room.

I hadn’t dreamed it. She was curled beneath the covers, her fists pressed to her eyes. She was crying so hard she couldn’t catch her breath.

I shifted from one foot to the other, nervously wringing the sleeve of my nightshirt. I just couldn’t do it. After all, so much had happened. I wasn’t a four-year-old child, and she was no more than a stranger. She was practically nothing to me.

I remembered how I had flinched at her touch this afternoon, and how annoyed I had been when she took my arrival as easily as she’d take an afternoon tea. I remembered seeing my face reflected in her eyes when she was talking about my father. I considered the room, that god-awful room, that she had had waiting for me.

Even as I crossed the floor I was listing all the reasons I shouldn’t. You don’t know her. She doesn’t know you. She shouldn’t be forgiven. I crawled under the covers. With a sigh that unraveled the years, I put my arms around my mother and willingly slid back to where I’d started.

chapter 28

Nicholas Prescott was already unofficially engaged to Paige O’Toole when they went out on their fourth date. Nicholas picked her up at that waitress Doris’s apartment, a small flea-ridden building in Porter Square. He’d left a message while she was working, telling her to wear something along the lines of haute couture because he was taking her to the top that night. He did not know that she spent an hour asking Doris, the neighbors, and finally the reference librarian at the Boston Public Library what haute couture meant.

She was wearing a simple black sleeveless sheath. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a loose knot; her eyes were wide and luminescent. Her shoes were fake alligatorskin, with spike heels-the kind of shoes his college friends had called fuck-me pumps-although with someone like Paige wearing them, that term would never have come to mind.

At the end of their other three dates, Nicholas had gone no further than gently cupping her breasts, and from her quiet trembling he knew that was enough. In spite of the fact that she’d run away from home, that she was not college educated, and that she was a waitress in a diner, to Nicholas, Paige O’Toole was as chaste as they came. When he pictured her, he thought of the image of Psyche from the White Rock ginger ale label, a girl-woman kneeling on a boulder, staring at her reflection as if she was surprised to see it in the water below. The way Paige was shy to smile, the instinctive habit she had of covering her body when Nicholas touched her-it all added up. They had never spoken of it; Nicholas wasn’t like that. But he believed in the strength of coincidence, and surely there was a reason he had been in Mercy when she had beg he T‡un to work there: Paige did not know it, but she had been waiting for him all her life.

“You look wonderful,” Nicholas said, kissing the spot below her left ear. They were waiting for the elevator.

Paige smoothed her hands over the dress, tugging as if it didn’t fit her like a second skin. “This is Doris’s,” she admitted. “I didn’t have any couture, so we went through her closet. Would you believe this is from 1959? We spent the whole afternoon taking in the seams.”

“And the shoes?” The bell rang, and Nicholas took Paige’s elbow to lead her into the elevator.

Paige looked straight at him, challenging. “I bought them. I figured I deserved something new.”

Nicholas was sometimes surprised by the fury she held in check. When she believed she was right, she would fight to the end to make you see her side, continuing emphatically even after she had proof that she was wrong.

When the elevator touched ground level, Nicholas waited for Paige to step out first, as he’d been taught in eighth grade. But when she didn’t, he turned to face her, and he saw again the expression she often had when looking at Nicholas. It was as if he filled up her entire world; as if there was nothing he could do wrong. “What is it?” Nicholas said, taking her hand.

Paige shook her head. “It’s just you.” She took two steps and then looked back at him, smiling. “If you had lived in Chicago, you would have passed me on the street.”

“No I wouldn’t,” Nicholas said.

Paige laughed. “You’re absolutely right. You wouldn’t have been caught dead on Taylor Street.”

Nicholas couldn’t convince Paige that it didn’t matter to him where she had come from, where she was working, whether she had a diploma. The one important thing was where she was going, and Nicholas was planning to make sure that she would go there with him. It was one of the reasons he’d told her to dress to the nines and had booked a reservation at the Empress in the Hyatt Regency on the river. They’d head up to the Spinnaker afterward, the revolving bar, and then he’d take her home and they’d sit beneath the street lights of Porter Square, kissing until their lips were swollen and bruised. Then Nicholas would drive back to his own apartment in Cambridge, and he would lie naked beneath the ceiling fan in the bedroom, lazily tracing circles on the sheets and imagining the silk of Paige’s skin underneath his fingers.

“Where are we going?” Paige asked as she slipped into the car.

Nicholas grinned at her. “A surprise,” he said.

Paige fastened her seat belt and smoothed the wrinkles out of the black skirt stretched over her lap. “Probably not McDonald’s,” she said. “They’ve relaxed the dress code.”

The tuxedoed maître d’ at the restaurant bowed to Nicholasghtဆ and led the way to a tiny corner table that abutted a wall of glass. The basin of the Charles River was bathed in the fuchsia and orange of sunset. Playing across the surface like skittering butterflies were the distant billowed sails of the MIT sailing club. Paige drew in her breath and pressed her palms to the glass for a second, leaving a neat steamed print when she took them away. “Oh, Nicholas,” she said, “this is great.”

Nicholas picked up the black matchbook in the crystal ashtray, embossed with Paige’s initials in gold lettering. It was one of the reasons he’d chosen the Empress instead of Café Budapest or the Ritz-Carlton; this was one of their touches. Nicholas handed the matches to Paige. “You might want to hang on to these,” he said.

Paige smiled. “You know I don’t smoke,” she said. “Doris doesn’t even have a fireplace.” She tossed them back into the ashtray, and then she noticed the letters, PMO. Nicholas sat back, watching Paige’s eyes darken and grow wide. Then, like a little kid, she glanced around and sneaked to an empty table next to them. She lifted the matchbook out of the ashtray and her face fell, but only for a second. “It’s just this one,” she said, breathless. “But how do they know?”

As the meal progressed, Nicholas began to question his motive for an elegant dinner. Paige had urged him to order, since she hadn’t had any of the dishes before, and he’d done that. The appetizer-a bird’s nest filled with chicken and vegetables-had been delicious, but Paige had no more than touched a straw mushroom to her mouth when her lip began to swell like a balloon. She had held ice to it with her napkin, and it subsided a little, but she must have been allergic. Then when the waiter had brought the complimentary palate-cleansing sorbet, frothed in dry ice that spilled over onto your lap like the mist of a Scottish moor, Paige had argued with the man, insisting that since they hadn’t ordered it, they shouldn’t have to pay. She had watched Nicholas eating throughout the entire meal, refusing to pick up one of the three forks or spoons until he did. More than once Nicholas caught her with her guard down, staring at her dish as if it were another wall to scale in an obstacle course.

When the check came, the waiter brought Paige a long-stemmed rose, and she smiled across the table at Nicholas. She looked exhausted. Nicholas couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it from this angle: to Paige, this had all been work, almost a kind of test. After Nicholas’s credit card had been returned, Paige bolted from her chair before he could even pull it out for her. She walked quickly through the path of least resistance toward the door, head down, not looking at the other diners she passed.

When she was in the hallway by the elevator, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. Nicholas stood beside her, his hands jammed into his trousers pockets. “I guess a drink upstairs is out of the question,” he murmured.

Paige opened her eyes, momentarily confused, as if Nicholas were the last person she’d expected to find beside her. A smile fixed itself on her face. “It was delicious, Nicholas,” she said, and Nicholas couldn’t help it, he kept staring at the puffy outline of her still-swollen lower lip, which made her look like a 1930s screen siren. She covered her mouth with her hand.

Nicholas grabbed her fingers and pulled them down to her side. “Do weဆn’t do that,” he said. “Don’t ever do that.” He slipped his suit jacket over her shoulders.

“Do what?”

Nicholas paused for a fraction of a second and then picked up again. “Lie to me.”

He expected her to deny it; but Paige turned to him. “It was awful,” she admitted. “I know you didn’t mean it, Nicholas, but that isn’t really my speed.”

Nicholas didn’t believe it was really his speed, either, but he’d been doing it for so long he had never really considered anything else. He rode down the fourteen stories in the elevator in silence, holding Paige’s hand, thinking about what Taylor Street in Chicago might look like and whether, in fact, he wouldn’t be caught dead on it.

