Harvesting the Heart

chapter 33

The front door has grown larger overnight. Thicker, even. It is the biggest obstacle I’ve ever seen. And I should know. For hours at a time, I focus all my concentration on it, waiting for a miracle.

It would almost be funny, if it didn’t hurt so much. For four years I walked in and out of that door without giving it a second thought, and now-the first time I’ve really wanted to, the first time I’ve chosen to-I can’t. I keep thinking, Open sesame. I close my eyes and I picture the little hallway, the Chinese umbrella stand, the Persian runner. I’ve even tried praying. But it doesn’t change anything; Nicholas and Max are on one side, and I’m stuck on the other.

I smile when I can to my neighbors as they go by, but I am very busy. Such concentration takes all my energy. I repeat Nicholas’s name silently, and I picture him so vividly I almost believe I can conjure him-magic!-inches from where I sit. And still nothing happens. Well, I will wait forever, if it comes to that. I have made my decision. I want my husband to come back into my life. But I will settle for finding a chink in his armor, so that I can slip back into his life and prove that we can go back to normal.

I don’t find it strange that I would give my right arm to be inside the house, watching Max grow up before my eyes-doing, really, the things that made me so crazy three months ago. I’d just been going through the motions then, acting out a role that I couldn’t really remember being cast in. Now I’m back by my own free will. I want to spread chutney on Nicholas’s turkey sandwiches. I want to stretch socks over Max’s sunburned feet. I want to find all my art supplies and draw picture after picture with pastels and oils and hang them on the walls until every dull, pale corner of that house is throbbing with color. God, there is such a difference between living the life you are expected to live and living the life you want to live. I just realized it a little late, is all.

Okay, so my homecoming hasn’t gone quite the way I’d planned. I figured on Nicholas welcoming me with a small parade, kissing me until my knees gave out beneath me, telling me that come hell or high water, he’d never let me go again. Truth is, I was so excited about slipping back into the remont routine that fit me like a soft old shoe, I never considered that the circumstances might have changed. I had learned the lesson already this past summer, with Jake, but I never thought to apply it here. But of course, if I am different, I shouldn’t expect that time has stood still for Nicholas. I understand that he’s been hurt, but if I can forgive myself, surely Nicholas can forgive me too. And if he can’t, I’ll have to make him try.

Yesterday I accidentally let him get away. I never thought of following him; I assumed that he’d found someone to watch Max at home when he went to work. But at 6:30 A.M., there he had been, toting the baby and a diaper bag, stuffing both into his car with the carelessness that comes from constant practice. I was very impressed. I could never carry both Max and the diaper bag-in fact, I could barely summon enough courage to take Max out of the house. Nicholas-well, Nicholas made it look so easy.

He had come out the front door and pretended I wasn’t there. “Good morning,” I had said, but Nicholas didn’t even nod his head. He got into his car, sitting for a minute behind the wheel. Then he unrolled the window on the passenger side and leaned toward it. “You will be gone,” he said, “by the time I get home.”

I assumed he was going to the hospital, but I wasn’t about to go there looking the way I did. Embarrassing Nicholas in his own front yard was one thing; making him look bad in front of his superiors was another. That I knew he would never forgive. And I had looked awful yesterday. I’d driven seventeen hours straight, slept on my front lawn, and skipped showers for two days. I would slip into the house, wash up, change my clothes, and then go to Mass General. I wanted to see Max without Nicholas around, and how difficult could it be to find the day care facility there?

After Nicholas left, I crawled into the front seat of my car and fished my keys from my pocketbook. I felt sure that Nicholas had forgotten about those. I opened the front door and stepped into my house for the first time in three full months.

It smelled of Nicholas and Max and not at all of me. It was a mess. I didn’t know how Nicholas, who loved order, could live like this, much less consider it sanitary for Max. There were dirty dishes piled on every pristine surface in the kitchen, and the Barely White tiles on the floor were streaked with muddy footprints and scribbles of jelly. In the corner was a dead plant, and fermenting in the sink was half a melon. The hallway was dark and littered with stray socks and boxer shorts; the living room was gray with dust. Max’s toys-most of which I’d never seen before-were covered with tiny smudged handprints.

My first instinct had been to clean up. But if I did that, Nicholas would know I had been inside, and I didn’t want him yelling again. So I made my way to the bedroom and pulled a pair of khaki pants and a green cotton sweater out of my closet. After a quick shower, I put them on and threw my dirty clothes into the bathroom hamper.

When I thought I heard a noise, I ran out of the bathroom, stopping only in the nursery to get a quick scent of Max-soiled diapers and baby powder and sweet milky skin. I slipped out the back door just in case, but I didn’t see anybody. With my hair still wet, I drove to Mass General and inquired about staff child care, but they told me there was no facility ify¡€†on the hospital grounds. “Good Lord,” I said to the receptionist at the information desk. “Nicholas has him in a day care center.” I laughed out loud then, thinking about how ridiculous this had all turned out. If Nicholas had agreed to consider day care before the baby was born, I wouldn’t have been home all day with him. I would have been taking classes, maybe drawing again-I would have been doing something for myself. If I hadn’t been home with Max, I might never have needed to get away.

I wasn’t about to search through the Boston phone book for day care centers, so I had gone home and resigned myself to the fact that I’d lost a day. Then Nicholas showed up and told me again to get the hell off his lawn. But late last night, he had come outside. He wasn’t angry, at least not as angry as he had been. He stepped down to the porch, sitting so close that I could have touched him. He was wearing a robe I had not seen before. As I watched him, I pretended that we were different, that it was years ago, and we were eating bagels and chive cream cheese and reading the real estate listings of the Sunday Globe. For a moment, just a moment, something passed behind the shadows in his eyes. I could not be sure, but I thought it took the shape of understanding.

That’s why today I am bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to follow Nicholas to the ends of the earth. He’s late-it’s past seven o’clock-and I’m already in the car. I have moved out of the driveway and parked down the block, because I want him to think I have disappeared. When he drives away I am going to tail him, like in the movies, always keeping a couple of cars between us.

He walks out the front door with Max tucked beneath his arm like a Federal Express package, and I start the engine. I unroll my window and stare, just in case Nicholas does anything I can use as a clue. I hold my breath as he locks the door, saunters to his car, and settles Max into the car seat. It’s a different car seat now, facing forward, instead of the little bucket that faced the back. On the plastic bar across the car seat is a circus of plastic animals, each holding a different jingling bell. Max giggles when Nicholas buckles him in, and he grabs a yellow rubber ball that hangs from an elephant’s nose. “Dada,” he says-I swear I can hear it-and I smile at my baby’s first word.

Nicholas looks over the top of the car before he slips into his seat, and I know he is trying to find me. I have an unobstructed view of him: his glinting black hair and his sky-colored eyes. It has been quite a while since I’ve really looked at him; I have been making up images from a composite of memories. Nicholas really is the most handsome man I have ever seen; time and distance haven’t changed that. It isn’t his features as much as their contrast; it isn’t his face as much as his ease and his presence. When he puts the car in gear and begins to drive down the block, I count, whispering out loud. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi,” I say. I make it to five, and then I start to follow him.

As I expected, Nicholas doesn’t take the turn to Mass General. He takes a route that I recognize from somewhere but that I can’t quite place. It is only when I hide my car in a driveway three houses down from Nicholas’s parents’ house that I realize what has happened while I’ve been away.

I can see Astrid only from a distance. Her shirt is a blue splotch against the wood door. Nicholas holds out the baby to her, and I feel my own arms ache. Hed s¡€† says a few words, and then he walks back to the car.

I have a choice: I can follow Nicholas to wherever he’s going next, or I can wait until he leaves and hope that I have the advantage of surprise and try to get Astrid Prescott to let me hold my baby, which I want more than anything. I see Nicholas start the car. Astrid closes the heavy front door. Without thinking about what I am doing, I pull out of the neighbor’s driveway and follow Nicholas.

I realize then that I would have come back to Massachusetts no matter what. It has to do with more than Max, with more than my mother, with more than obligation. Even if there were no baby, I would have returned because of Nicholas. Because of Nicholas. I’m in love with Nicholas. In spite of the fact that he is no longer the man I married; in spite of the fact that he spends more time with patients than with me; in spite of the fact that I have never been and never will be the kind of wife he should have had. A long time ago, he dazzled me; he saved me. And out of every other woman in the world, Nicholas chose me. We may have changed over the years, but these are the kinds of feelings that last. I know they’re still there in him, somewhere. Maybe the part of his heart that he’s using now to hate me used to be the part that loves.

Suddenly I am impatient. I want to find Nicholas immediately, tell him what I now know. I want to grab him by the collar and kiss my memory into his bloodstream. I want to tell him I am sorry. I want to hear him set me free.

I lean my hand out the window as I drive, cupping the firm knob of air that I can’t see. I laugh out loud at my discovery: I had been restless for so long that, like an idiot, I ran for miles and miles just to realize that what I really wanted was right here.

Nicholas parks in the Mass General garage, the uppermost level, and I park four spaces away from him. I think about the police shows I’ve seen on TV as I hide behind the concrete pylons, keeping my distance in case Nicholas decides to turn around. I start to sweat, wondering how I’ll be able to keep him from noticing me on an elevator, but Nicholas takes the stairs. He goes down one level into the hospital building and walks down a hall that does not even remotely resemble a surgical floor. There is blue commercial carpeting and a line of wooden doors with the names of doctors spread across them on brass plaques. At one point, when he turns to fit a key into a lock, I pull myself into a doorway. “May I help you?” a voice says behind the half-open door, and I feel the blood drain out of my face, even as I curl my way back into the hall.

Nicholas has closed the door behind himself. I walk up to it and read the plaque. DR. NICHOLAS J. PRESCOTT, ACTING CHIEF OF CARDIOTHORACIC SURGERY. When did that happen? I lean against the frame of the smooth varnished door and rub my fingers over the recessed letters of Nicholas’s name. I would have liked to be here for that, and even as I think this, I am wondering what the circumstances were. I see Alistair Fogerty, pants pillowed around his ankles, in a compromising position with a nurse in the supply closet. Maybe he is sick, or even dead. What else would make that pompous old goat give up his position?

The twitch of the doorknob startles me. I turn to the bulletin board and pretend to be engrossed in an article about endorphins. Nicholas walks padiv¡€†st without noticing me. He has taken off his jacket and is wearing his white lab coat. He stops at an empty circular desk near the elevator bank and riffles through a clipboard’s papers.

When he disappears behind the doors of the elevator, I panic. This is a big hospital, and the chances of my finding him again are next to nothing. But I must have followed him here for a reason, whatever it might be, and I’m not ready to give up yet. I press my fingers to my temples, thinking of Sherlock Holmes and Nancy Drew, of clues. How did Nicholas spend his day? Where would a doctor be likely to go? I try to run through my mind snippets of conversation we’ve had when he mentioned places in the hospital, even specific floors. Nicholas could have gone to the patient rooms, the laboratory, the lockers. Or he could be headed where a cardiac surgeon should be headed.

“Excuse me,” I say quietly to a janitor emptying a trash container.

“No hablo inglés. ”The man shrugs.

I try again. “Operation,” I say. “I’m looking for the operations.”

“Sí, operación.” The man makes a jagged line across his stomach. He bobs his head, smiling.

I shake my head and try to remember the Sesame Street Spanish I’d heard when I turned it on for Max. “Uno,” I say, holding my hand close to the floor. I move it up an inch. “Dos.” I move it again. “Tres, cuatro… operation?”

The man claps his hands. “Sí, sí, operación.” He holds up three fingers. “Tres,” he says.

“Gracias,” I murmur, and I jam my finger repeatedly into the elevator call button, as if this might make it come faster.

Sure enough, the operating rooms are on three, and as the elevator doors part I get a glimpse of Nicholas rushing by, now in his blue scrubs. Everything on him is covered, except for his face, but I would have been able to spot him from a distance simply by the stately manner of his walk. He looks over my head at a wall clock, then he disappears behind a double panel of doors.

“If you’re a relative,” a voice says behind me, “you’ll have to go to the waiting room.” I turn to see a pretty, petite nurse in a crisp white uniform. “Only patients are allowed in here,” she says.

“Oh,” I say. “I must have gotten lost.” I give a quick smile and then ask her if Dr. Prescott has arrived yet.

Nodding, she takes my elbow, as if she knows this is a ploy and wants me out immediately. “Dr. Prescott is always ten minutes early,” she says. “We set our watches by him.” She stands beside the elevator with me. “I’ll tell him you were here,” she says. “I’m sure he’ll come to see you when the operation is over.”

“No!” I say, a little too loud. “You don’t have to tell him anything.” For the past half hour, I’ve had the upper hand. I’m where I want to be, and Nicholas doesn’t know. I like being anonymous and" w¡€† watching him. After all, I’ve never really seen him work, and maybe this is part of the reason I felt compelled to follow him to the hospital. Another hour or two, and I’ll come into the open. But not now, not yet. I’m still learning.

I look at the nurse, considering a string of different excuses. I knot my hands together in front of me. “I… I don’t want him to be distracted.”

“Of course,” she says, and she propels me into the yawning mouth of the elevator.