It wasn’t that he doubted Paige; in spite of his parents’ reaction, he knew that they were going to get married. But he wondered how very different two worlds had to be before they kept people apart. His parents had come from opposite sides of the proverbial tracks, but that didn’t count, since they’d wanted to swap places anyway. In Nicholas’s mind, that sort of equalized them. His mother had married his father to thumb her nose at society, and his father had married his mother to gain entry into a tight circle of wealth that all the new money in the world couldn’t buy. He really didn’t know how-or if-love ever figured into it, and that was the biggest difference between his parents’ relationship and the feelings he had for Paige. He loved Paige because she was simple and sweet, because her hair was the color of an Indian summer, and because she could do an impression of Elmer Fudd that was nearly flawless. He loved her because she had made it to Cambridge on less than a hundred dollars, because she knew how to say the Lord’s Prayer backward without stopping, because she could draw exactly what he could never quite put into words. With an overwhelming fervor that surprised Nicholas himself, he believed in her ability to land on her feet; in fact, Paige was the closest thing to a religion he’d had in years. He didn’t give a damn whether or not she could tell a fish knife from a salad fork, if she’d be able to pick a waltz from a polka. That wasn’t what marriage was about.

But on the other hand, Nicholas couldn’t help but remember that marriage was a man-made thing, a statute created by society itself. Two souls that were meant to be together-and Nicholas wasn’t saying that was the case with him; he was too scientific to be so romantic-well, two people like that could just mate for life with no need for a paper certificate. Marriage didn’t really seem to be about love; it was about the ability to live together for a long period of time, and that was something completely different. That was something he just wasn’t sure about when it came to him and Paige.

He stared at her profile when he pulled up at a red light. Tiny nose, shining eyes, classic lips. Suddenly she turned to him, smiling. There had to be a happy medium. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“I was thinking,” Nicholas said, “that I wish you could show me what Taylor Street is like.”

chapter 29

My mother had seven geldings, and with the exception of Donegal, they were named for men she had turned down. “I don’t date,” she had told me. “Very few men think that the perfect end to an evening of seduction is a ten o’clock check through the stable.” Eddy and Andy were chestnuts, Thoroughbreds. Tony was a mixed-breed pony she had saved from starvation. Burt was a quarter horse that was older than dirt, and Jean-Claude and Elmo were three-year-olds that had come from the racetrack and were in the process of being broken.

While she took Jean-Claude or Elmo down to the ring to work on a lunge line, Josh and I mucked the stalls and spread sweet bedding and scrubbed the water buckets. It was hard work, which knotted my back and my calf muscles, but I found that I could rake through an entire stable sometimes without thinking about Nicholas or Max. In fact, almost anything I did in association with the horses took my mind off the family I had left behind, and I began to see what held my mother’s fascination.

I was filling the black beveled buckets in Aurora’s stall, and as usual she was trying to bite my back every time I turned away. She was the eighth horse my mother owned, the white fairy-tale mare. She had said that she bought her on impulse, because she’d been hoping Prince Charming would come with the deal, but she’d regretted the purchase ever since. Aurora was bitchy and foul-tempered and stubborn to train. “I’ve done Aurora’s water,” I called to Josh, who was mucking farther down in the same barn. I liked him-he was a little weird, but he made me smile. He did not eat meat because “somewhere, cows are sacred.” He had let me know the second day I was here that he was already halfway down the eightfold path to nirvana.

I picked up the wheelbarrow Josh had filled with manure and went to the dump pile that composted under the hot Carolina sun. I lifted my face and felt the grime collecting on the back of my neck although it was only eight-thirty.

“Paige!” Josh yelled, “Get here quick! And bring a halter!”

I threw the wheelbarrow aside and raced back, grabbing the halter hanging beside Andy’s stall. From the far end of the barn I heard Josh’s soothing words. “Come closer,” he whispered to me, “and walk slow.”

When I peeked out the far door, he had Aurora by the mane. “It’s customary to lock the stall when you finish,” he said, grinning.

“I did!” I insisted, and I worked the little clip, just to prove it. But one of the chain-link spokes had broken, and I realized I had probably fastened the clip over that one, and the door had sprung free. “Sorry,” I said, and I took Aurora by the halter. “Maybe you should have just let her go,” I said.

“I don’t know,” Josh said. “I don’t owe Lily any favors this month.”

We took a break and went to watch my mother lunging Jean-Claude. She stood in the center of the ring, letting the horse buck and gallop in circles around her. This time, he had a saddle on his back, simply to get used to the feeling. “Look at his conformation,” she’d said. “He’s a born jumper-nice sloping shoulders, short back.”

“And,” Josh had said, “an ass like a truck.”

My mother had patted him on the cheek with the same tenderness she showed her horses. “Just as long as you don’t say that about me,” she said.

We watched the muscles in my mother’s arms cord and bunch as she tugged on the line that Jean-Claude was valiantly trying to shake free. “How long has she been doing this?” I asked.

“Jean-Claude?” Josh said. “He’s only been here a month. But Jesus, Donegal’s her first horse, and he’s a champion, and he’s only seven.” Josh bent down and pulled a stalk of grass from the ground and settled it between his front teeth. He began to tell me the story of my mother and Fly By Night Farm.

She had been working as a personal secretary to Harlan Cozackis, a Kentucky millionaire who had made his fortune in corrugated cardboard. He was very involved in the racing circuit and bought a couple of horses who placed well in the Derby and the Preakness. When he got pancreatic cancer, his wife left him for his business partner. He had told Lily she ought to go too; who gave a damn if his company was in order, since the co-owner was banging his own wife? But Lily hadn’t left. She stopped keeping the books and started to feed Harlan barley soup in bed; she recorded the times he’d taken his painkillers. He tried chemotherapy for a while, and Lily stayed with him the nights after the treatments, holding damp washcloths to his wrinkled chest and mopping up his vomit.

When he started to die, Lily sat for hours at his side, reading him the odds for local horse races and placing bets over the phone. She told him stories of her days as Calamity Jane in the rodeo, and that was probably what had given him the idea. When he died, he did not leave her any money but instead gave her the colt that had been born just a month before, sired by a stallion with bloodlines to Seattle Slew.

Josh said my mother had laughed long and hard over this one: she had a nearly priceless horse and not a red cent to her name. She drove to Carolina, all the way to Farleyville, until she found a stable she wanted to lease. She brought Donegal out here and for a long time he was the only one in the barn, but she paid her rent just the same. Little by little, by giving lessons to people on their own horses and farms, she saved enough money to buy Eddy, and also Tony, and then Aurora and Andy. She bought a horse named Joseph right from the track, like Aurora, and trained him for a year and then sold him for $45,000-three times her buying price. That was when she started to show Donegal, and his prize money began to pay for his blue-blood care: hundred-fifty-dollar plastic shoes, shots every three months, expensive hay with more clover than timothy. “But we still lost ten thousand dollars last year,” Josh said.

“You lost ten thousand dollars,” I whispered. “You don’t even turn a profit? Why does she keep doing this?”

Josh smiled. In the distance, my mother spoke softly to Jean-Claude and then lifted herself into the saddle bound over his back. She held her reins steady until the horse stopped whinnying and tossing from side to side. She lifted her face to the sky and laughed into the wind. “It’s her karma,” Josh said. “Why else?”

It got easier every day. I would ride for an hour in the morning after we’d turned out the other horses and mucked the stalls. I rode Tony, the gentlest horse my mother owned. Under her careful direction, I improved. My legs stopped feeling like tightly stretched bands. I could second-guess the horse, who had a habit of ducking out to the right of a jump. Even the canter, which at first had seemed so quick and uncontrollable, had settled. Now Tony would take off so neatly I could close my eyes and pretend that I was running on the voice of the wind.

“What do you want to do now?” my mother called from the center of the ring.

I had slowed Tony to a walk. “Let’s jump,” I said. “I want to try a vertical.” I knew now that the fences were called gymnastics; that a straight-across bar was a vertical and an “X” was called a cross-rail. Because Tony was only about fourteen hands, he couldn’t jump very high, but he could easily take a two-foot vertical if he was in the mood.

I loved the feeling of a jump. I loved the easy lead up to it, the squeeze of my thighs and calves pressuring the horse’s hind end, the remarkable power with which he pushed off the ground. As Tony started to come up, I’d lift myself into the half-seat position, suspended in midair until the horse’s back rose up to meet me. “Don’t look down-look across the jump,” my mother had told me over and over, and I would, seeing the rich berry-twisted brush that edged the stream. It never failed to surprise me that within seconds, we actually touched down on everyday earth.