When Nicholas comes back up to his office, he is still wearing scrubs, but they are dark with sweat, pressed against his back and under his arms. He unlocks his door and leaves it open, and I creep from my hiding spot behind a row of sleeping wheelchairs to sit on the floor beside the doorway. “Mrs. Rosenstein,” Nicholas is saying, “this is Dr. Prescott.”

His voice makes my stomach flip. “I’m calling to let you know that the procedure went well. We did four grafts, as expected, and he came off the bypass machine nicely. Everything is going just fine, and he should be waking up in a few hours.” I listen to the calm currents running under his words and wonder if he uses that tone to put Max to sleep. I remember Nicholas telling me about making postoperative phone calls when he was a beginning resident. “I never say ‘How are you,’ because I know damn well how they are. How else could you be if you’ve been sitting next to the phone for six hours, waiting to hear if your husband is alive or dead?”

I lose Nicholas for a little while after that, because he meets with some residents and fellows in a small room where there is nowhere for me to hide. I am impressed. He hasn’t stopped yet. Everywhere he goes in the hospital, people know his name, and nurses fall over each other to hand him charts and schedules before he even thinks to ask. I wonder if that is because he is a surgeon or because he is Nicholas.

When I see Nicholas again, he is with a younger man, probably a resident, walking through the halls of surgical ICU. I knew he’d make a swing through here, even if he was planning to head to other floors first, because he’d have to check on that morning’s patient. His name is Oliver Rosenstein, and he is sleeping peacefully, breathing in time with the steady beats of the heart monitor. “We make patients sicker than they are when they come to us,” Nicholas is saying to the resident. “We elect to make them sicker in hopes that they’ll be better in the long run. That’s part of why you’re put up on a pedestal. If you trust your car to a mechanic, you look for someone who’s good. If you trust your life to a surgeon, you look for someone who’s God.” The resident laughs and looks up at Nicholas, and it is clear that he thinks Nicholas is as mythic as they come.

Just as I am wondering why I have never seen Nicholas work during the eight years we’ve been married, he is paged over the loudspeaker. He murmurs something to the resident and bolts up the nearest staircase. The resident leaves Oliver Rosenstein’s room and walks off in the other direction. Because I don’t know where to go, I stay where I am, at the open doorway to the room.

“Uhh,” I hear, and Oliver Rosenstein stirs.

I bite my lower lip, not certain what to do, when a nurse breezes past me into the room. She leans close to Oliver and adjusts several tubes and wires and catheters. “You’re doing fine,” she soothes, and then she pats his yellow, veined hand. “I’m going to page your doctor for you.” She leaves as briskly as she entered, and because of that I am the only person who hears Oliver Rosenstein’s first postsurgical words. “It isn’t easy,” he says, barely audible, “not easy to go through this… It’s real, real hard.” He rolls his head from side to side, as if he is looking for something, and then he sees me and smiles. “Ellie,” he says, his voice a rough sandpaper snap. He clearly thinks I am someone else. “I’m here, kine ahora,” he says. “For a WASP, that Prescott is a mensch.”

It is another hour before I find Nicholas again, and that is only by accident. I am wandering around the post-op floor, when Nicholas blusters out of the elevator. He is reading a file and eating a Hostess cupcake. A nurse laughs at him as he passes the central desk. “You gonna be the next cardiac surgeon around these parts with blocked arteries,” she scolds, and Nicholas tosses her the second cupcake, still packaged.

“If you don’t tell anyone,” he says, “this is yours.”

I marvel at this man, whom everyone seems to know, who seems so controlled and so calm. Nicholas, who could not tell you where I keep the peanut butter in his own kitchen, is completely in his element at this hospital. It hits like an unexpected slap: This is really Nicholas’s home. These people are really Nicholas’s family. This doctor, whom everyone seems to need for a signature or a quiet word or an answer, does not need anyone else, especially me.

Nicholas stuffs the chart he has been reading into the box glued to the door of room 445. He enters and smiles at a young resident in a white coat, her hands jammed in her pockets. “Dr. Adams tells me you’re all set for tomorrow,” he says to the patient, pulling up a chair next to the bed. I scoot to the other side of the doorway so that I can peek in, unseen. The patient is a man about my father’s age, with the same round face and faraway look in his eyes. “Let me tell you what we’re going to do, since I don’t think you’re going to remember much of it,” Nicholas says.

I cannot really hear him, but little drifts of dialogue float out to me, words like oxygenation, mammary arteries, intubate. The patient does not seem to be listening. He is staring at Nicholas with his mouth slightly open, as if Nicholas is Jesus Himself.

Nicholas asks the man if he has any questions. “Yes,” the patient says hesitantly. “Will I know you tomorrow?”

“You might,” Nicholas says, “but you’re going to be groggy by the time you see me. I’ll check in when you’re up in the afternoon.”

“Dr. Prescott,” the patient says, “in case I’m too doped up to tell you-thanks.”

I do not hear Nicholas respond to the patient, so I don’t have time to retreat before he comes out the door. He barrels into me, apologizes, and then notices whom he has r1em¡€†un into. With a narrowed look, he grabs my upper arm and starts to pull me down the hall. “Julie,” he says to the resident who has been in the room with him, “I’ll see you after you round.” Then he curses through his clenched teeth and drags me into a tiny room off the side of the hall, where patients can get ice chips and orange juice. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

My breath catches in my throat, and for the life of me I cannot answer. Nicholas squeezes my arm so hard that I know he is leaving behind a bruise. “I-I-”

“You what?” Nicholas seethes.

“I didn’t mean to bother you,” I say. “I just want to talk to you.” I start to tremble and wonder what I will say if Nicholas takes me up on my offer.

“If you don’t get the hell out of here,” Nicholas says, “I’ll have security throw you out on your ass.” He releases my arm as if he’s been touching a leper. “I told you not to come back,” he says. “What else do I have to do to show you I mean it?”

I lift my chin and pretend I haven’t heard anything he’s said. “Congratulations,” I say, “on your promotion.”

Nicholas stares at me. “You’re crazy,” he says, and then he walks down the hall without turning back.

I watch him until his white coat is a blur against a distant wall. I wonder why he cannot see the similarity between me and his patients, whom he keeps from dying of broken hearts.

At the Prescotts’ Brookline mansion, I sit for seven minutes in the car. I let my breath heat up the interior and wonder if there is an etiquette for begging mercy. Finally, driven by an image of Max, I push myself up the slate path and rap on the door with the heavy brass lion knocker. I am expecting Imelda, the short, plump maid, but instead Astrid herself-and my son-opens the door.

I’m immediately struck by the contrast between Astrid and my own mother. There are the simple things-Ascrid’s silk and pearls as compared to my mother’s flannel shirts and chaps; Astrid’s antiques set against my mother’s stables. Astrid thrives on her fame; my mother goes to great lengths to protect her identity. But on the other hand, Astrid and my mother are both strong; they are both proud to a fault. They have both fought the system that bound them, and recreated themselves. And from the look of things, Astrid-like my mother-is beginning to admit to her mistakes.

Astrid doesn’t say anything. She looks at me-no, actually she looks into me, as if she is sizing me up for the best lighting and direction and angle. Max is balanced on her hip. He watches me with eyes that the color blue must have been named for. His hair is matted with sweat on the side of his head, and a crinkled line from a sheet is imprinted on his cheek.

Max has changed so much in just three months.

Max is the image of Nicholas.

He figures out that I am a stranger, and he burrows his face in Astrid’s blouse, rubbing his nose back and forth on the ribbing.

Astrid makes no move to give him to me, but she also doesn’t shut the door in my face. To make sure of this, I take a tiny step forward. “Astrid,” I say, and then I shake my head. “Mom.”

As if the word has triggered a memory, which I know is impossible, Max lifts his face. He tilts his head, as his grandmother did at first, and then he reaches out one balled fist. “Mama,” he says, and the fingers of the fist open one by one like a flower, stretching and coming to rest on my cheek.

His touch-it’s not what I’ve expected, what I’ve dreamed. It is warm and dry and gentle and brushes like a lover. My tears slip down between his fingers, and he pulls his hand away. He puts it back into his mouth, drinking in my sorrow, my regrets.

Astrid Prescott hands Max to me so that his arms wrap around my neck and his warm, solid form presses the length of my chest. “Paige,” she says, not at all surprised to see me. She steps back so that I can enter her home. “Whatever took you so long?”

chapter 34

Paige has single-handedly ruined Nicholas’s day. Nicholas knows he has nothing else to complain about-his surgery went well enough; his patients are bearing up-but discovering Paige tripping along at his heels has unnerved him. It is a public hospital, and she has every right to be inside it; his threat about calling security was only that-a threat. Seeing her outside his patient’s door rattled him, and he never gets rattled at the hospital. For several minutes after he walked away from her, he had felt his pulse jumping irregularly, as if he’d received a shock to the system.

At least she wouldn’t find Max. She hadn’t followed him to the hospital; surely he would have noticed. She must have showed up later. Which meant that she didn’t know Max was at his parents’, and never, never would she guess that Nicholas had swallowed his pride and in fact was starting to enjoy having Robert and Astrid Prescott back in his life. On the outside chance that Paige did go over there, well, his mother certainly wouldn’t let her in, not after all the pain she’d caused to Astrid’s own son.

Nicholas stops at his office to pick up his suit jacket before heading home. In spite of the name on the door and the fact that he has his own secretary, it is still really Alistair’s place. The art on the walls is not what Nicholas would have picked; the nautical paraphernalia like that sextant and the brass captain’s wheel are not his style. He would like a forest-green office with fox-and-hound prints, a banker’s shaded lamp on his desk, an overstuffed cranberry damask couch. Anything but the pale white and beige that predominate in his house-which Paige, with her predilection for color, has always hated and which, all of a sudden, Nicholas is starting to see that he doesn’t like himself.

Nicholas rests his hand on the brass wheel. Maybe one day. He is doing a good job as chief of cardiac sit;chanc liurgery; he knows that. Saget has as much as told him that if Alistair decides to cut back his schedule or retire completely, the position is Nicholas’s for keeps. It is a dubious honor. Nicholas has wanted it for so long that he has slipped into the schedule naturally, joining the proper hospital committees and giving lectures to the residents and visiting surgeons. But all the extra hours and the grueling pressure to succeed keep him apart from Max and from Paige.

Nicholas shakes his head. He wants to be apart from Paige. He doesn’t need her anymore; he wants her to choke on a taste of her own medicine. Setting his jaw, he pulls together the files he needs to review before tomorrow and locks his office door behind him.

At eight o’clock, there isn’t much traffic on Storrow Drive, and Nicholas makes it to his parents’ house in fifteen minutes. He lets himself in and steps into the hall. “Hello,” he calls, listening to his echo in the cupola above. “Where are you guys?”

He wanders into the parlor, which is primarily a playroom now, but no one is there. He peeks into the library, where his father usually spends the evenings, but the room is dark and cool. Nicholas starts up the stairs, his feet falling onto the worn track of the Oriental runner. “Hello,” he says again, and then he hears Max giggle.

When Max laughs, it rumbles out of his belly, and it overcomes him so thoroughly that by the time the sound bubbles up through his throat, his little shoulders are shaking and his smile is like the sun. Nicholas loves the sound, just as much as he hates Max’s piercing crabby whine. He follows the giggle around the hall and into one of the extra bedrooms, the one that Astrid has redecorated into a gingham nursery. Just outside, Nicholas drops to his hands and knees, thinking to surprise Max by crouching like a tiger. “Max, Max, Maximilian,” Nicholas growls, pawing his way into the half-open door.

Astrid is sitting on the only chair in the room, an oversize white rocker. Max is in the middle of the pale-blue carpeted floor, tugging at tufts of the rug with one fist. His free hand is used for balance and is propped comfortably against Paige’s knee.

Although Astrid looks up, Paige doesn’t seem to notice that Nicholas has crawled into the room. She reaches for Max’s bare toes and pulls them one by one, the pinkie last, and then runs her fingers up the length of his leg. He squeals and giggles again, leaning back his head so that he can see her upside down. “More?” she says, and Max slaps his hands against her thighs.

Somewhere in the back of Nicholas’s mind, behind the red haze, something snaps. He stares at Paige, dumbfounded that she is actually in the same room as his son. She looks impossibly young, with her red hair spilling down over her shoulders and her shirt untucked in the back, her sneakered feet just out of Max’s reach. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. But Max, who wails when the UPS man comes to the door these days, has taken to Paige as if she’s been there all his life, instead of only half. And Paige makes it look so easy. Nicholas remembers the nights he had to walk up and down the halls of the house, letting Max cry in his arms because he didn’t know how else to put him to sleep. He even took books out of the library to learn the words to “Patty-Cake” and “Three Blind Mice.” But Paige walks in from nowhere, sits down, spreadslik±€† her legs in a circular playground for Max, and she’s got him crowing.

Out of the blue, a vision of Paige flashes across Nicholas’s mind -Paige with her hand in the Miracle Whip jar, scraping together the last of the stuff for his sandwich. It was four-thirty in the morning, and he was leaving for surgery, but she, as always, had got up to make his lunch. “Well,” she said, ringing the knife against the empty jar, “we can call this one quits.” And she looked around the kitchen for a dish towel and couldn’t find one and wiped her hands on the soft white cotton of her angel’s nightgown when she thought, incorrectly, that Nicholas wasn’t looking.