My mother set up a course of six jumps for me. I patted Tony’s neck and gathered up my reins for a canter. My mother shouted corrections at me, but I could barely hear her. We flew around the ring so gracefully I wasn’t sure that the horse’s legs were striking the ground. Tony took the first jump long, throwing me back in the saddle. He picked up speed, and I knew that I should be sitting back to slow him, but somehow my body wasn’t doing what I wanted it to. As he landed the next jump, he raced around the corner of the ring. He leaned strangely to one side, and I fell off.

When I opened my eyes, Tony was gnawing on the grass along the edge of the ring and my mother was standing above me. “It happens to everyone,” she said, reaching out her hand to help me up. “What do you think you did wrong?”

I stood and dusted off the britches I’d borrowed from her. “Besides the fact that he was running a hundred miles an hour?”

My mother smiled. “Yeah, it was a little faster than a usual canter,” she said.

I rubbed my hand over the back of my neck and readjusted the black velvet helmet. “He was off center,” I said. “I knew I was going to fall off before it happened.”

My mother pulled Tony back by the reins and held him while I mounted again. “Good girl,” she said. “That’s because when you come across a diagonal, you’ve changed your direction. When you canter, a horse should have the inside lead, right?” I nodded; I remembered this lesson well because it had takup ñ€†en me forever to figure it out: when a horse cantered, or galloped, for that matter, the leg on the innermost side of the ring should be the first to fall; it kept them balanced. “When you change your direction, the horse needs to switch leads. Tony won’t do it naturally-he’s too dumb for that; he’ll just run around off kilter, wearing himself out until he trips or throws you off. You’ve got to tell him, really, that you want him to try a new trick in his repertoire. You break him down to a trot and then pick up the canter again-it’s called a simple change of lead.”

I shook my head. “I can’t remember all this,” I said.

“Yes you can,” my mother insisted. She clucked Tony into a trot. “Do a figure eight,” she said, “and don’t stop. He’s not going to do what you want him to unless you guide him into it. Keep going across your diagonals and do your simple changes.”

By the time we turned down the first diagonal, I had Tony moving quietly toward the middle of the jump. I looked at his hooves, and Tony was on the same lead he’d been on before the jump, only now, because we’d changed direction, it was his outside leg. I pulled back on the reins until he broke his stride, and then I turned his head toward the woods and kicked him into a canter again. “Good,” my mother yelled, and I squeezed Tony over the next line of jumps. I did the same pattern over and over until I thought I was breathing harder than Tony, and I slowed him to a walk without my mother’s command.

I leaned over Tony’s neck, sighing into his coarse mane. I knew about running fast, and knowing you were off balance, and not understanding how to fix yourself. “You don’t see how lucky you have it,” I said. I thought about how easy it would be to take an unfamiliar course if I had someone pushing me in the right direction; a gentle, knowing pressure that let me break down the pace until I was ready to run again.

“When do I get to ride Donegal?” I asked, as we led him to the field where my mother liked to ride him. His mane whipped from left to right as he strained against the leather lead to his halter.

“You could sit him right now,” my mother said, “but you wouldn’t be riding him; he’d be riding you.” She handed me the reins while she adjusted the chin strap of her riding helmet. “He’s a phenomenal horse, he’ll take any jump you put in front of him and automatically change his leads, but he’d just be making you look good. If you’re learning to ride, you should do it on someone like Tony, a workhorse with an attitude.”

I saw my mother swing herself into the saddle and take off at a trot; then I sat down on the grass and watched her ride. I opened the pad I’d brought and took out a stick of charcoal. I tried to draw the spirit that seemed to run straight from my mother’s spine through the flanks and powerful hind legs of Donegal. She didn’t even have to touch the horse; it seemed that she communicated her changes and transitions by willing them into Donegal’s mind.

I drew the crimped jet mane and the arch of the horse’s neck, the steam rising from his sides and the rhythm of his labored breathing. I sketched the rippled muscles of Donegal’s legs, from the line of the blue shin and ankle boots to the raw fo"3"ñ€†rce that throbbed in check beneath the sheen of his haunches. My mother leaned low over his neck, whispering words I could not hear. Her shirt flew out behind her, and she moved faster than light.

When I drew her, she seemed to come right out of the horse, and it was impossible really to tell where he ended and she began. Her thighs were wrapped tight around Donegal’s flanks, and his legs seemed to move across the page. I drew them over and over on the same piece of paper. I was working so furiously that I never noticed my mother getting off Donegal, tying him up to the fence, and coming to sit beside me.

She peered over my shoulder and stared at her image. I had drawn her repeatedly, but the final effect was that of motion: her head and Donegal’s were bent low at several different angles and positions, all rooted to the same flying body. It seemed mythical and sensual. It was as if my mother and Donegal had started off several times but couldn’t decide where they wanted to go.

“You’re amazing,” my mother said, resting her hand on my shoulder.

I shrugged. “I’m okay,” I said. “I could be better.”

My mother touched her fingertips to the edge of the paper. “Can I have it?” she asked, and before I handed it over I peered into the hollows and shadows of the picture, trying to see what else I might have revealed. But this time, in spite of all the secrets that lay between us, there was absolutely nothing.

“Sure,” I said. “Consider it yours.”

Dear Max,

Enclosed is a sketch of one of the horses here. Her name is Aurora, and she looks like the one in your picture book of Snow White, the one you always tried to eat when I read it to you. Oh, I suppose you don’t know-“here” is your grandmother’s place. It’s a farm in North Carolina, and it’s very green and very beautiful. When you are older one day maybe you’ll come down here and learn how to ride.

I think of you quite a lot-I wonder if you are sitting up yet and if you have your bottom teeth. I wonder if you’ll recognize me when you see me. I wish I could explain why I left the way I did, but I am not sure I could put it into words. Just keep believing me when I say I’m coming back.

I don’t know when yet.

I love you.

Do me a favor, will you? Tell your daddy I love him.

Mom

At the end of August I went with my mother to an AHSA “A” list horse show in Culpeper, Virginia. We packed Donegal into the trailer and drove for six hours. I helped my mother lead him into the makeshift stalls under the blue-and-white tent. That night, we paid to practice on the four-foot jumps, which Donegal to eañ€†ok easily after being cooped up for so long. My mother tacked him down and gave him a warm bath. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Don,” she said, “and I’m planning on going home with a champion.”

The next day I watched, wide-eyed, as judging went on in three rings at once. Men and women competed together, one of the few sports where they were equal. My mother’s class was Four Foot Working Hunter, the highest show class. She seemed to know everyone there. “I’m going to change,” she said, and when she returned, she was wearing tan britches, tall polished boots, a high-necked white blouse, and a blue wool blazer. She had jammed her hair into fifteen little barrettes all around her head, and she asked me to hold a mirror while she stuffed her helmet on over them. “Points off,” she told me, “if any hair is sticking out.”

There were twenty-one horses in her class, the last event of the day. She was the third rider up. While Donegal pranced around the warm-up ring, I watched from the bleachers, keeping an eye on the man jumping the largest stallion I’d ever seen, over fences that were nearly as tall as me. My mother’s number was forty-six, tied on her back on a crinkled piece of yellowed card. She smiled at the man who had finished the course, passing him on her way in.

The judge sat off to the side. I tried to make out what he was writing, but it was impossible at this distance. Instead I concentrated on my mother. It took only seconds. I watched Donegal come down the final line on the outside of the ring. As he reared up, his front legs were tight, his knees were high. He didn’t take the jump long or chip it; it was right in stride. I saw my mother sit back, holding Donegal slow until the next jump rose in front of them, and then she pulled into her half-seat, chin high, eyes burning straight ahead. It was only when they finished the course that I realized I had been holding my breath.

The woman sitting beside me had on a copper-colored polka-dotted dress and a wide-brimmed white straw hat, as if she’d been expecting Ascot. She held a program, and on the back she was writing the numbers of the riders she believed would win. “I don’t know,” she murmured to herself. “I think the first man was much better.”

I turned to her, angry. “You’ve got to be joking,” I said. “His horse took every jump long.” The woman sniffed and tapped her pencil against her chin. “I’ll give you five dollars if forty-six doesn’t beat that guy,” I said, pulling a fold of cash from my back pocket.

The woman stared at me, and for a moment I wondered if this was illegal, but then a smile spread across her onion features and she held out a gloved hand. “You’re on,” she said.

Nobody else in the class was as good as my mother on Donegal. Several of the horses ducked out at the jumps, or dumped their riders and were disqualified. When the results were announced, the blue ribbon went to number forty-six. I stood up in the bleachers and cheered, and my mother twisted her head around to look at me. She jogged the horse back into the ring so Donegal could be judged sound, then fixed her blue ribbon on the loop of Donegal’s bridle. The woman beside me sniffed loudly and held out a crisp five-dollar bill. “One thirty-one was better,” she insisted.