Paige hasn’t made his lunch since Max was born, and although he isn’t about to blame a newborn or admit to jealousy, he suddenly realizes that Paige hasn’t been his since Max was born. He clenches his fists in the carpet, just like Max. Paige hasn’t come back here for him; she’s come for Max. She probably traced Nicholas to the hospital only to make sure he wouldn’t be around when she found Max. And although this shouldn’t bother him, because he’s pushed away all his feelings for her, it still smarts.

Nicholas takes a deep breath, waiting for brilliant anger to replace the pain. But it is slow in coming, especially when he looks at Paige, at the picture she makes with his son. He narrows his eyes and tries to remember what is familiar about this, and then he sees the connection. The way Max looks at her-as if she is a deity-is exactly the way Paige used to look at Nicholas.

Nicholas jumps to his feet and glares at his mother. “Who the hell told you to let her in here?” he seethes.

Astrid stands calmly. “Who the hell told me not to?” she says.

Nicholas runs a hand through his hair. “For Christ’s sake, Mom, I didn’t think I had to spell it out. I told you she was back. You know how I feel. You know what she’s done.” He points to Paige, still wrapped around the baby and tickling his sides. “How do you know she isn’t going to steal him away when your back is turned? How do you know she isn’t going to hurt him?”

Astrid lays a hand on her son’s arm. “Nicholas,” she says, “do you really think she’s going to do that?”

At that, Paige looks up. She stands and pulls Max up on his feet. “I just had to see him, Nicholas. I’ll go now. It’s not your mother’s fault.” She scoops Max into her embrace, and he locks his dimpled arms around her neck.

Nicholas takes a step forward, so close he can feel the warm rush of Paige’s breath. “I don’t want to see your car at home,” he says in his quiet, steely surgeon’s voice. “I’ll get a restraining order.”

He expects Paige to turn and slink away, intimidated, like everyone else does when he speaks that way. But she stands her ground and rubs her hands over Max’s back. “It’s my house too,” she says quietly, “and it’s my son.”

Nicholas explodes. He grabs the baby so roughly, Max begins to cry. “What the hell do you think you’re going to do? Take the kid the next time you decidehei±€† to bolt? Or maybe you already have a plan to leave.”

Paige knots her hands in front of her. “I am not going to bolt. All I want is to be let back in my house again. I’m not going to run anywhere unless I’m forced to.”

Nicholas laughs, a strange sound that comes through his nose. “Right,” he says. “Just like last time. Poor Paige, driven away by a twist of Fate.”

In that moment, Nicholas knows he has won. “How come you have to see it like that?” Paige whispers. “How come you can’t just see that I came home?” She steps back, speaking through a broken smile. “Maybe you’re perfect, Nicholas, and everything you do turns out right the first time. The rest of us ordinary humans have to try over and over again and hope that we’ll keep getting second chances until we figure it out.” She turns and runs out of the room before a single tear falls, and Nicholas can hear the heavy oak front door pulled shut behind her.

Max fidgets in Nicholas’s arms, so he sets him down on the carpet. The baby stares out the open bedroom door as if he is waiting for Paige to come back. Astrid, whom Nicholas has forgotten about, reaches down to pull the dying leaf of a potted palm out of Max’s hand. When she straightens, she looks Nicholas right in the eye. “I’m ashamed of you,” she says, and she walks out of the room.

Paige is at the house when Nicholas returns with Max. She sits quietly in front of the porch with her sketch pad and her charcoal. In spite of his threat, Nicholas does not call the police. He does not even acknowledge that he sees her when he carries Max and his diaper bag and the files from the hospital into the house. From time to time that night when he is playing with Max on the living room floor he can see Paige peering in through the window, but he doesn’t bother to close the drapes or to move Max into another room.

When Max has trouble falling asleep, Nicholas tries the one thing that always works. Dragging the vacuum cleaner out of the front hall closet, he sets it over the threshold of the nursery and flips the switch so that the whir of the motor drowns out the choked cries of Max’s screams. Eventually Max quiets down and Nicholas pulls the vacuum away. It works because of the white noise that distracts Max, but Nicholas thinks it might be genetic. He can remember coming home from thirty-six-hour shifts, falling asleep to the hum of the vacuum as Paige cleaned the house.

Nicholas walks to the front hall and turns out the light. Then he steps to the window, knowing that he’ll be able to see Paige without her being able to see him. Her face is silver in the moonlight, her hair a rich bronze glow. Puddled around her are scores of drawings: Max sitting, Max sleeping, Max rolling over. Nicholas can not see among them a single image of himself.

The wind blows a couple of the drawings up the steps of the porch. Before he can even think to stop himself, Nicholas opens the front door in time for them to fly into the hall. He picks them up -one of Max playing with a rattle, one of Max grabbing his own feet-and walks onto the porch. “I think these are yours,” he says, coming to stand beside her.

Paige is on her hands and knees, trying to keep the other drawings from blowing away. She has secured a stack of them under a big rock and has pinned the rest with her elbow. “Thanks,” she says, rolling awkwardly onto her side. She gathers the pictures up and stuffs them inside the front cover of her sketch pad, as if she is embarrassed. “If you want to stay out here,” she says, “I can sit in the car.”

Nicholas shakes his head. “It’s cold,” he says. “I’m going to go inside.” He sees Paige draw in her breath, waiting for an invitation, but he’s not about to let that happen. “You’re very good with Max,” he says. “He’s going through this stranger thing now, and he doesn’t take to just anybody.”

Paige shrugs. “I think I’ve grown into him. This is more what I pictured when I thought of a baby-something that sits up and smiles and laughs with you, not just something that eats and sleeps and poops and completely ignores you.” She peers up at him. “I think that you’re the one who’s very good with Max. Look at what he’s turned into. He’s like a whole different kid.”

Nicholas thinks of many things he could say, but instead he just nods his head. “Thanks,” he says. He leans against the step of the porch and stretches out his legs. “You can’t stay here forever,” he says.

“I hope I don’t have to.” Paige tilts her head back and lets the night wash over her face. “When I was in North Carolina, I slept outside with my mother.” She sits up and laughs. “I actually liked it.”

“I’ll have to take you camping in Maine,” Nicholas says.

Paige stares at him. “Yes,” she says, “you’ll have to.”

A chill sweeps across the lawn, beading the dew and sending a shiver down Nicholas’s spine. “You’re going to freeze out here,” he says, and he stands before he can say anything else. “I’m going to get you a coat.”

He runs up the porch as if it is a refuge and pulls the first coat he can find out of the hall closet. It is a big woolen overcoat, one of his, and as he holds it out to Paige he sees it will sweep her ankles. Paige steps into the coat and pulls the lapels together. “This is nice,” she says, touching Nicholas’s hand.

Nicholas pulls away. “Well,” he says, “I don’t want you to get sick.”

“No,” Paige says, “I mean this.” She gestures between herself and Nicholas. “Not yelling.” When Nicholas does not say anything, she picks up her sketch pad and her charcoal, and as a second thought she offers a half-smile. “Give Max a kiss for me,” she says.

When Nicholas steps into the safety of the house and stands in the folds of the dark hallway, he is momentarily disoriented. He has to lean against the doorframe and let the room settle before his memory returns. Maybe he believed that at some point he’d stop playing the game and let Paige back; but he can see that isn’t going to happen. She’s come for Max, only for Max, and something about that is driving him crazy. The feeling is like a fist being driven into his gut, and he knows exactly why. He still loves her. As stuiv ±€†pid as it seems, as much as he hates her for what she has done, he can’t quite stop that.

He peeks out the window and sees Paige settled in his overcoat and a sleeping bag she’s borrowed from some goddamned neighbor. Part of him hates her for being given that comfort, and part of him hates himself for wanting to give her even more. With Paige, there have never been easy answers, only impulses, and Nicholas is beginning to wonder if it has all been a huge mistake. He can’t keep doing this; not to himself and not to Max. There has to be a reconciliation or a clean break.

The moon slips under the front door, filling the hallway with a spectral glow. Suddenly exhausted, Nicholas pulls himself up the stairs. He will have to sleep on it. Sometimes things look different in the morning. He crawls into bed with his clothes still on and envisions Paige lying like a sacrifice beneath that stifling moon. His last conscious thought is of his bypass patients, of the moment during surgery when he stops their hearts from beating. He wonders if they ever feel it.

chapter 35

Anna Maria Santana, whom I had never met, was born and died on March 30, 1985. OUR FOUR HOUR ANGEL, the tombstone reads, still fairly new among the grave markers in the Cambridge graveyard I had last walked through when I was pregnant. I do not know why I didn’t notice Anna Maria’s grave back then. It is tidy and trimmed, and violets grow at the edges. Someone comes here often to see their little girl.

It does not pass my notice that Anna Maria Santana died at just about the same time I conceived my first child. Suddenly I wish I had something to leave-a silver rattle or a pink teddy bear-and then I realize that both Anna Maria and my own baby would have been eight now, growing out of baby gifts and into Barbies and bicycles. I hear my mother’s voice: You were stuck in my mind at five years old. Before I knew it, you were all grown up.

Something has to come to a head soon. Nicholas and I can’t keep stepping around each other, moving closer and then ripping apart as though we’re following a strange tribal dance. I have not even attempted going to Mass General today, and I do not plan to go to the Prescotts’ to see Max. I can’t push Nicholas any more, because he is at the breaking point, but that makes me restless. I won’t just sit around and let him decide my future the way I used to. But I can’t make him see what I want him to see.

I am in the graveyard to clear my mind-it worked for my mother, so I hope it will work for me. But seeing Anna Maria’s tombstone doesn’t help much. I have told Nicholas the truth about leaving, but I still haven’t really come clean. What if, when I get home, Nicholas is standing on the porch with open arms, willing to pick up where we left off? Can I let myself make the same mistakes all over again?

I read a “Dear Abby” column years ago in which a man had written about having an affair with his secretary. It had been over for years, but he had never told his wife, and although they had a happy marriage, he felt he should reveal what had happened. I was surprised by Abby’s answer. You’re opening a can of worms, Abby wrote. What she do fiother, bes not know she cannot be hurt by.

I do not know how long I can wait. I would never take Max and flee in the night, like I know Nicholas is thinking. I couldn’t do it to Max, and I especially couldn’t do it to Nicholas. Being with Max for three months has softened him around the edges. The Nicholas I left in July would never have crept around a corner on his hands and knees, pretending to be a grizzly bear to entertain his son. But practically, I cannot keep sleeping on the front lawn. It’s mid-October, and already the leaves have come off the trees. We’ve had a frost at night. Soon there will be snow.

I walk to Mercy, hoping to get a cup of coffee from Lionel. The first familiar face is Doris’s, and she drops two blue-plate specials at a booth and comes to hug me. “Paige!” She cries into the kitchen pass-through: “Paige is back again!”

Lionel runs in front and makes a big show of sitting me at the counter on a cracked red stool. The diner is smaller than I have remembered it, and the walls are a sickly shade of yellow. If I did not know the place, I would not feel comfortable eating here. “Where’s that precious baby?” Marvela says, leaning in front of me so that her earbobs sway against the edges of my hair. “You got to have pictures, at least.”

I shake my head and gratefully accept the cup of coffee that Doris brings. Lionel ignores the small line that has formed by the cash register and sits down beside me. “That doctor boy of yours came in here some months back. Thought you’d up and run off, and come to us for help.” Lionel stares straight at me, and the line of his jagged scar darkens with emotion. “I tell him you ain’t that kind of person,” he says. “I know these things.”

He looks for a moment as if he is going to hug me, but then he remembers himself and hoists his frame off the neighboring stool. “What you lookin’ at?” he snaps at Marvela, who is wringing her hands beside me. “We got us a business, sweet pea,” he says to me, and he stomps toward the cash register.

When the waitresses and Lionel have settled back into their routines, I let myself look around. The menus haven’t changed, though the prices have. They have been rewritten on tiny fluorescent stickers. The men’s bathroom is still out of order, as it was the last day I had worked there. And tacked above the cash register, dangling above the counter, are all the portraits I drew of the customers.

I cannot believe Lionel hasn’t thrown them out. Surely some of the people have died by now. I scan the portraits: Elma the bag lady; Hank the chemistry professor; Marvela and Doris and Marilyn Monroe; Nicholas. Nicholas. I stand up, and then I crawl onto the countertop to get a closer look. I crouch with my hands pressed against Nicholas’s portrait, feeling the stares of the customers. Lionel and Marvela and Doris, true friends, pretend they do not notice.

I remember this one very well. In the background I had drawn the face of a little boy, sitting in a twisted tree and holding the sun. At first I thought I’d drawn my favorite Irish legend, the one about Cuchulainn leaving the sun god’s palace when his mother went home to her original husband. I did not understand why I would have drawn this particular scene, something from my own childhood, on Nicholas’s portrait, but I thought it s iÁ€†had something to do with my running away. I had stared at the drawing, and I imagined my father telling me the story while he smoked a bayberry pipe. At the time, I could easily see my father’s hands, studded with glue and bits of twine from his workshop, waving in the air as he mimicked the passage of Cuchulainn back to ordinary earth. I wondered if Cuchulainn missed that other life.

Months afterward, when Nicholas and I were sitting in the diner and looking at his portrait, I told him the story of Dechtire and the sun god. He laughed. When I’d drawn it he had seen something completely different in the picture. He said he’d never even heard of Cuchulainn, but that as a kid he believed that if he climbed high enough he could truly catch the sun. I guess, he said, in a way, we all do.

I unlock the house and spend a full hour pulling dirty socks and Onesies and fuzzy blanket sleepers from unimaginable places: the microwave, the wine rack, a soup tureen. When I have gathered a pile of laundry, I start a wash. In the meantime I dust the living room and the bedroom and scrub the white counters in the bathroom. I scour the toilet and vacuum the skin-colored rugs and try my best to get the jelly stains off the ivory tiles in the kitchen. I change the sheets on the bed and the ones in Max’s crib, and I empty his diaper pail and spray perfume into the carpet so that some of the smell is masked. All the while, the TV is on, tuned to the soap operas I watched when my mother’s ankle was first broken. I tell Devon to leave her husband and I cry when Alana’s baby is stillborn and I watch, riveted, a love scene between a rich girl named Leda and Spider, a street-smart hustler. I am just setting the table for two when the telephone rings, and out of force of habit, I pick it up.

“Paige,” the voice says. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to find you.”

“It’s not what you think,” I say, hedging, while I try to figure out who is on the other end.

“Aren’t you coming to see Max? He’s been waiting all day.”

Astrid. Who else would call? I don’t have any friends in this city. “I-I don’t know,” I say. “I’m cleaning the house.”

“Nicholas didn’t say that you’d moved back in,” she says.

“I haven’t.”

“Paige,” Astrid says, her voice as sharp as the edges of her black-and-white stills. “We need to have a little talk.”

She is waiting for me at the front door with Max. He’s dressed in Osh-Kosh overalls and is wearing the tiniest Nike sneakers I have ever seen. “Imelda has coffee waiting for us in the parlor,” she says, handing Max over to me. She turns and walks into the imposing hall, expecting me to follow.

The parlor, just a room full of toys now, is much less intimidating than it was the first time I was there with Nicholas. If the rocking horse and the Porta-Crib had been there eight years ago, I wonder if things would have turned out this way. I set Max down on the floor saÁ€†, and he immediately gets onto his hands and his knees, rocking back and forth. “Look,” I say, breathless. “He’s going to crawl!”

Astrid hands me a cup and saucer. “Not to burst your bubble, but he’s been doing that for two weeks. He can’t seem to figure out the coordination.” I watch Max bounce for a while; I accept cream and sugar. “I have a proposition for you,” Astrid says.

I look up, a little afraid. “I don’t know,” I say.

Astrid smiles. “You haven’t even heard it yet.” She moves a fraction of an inch closer to me. “Listen. It’s freezing these nights, and I know you can’t stay much longer on your lawn. God only knows how long it’s going to take my stubborn son to come to his senses. I want you to move in here. Robert and I have discussed it; we have more rooms than a small hotel. Now, out of deference to Nicholas, I’ll have to ask you to leave during the day, so that Max is still in my care-he’s a bit uptight about you being around him, as you’ve probably noticed. But I don’t see why every now and then you and I and Max might not just cross paths.”

I gape at Astrid, my mouth hanging open. This woman is offering me a gift. “I don’t know what to say,” I murmur, tugging my gaze away to rest on Max on the floor. A million things are running through my mind: There has to be a catch. She’s worked something out with Nicholas, something to prove that I’m an unfit mother, something to keep me even further away from Max. Or else she wants something in return. But what could I possibly give her?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Astrid says. “Robert and I owe you. I was wrong in believing that you and Nicholas shouldn’t be married. You’re just what Nicholas needs, even if he’s too stupid to realize it himself. He’ll come around.”

“I’m not what Nicholas needs,” I say, still looking at Max.

Astrid leans forward so that her face is inches from mine and I am forced to turn to her. “You listen to me, Paige. Do you know what my first reaction was when Nicholas told me you’d left? I thought, Hallelujah! I didn’t think you had it in you. When Nicholas brought you here originally, it wasn’t your past or your life-style that I objected to. I won’t speak for Robert, although he’s far beyond that now. I wanted someone for Nicholas who had determination and tenacity-someone with a little bit of pluck. It rubs off, you know. But all I saw when I first looked at you was someone who idolized him, someone who tagged at his heels like a puppy and was willing to put her whole life in his hands. I didn’t think you had the gumption to stand up in the wind, much less in a marriage. But he’s had you running around for years at his beck and call, and finally you’ve given him a reason for pause. What you’ve gone through is not, in the long run, a tragedy-just a hiccup. You both will survive, and there will be two or three other little Maxes and a string of graduations and weddings and grandchildren. You’re a fighter, every bit as much as Nicholas. I’d say, actually, that you’re a very even match.” She puts down her coffee cup and takes mine too. “Imelda is making up the room,” she says. “Shall we go take a look?”

Astrid stands, but I do not. I knot my hands together in my lap and wonder if this is really what I want to do. It’s going to make Nicholas furious. It’s t hÁ€†going to backfire in my face.

Max is making loud slurping noises and chewing on something that looks like a card. “Hey,” I say, pulling it out of his hand. “Should you have this thing?” I wipe off the saliva and hand Max a different toy. Then I notice what I am holding. It is a key ring that holds three laminated photographs, eight-by-ten glossies. I know they are Astrid’s work. The first is a picture of Nicholas giving his half-smile, his mind miles away. The second is a picture of Max taken about two months ago. I find myself staring at it greedily, drinking in the subtle changes that I have missed. Then I flip to the last card. It is a picture of me, fairly recent, although I don’t know how Astrid could have taken it. I am sitting at an outdoor café at Faneuil Hall. I may even have been pregnant. I have a distant look in my eyes, and I know that even then I was plotting my escape.

“Mama,” Max says, reaching for the card that I hold. On the back, written in permanent marker in Astrid’s handwriting, is the word he’s just spoken.

Imelda is just smoothing the bedspread when Astrid leads me into what will be my room. “Señora Paige,” she says, smiling at me and then at Max when he grabs her long, dark braid. “This one, he has a bit of the devil in him,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “It comes from his father’s side of the family.”

Astrid laughs and opens an armoire. “You can keep your things here,” she says, and I nod and look around. The room is simple by Prescott standards. It is furnished with a pale-peach sofa and a canopy bed; its sheets are the shades of a rainy Arizona sunset. The floor-length window curtains are Alençon lace, held back by brass pineapples. The mirror is an antique cheval glass and matches the armoire. “Is this all right?” Astrid asks.

I sink down on the bed and place Max next to me, rubbing his belly. I will miss the wet stars and the hydrangeas, but this will be just fine. I nod at her, and then I shyly stand and pass her the baby. “I think these were your terms,” I say quietly. “I’ll be back later.”

“Come for supper,” Astrid says. “I know Robert will want to see you.”

She follows me down the steps and leads me to the front door. Max whimpers and reaches out when I start to leave, and she gives him to me for a moment. I trace the whorl of hair on the back of Max’s head and squeeze the spare flesh of his upper arms. “Why are you on my side?” I ask.

Astrid smiles. In the fading light, in just that instant, she reminds me of my mother. Astrid takes back my baby. “Why shouldn’t I be?” she says.

“Robert,” Astrid Prescott says as we walk into the dining room, “you remember Paige.”

Robert Prescott folds his newspaper and his reading glasses and stands up from his seat. I hold out my hand, but he ignores it and, after a moment’s hesitation, sweeps me into his arms. “Thank you,” he says.

“For what?” I whisper, unsure of what I’ve done now.

“For that kid,” he tells me, and he smiles. I realize that in all the time I was taking care of Max, those were words Nicholas never said.

I sit down, but I am too nervous to eat the soup or the salad that Imelda brings from the kitchen. Robert sits at one end of the enormous table, Astrid at the other, and I am somewhere in between. There is an empty place setting across from me, and I stare at it anxiously. “It’s just for balance,” Astrid says when she sees me looking. “Don’t worry.”

Nicholas has already come for Max. He has a twenty-four-hour shift coming up and wanted to get to sleep early, according to Astrid. Usually during dinner, Max sits in a high chair next to Robert, who feeds him pieces of Parker House rolls.

“Nicholas hasn’t told us very much about your trip,” Robert says, making it sound as if I’ve been on the QE2 for a holiday.

I swallow hard and wonder how much I can say without incriminating myself. After all, these are Nicholas’s parents, however nice they are being. “I don’t know if Nicholas ever told you,” I say hesitantly. “I grew up without my mother. She left us when I was five, and somehow, when I wasn’t doing a very good job taking care of Max, I figured if I could find her I’d automatically know how to do it all right.”

Astrid clucks. “You did a fine job,” she says. “In fact, you did all the hard work. You nursed, didn’t you? Yes, I remember Nicholas found that out the hard way when Max was weaned in a day. We never bothered when you all were children. In our circles, nursing wasn’t the proper thing to do.”

Robert turns away and picks up the thread of the conversation. “Ignore Astrid,” he says, smiling. “She sometimes spends weeks and months in huts without any other humans. She has a lot of practice talking only to herself.”

“And sometimes,” Astrid says pleasantly from the other end of the table, “I go away and I can’t tell the difference between talking to myself and dinner conversation with you.” She stands and walks toward Robert. She leans over him until he turns toward her. “Have I told you today that I love you?” she says, kissing his forehead.

“No, as a matter of fact,” Robert says.

“Ah.” Astrid pats his cheek. “So you have been listening.” She looks up at me and grins. “I’m going to see what’s happened to our steak.”

It turns out that Robert Prescott actually knows of Donegal, my mother’s horse. Well, not really of Donegal, but of his sire, the one with bloodlines to Seattle Slew. “She does this all by herself?” he asks.

“She rents space from a larger farm, and she has some kid come in to help her muck stalls,” I say. “It’s a beautiful place. So much green, and there are the mountains right behind her-it’s a nice place to live.”

“But you er Á€†didn’t stay,” Robert points out.

“No,” I say. “I didn’t.”

At that moment, when the conversation is starting to fit a little too tightly around me, Astrid comes back through the swinging door to the kitchen. “Another five minutes,” she says. “Would you believe that after twenty years of living with us, Imelda still doesn’t know that you like your steak burned to a crisp?”

“Well done,” Robert says.

“Yes,” Astrid says, laughing. “I am good, aren’t I?”

Watching them, I feel my stomach tighten. I would never have expected this kind of warmth to exist between Nicholas’s parents, and it makes me realize what I missed as a child. My father wouldn’t remember how my mother prefers her steak; my mother couldn’t tell you my father’s favorite color or breakfast cereal. I had never seen my mother stand behind my father in the kitchen to kiss him upside down. I had never seen the jigsaw puzzle their hands made when they fit together, like Robert’s and Astrid’s, as if they’d been cut for each other.

The night that Nicholas asked me to marry him at Mercy, I did not really know him at all. I knew that I wanted his attention. I knew that he commanded respect wherever he went. I knew that he had eyes that took my breath away, the shifting color of the sea. I said yes because I thought he’d be able to help me forget, about Jake, and the baby, and my mother, and Chicago. And in the long run I had blamed him because he lived up to all my expectations, making me forget about my old self so well that I panicked and ran again.

I said yes to Nicholas, but I did not know that I really wanted to marry him until the night we ran out of his parents’ house after the argument about the marriage. That was the first time I noticed that in addition to my needing Nicholas, Nicholas needed me. Somehow I’d always just pictured him as the hero, the accessory to my plan. But that night, Nicholas had wavered beneath his father’s words and turned his back on his family. Suddenly the man who had the world wrapped around his little finger found himself in absolutely unfamiliar territory. And to my surprise, it turned out to be a road I had traveled. For the first time in my life, someone needed my experience. It made me feel the way nothing ever had before.

That wasn’t something that went away easily.

As I watch Astrid and Robert for the remainder of the meal, I think of all the things I know about Nicholas. I know that he absolutely will not eat squid or snails or mussels or apricot jam. I know that he sleeps on the right side of the bed and that no matter what precautions I take, the top sheet always becomes untucked on his side. I know that he won’t come within a mile of a martini. I know that he folds his boxer shorts in half to fit into his dresser. I know that he can smell the rain a day before it comes, that he can sense snow by the color of the sky. I know that nobody else will ever know him as I do.

I also know that there are many facts Nicholas can list about me and still the most important truths will be missing.

Bless me, Nicholas, for I have sinned. The words run through my mind with every footstep that leads me out of the Prescotts’ house. I drive down the streets of Brookline and make familiar turns to our own house. For the last half mile I turn off the headlights and let the moon cut my path, wishing not to be seen.

I have not been to confession in eight and a half years. This makes me smile-how many rosaries would Father Draher pin on me to absolve me of my sins if it were him I was turning to instead of Nicholas?

My first confession was in fourth grade. We had been coached by the nuns, and we waited in line, saying our act of contrition before going into the confessional. The chamber was tiny and brown and gave me the sinking sense that the walls were coming in around me. I could hear the breathing of Father Draher, coming through the latticed metal that separated us. That first time, I said that I had taken the Lord’s name in vain and that I had fought with Mary Margaret Riordan over who would get the last chocolate milk in the cafeteria. But when Father Draher didn’t say anything, I began to make up sins: I had cheated on a spelling quiz; I had lied to my father; I had had an impure thought. At that last one Father Draher coughed, and I did not know why at the time, since I hadn’t any idea what an impure thought was-it was a phrase I’d heard in a TV movie. “For your penance,” he said, “say one Our Father and three Hail Marys.” And that was that; I was starting with a clean slate.