I took the money from her palm. “Maybe,” I said, “but forty-as ñ€†six is my mother.”

At my mother’s suggestion, we celebrated the end of summer by camping out in the backyard. I didn’t think I would like it. I figured the ground would be lumpy and I’d be worried about ants crawling up my neck and into my ears. But my mother found two old sleeping bags the owners of Pegasus had used in Alaska, and we stretched out on them in the field where my mother rode Donegal. We watched for falling stars.

It had been unbearably hot in August, and I had become used to seeing blisters on the backs of my hands and my neck-the parts that were exposed to sun all the time. “You’re a country girl, Paige,” my mother said, reaching her arms up behind her head. “You wouldn’t have lasted this long if you weren’t.”

There were things to be said about North Carolina. It was nice to see the sinking sun cool itself against the face of a mountain instead of the domes of Harvard; there was no pavement to breathe beneath your feet. But sometimes I felt so secluded that I stopped to listen, to make sure I could hear my pulse over the singing black flies and the rumble of hoofbeats.

My mother rolled toward me, propping herself on an elbow. “Tell me about Patrick,” she said.

I looked away. I could tell her what my father had looked like or that he hadn’t wanted me to search for her, but either one would hurt. “He’s still building pipe dreams in the basement,” I said. “A couple have actually sold.” My mother held her breath, waiting. “His hair is gray now, but he hasn’t really lost any of it.”

“It’s still there, isn’t it? That look in his eyes?”

I knew what she meant: it was this glow that came over my father when he saw a masterpiece even though he was looking at a concoction of spit and glue. “It’s still there,” I said, and my mother smiled.

“I think that’s what made me fall for him,” she said, “that and the way he promised to show me Ireland.” She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes. “And what does he think of the fine Dr. Prescott?”

“He’s never met him,” I blurted, cursing myself for making such a stupid mistake. I decided to tell her a half-truth. “I’ve just barely kept in touch with Dad. I ran away from Chicago when I graduated from high school.”

My mother frowned. “That doesn’t sound like Patrick. Patrick only wanted you to go to college. You were going to be the first Irish Catholic woman President.”

“It wasn’t college,” I told her. “I was planning on going to the Rhode Island School of Design, but something else came up.” I held my breath, but she did not pressure me. “Mom,” I said, eager to change the subject, “what about that rodeo guy?”

She laughed. “That rodeo guy was Wolliston Waters, and we ran around together with the money we stole from the Wild West show. I slept with him a couple of times, but only to remember what it was like to feel another personncoñ€† next to me. It wasn’t love, you know; it was sex. You’ve probably seen the difference.” I turned away, and my mother touched my shoulder. “Oh, come on, now. There had to be a high school guy who broke your heart.”

“No,” I said, avoiding her eyes. “I didn’t date.”

My mother shrugged. “Well, the point is I never got over your father. Never really wanted to. Wolliston and I, well, more than anything we were in business together. Until one morning I woke up and he’d taken all our cash and savings, plus the toaster oven and even the stereo. Just disappeared, like that.”

I rolled onto my back and remembered Eddie Savoy. “People don’t just disappear,” I told her. “You of all people should know that.”

Overhead, stars shifted and winked against the dark night sky. I opened my eyes wide and tried to see the other galaxies that hid at the edges of ours. “There was nobody else?” I asked.

“No one worth mentioning,” my mother said.

I looked at her. “Don’t you-you know-miss it?”

My mother shrugged. “I have Donegal.”

I smiled into the darkness. “That’s not really the same,” I said.

My mother frowned, as if she was thinking about this. “You’re right; it’s more fulfilling. See, I’m the one who trained him, so I’m the one who can take credit for whatever Donegal does. With a horse I’ve made a name for myself. With a husband I was nobody.” Barely moving a muscle, my mother covered my hand with her own. “Tell me what Nicholas is like,” she said.

I sighed and tried to do with words what I would ordinarily do in a sketch. “He’s very tall, and he has hair as dark as Donegal’s mane. His eyes are the same color as yours and mine-”

“No, no, no,” my mother interrupted. “Tell me what Nicholas is like. ”

I closed my eyes, but nothing came clearly to mind. I seemed to be seeing my life with him through shadows, and even after eight years I could barely hear the patterns of his voice or feel the touch of his hands on me. I tried to picture those hands, their long, surgeon’s fingers, but couldn’t even imagine them holding the base of a stethoscope. I felt a hollow pit in the base of my chest, where I knew these memories should be, but it was as if I had married someone a long time ago and hadn’t kept contact since. “I really don’t know what Nicholas is like,” I said. I could feel my mother’s eyes on me, so I tried to explain. “He’s just a different man these days; he works extremely hard, and that’s important, you know, but because of that I don’t get to see him all that much. A lot of the time when I do see him I’m not at my best-I’m at a fund-raising dinner table and he’s sitting beside a Radcliffe girl making comparisons, or I’ve been up half the night with Max and I look like the wild woman of Borneo.”

“And that’s why you left,” my mother finished for me.

I sat up abruptly. “That’s not why I left,” I said. “I left because of you.”

It was a what came first, the chicken or the egg dilemma. I had left because I needed time to catch my breath and get my bearings and start with a clean slate. But obviously, this tendency had been bred into me. Hadn’t I known all along I would grow up to be just like my mother? Hadn’t I worried about this very thing happening when I was pregnant with Max-and with my other baby? I still believed these events were all linked together. I could honestly say that my mother was the reason I’d run away, but I wasn’t sure if she had been the cause or the consequence of my actions.

My mother crawled into her sleeping bag. “Even if that was true,” she said, “you should have waited until Max was older.”

I rolled away from her. The scent of the pine trees on the ridge behind us was so overwhelming I was suddenly dizzy. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black,” I murmured.

From behind me came my mother’s voice. “When you were born, they were just starting to let men in the delivery room, but your father didn’t want any part of it. He actually wanted me to give birth at home, like his mother had, but I vetoed that. So he took me to the hospital, and I begged him not to leave me. Told him I couldn’t go through with it. I was all alone for twelve hours, until you decided to make your appearance. It was another hour until they let him in to see you and me together-it took that long for the nurses to comb my hair and give me my makeup so I’d look like I hadn’t been doing anything at all for the past day.” My mother was so close I could feel her breath against my ear. “When your father came in and saw you, he stroked your cheek and said, ‘Now, May, now that you’ve got her, where’s the sacrifice?’ And do you know what I told him? I looked at him and I said, ‘Me.’ ”

My heart constricted as I remembered staring at Max and wondering how he could possibly have come from inside me and what I could do to make him go back. “You resented me,” I said.

“I was terrified of you,” my mother said. “I didn’t know what I’d do if you didn’t like me.”

I remembered that the year I was enrolled in Bible preschool my mother had bought me a special coat for Easter, as pink as the inside lip of a lily. I had bothered her and begged and pleaded to wear it to school after Easter. “Just once,” I had cried, and finally she let me. But it rained on the way home from school, and I was afraid she’d be angry if the coat got wet, so I took it off and stuffed it into a little ball. The neighbor’s daughter, who walked me home every day because she was nine years old and responsible, helped me jam the coat inside my Snoopy book bag. “You little fool,” my mother had said when my friend left me at the door, “you’re going to catch pneumonia.” I had run up to my room and thrown myself on the bed, angry that I had disappointed her yet again.

But then again, this was the woman who let me take a bus across downtown Chicago when I was five because she thought I was trustworthy. She had tinted clear gelatin with blue food coloring because that was my favorite color. She taught me how to dance the Stroll and how to hang from the monkey bars with my hem tucked a certain way so thoulñ€†at my skirt didn’t fall up over my head. She had given me my first crayons and coloring book, and had held me when I messed up, assuring me that the lines were for people with no imagination. She had turned herself into someone who was larger than life; someone whose gestures I practiced at night in the bathroom; someone I wanted to be when I grew up.

The night closed around us like a choked throat, suffocating the twitched sounds of the squirrels and the whistling grass. “You weren’t all that bad as a mother,” I said.

“Maybe,” my mother whispered. “Maybe not.”

chapter 30

For the first time in years, Nicholas’s gloved hands shook as he made the incision in the patient’s chest. A neat red line of blood spilled into the hollow left by the scalpel, and Nicholas swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. Anything but this, he thought to himself: climbing Everest, memorizing a dictionary, fighting a war from the front line. Anything had to be easier than doing a quadruple bypass on Alistair Fogerty himself.

He did not have to look under the sterile drapes to know the face connected with the hideously swabbed orange body. Every muscle and line had been etched into his mind; after all, he’d spent eight years absorbing Fogerty’s insults and rallying to meet his boundless expectations. And now the man’s life was in his hands.

Nicholas picked up the saw and switched it to life. It vibrated in the circle of his hands as he touched it to the sternum, carving through the bone. He spread the ribs and he checked the solution in which the leg veins, already harvested, were floating. He imagined Alistair Fogerty standing in the background of the operating suite, his presence hovering at Nicholas’s neck like the stale breath of a dragon. Nicholas looked up at his assisting resident. “I think we’re all set,” he said, watching his words puff out his blue paper mask as if they had meaning or substance.

Robert Prescott was on his hands and knees on the Aubusson rug, rubbing Perrier into a round yellow spot that was part vomit and part sweet potatoes. Now that Max could sit up by himself-at least for a few minutes-he was more likely to spit up whatever he’d last eaten or drunk.

Robert had tried using his baby-sitting time to go over patient files for the next morning, but Max had a habit of pulling them off the couch and wrinkling the papers into his palms. He had gummed one manila binder so thoroughly it fell apart in Robert’s hands.

“Ah,” he said, sitting back on his heels to survey his work. “I don’t think it looks any different from the rosettes.” He frowned at his grandson. “You haven’t done any more of that, have you?”

Max squealed to be picked up-that was his latest thing, that and a razz sound that sprayed everything within three feet. Robert thought he had lifted his arms too, but that might have been wishful thinking. According to Dr. Spock, whom he’d been rereadingon. t‡ in between patients, that didn’t come until the sixth month.

“Let’s see,” he said, holding Max like a football under his arm. He looked around the little parlor, redecorated as a substitute nursery/ playroom, and found what he had been looking for, an old stethoscope. Max liked to suck on the rubber tubes and to hold the cold metal base against his gums, swollen from teething. Robert stood up and passed the toy to Max, but Max dropped it and puckered his lips, getting ready to cry. “Drastic measures,” he said, wheeling Max in a circle over his head. He switched on a Sesame Street cassette he’d bought at the bookstore and started to do a jaunty tango over the clutter of toys on the floor. Max laughed-a wonderful sound, really, Robert thought-every time they whipped around at the corner.

Robert heard the jingle of keys in the door and jumped over the walker so that he could push the Stop button on the tape deck. He slipped Max into the Sassy Seat that was balanced on the edge of the low walnut coffee table and handed him a colander and a plastic mixing spoon. Max stuck the spoon in his mouth and then dropped it on the floor. “Don’t say anything that might give me away,” Robert warned, leaning close to Max, who grabbed his grandfather’s finger and pulled it into his mouth.

Astrid walked into the room, to find Robert thumbing through a patient file and Max sitting quietly with a colander on his head. “Everything’s all right?” she asked, sliding her pocketbook onto the nearest chair.

“Mmm,” Robert said. He noticed that the file he was supposed to be reading was upside down. “Not a peep out of him the whole time.”

When the hospital grapevine made it known that Fogerty had collapsed while doing an aortic valve replacement, Nicholas postponed his afternoon rounds and went straight to his chief’s office. Alistair had been sitting with his feet propped up on the radiator, facing out the window toward the stacks and bricks of the hospital’s incinerator. He was absentmindedly breaking the spiked leaves off his spider plant. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, not bothering to turn around. “Hawaii. Or maybe New Zealand, if I can stand the flight.” He swiveled in the wide leather chair. “Do call out the eighth-grade English teachers. Definition of irony: getting into a car accident while you’re putting on your seat belt. Or the cardiac surgeon discovering he needs a quadruple bypass.”

Nicholas sank down into the chair that sat across from the desk. “What?” he murmured.

Alistair smiled at him, and Nicholas suddenly realized how very old he seemed. He didn’t know Alistair at all, out of this context. He didn’t know if he golfed, or if he took his Scotch neat; he didn’t know if he had cried at his son’s graduation or his daughter’s wedding. Nicholas wondered if anyone knew Alistair that well; if, for that matter, anyone knew him, either. “Dave Goldman ran the tests,” Fogerty said. “I want you to do the surgery.”

Nicholas swallowed. “I-”

Fogerty held up a hand. “Before you humble yourself, Nicholas, keep in mind that I’d rather do it myself. But since I can’t and sincerad€† you’re the only other asshole I trust in this entire organization, I wonder if you might pencil me into your busy schedule.”

“Monday,” Nicholas said. “First thing.”

Fogerty sighed and leaned his head against the chair. “Damn right,” he said. “I’ve seen you in the afternoon; you’re sloppy.” He ran his thumbs over the armrests of the chair, worn smooth by the habit. “You’ll take on as many of my patients as you can,” he said. “There will have to be a leave of absence.”

Nicholas stood. “Consider it done.”

He watched as Alistair Fogerty turned his chair to the window again, charting the rise and fall of the chimney smoke. His echo was simply a whisper. “Done,” he said.

Astrid and Robert Prescott sat on the floor of their dining room under the magnificent cherry table that, with all the leaves in place, could seat twenty. Max seemed to like it under there, as if it were some kind of natural cave that deserved exploration. Spread in front of his chubby feet was an array of eight-by-ten glossies, laminated so that his saliva wouldn’t stain the surfaces. Astrid pointed to the smiling picture of Max himself. “Max,” she said, and the baby turned toward her voice. “Ayee,” he said, drooling.

“Close enough.” She patted his shoulder and pointed to the picture of Nicholas. “Daddy. Daddy.”

Robert Prescott straightened abruptly and slammed his head on the underside of the table. “Shit,” he said, and Astrid poked him with an elbow.

“Your language,” she snapped. “That’s not the first word I want to hear from him.” She picked up the portrait of Paige she had shot from a distance, the one Nicholas had balked at the first day he’d left Max. “This is your mommy,” she said, running her fingertips over Paige’s delicate features. “Mommy.”

“Muh,” Max said.

Astrid turned to Robert, her mouth wide. “You did hear that, didn’t you? Muh?”

Robert nodded. “It could have been gas.”

Astrid scooped the baby into her arms and kissed the folds of his neck. “You, my love, are a genius. Don’t listen to your dotty old grandfather.”

“Nicholas would pitch a fit if he knew you were showing him Paige’s picture, you know,” Robert said. He stood and straightened, rubbing the small of his back. “I’m too damn old for this,” he said. “Nicholas should have had Max ten years ago, when I could really enjoy him.” He held out his arms for Max, so that Astrid could pull herself up. She gathered together the photos. “Max isn’t all yours, Astrid,” he said. “You really should get Nicholas’s go-ahead.”

Astrid pulled the baby back into her arms. Max pressed his lips to her neck and made razzing sounds. She slid him into the high chair that hol€†sat at the head of the table. “If we’d always done what Nicholas wanted,” she said, “he’d have been a teenage vegetarian with a crew cut who bungee-jumped from hot-air balloons.”

Robert opened two jars of baby food, pear-pineapple and plums, and sniffed at them to see which might taste better. “You have a point,” he said.

Nicholas had planned to do the entire operation, with the exception of the vein harvest, from start to finish, out of deference to Alistair. He knew that if the positions were reversed, he would want it that way. But by the time he had threaded the ribs with wire, he was unsteady on his feet. He had been concentrating too hard too long. The placement of the veins had been perfect. The sutures he’d made around Alistair’s heart were microscopically minute. He just couldn’t do any more.

“You can close,” he said, nodding to the resident who had been assisting him. “And you’d better do the best goddamned job of your surgical career.” He regretted the words as soon as he’d said them, seeing the slight tremor in the girl’s fingers. He leaned down below the sterile drapes that hid Alistair’s face. There was a lot he had planned to say, but just seeing him there with the life temporarily drained out of him reminded Nicholas too much of his own mortality. He held his wrist against Alistair’s cheek, careful not to mark him with his own blood. He felt the tingle coming back to Fogerty’s skin as the unobstructed heart began to do its work again. Satisfied, he left the room with all the dignity Fogerty had told him he would one day command.