How many years has it been since I have had to make up sins? How many years since I realized that an endless number of rosaries can’t take away the guilt?

The lights are all off at the house, even in Nicholas’s study. Then I remember what Astrid said. He is trying to get a good night’s sleep. I feel a pang of conscience: maybe this would be better done some other time. But I don’t want to put it off anymore.

I stub my toe on Max’s walker, which is stuffed into the corner of the hallway. Soundlessly I move up the stairs and tiptoe past the nursery to the door of our bedroom. It is ajar: Nicholas will be able to hear Max if he cries.

This is what I have planned: I will sit on the edge of the bed and fold my hands in my lap and poke Nicholas so that he wakes up. I will tell him everything he should have known from the start, and I will say that I couldn’t let it go any longer and that I’ll leave him now to think about it. And I’ll pray for kindness the whole way home.

I am betting it all on one turn, I know that. But I don’t see any other way out. Which is why when I creep into the bedroom and see Nicholas, half naked and wrapped in our pale-blue comforter, I don’t just sit on the edge of the bed. I can’t do that. If things don’t work out for the best, at least I’ll be able to know where his heart lies.

I kneel beside the bed and tangle my fingers in the thick sheaf of Nicholas’s hair. I put my other hand on his shoulder, amazed at how warm his skin is to the touch. I slip my hand down to his chest and feel the hair spring against my palm. Nicholas groans and stretches, rolling over on his side. His arm falls across my own.

Moving very slowly, I touch my fingertips to his eyebrows, his cheekbones, his mouth. I lean forward until I can feel his breath on my eyelids. Then I inch closer until my lips brush his. I kiss him until he begins kissing me back, and before I can step away he wraps his arms around me and pulls me to him. His eyes fly open, but he does not seem surprised to find me there. “You cleaned my house,” he whispers.

“Our house,” I say. His hands are hot against me. I stiffen and pull away, sitting back on my heels.

“It’s okay,” Nicholas murmurs, propping himself against his pillows. “We’re already married.” He looks at me sideways and gives me a lazy smile. “I could get used to this,” he says. “You sneaking into my bed.”

I stand up and catch my reflection in the mirror. Then I rub my palms on the legs of my jeans and sit gingerly on the edge of the bed. I wrap my arms close, hugging myself tight. Nicholas sits next to me and slides an arm around my waist. “What’s the matter?” he whispers. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I shrug his hand away. “Don’t touch me,” I say. “You aren’t going to want to touch me.” I turn and sit cross-legged opposite him. Over his shoulder, I watch myself in the mirror. “Nicholas,” I say, seeing my own lips move over words I never wanted to hear. “I had an abortion.”

His back stiffens, and then his face sets, and finally he seems to be able to exhale. “You what?” he says. He moves closer, and the rage that darkens his features terrifies me. I wonder if he will grab me by the throat. “Is that where you were for three months? Getting rid of my child?”

I shake my head. “It happened before I met you,” I say. “It wasn’t your child.”

I watch expressions flicker across his face as he remembers. Finally, he shakes his head. “You were a virgin,” he says. “That’s what you told me.”

“I never told you anything,” I say quietly. “That’s what you wanted to believe.” I hold my breath and tell myself that maybe it won’t make a difference; after all, Nicholas had been living with his other girlfriend before he decided to marry me, and these days very few women come to marriage untouched. But then again, not all women are Nicholas’s wife.

“You’re Catholic,” he says, trying to fit the pieces together. I nod. “That’s why you left Chicago,” he says.

“And that’s why,” I add softly, “I left Max. The day that I went-the day he fell off the couch and got that nosebleed-I figured I had to be the worst mother around. I had killed my first child; I had hurt my second. I figured no mother was better than someone like me.”

Nicholas stands up, and I see in his eyes something I’ve never seen before. “You may be right about that,” he says, speaking so loud I think the baby will wake. He grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me violently, so hard that my neck wrenches and I cannot see straight. “Get out of my house,” he says, “and do not come back. What else do you want to get off

He sinks onto the edge of the bed as if his weight has suddenly become too much for him to bear. He bends down and holds his face in his hands. I want to touch him, to take away the ache. Looking at him, I wish I had never spoken. I reach out my hand, but Nicholas flinches before my skin brushes his. Ego te absolvo. “Forgive me,” I say.

He takes the words like a brutal blow. When he lifts his head, his eyes are red-rimmed and brimming with fury. He stares at me, seeing me for what I really am. “God damn you,” he says.

chapter 36

When Nicholas was a sophomore undergraduate at Harvard, he and his roommate, Oakie Peterborough, had got drunk and sprayed the fire extinguisher’s foam all over their sleeping resident dorm adviser. They were put on probation for a year and then had gone their separate ways. When Nicholas entered Harvard Med, Oakie entered Harvard Law, and years before Nicholas had ever done surgery, Oakie was already an associate at a Boston law firm.

Nicholas takes a sip of his lemon water and tries to find the slightest resemblance between the Oakie he knew and the matrimonial attorney who sits across from him at the restaurant table. He was the one to call and ask about a lunch date, and Oakie, over the phone, said, “Hell, yeah,” and penciled him in that afternoon. Nicholas thinks about Harvard and its connections. He watches the cool confidence of his old roommate as he settles his napkin on his lap, the shifting indifference of his eyes. “It’s great to see you, Nicholas,” Oakie says. “Amazing, isn’t it, how you work in the same town and still never get the chance to see your old friends.”

Nicholas smiles and nods. He does not consider Oakie Peterborough an old friend; he hasn’t since he was nineteen and found him with a hand down Nicholas’s own girlfriend’s pants. “I’m hoping you can give me some answers,” Nicholas says. “You practice family law, don’t you?”

Oakie sighs and leans back. “Family law-what a crock. What I do doesn’t keep families together. Sort of a contradiction in terms.” He stares at Nicholas, and his eyes widen in realization. “You don’t mean for yourself,” he says.

Nicholas nods, and a muscle jumps at his jaw. “I want to find out about getting a divorce.” Nicholas has lost a lot of sleep over this and has come to a decision with blinding clarity. He doesn’t give a damn what it costs him, as long as he gets Paige out of his life and gets to keep Max. He is angry at himself for letting down his guard when Paige came into the bedroom last night. Her touch, the lilac smell of her skin-for a moment he was lost in the past, pretending she’d never left. He almost forgave the past three months. And then she told him the one thing he would never forget.

He starts shaking when he thinks of another man’s hands on her body, another man’s child in her womb, but he believes that witnec D‡h time the shock will pass. It’s not really the abortion that upsets him. As a doctor, Nicholas spends so much time and effort saving lives that he can’t personally support the decision to have an abortion, although he understands the motives of the pro-choice camp. No, what unnerves him is the secrecy. Even if he could listen to Paige’s reasons for terminating a pregnancy, he couldn’t understand hiding something like that from one’s own husband. He had a right to know. It might have been her body, but it was their shared past. And in eight years, she never thought enough of him to mention the truth.

Nicholas spent the early morning trying to push from his mind the image of Paige begging for mercy. She had been shadowed by the mirror, so that there were two of her, her words and actions mocking her like a clown’s silhouette. She had looked so fragile that Nicholas couldn’t help but think of the wispy heads of dried dandelions, vulnerable to a breath. One word from him, and he knew she would fall apart.

But Nicholas had enough anger pulsing through his blood to block out any residual feelings. He was going to beat her at her own game, taking Max before she could use the poor kid to absolve her of guilt. He was going to get a divorce and drive her as far from him as possible, and maybe in five, in ten years, he wouldn’t see her face every time he looked at his son.

Oakie Peterborough blots his meaty lips with his napkin and takes a deep breath. “Look,” he says, “I’m a lawyer, but I’m also your friend. You ought to know what you’re getting into.”

Nicholas stares him down. “Just tell me what I have to do.”

Oakie exhales, a sick sound like that of an overboiled kettle. “Well, Massachusetts is a state that permits fault in divorce cases. That means you don’t have to prove fault to get a divorce, but if you can, the property and assets will be divided accordingly.”

“She abandoned me,” Nicholas interrupts. “And she lied for eight years.”

Oakie rubs his hands together. “Was she gone for more than two years?” Nicholas shakes his head. “She wasn’t the primary breadwinner, was she?” Nicholas snorts and throws his napkin on the table. Oakie purses his lips. “Well, then it’s not desertion-at least not legally. And lying… I’m not sure about lying. Usually, just cause for fault is things like excessive drinking, beating, adultery.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Nicholas mutters.

Oakie does not hear him. “Fault would not include a change of religion, say, or moving out of the house.”

“She didn’t move,” Nicholas clarifies. “She left.” He stares up at Oakie. “How long is this going to take?”

“I can’t know yet,” he says. “It depends on whether we can find grounds. If not, you get a separation agreement, and a year later it can be finalized into a divorce.”

“A year,” Nicholas yells. “I can’t wait a year, Oakie. She’s going to do something crazy. She justtatÑ€† up and left three months ago, remember-she’s going to take my kid and run.”

“A kid,” Oakie says softly. “You didn’t say there was a kid.”

When Nicholas leaves the restaurant, he is seething. What he has learned is that although courts no longer assume that a woman should have custody, Max will go wherever his best interests lie. With Nich olas working so many hours a day, there is no guarantee of custody. He has learned that since Paige supported him through medical school, she is entitled to a portion of his future earnings. He has learned that this procedure will take much longer than he ever thought possible.

Oakie has tried to talk him out of it, but Nicholas is certain he has no choice. He cannot even think about Paige without feeling his spine stiffen or his fingers turn to ice. He cannot stand knowing that he has been played for a fool.

He walks into Mass General and ignores everyone who says hello to him. When he reaches his office, he shuts and locks the door behind him. With a sweep of his arm, he clears all the files off his desk. The one that lands on top of the pile on the floor is Hugo Albert’s. That morning’s surgery. It was also, he noted from the patient history, Hugo Albert’s golden wedding anniversary. When he told Esther Albert that her husband was doing well, she cried and thanked Nicholas over and over, said that he would always be in her prayers.

He puts his head down on the desk and closes his eyes. He wishes he had his father’s private practice, or that the association with surgical patients lasted as long as it does in internal medicine. It is too hard to deal with such intense relationships for such a short period of time and then move on to another patient. But Nicholas is starting to see that this is his lot in life.

With fierce self-control, he opens the top drawer and takes out a piece of the Mass General stationery that now bears his name. “Oakie wants a list,” he mutters, “I’ll give him a list.” He starts to write down all the things that he and Paige own. The house. The cars. The mountain bikes and the canoe. The barbecue and the patio furniture and the white leather couch and the king-size bed. It is the same bed they had in the old apartment; it had too much of a history to justify replacement. Nicholas and Paige had ordered the handcrafted bed on the understanding that it would be theirs by the end of the week. But it was delayed, and they slept on a mattress on the floor for months. The bed had been burned in a warehouse fire and had to be built all over again. “Do you think,” Paige said one night, curled against him, “God is trying to tell us this was all a mistake?”

When Nicholas runs out of possessions, he takes a blank sheet of paper and writes his name at the top left and Paige’s name at the top right. Then he makes a grid. DATE OF BIRTH. PLACE OF BIRTH. EDUCATION. LENGTH OF MARRIAGE. He can fill it all in easily, but he is shocked at how much space his own schooling takes up and how little is written in Paige’s column. He looks at the length of marriage and does not write anything.

If she had married that guy, would she have had the child?

Nicholas pushes away the papers, which suddenly feel heavy enough to thrertiÑ€†aten the balance of the desk. He leans his head back in the swivel chair and stares at the clouds manufactured by the hospital smokestacks, but all he sees are the lines of Paige’s wounded face. He blinks, but the image does not clear. He half expects that if he whispers her name, she will answer. He thinks he must be going crazy.

He wonders if she loved this other guy, and why the question, still unspoken, makes him feel as if he will be sick.

When he turns the chair around, his mother is standing in front of the desk. “Nicholas,” she says, “I’ve brought you a present.” She holds a large, flat, paper-wrapped square. Even before he pulls at the string, Nicholas knows it is a framed photograph. “It’s for your office,” she says. “I’ve been working on it for weeks.”

“It isn’t my office,” Nicholas says. “I can’t really hang anything up.” But even as he is speaking, he finds himself staring at the photograph. It is a pliant willow tree on the shore of a lake, bent into an inverted U by an angry wind. Everything in the background is one shade or another of purple; the tree itself is molten red, as if it is burning at the core.

Astrid comes to his side of the desk and stands at his shoulder. “Striking, isn’t it?” she says. “It’s all in the lighting.” She glances at the papers on Nicholas’s desk, pretending not to notice what they say.

Nicholas runs his fingers across his mother’s signature, carved at the bottom. “Very nice,” he says. “Thanks.”

Astrid sits on the edge of the desk. “I didn’t come just to give you the photograph, Nicholas; I’m here to tell you something you aren’t going to like,” she says. “Paige has moved in with us.”

Nicholas stares at her as if she has stated that his father was really a gypsy or that his medical diploma is a fraud. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he says. “You can’t do this to me.”