Robert didn’t like it when Astrid took Max into the darkroom. “Too many wires,” he said, “too many toxic chemicals. God only knows what gets into his system in there.” But Astrid wasn’t stupid. Max couldn’t crawl yet, so there was no danger of his getting into the stop bath or the fixer. She didn’t do any developing when he was around; she just scanned contact sheets for the prints she’d make later. If she placed him just right, on a big striped beach towel, he was perfectly content to play with his chunky plastic shapes and the electronic ball that made farm animal noises.

“Once upon a time,” Astrid said, telling the story over her shoulder, “there was a girl named Cinderella, who hadn’t lived the most charmed life but had the good fortune to meet a man who had. The kind of man, by the way, you’re going to grow up to be.” She leaned down and handed him a rubber triangle he’d inadvertently tossed away. “You’re going to open doors for girls and pay for their dinners and do all the chivalrous things men used to do before they slacked off under the excuse of equal rights.”

Astrid circled a tiny square with her red grease pen. “This one’s good,” she murmured. “Anyway, Max, as I was saying… oh, yes, Cinderella. Well, someone else will probably tell you the story at a later date, so I’m just going to skip ahead a little. You see, a book doesn’t always end at the final page.” She squatted down until she was sitting across from Max, and then she took his hands in her own, kissing the tips of his stubby wet fingers.

“Cinderella had liked the idea of living in a castle, and she was actually rather good at being a princess unthe €†il one day she started to think about what she might be doing if she hadn’t gotten married to the handsome prince. All her old friends were kicking up their heels at banquet halls and entering Pillsbury Bake-Offs and dating Chippendale’s dancers. So she took one of the royal horses and traveled to the far ends of the earth, taking photographs with this camera she’d gotten from a peddler in exchange for her crown.”

The baby hiccuped, and Astrid pulled him to a standing position. “No, really,” she said, “it wasn’t a rip-off. After all, it was a Nikon. Meanwhile, the prince was doing everything he could to get her out of his mind, because he was the laughingstock of the royal community for not being able to keep a leash on his wife. He went hunting three times a day and organized a croquet tournament and even took up taxidermy, but staying busy all the time still couldn’t occupy his thoughts. So-”

Max waddled forward, supported by Astrid’s hands, just as Nicholas appeared at the darkroom’s curtain. “I don’t like when you take him in here,” he said, reaching for Max. “What if you turn your back?”

“I don’t,” Astrid said. “How was your surgery?”

Nicholas hoisted Max onto his shoulder and smelled his bottom. “Jeez,” he said. “When did Grandma change you last?”

Standing, Astrid frowned at her son and plucked Max off his shoulder. “It only takes him a minute,” she said, walking past Nicholas from her darkroom into the muted light of the Blue Room.

“The surgery was fine,” Nicholas said, picking at a tray of olives and cocktail onions that Imelda had set out for Astrid hours before. “I’m just here to check in because I know I’ll be late. I want to be there when Fogerty wakes up.” He stuffed three olives into his mouth and spit the pimentos into a napkin. “And what was that trash you were telling Max?”

“Fairy tales,” Astrid said, unsnapping Max’s outfit and pulling free the tapes of the diaper. “You remember them, I’m sure.” She swabbed Max’s backside and handed Nicholas the dirty bundle to dispose of. “They all have happy endings.”

When Alistair Fogerty awoke from a groggy sleep in surgical ICU, the first words he uttered were, “Get Prescott.”

Nicholas was paged. Since he had been expecting this summons, he was at Fogerty’s bedside in minutes. “You bastard,” Alistair said to him, straining to shift his weight. “What have you done to me?”

Nicholas grinned at him. “A very tidy quadruple bypass,” he said. “Some of my best work.”

“Then how come I feel like I have an eighteen-wheeler on my chest?” Fogerty tossed against the pillows. “God,” he said. “I’ve been listening to patients tell me that for years, and I never really believed them. Maybe we should all go through open heart, like psychiatrists have to be analyzed. A humbling experience.”

His eyes began to close, and Nicholas stood upgn=€†. Joan Fogerty was waiting at the door. He crossed to speak to her, to tell her that all the preliminary signs were very good. She had been crying; Nicholas could tell by the raccoon rings of mascara under her eyes. She sat beside her husband and spoke softly, words Nicholas could not hear.

“Nicholas,” Fogerty whispered, his voice barely audible above the steady blip of the cardiac monitor. “Take care of my patients, and don’t fuck with my desk.”

Nicholas smiled and walked out of the room. He took several steps down the hall before he realized what Alistair had been telling him: that he was now the acting chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Mass General. Without realizing it, he took the elevator to the floor where Fogerty’s office was located, and he turned the unlocked door. Nothing had changed. The files were still piled high, their coded edges bright like confetti. The sun fell across the forbidding swivel chair, and Nicholas was almost certain he could see Alistair’s impression on the soft leather.

He walked to the chair and sat down, placing his hands on the arms as he had seen Fogerty do so many times. He turned to face the window but closed his eyes to the light. He didn’t even hear Elliot Saget, Mass General’s chief of surgery, enter. “And the seat isn’t even cold yet,” Saget said sarcastically.

Nicholas whipped around and stood up, sending the chair flying into the radiator behind. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just down checking on Alistair-”

Saget held up a hand. “I’m only here to make it official. Fogerty’s on six months leave. You’re the acting director of cardiothoracic. We’ll let you know what kind of meetings and committees we’ll be cluttering your evenings with, and I’ll get your name on the door.” He turned to leave and then paused at the threshold of the door to smile. “We’ve known about your skills for a long time, Nicholas. You’ve got quite a reputation for spit and fire. If you’re the one who gave Alistair his heart trouble, then God help me,” he said, and he walked out.

Nicholas sank back into Alistair’s leather wing chair-his leather wing chair-and wheeled himself in circles like a little kid. Then he put his feet down and soberly organized the papers on the desk into neat, symmetric piles, not bothering to read the pages, not yet. He picked up the phone and dialed for an outside line, but realized he had no one to call. His mother was taking Max to a petting zoo, his father was still at work, and Paige, well, he didn’t know where she was at all. He leaned back and watched the billowed smoke blowing from Mass General toward Boston. He wondered why, after years of wanting to stand at the very top, he felt so goddamned empty.

chapter 31

My mother said there was no connection, but I knew that Donegal colicked because she had broken her ankle. It hadn’t been his feed or water; those had been consistent. There hadn’t been any severe temperature changes that could have caused it. But then my mother had been tossed from Elmo over a jump, right into the blue wall. She had landed a certain way and was now wearing a cast. I thought Donegal’s colic was a sort of sympathy pain.

My mother, who had been told not to move by the doctor who’d set her ankle, hopped the whole way from the house to the barn on her crutches. “How is he?” she said, falling to her knees in the stall and running her hands over Donegal’s neck.

He was lying down, thrashing back and forth, and he kept looking back at his sides. My mother pulled up his lip and looked at his gums. “He’s a little pale,” she conceded. “Call the vet.”

Josh walked to the phone, and I sat by my mother. “Go back to bed,” I told her. “Josh and I can take care of this.”

“Like hell you can,” my mother said. “Don’t tell me what to do.” She sighed and rubbed her face against her shirt sleeve. “In the chest on the table up there you’ll find a syringe of Banamine,” she said. “Would you get it for me?”

I stood up, clenching my jaw. I only wanted to help her, and she wasn’t doing herself any good hobbling around a sick horse that was flailing all over the place and likely to hit her. “I hope to God he hasn’t got a twisted gut,” she murmured. “I don’t know where I’ll get the money for an operation.”

I sat on the other side of Donegal while my mother gave him the shot. We both stroked him until he quieted. After a half hour, Donegal suddenly neighed and wriggled his legs beneath him and shuddered to his feet. My mother scooted out of the way on her hands, into a urine-soaked pile of hay, but she didn’t seem to care. “That’s my boy,” she said, beckoning Josh to help her stand.

Dr. Heineman, the traveling vet, arrived with a pickup truck stocked with two treasure chests full of medicine and supplies. “He’s looking good, Lily,” he said, checking Donegal’s temperature. “ ‘Course, you look like hell. Whaddya do to your foot?”

“I didn’t do it,” my mother said. “It was Elmo.”

Josh and I held Donegal in the center aisle of the barn as the vet put a twitch on his nose-a metal clothespin-like thing-and then, when he was distracted by that pain, threaded a thick plastic catheter down his nostril and into his throat. Dr. Heineman waved his nose over the free end and smiled. “Smells like fresh green grass,” he said, and my mother sighed, relieved. “I think he’s going to be just fine, but I’ll give him a little oil just in case.” He began to pump mineral oil from a plastic gallon tub through the tube, blowing the last bit down with his own mouth. Then he unthreaded the catheter, letting loose phlegm splatter at Donegal’s feet. He patted the horse’s neck and told Josh to lead him back into the stall. “Watch him for the next twenty-four hours,” he said, and then he turned to me. “And it couldn’t hurt to watch her as well.”

My mother waved him away, but he was laughing. “You tried out that cast yet, Lily?” he said, walking down the barn’s aisle. “Does it fit into your stirrup?”

My mother leaned against my side and watched the vet go. “I can’t believe I pay him,” she said.

I walked slowly with my mother back to the house, getting her to promise she’d at least mot‘€†stay on the couch downstairs if I sat in the barn with Donegal. While Josh did the afternoon chores, I ran back and forth between the stable and the house. When Donegal slept, I helped my mother do crossword puzzles. We turned on the TV and watched daytime soaps, trying to figure out the story lines. I cooked dinner and tied a plastic bag around my mother’s foot when she wanted to bathe, and then I tucked her into bed.

I woke up suddenly, breathless, at midnight, realizing that of all nights, tonight I had forgotten to do a ten o’clock check. How did my mother remember all these things? I ran down the stairs and threw the door open. I raced the whole way to the barn in my bare feet. I switched on the light and panted, catching my breath as I walked down the stalls. Aurora and Andy, Eddy and Elmo, Jean-Claude and Tony and Burt. All the horses were sitting, their legs folded neatly beneath them. They were in varying states of consciousness, but none startled at my appearance. The last stall in the barn was Donegal’s. I took a deep breath, thinking I would never forgive myself if anything had happened to him. I could never make something like that up to my mother. I held my hands against the chain-link door. Curled against the belly of the snoring horse was my mother, fast asleep, her cast gleaming in the slanted square of moonlight, her fingers twitching in the wake of a dream.

“Now remember,” my mother said, balancing precariously on her crutches at the gate to the field, “he hasn’t been turned out in two days. We’re going to ease into this; we’re not going to run him ragged. Understand?”

I nodded, looking down at her from what seemed like a tremendous height when in fact I was only on Donegal. I was terrified. I kept remembering what my mother had said two months before, that even an inexperienced rider could sit on Donegal and look good. But he had been sick, and I had never galloped across an open field, and the only horse I’d ridden was twenty years older than this one and knew the routine better than I did.

My mother reached up and squeezed my ankle. She adjusted the stirrup so it rested further up by my toes. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I wouldn’t have asked you to ride him if I didn’t think you could do it.” She hallooed and slapped Donegal’s hind leg, and I sat level in the saddle as he cantered off.

I couldn’t see Donegal’s legs for the tall grass, but I could feel his strength between my thighs. The more I gave him the reins, the gentler the rhythm of his run became. I fully expected that I was going to take off, that he would step on the lowest clouds and carry me over the swollen blue peaks of the mountains.

I leaned in toward Donegal’s neck, hearing my mother’s voice in my mind from that very first day: “Never lean forward unless you’re planning to gallop.” I had never galloped, not really, unless you counted a pony’s quick strides at a canter. But Donegal shifted into a faster run, so smooth that I barely lifted in the saddle.

I sat very still and closed my eyes, letting the horse take the lead. I tuned in to the pounding sound of Donegal’s hooves and the matching beat of my own pulse. I opened my eyes just in time to see the brook.

I hadn’t knowhei‘€†n there was another stream, one that ran across this field, but then again I’d never ridden in it, never even walked all the way across it. As Donegal approached the stream he tensed the muscles in his hindquarters. I released my hands to slide up his neck, adding leg to help him off the ground. We soared over the water, and although it couldn’t have been more than half a second, I could have sworn I saw each glistening rock, each rush and surge of current.

I pulled back on the reins, and Donegal tossed his head, breathing heavily. He stopped at the fence a few feet away from the brook and turned toward the spot where we had left my mother as if he knew he had been putting on a show all along.

At first I could not hear it over the tumble of water and the gossip of the robins, but then the sound came: slow, growing louder, until even Donegal became perfectly quiet and pricked up his ears. I patted his neck and praised him, all the while listening to the proud beat of my mother’s clapping.

My mother came into my bedroom late that night when the heaviest stars had dripped like a chain of diamonds over the sill of my window. She put her hand over my forehead, and I sat up and thought for a moment that I was five years old and that this was the night before she left. Wait, I tried to tell her, but nothing came out of my throat. Don’t do it again. Instead I heard myself say, “Tell me why you left.”

My mother lay down beside me on the narrow bed. “I knew this was coming,” she said. Nearby, the face of the porcelain doll gleamed like a Cheshire cat. “For six years I believed in your father. I bought into his dreams and I went to Mass for him and I worked at that stinking paper to help pay the mortgage. I was the wife he needed me to be and the mother I was supposed to become. I was so busy being everything he wanted that there was too little left of Maisie Renault. If I didn’t get away, I knew I’d lose myself completely.” She wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pulled me back against her chest. “I hated myself for feeling that way. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t like Donna Reed.”

“I didn’t understand that, either,” I said quietly, and I wondered if she thought I was talking about her or about me.

My mother sat up and crossed her legs. “You’re happy here,” she said. “And you fit. I saw it in the way you rode Donegal. If you lived here you could teach some of the beginner kids. If you want, you could even start to show.” Her voice trailed off as she stared out the window, and then she turned her gaze back to me. “Paige,” she said, “why don’t you just stay here with me?”

Just stay here with me. As she spoke, something inside me burst and coursed warm through my veins, and I realized that all along I must have been a little bit cold. Then that rush stopped, and there was nothing. This was what I had wanted, wasn’t it? Her stamp of approval, her need for me. I’d waited twenty years. But something was missing.

She said she wanted me to stay, but I was the one who’d found her. If I did stay, I’d never know the one thing I really wanted to know. Would she ever have come looking for me?

It was a choice, a simple choice. If I stayed, I would not be with Nicholas and Max. I wouldn’t be around when Max threw his first loopy pitch; I wouldn’t run my fingers over the plaque on Nicholas’s office door. If I stayed, it was for good; I would never be going home.

Then it struck me for the first time: the meaning of the words I’d been saying over and over since I’d arrived. I really did have to go home, although I was only now beginning to believe it. “I have to go back,” I said. The words fell heavy, a wall between my mother and myself.

I saw something Bicker across my mother’s eyes, but just as quickly it was gone. “You can’t undo what’s done, Paige,” she said, squaring her shoulders the same way I did when I fought with Nicholas. “People forgive, but they never forget. I made a mistake, but if I had come back to Chicago, I never would have been able to live it down. You always would have been throwing that up at me, like you are now. What do you think Nicholas is going to do? And Max, when he’s old enough to understand?”

“I didn’t run away from them,” I said stubbornly. “I ran to find you.”

“You ran to remind yourself you still had a self,” my mother said, getting up from the bed. “Be honest. It’s about you, isn’t it?”

She stood beside the window, blocking out the reflected light so that I was left in almost total darkness. All right, I was at my mother’s horse farm and we were catching up and all that was good, but it hadn’t been the reason I’d left home. In my mind, both actions were tangled together, but one hadn’t caused the other. Still, no matter what, leaving home had to do with more than just me. It may have started out that way, but I was beginning to see how many chain reactions had been set off and how many people had been hurt. If the simple act of my disappearance could unravel my whole family, I must have held more power-been more important-than I’d ever considered.

Leaving home was all about us. I realized this was something that my mother had never stopped to learn.

I stood up and rounded on her so quickly she fell back against the pale glass of the window. “What makes you think it’s that simple?” I said. “Yes, you walk out-but you leave people behind. You fix your life-but at someone else’s expense. I waited for you,” I said quietly. “I needed you.” I leaned closer. “Did you ever wonder what you missed? You know, all the little things, like teaching me to put on mascara and clapping at my school plays and seeing me fall in love?”

My mother turned away. “I would have liked to see that,” she said softly. “Yes.”

“I guess you don’t always get what you want,” I said. “Do you know that when I was seven, eight, I used to keep a suitcase, all packed and ready, hidden in my closet? I used to write to you two or three times a year, begging you to come and get me, but I never knew where to send the letters.”

“I wouldn’t have taken you away from Patrick,” my mother said. “It wouldn’t have been fair.”