“As a matter of fact, Nicholas,” Astrid says, standing and pacing the room, “you have very little say as to what we do in our own house. Paige is a lovely girl-better to realize it late than never, I think-and she’s a charming guest. Imelda says she even makes her own bed. Imagine.”

Nicholas’s fingers itch; he has a savage urge to strike out or to strangle. “If she lays a hand on Max-”

“I’ve already taken care of it,” Astrid says. “She’s agreed to leave the house during the day while I’ve got Max. She only comes back to sleep, since a car or a front lawn isn’t really suitable.”

Nicholas thinks that maybe he will remember this moment forever: the wrinkled empty smile of his mother; the flickering track light overhead; the scrape of wheels as something is rolled by the door. This, he will say to himself in years to come, was the moment my life fell apart. “Paige isn’t what you think she is,” he says bitterly.

Astrid walks to the far side of the office as if she hasn’graÑ€†t heard him. She removes a yellowed nautical map from the wall, smoothing her fingers over the glass and tracing the whorls of eddies and currents. “I’m thinking about right here,” she says. “You’ll see it every time you look up.” She crosses the room to put the old frame on the desk and picks up the picture of the willow. “You know,” she says casually, reaching up on her toes to hang the picture correctly, “your father and I almost got a divorce. I think you remember her-she was a hematologist. I knew about it, and I fought him every step of the way, trying to be very difficult and spilling drinks on him to make a scene and threatening once or twice to run away with you. I thought that being quiet about the whole thing was the biggest mistake I could make, because then he’d think I was weak and he could walk all over me. And then one day I realized that I would have much more power if I decided to be the one to yield.” Astrid straightens the picture and steps back. “There. What do you think?”

Nicholas’s eyes are slitted, dark and angry. “I want you to throw Paige out of the house, and if she comes within a hundred feet of Max, I swear to God I’ll have you brought up on charges. I want you to get out of my office and call me later and apologize profusely for butting into my life. I want you to put back that goddamned ocean map and leave me alone.”

“Really, Nicholas,” Astrid says lightly, although every muscle in her body is quivering. She has never seen him like this. “The way you’re acting, I wouldn’t recognize you as my son.” She picks up the sailing chart and hooks it on the wall again, but she does not turn around.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Nicholas murmurs.

By a twist of bad timing, Nicholas and Paige run into each other that afternoon at the Prescotts’. Because of a complication with a patient, Nicholas left the hospital late. He is just packing Max’s toys into the duffel bag when Paige bursts into the parlor. “You can’t do this to me,” Paige cries, and when Nicholas lifts his head, his gaze has carefully been wiped clean of emotion.

“Ah,” Nicholas says, picking up a Big Bird jingle ball. “My mother has been the bearer of bad news.”

“You’ve got to give me a chance,” she says, moving in front of him to catch his eye. “You aren’t thinking clearly.”

Astrid appears in the doorway, with Max in her arms. “Listen to her, Nicholas,” she says quietly.

Nicholas tosses his mother a look that makes Paige remember the basilisk in Irish legend, the monster who killed with a glance. “I think I’ve listened enough,” he says. “In fact, I’ve heard things I never wanted to hear.” He stands and slings the diaper bag over his shoulder, roughly grabbing Max out of Astrid’s arms. “Why don’t you just run upstairs to your guest bedroom,” he sneers. “Cry your little heart out, and then you can come downstairs for brandy with my goddamned parents.”

“Nicholas,” Paige says. Her voice breaks over the syllables. She takes a quick look at Astrid and runs through the hall after Nicholas, swinging open the door and yelling his name again into the street.

Nicholas stops just before his car. “You’ll get a good settlement,” he says quietly. “You’ve earned it.”

Paige is openly crying now, clinging to the frame of the door as if she cannot keep upright by herself. “It isn’t supposed to be this way,” she sobs. “Do you think I really care about the money? Or about who lives in that stupid old house?”

Nicholas thinks about the horror stories he’s heard from other surgeons, whose cutthroat, red-taloned wives have robbed them of half their Midas earnings and all their sterling reputations. He cannot picture Paige in a tailored suit, glaring from the witness stand, replaying a testimony that will support her for life. He can’t truly see her caring about whether $500,000 per year will be enough to cover her cost of living. She’d probably hand him the keys to the house if he asked nicely. In truth, she isn’t like the others; she never has been, and that’s what Nicholas always liked.

Her hair has fallen over her face, and her nose is running; her shoulders are shaking with the effort to stop crying. She is a mess. “Mama,” Max says, reaching out to her. Nicholas turns him away and watches Paige swipe the back of her hand across her eyes. He tells himself it can’t turn out any other way, not with what he knows now; but he quite literally feels his chest burn, swollen tissue irreparably staked, as his heart begins to break.

Nicholas grimaces and shakes his head. He slips inside the car, fastening Max into his seat and then turning the ignition. He tries to trace the sequence, but he cannot figure out how they have made it to this point-the place where you cannot go back. Paige hasn’t moved an inch. He cannot hear her voice over the purr of the engine, but he knows that she is telling him she loves him, she loves Max.

“I can’t help that,” he says, and he drives away without letting himself look back.

chapter 37

When I come down to breakfast in the morning, I am carrying my overnight bag. “I want to thank you for your hospitality,” I say stiffly, “but I think I’m going to be leaving today.”

Astrid and Robert look at each other, and it is Astrid who speaks first. “Where are you going?” she asks.

This question, the one I have been expecting, still throws me for a loop. “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess back to my mother’s.”

“Paige,” Astrid says gently, “if Nicholas wants a divorce, he’ll find you even in North Carolina.”

When I do not say anything, Astrid stands up and folds her arms around me. She holds me even though I do not hold her back. She is thinner than I expected, almost brittle. “I can’t change your mind?” she says.

“No,” I murmur, “you can’t.”

She pulls away, keeping me at arm’s length. “I won’t let you leave without something to eat,” she says, already moving toward the kitchen. “Imelda!”

She leaves me alone with Robert, who of all the people in this household makes me most uncomfortable. It isn’t that he’s been rude or even unkind; he has offered his house to me, he goes out of his way to compliment my appearance when I come down to dinner, he saves me the Living section of the Globe before Imelda clips the recipes. I suppose the problem is mine, not his. I suppose some things -like forgiveness-take time.

Robert folds his morning paper and motions for me to sit next to him. “What was the name of that colicky horse?” he says out of nowhere.

“Donegal.” I smooth my napkin across my lap. “But he’s fine now. Or he was when I left.”

Robert nods. “Mmm. Incredible how they bounce back.”

I raise my eyebrows, now understanding where this conversation is headed. “Sometimes they die,” I point out.

“Well, yes, of course,” Robert says, spreading cream cheese on a muffin. “But not the good ones. Never the good ones.”

“You hope not,” I say.

Robert jabs the muffin toward me, making his point. “Exactly.” Suddenly he reaches across the table and covers my wrist with his free hand. His touch, unexpected, is cool and steady, just like Nicholas’s. “You’re making it very easy for him to forget about you, Paige. I’d think twice about that.”

At that moment Nicholas strides into the dining room, carrying Max. “Where the hell is everybody?” he says. “I’m late.”

He slips Max into the high chair beside Robert and makes a point of not looking at me. Astrid walks in with a tray of toast and fruit and bagels. “Nicholas!” she says, as if last night never happened. “You’ll stay for breakfast?”

Nicholas glares at me. “You already have company,” he says.

I stand up and watch Max bang the edge of Robert’s plate with a sterling-silver spoon. Max has Nicholas’s aristocratic face but most definitely my eyes. You can see it in his restlessness. He’s always looking at the one place he cannot see. You can tell he will be a fighter.

Max sees me and smiles, and it makes his whole body glow. “I was just going,” I say. With a quick look at Robert, I walk out the door, leaving my overnight bag behind.

The volunteer lounge at Mass General is little more than a closet, tucked behind the ambulatory care waiting rooms. While I am waiting for Harriet Miles, the secretary, to find me an application form, I stare over her shoulder at the hall and wait to catch a glimpse of Nicholas.

I do not want to do this, but I see no other choice. If I’m going to make Nicholas change his mind about a divorce, I have to show him what he’ll be missing. I can’t do that when the only way I see him is by chance or in passing at his parents’, so I’ll have to spend all my time where he does-at the hospital. Unfortunately, I’m not qualified for most of the positions that would throw me together with him, so I try to convince myself that I’ve wanted to volunteer at the hospital all along but haven’t had the time. Still, I know this isn’t true. I hate the sight of blood; I don’t like that antiseptic cloud of illness that you always smell in a hospital’s halls. I wouldn’t be here if I could think of any other way to cross Nicholas’s path several times a day.

Harriet Miles is about four feet ten inches tall and almost as wide. She has to step on a little stool, fashioned in the shape of a strawberry, to reach the top drawer of the filing cabinet. “We don’t have as many adult volunteers as we’d like,” she says. “Most of the kids rotate through for a year or so just to beef up their college applications.” She closes her eyes and stuffs her hand into a stack of papers and comes up with the right one. “Ah,” she says, “success.”

She settles back on her chair, which I could swear has a booster seat on it, but I am too embarrassed to lean over and check. “Now, Paige, have you had any medical training or been a volunteer at another hospital?”

“No,” I say, hoping this won’t keep them from accepting me.

“That’s not a problem,” Harriet says smoothly. “You’ll attend one of our orientation sessions, and you can start working right after that-”

“No,” I stammer. “I have to start today.” When Harriet stares at me, unnerved, I settle into the chair and clench my hands at my sides. Careful, I think. Say what she wants to hear. “I mean, I really want to start today. I’ll do anything. It doesn’t have to involve medical stuff.”

Harriet licks the tip of her pencil and begins to fill in my application form. She doesn’t blink when I give my last name, but then again, I suppose there are a lot of Prescotts in Boston. I give Robert and Astrid’s address instead of my own, and just for kicks I fake my birth date, making myself three years older. I tell her I can work six days a week, and she looks at me as if I am a saint.

“I can put you in admitting,” she says, frowning at a schedule on the wall. “You won’t be able to do paperwork, but you can shuttle the patients up to their rooms in wheelchairs.” She taps the pencil on the blotter. “Or you can work the book cart,” she suggests, “on the patient floors.”

Neither of which, I realize, will place me where I need to go. “I have a request,” I say. “I’d like to be near Dr. Prescott, the cardiac surgeon.”

Harriet laughs and pats my hand. “Yes, he’s a favorite, isn’t he? Those eyes! I think he’s the reason for half the graffiti in the candy stripers’ bathroom. Everyone wants to be near Dr. Prescott.”

“You don’t understand,” I say. “He’s my husband.”

Harriet scans the application sheet and points to my last name. “So he is,” she says.

I lick my lips and lean forward. I offer a quick, silent prayer that in this war between Nicholas and myself, no one else will be hurt. Then I smile and lie as I never have before. “You know, his hours are pretty awful. We never get a chance to see each other.” I wink at Harriet conspiratorially. “I thought I’d do this as a kind of anniversary present. Try to be near him and all. I figured if I could get assigned close to him every day, kind of be his personal volunteer, he’d be happier, and then he’d be a better surgeon, and then everyone would win.”

“What a romantic idea.” Harriet sighs. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the other doctors’ wives came in as volunteers?”

I give her a steady, sober look. I have never been on a conversational basis with those women, but if that is my penance I will swear to carry it out on penalty of death. Today I’d promise Harriet Miles the moon. “I’ll do everything I can,” I say.

Even as she smiles at me, Harriet Miles’s eyes are melting. “I wish I was crazy in love,” she says, and she picks up the telephone to dial an inside number. “Let’s see what we can do.”

Astrid finds me sitting in the backyard under a peach tree, drawing. “What is it?” she asks, and I tell her I don’t know. Right now it is just a collection of lines and curves; it will eventually form into something I recognize. I’m drawing because it is therapeutic. Nicholas almost didn’t notice me today-even after I had helped wheel the stretcher with his recovering patient from surgical ICU to a semiprivate room, followed him with the book cart as he made his rounds, and stood behind him in the lunch line at the cafeteria. When he did finally recognize me as I refilled a water pitcher in the room of the patient he’d be operating on tomorrow, it was only because he had knocked against me and spilled water all over the front of my pale-pink volunteer pinafore. “I’m so sorry,” he said, glancing at the stains on my lap and my chest. Then he looked at my face. Terrified, I didn’t say a word. And although I expected Nicholas to storm out of the room and call for the chief of staff, he only raised his eyebrows and laughed.

“Sometimes I just draw,” I say to Astrid, hoping that’s enough of an explanation.

“Sometimes I just shoot,” she says. I look up, startled. “A camera,” she adds. She leans against the trunk of a tree and turns her face to the sun. I take in the firm set of her chin, the silver sweep of hair, the courage that hovers about her like expensive perfume. I wonder if there is anything in the world that Astrid Prescott would not be able to do if she set her mind to it.

“It would have been nice to have an artist in the family earlier,” she says. “I always felt honor bound to pass along my talents.” She laughs. “The photographic ones, anyway.” She opens her eyes and smiles at me. “Nicholas was a nightmare with a camera. He never got the hang of f-stops, and he routinely overexposed his prints. He had the skill for photography, but he never had the patience.”