“Fair? By whose standardseig‘€†?” I stared at her, feeling worse than I had in a very long time. “What about me? Why didn’t you ever ask me?”

My mother sighed. “I couldn’t have forced you to make that kind of choice, Paige. It was a no-win situation.”

“Yes. Well,” I said bitterly, “I know all about those.” Suddenly I was so tired that all the rage rushed out of my body. I wanted to sleep for months; for, maybe, years. “There are some things you can’t tell your father,” I said, sinking onto the bed. My voice was even and matter-of-fact, and in a moment of courage I lifted my eyes to see, quicksilver, my soul fly out of hiding. “I had an abortion when I was eighteen,” I said flatly. “You weren’t there.”

Even as my mother reached for me, I could see her face blanch. “Oh, Paige,” she said, “you should have come to me.”

“You should have been there,” I murmured. But really, what difference could it have made? My mother would have believed it was her duty to tell me of the choices. She might have whispered about the certain smell of a baby, or reminded me of the spell we had woven, mother and daughter, lying beside each other on a narrow kitchen table, wrapping our future around us like a hand-worked shawl. My mother might have told me the things I didn’t want to hear back then and could not bear to hear right now.

At least my baby never knew me, I thought. At least I spared her all that pain.

My mother lifted my chin. “Look at me, Paige. You can’t go back. You can’t ever go back.” She moved her hands to rest on my shoulders like gripped clamps. “You’re just like me,” she said.

Was I? I had spent the past three months trying to find all the easy comparisons-our eyes, our hair, and the less obvious traits, like the tendency to run and to hide. But there were some traits I didn’t want to admit I shared with her. I had given up the gift of a child because I was so scared that my mother’s irresponsibility would be passed on in my bloodline. I had left my family and chalked it up to Fate. For years I had convinced myself that if I could find my own mother, if I could just see what might have been, I would possess all the answers.

“I’m not like you,” I said. It wasn’t an accusation but a statement, curled at the end in surprise. Maybe I had expected to be like her, maybe I had even secretly hoped to be like her, but now I wasn’t going to lie down and just let it happen. This time I was fighting back. This time I was choosing my own direction. “I’m not like you,” I said again, and I felt a knot tighten at the base of my stomach, now that all of a sudden I had no excuse.

I stood up and walked around the little-girl’s bedroom, already knowing what I was going to do. I had spent my life wondering what I could have done wrong that made the one person I loved more than anything leave me behind; I wasn’t going to pin that blame like a scarlet letter on Nicholas or Max. I pulled my underwear out of a drawer. I stuffed my jeans, still covered with hay and manure, into the bottom of the small overnight bag I’d arrived with. I carefully wrapped up my sticks of charcoal. I started to envision the quickest route home, and I counted off the hours in my mind. “How can you even ask me todn’‘€† stay?” I whispered.

My mother’s eyes glowed like a mountain cat’s. She shook with the effort of holding her tears at bay. “They won’t take you back,” she said.

I stared at her, and then I slowly smiled. “You did,” I said.

chapter 32

Max had his first cold. It was amazing that he’d made it this long-the pediatrician said it had something to do with breast-feeding and antibodies. Nicholas had got almost no sleep in the past two days, which were supposed to be his time off from the hospital. He sat helpless, watching Max’s nose bubble and run, scrubbing clean the cool-mist vaporizer, and wishing he could breathe for his son.

Astrid was the one to diagnose the cold. She had taken Max to the pediatrician because she thought he’d swallowed a willow pod-which was an entirely different story-and she wanted to know if it was poisonous. But when the doctor listened to his chest and heard the upper-respiratory rattle and hum, he’d prescribed PediaCare and rest.

Nicholas was miserable. He hated watching Max choke and sputter over his bottle, unable to drink since he couldn’t breathe through his nose. He had to rock him to sleep, a lousy habit, because Max couldn’t suck on a pacifier and if he cried himself to sleep he wound up soaked in mucus. Every day Nicholas called the doctor, a colleague at Mass General who’d been in his graduating class at Harvard. “Nick,” the guy said over and over, “no baby’s ever died of a cold.”

Nicholas carried Max, who was blessedly quiet, to the bathroom to check his weight. He placed Max on the cool tile and stood on the digital scale, getting a reading before he stepped back onto it holding Max. “You’re down a half pound,” Nicholas said, holding Max up to the mirror so he could see himself. He smiled, and the mucus in his nostrils ran into his mouth.

“This is disgusting,” Nicholas muttered to himself, tucking the baby under his arm and carrying him to the living room. It had been an endless day of carrying Max when he cried, cuddling him when he got frustrated and batted at his nose, washing his toys in case he could reinfect himself.

He propped Max up in front of the TV, letting him watch the evening news. “Tell me what the weather’s going to be like this weekend,” Nicholas said, walking upstairs. He needed to raise one end of the crib and to get the vaporizer going so that if, God willing, Max fell asleep, he could carry him into the dark nursery without waking him. He was bound to fall asleep. It was almost midnight, and Max hadn’t napped since morning.

He finished in the nursery and came back downstairs. He leaned over Max from behind. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Rain?”

Max reached up his hands. “Dada,” he said, and then he coughed.

Nicholas sighed and settled Max into the crook of his arm. “Let’s make a deal,” he said. “If yo. “ep. I, au go to sleep within twenty minutes I’ll tell Grandma you don’t have to eat apricots for the next five days.” He uncapped the bottle that had been leaking onto the couch and rubbed it against Max’s lips until his mouth opened like a foundling’s. Max could take three strong sucks before he had to break away and breathe. “You know what’s going to happen,” Nicholas said. “You’re going to get all better, and then I’m going to get sick. And I’ll give it back to you, and we’ll have this damn thing until Christmas.”

Nicholas watched the commentator talk about the consumer price index, the DJIA, and the latest unemployment figures. By the time the news was over, Max had fallen asleep. He was cradled in Nicholas’s arms like a little angel, his arms resting limp over his stomach. Nicholas held his breath and contorted his body, pushing himself up from the heels, then the calves, then the back, finally snapping his head up. He tiptoed up the stairs toward the nursery, and then the doorbell rang.

Max’s eyes flew open, and he started to scream. “Fuck,” Nicholas muttered, tossing the baby against his shoulder and jiggling him up and down until the crying slowed. The doorbell rang again. Nicholas headed back down the hall. “This better be an emergency,” he muttered. “A car crash on my front lawn, or a fire next door.”

He unlocked and pulled open the heavy oak door and came face-to-face with his wife.

At first Nicholas didn’t believe it. This didn’t really look like Paige, at least not as she had looked when she left. She was tanned and smiling, and her body was trim. “Hi,” she said, and he almost fell over just hearing the melody wrapped around her voice.

Max stopped crying, as if he knew she was there, and stretched out his hand. Nicholas took a step forward and extended his palm, trying to ascertain whether he would be reaching toward a vision, coming up with a handful of mist. His fingertips were inches away from her collarbone, and he could see the pulse at the base of her throat, when he snapped his wrist back and stepped away. The space between them became charged and heavy. What had he been thinking? If he touched her, it would start all over again. If he touched her, he wouldn’t be able to say what had been building inside him for three months; wouldn’t be able to give her her due.

“Nicholas,” Paige said, “give me five minutes.”

Nicholas clenched his teeth. It was all coming back now, the flood of anger he’d buried under his work and his care of Max. She couldn’t just step in as though she’d been on a getaway weekend and play the loving mother. As far as Nicholas was concerned, she didn’t have the right to be there anymore at all, “I gave you three months,” he said. “You can’t just breeze in and out of our lives at your pleasure, Paige. We’ve done fine without you.”

She wasn’t listening to him. She reached forward and touched her hand to the baby’s back, brushing the side of Nicholas’s thumb. He turned so that Max, asleep again on his shoulder, was out of reach. “Don’t touch him,” he said, his eyes flashing. “If you think I’m going to let you walk back in here and pick up where you left off, you’ve got another thing coming. You aren’t getting into this house, and you’re not getting within a hundred feet of this baby.”

If he decided to talk to Paige, if he let her see Max, it would be in his own sweet time, on his own agenda. Let her stew for a little while. Let her see what it was like to be powerless all of a sudden. Let her fall asleep fitfully, knowing she had absolutely no idea what tomorrow held in store.

Paige’s eyes filled with tears, and Nicholas schooled himself not to move a muscle. “You can’t do this,” she said thickly.

Nicholas stepped back far enough to grab the edge of the door. “Watch me,” he said, and he slammed it shut in his wife’s face.