“My mother was an artist,” I blurt out, and then I freeze, my hand paused inches above my sketch pad. My first volunteered personal admission. Astrid moves closer to me, knowing that this unexpected chink in my armor is the first step toward getting inside. “She was a good artist,” I say as carelessly as I can manage, thinking of the mural of horses in Chicago and then in Carolina. “But she fancied herself a writer instead.”

I start to move my pencil restlessly over a fresh page, and not daring to meet Astrid’s eyes, I tell her the truth. The words come fresh as a new wound, and once again I can clearly smell the Magic Markers in my tiny hand; feel my mother’s fingers close around my ankles for balance on the stool. I can sense my mother’s body pressed beside mine as we watch our unfettered stallions; I can remember the freedom of assuming-just knowing-that she would be there the next day, and the next.

“I wish my mother had been around to teach me how to draw,” I say, and then I fall silent. My pencil has stopped flying over the page, and as I stare at it, Astrid’s hand comes to cover mine where it lies. Even as I am wondering what has made me say these things to her, I hear myself speak again. “Nicholas was lucky,” I say. “I wish I’d had someone like you around when I was growing up.”

“Nicholas was doubly lucky, then.” Astrid shifts closer to me on the grass and slips her arms around my shoulders. It feels awkward -not like my mother’s embrace, which I fit into so neatly by the summer’s end. Still, before I can stop myself, I lean toward Astrid. She sighs against my hair. “She didn’t have a choice, you know.” I close my eyes and shrug, but Astrid will not leave it be. “She’s no different from me,” Astrid says, and then she hesitates. “Or you.”

Instinctively I pull away, putting the reason of distance between us. I open my mouth to disagree, but something stops me. Astrid, my mother, myself. I picture, like a collage, the grinning rows of white frames on Astrid’s contact sheets; the dark press of hoofprints in my mother’s fields; the line of men’s shirts I’d flung from the car on the day I had to leave. The things we did, we did because we had to. The things we did, we did because we had a right to. Still, we each left markers of some kind-a public trail that either led others to us or became, one day, the road upon which we returned.

I exhale slowly. God, I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in days. To win over Nicholas, I may be fighting a force that is greater than myself, but I’m beginning to see that I’m part of a force that is greater than myself. Maybe I do have a chance after all.

I smile at Astrid and pick up the pencil again, quickly fashioning on paper the naked knot of branches that hangs above Astrid’s head. She peers at the pad, then up at the tree, and then she nods. “Can you do me?” she asks, settling herself back in a pose.

I rip the top sheet off my pad and start to draw the slopes of Astrid’s face, the gray strands laced with the gold in her hair. With her bearing and her expression, she should have been a queen.

The shadows of the peach tree color her face with a strange scroll-work that reminds me of the insides of confessionals at Saint Christope="ဆher’s. The leaves that are starting to fall dance across my pad. When I am finished, I pretend that my pencil is still moving just so I can see what I have really drawn, before Astrid has a chance to look.

In each leaf-patterned shadow of her face, I have drawn a different woman. One looks to be African, with a thick turban wrapped around her head and gold hoops slicing her ears. One has the bottomless eyes and the black roped hair of a Spanish puta. One is a bedraggled girl, no older than twelve, who holds her hands against her swollen, pregnant belly. One is my mother; one is myself.

“Remarkable,” Astrid says, lightly touching each image. “I can see why Nicholas was impressed.” She cocks her head. “Can you draw from memory?” I nod. “Then do one of yourself.”

I have done self-portraits before but never on command. I do not know if I can do it, and I tell her this. “You never know until you try,” Astrid chides, and I dutifully turn to a blank page. I start with the base of my neck, working my way up the lines of my chin and my jaw. I stop for a second and see it is all wrong. I tear it off and turn to the next page, start at the hairline, working down. Again, I have to begin all over. I do this seven times, making each drawing a little more complete than the last. Finally, I put the pencil down and press my fingers against my eyes. “Some other time,” I say.

But Astrid is leafing through the discarded drawings I’ve ripped off the pad. “You’ve done better than you think,” she says, holding them out to me. “Look.” I riffle through the papers, shocked that I didn’t see this before. On every one, even the pictures made of threadbare lines, instead of myself I have drawn Nicholas.

chapter 38

For the past three days Nicholas has been the talk of the hospital, and it’s all because of me. In the morning when he arrives, I help ready his patient for surgery. Then I sit on the floor in front of his office in my pale pinafore and draw the portrait of the person he is operating upon. They are simple sketches that take only minutes. Each shows the patient far away from a hospital, in the prime of his or her life. I have drawn Mrs. Comazzi as a dance hall girl, which she was in the forties; I have drawn Mr. Goldberg as a dapper pin-striped gangster; I have drawn Mr. Allen as Ben-Hur, robust and perched on his chariot. I leave them taped to the door of the office, usually with a second picture, of Nicholas himself.

At first I drew Nicholas as he was at the hospital, on the telephone or signing a release form or leading a gaggle of residents into a patient’s room. But then I started to draw Nicholas the way I wanted to remember him: singing “Sweet Baby James” over Max’s bassinet, teaching me how to pitch a Wiffle ball, kissing me on the swan boat in front of everyone. Every morning at about eleven, Nicholas does the same thing. He comes back to his office, curses at the door, and rips both pictures off. He stuffs the one of himself in the trash can or his upper desk drawer, but he usually takes the one I’ve done of the patient and brings that during the postoperative checkup. I was offering magazines to Mrs. Comazzi when he gave the picture to her. “Oh, my stars,” she exclaimed. “Look at me. Look at me!” And Nich olas, in spite onte d‡f himself, smiled.

Rumors spread fast through Mass General, and everyone knows who I am and when I leave the drawings. At ten-forty, before Nicholas arrives, a crowd starts to gather. The nurses drift upstairs on their coffee break to see if they can figure out the likeness and to make cracks about the Dr. Prescott I tend to draw, the one they never see. “Jeez,” I heard one profusionist say, “I wouldn’t have guessed he even owned casual clothes.”

I hear Nicholas’s footsteps coming down the hall, quick and clipped. He is still wearing his scrubs, which might mean something has gone wrong. I start to scoot out of his way, but I am stopped by an unfamiliar voice. “Nicholas,” the man says.

Nicholas stops, his hand on the doorknob. “Elliot,” he says, more a sigh than a word. “Look,” he says, “it’s been a pretty bad morning. Maybe we can talk later.”

Elliot shakes his head and holds up a hand. “Didn’t come here to see you. I came to see what the fuss is with the artwork. Your door is becoming the hospital gallery.” He looks down at me and beams. “Scuttlebutt has it that the phantom artist here is your wife.”

Nicholas pulls the blue paper cap off his head and leans back against the door, closing his eyes. “Paige, Elliot Saget. Elliot, Paige. My wife.” He exhales slowly. “For now.”

If memory serves me right, Elliot Saget is the chief of surgery. I stand quickly and offer my hand. “A pleasure,” I say, smiling.

Elliot pushes Nicholas out of the way and stares at the picture I’ve done of Mr. Olsen, Nicholas’s morning surgery. Next to him is the image of Nicholas singing karaoke at an Allston bowling alley, something that to my knowledge he has never tried but that probably would do him good. “Quite a talent,” he says, looking from the picture to Nicholas and back again. “Why, Nicholas, she almost makes you seem as human as the rest of us.”

Nicholas mutters something under his breath and turns the key in the doorknob. “Paige,” Elliot Saget says to me, “the hospital’s communications director would like very much to talk to you about your artwork. Her name is Nancy Bianna, and she asked me to tell you to stop by when you aren’t busy.” He smiles then, and I know immediately that I can trust him if need be. “Nicholas,” he says into the open doorway. He nods and then he lopes away down the hall.

Nicholas bends over, trying to touch his fingers to his toes. It helps his back; I’ve seen him do it before, after a very long day on his feet. When he looks up and sees that I am still here, he grimaces. He crosses to the door and rips off the two pictures I’ve drawn, crumples them into a ball, and tosses them into the garbage.

“You don’t have to do that,” I say, angry. The pictures-however simple they are-are my work. I hate watching my work be destroyed. “If you don’t want yours, well, fine. But maybe Mr. Olsen would like to see his portrait.”

Nicholas’s eyes darken, and his fingers tighten on the doorknob. “This isn’t a garden party, Paige. Mr. Olsen died twenty minutes ago on the opery. ñ€†ating table. Maybe now,” he says quietly, “you can leave me alone.”

It takes me forty minutes to get back to the Prescotts’, and when I do I am still shaking. I pull off my jacket and sag against a highboy, which jabs into my ribs. Wincing, I move away and stare at myself in an antique mirror. For the past week, no matter where I am, I’ve been uncomfortable. And deep down I know this has nothing to do with the sharp edges of the furniture, or with any other piece of decor. It’s just that the cool hospital and the elegant Prescott mansion are not places where I feel at home.

Nicholas is right. I don’t understand his life. I don’t know the things that everyone else takes for granted, like how to read a doctor’s mood after surgery, or which side to lean to when Imelda takes the dishes away. I’m killing myself to be part of a world where I’m always two steps behind.

A door opens, and classical music floods the hallway. Robert holds Max, letting him chew on the plastic CD case. I give my best smile, but I am still shivering. My father-in-law steps forward and narrows his eyes. “What’s happened to you?” he asks.

The whole day, this past month, all of it crowds and chokes in my throat. The last person in the world I want to break down in front of is Robert Prescott, but still, I start to cry. “Nicholas,” I sob.

Robert frowns. “Never did learn to pick on someone his own size,” he says. He takes my elbow and guides me into his study, a dark room that makes me think of fox hunts and stiff British lords. “Sit down and unwind,” he says. He settles into a huge leather chair and sets Max on the top of his desk to play with brass paperweights.

I lean back against the burgundy couch and obediently close my eyes, but I feel too conspicuously out of place to unwind. A crystal brandy decanter rests on a mahogany table beneath the frozen smile of a mounted buck. A set of dueling pistols, just for show, are crossed above the arch of the door. This room-dear God, this whole house -is like something straight out of a novel.

Real people do not live like this, surrounded by thousands of volumes of books and ancient paintings of pale women and thick silver varsity mugs. Real people do not take tea as seriously as if it were Communion. Real people do not make five-figure donations to the Republican party-

“Do you like Handel?”

At the sound of Robert’s voice, my eyes fly open and every muscle in my body goes on the alert. I stare at him carefully, wondering if this is a test, a trap set for me so I’ll slip up and show how little I understand. “I don’t know,” I say bitterly. “Should I?” I wait to see his eyes flare, or his mouth tighten, and when it doesn’t, the fight goes out of me. It’s your own fault, Paige, I think. He’s only trying to be nice. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I haven’t had a very good day. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that when I was growing up, the only antique we had was my father’s family Bible, and the music we listened to had words.” I smile hesitantly. “This kind of life takes a little getting used to, although you couldn’t really undey wñ€†rstand that-”

I break off, recalling what Nicholas told me years ago about his father, what I’d forgotten when I’d seen Robert, and all his trappings, again. Something flickers across his eyes-regret, or maybe relief-but just as quickly, it disappears. I stare at him, fascinated. I wonder how he could have come from my kind of background but still know, so easily, the right way to move and to act in a house like this.

“So Nicholas told you,” Robert says, and he doesn’t sound disappointed or furious; it’s simply a statement of fact.

Suddenly I remember what had tugged at the corner of my mind when Nicholas said his father had grown up poor. Robert Prescott was the one who had objected to Nicholas’s marrying me. Not Astrid-which I could understand-but Robert. He had been the one to drive Nicholas away. He had been the one who said Nicholas would be ruining his life.

I tell myself I’m not angry anymore, just curious. But I pick Max up anyway, taking him away from my father-in-law. “How could you?” I whisper.

Robert leans forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “I worked so hard for this. All of this.” He gestures, sweeping his hands in the directions of the four walls. “I could never stand the thought of someone throwing it all away. Not Astrid, and especially not Nicholas.”

Max squirms, and I set him down on the floor. “Nicholas didn’t have to throw it all away,” I point out. “You could have paid for his education.”

Robert shakes his head. “It wouldn’t have been the same. Eventually you’d have held him back. You could never move in these circles, Paige. You wouldn’t be comfortable living like this.”

It isn’t the truth that stings; it is hearing Robert Prescott, once again, decide what is best for me. I curl my hands into fists. “How the hell can you be so sure?”

“Because I’m not,” he says quietly. Shocked, I sink back into the couch. I stare at Robert’s cashmere sweater, his neat white hair, the pride gracing his jaw. But I also notice that his hands are clenched tight together and that a pulse beats fast at the base of his neck. He’s terrified, I think. He’s as scared of me as I’ve been of him.

I think about this for a moment, and about why he is telling me something it obviously hurts him to discuss. I remember something my mother said in North Carolina when I asked her why she had never come back. “You make your own bed,” she told me. “You have to lie in it.”

I smile gently and sweep Max off the floor. I hand him to his grandfather. “I’ll change for dinner,” I say, and I start toward the hall.

Robert’s voice stops me. His words trip over Handel’s sweet violins and reaching flutes. “It’s worth it,” he says quietly. “I would do it all over again.”

I do not turn around. “Why?”

“Why would you?” he says, and his question follows me up the stairs and slips into the cool quiet of my room. It demands an answer, and it knocks me off center.

Nicholas.

Sometimes I sing Max to sleep. It doesn’t seem to matter what I sing-gospel or pop, Dire Straits or the Beatles. I usually skip the lullabies, because I figure Max will hear those from everyone else.

We sit on the rocking chair in his room at the Prescotts’. Astrid lets me hold him whenever I want to now, as long as Nicholas isn’t around and isn’t about to show up. It’s her way of getting me to stay, I think, although I don’t consider leaving a real option anymore.

Max has just had his bath. The easiest way to give it, because he’s so slippery in the bathtub, is just to get naked with him and set him between my legs. He has a Tupperware bowl and a rubber duck that he plays with in the water. He doesn’t mind when I get baby shampoo in his eyes. Afterward I wrap him in the towel with me, pretending we share the same skin, and I think of wallabees and opossums and other animals that always carry around their young.

Max is getting very sleepy, rubbing his eyes with his little fists and yawning often. “Hang on a second,” I say, sitting him up on the floor. I lean down and pop a pacifier into his mouth.

He watches me as I straighten his crib. I smooth the sheet and move the Cookie Monster and the rabbit rattle out of the way. When I turn around fast, he smiles, as if this is a game, and he loses his pacifier in the process. “You can’t suck and smile at the same time,” I tell him. I turn around to plug in the night-light, and when I face Max again he laughs. He holds up his arms to me, asking to be held.

Suddenly I realize that this is what I’ve been waiting for-a man who depends entirely on me. When I met Jake, I spent years trying to make him fall in love with me. When I married Nicholas, I lost him to the mistress of medicine. I dreamed for years of a man who couldn’t live without me, a man who pictured my face when he closed his eyes, who loved me when I was a mess in the morning and when dinner was late and even when I overloaded the washing machine and burned out the motor.

Max stares up at me as if I can do no wrong. I have always wanted someone who treats me the way he does; I just didn’t know that I’d have to give birth to him. I pick Max up, and immediately he wraps his arms around my neck and starts crawling up my body. This is the way he hugs; it is something he’s just learned. I can’t help but smile into the soft folds of his neck. Be careful what you wish for, I think. It might come true.

Nancy Bianna stands in the long main founders’ hallway, her finger pressed against her pursed lips. “Something,” she murmurs. “I’m missing something.” She swings her head back and forth, and her hair, blunt cut, moves like an Egyptian’s.

Nancy has ifiñ€†been the primary reason that my sketches of Nicholas’s patients and some new ones, of Elliot Saget and Nancy and even Astrid and Max, now hang framed in the entrance to the hospital. Previously a row of unimaginative prints, imitations of Matisse, hung against the cinder-block walls. But Nancy says this will be the start of something big. “Who knew Dr. Prescott was so well connected?” she mused to me. “First you, and then maybe an exhibit by his mother.”

That first day I met her, after I had left Nicholas in his office, she shook my hand vigorously and slid her thick black-rimmed glasses up her nose. “What patients want to see when they check into a hospital,” she explained, “isn’t a line of meaningless color. They want to see people.” She leaned forward and gripped my shoulders. “They want to see survivors. They want to see life.”

Then she stood up and walked casually in a circle around me. “Of course we understand you’d have the final say on placement and inclusion,” she added, “and we’d compensate you for your work.”

Money. They were going to give me money for the silly little pictures I drew to get Nicholas to notice me. My sketches were going to hang on the walls at Mass General, so that even when I wasn’t around Nicholas, he couldn’t help but be reminded.

I smiled at Nancy. “When can we start?”

Three days later, the exhibit is being set up. Nancy paces the hallway and switches a portrait of Mr. Kasselbaum with one of Max. “The juxtaposition of youth and age,” she says. “Autumn and spring. I love it.”

At the far end of the exhibit, near the admissions desk, is a small white card with my name printed on it. PAIGE PRESCOTT, it reads, VOLUNTEER. There is no biography, nothing at all about Nicholas or Max, and this is sort of nice. It makes me feel as though I have just appeared out of nowhere and stepped into the limelight; as if I have never had a history at all.

“Okay, okay… places,” Nancy calls, grasping my hand. There are only two other people in the hall, custodians with ladders and wire-cutters, and neither of them speaks very good English. I don’t really know who Nancy is talking to. She pulls me to the side and draws in her breath. “Ta-da!” she trills, although nothing has changed from a moment before.

“It’s lovely,” I say, because I know she is waiting.

Nancy beams at me. “Stop by tomorrow,” she says. “We’re thinking of changing our stationery, and if you’re any good at lettering…” She lets her sentence trail off, speaking for itself.

When she disappears into an elevator, taking the workmen and the ladders with her, I stand in the hallway and survey my own work. It is the first time I have ever seen my skills on formal display. I am good. A sweet rush of success bubbles inside me, and I walk down the hall, touching each individual picture. I take away a shot of pride from each one and leave in its place the promise-marker of my fingerprints.

One night when the house is as dark as a forest I go to the library to call my mother. I pass Astrid and Robert’s room on the way and I hear the sound of lovemaking, and for some reason instead of being embarrassed I am frightened. When I reach the library, I settle in the big wing chair Robert likes best and I hold the heavy phone in my hands like a trophy.

“I forgot to tell you something,” I say when my mother answers the phone. “We named the baby after you.”

I hear my mother draw in her breath. “So you’re speaking to me after all.” She pauses, and then she asks me where I am.

“I’m staying with Nicholas’s parents,” I say. “You were right about coming back.”

“I wish I didn’t have to be,” my mother says.

I didn’t really want to call my mother, but I couldn’t help it. In spite of myself, now that I had found her I needed her. I wanted to tell her about Nicholas. I wanted to cry about the divorce. I wanted her suggestions, her opinion.

“I’m sorry you left like that,” she says.

“Don’t be sorry.” I want to tell her that no one is at fault. I think about the way the clean air in North Carolina would thrill to the back of my throat with the first breath of the morning. “I had a very nice time.”

“For God’s sake, Paige,” she says, “that’s the kind of thing you’d tell some Daughter of the American Revolution after a luncheon.”

I rub my eyes. “Okay,” I say, “I didn’t have a very nice time.” But I’m lying, and she knows it as well as I do. I picture the two of us, bracing Donegal when he could barely stand. I picture my arms around my mother’s shoulders when she cried at night. “I miss you,” I say, and instead of feeling sort of empty as the words leave my mouth, I start to smile. Imagine me saying that to my own mother after all these years, and meaning it, and no matter what I expected, the world hasn’t shattered at my feet.

“I don’t blame you for leaving,” my mother says. “I know you’ll be back.”

“How do you know that?” I say sulkily, a little upset that she can pin me down so easily.

“Because,” my mother says, “that’s what’s keeping me going.”

I tighten my grip on the arm of Robert’s chair. “Maybe I’m wasting my time,” I say. “Maybe I should just come back now.”

It would be so easy to be someplace where I am wanted, anyplace but here. I pause, waiting for her to take me up on the offer. But instead my mother laughs softly. “Do you know that your first word,” she says, “even before Mama and Dada, was goodbye?”

She’s right. It isn’t going to do me any good to just keep running. I sink back against the chair and close my eyes, trying to picture the hasizñ€†irpin stream I jumped with Donegal, the ribbons of clouds lacing the sky. “Tell me what I’m missing,” I say. I listen to my mother speak of Aurora and Jean-Claude, of the sun-bleached paint on the chipped wall of the barn, of a brisk seasonal change that creeps farther up the porch every night. After a while I don’t bother to concentrate on her actual words. I let the sound of her voice wash over me, making itself familiar.

Then I hear her say, “I called your father, you know.”

But I haven’t spoken to my father since I’ve been back, so of course I could not have known. I am certain I’ve heard her wrong. “You what?” I say.

“I called your father. We had a good talk. I never would have called, but you sort of encouraged me. By leaving, I mean.” There is silence for a moment. “Who knows,” she murmurs. “Maybe one day I’ll even see him.”

I look around at the mutated, hunkering shapes of chairs and end tables in the dark library. I rub my hands over my shoulders. I am beginning to feel hope. Maybe, after twenty years, this is what my mother and I can do for each other. It is not the way other mothers and daughters are-we will not talk about seventh-grade boys, or French-braid my hair on a rainy Sunday; my mother will not have the chance to heal my cuts and bruises with a kiss. We cannot go back, but we can keep surprising each other, and I suppose this is better than nothing at all.

Suddenly I really believe that if I stick it out long enough, Nicholas will understand. It’s just a matter of time, and I have a lot of that on my hands. “I’m a volunteer at the hospital now,” I tell my mother proudly. “I work wherever Nicholas works. I’m closer than his shadow.”

My mother pauses, as if she is considering this. “Stranger things have happened,” she says.

Max wakes up screaming, his legs bent close to his chest. When I rub his stomach, it only makes him scream harder. I think that maybe he needs to burp, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem. Finally, I walk around with him perched on my shoulder, pressing his belly flush against me. “What’s wrong?” Astrid says, her head at the nursery doorway.

“I don’t know,” I say, and to my surprise, uttering those words doesn’t throw me into a panic. Somehow I know I will figure it out. “It might be gas.”

Max squeezes up his face and turns red, the way he does when he’s trying to go to the bathroom. “Ah,” I say. “Are you leaving me a present?” I wait until he looks as if he’s finished, and then I pull down his sweatpants to change his diaper. There is nothing inside, nothing at all. “You fooled me,” I say, and he smiles.

I rediaper him and sit him on the floor with a Busy Box, rolling and turning the knobs until he catches on and follows. From time to time he screws up his face again. He seems to be constipated. “Maybe we’ll have prunes for breakfast,” I say. “That ought to make you feel better.”

Max plays quietly with me for a few minut="ñ€†tes, and then I notice that he isn’t really paying attention. He’s staring off into space, and the curiosity that flames the blue in his eyes seems to have dulled. He sways a little, as if he’s going to fall. I frown, tickle him, and wait for him to respond. It takes a second or two longer than usual, but eventually he comes back to me.

He’s not himself, I think, although I cannot put my finger on what the problem really is. I figure I will watch him closely. I tenderly rub his chunky forearms, feeling a satisfied flutter in my chest. I know my own son, I think proudly. I know him well enough to catch the subtle changes.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called,” I tell my father. “Things have been a little crazy.”

My father laughs. “I had thirteen years with you, lass. I think your mother deserves three months.”

I had written my father postcards from North Carolina, just as I had written Max. I’d told him about Donegal, about the rye rolling over the hills. I told him everything I could on a three-and-a-half-by-five-and-a-half-inch card, without mentioning my mother.

“Rumor has it,” my father says, “you’ve been sleepin’ with the enemy.” I jump, thinking he means Nicholas, and then I realize he is talking about living at the Prescotts’.

I glance at the Fabergé egg on the mantel, the Civil War Sharps carbine rifle hanging over the fireplace. “Necessity makes strange bed-fellows,” I say.

I wind the telephone cord around my ankles, trying to find a safe route for conversation. But there is little I have to say, and so much I want to. I take a deep breath. “Speaking of rumors,” I say, “I hear Mom called.”

“Aye.”

My mouth drops open. “That’s it? ‘Aye’? Twenty-one years go by, and that’s all you have to say?”

“I was expectin’ it,” my father says. “I figured if you had the fortune to find her, sooner or later she’d return the favor.”

“The favor?” I shake my head. “I thought you wanted nothing to do with her. I thought you said it was too late.”

For a moment my father is silent. “Paige,” he says finally, “how did you find her to be?”

I close my eyes and sink back on the leather couch. I want to choose my words very carefully. I imagine my mother the way she would have wanted me to: seated on Donegal, galloping him across a field faster than a lie can spread. “She wasn’t what I expected,” I say proudly.

My father laughs. “May never was.”

“She thinks she’s going to see you someday,” I add.

“Does she now,” my father answers, but his thoughts seem very far away. I wonder if he is seeing her the way he did the first time he met her, dressed in her halter top and carrying her practice suitcase. I wonder if he can remember the tremor in his voice when he asked her to marry him, or the flash across her eyes as she said yes, or even the ache in his throat when he knew she was gone from his life.

It may be my imagination, but for the breadth of a moment everything in the room seems to sharpen in focus. The contrasting colors in the Oriental carpet become more striking; the towering windows reflect a devil’s glare. It makes me question if, all this time, I haven’t really been seeing clearly.

“Dad,” I whisper, “I want to go back.”

“God help me, Paige,” my father says. “Don’t I know it.”

Elliot Saget is pleased with my gallery at Mass General. He is so convinced that it is going to win some kind of humanitarian Best of Boston award that he promises me the stars on a silver platter. “Well, actually,” I say, “I’d rather watch Nicholas in surgery.”

I have never seen Nicholas truly doing his job. Yes, I have seen him with his patients, drawing them out of their fear and being more understanding with them than he has been with his own family. But I want to see what all the training is for; what his hands are so skilled at. Elliot frowns at me when I ask. “You may not like it very much,” he says. “Lots of blood and battle scars.”

But I stand my ground. “I’m much tougher than I look,” I say.

And so this morning there will be no picture of Nicholas’s patient tacked to his door. Instead I sit alone in the gallery above the operating suite and wait for Nicholas to enter the room. There are already seven other people: anesthesiologists, nurses, residents, someone sitting beside a complicated machine with coils and tubes. The patient, lying naked on the table, is painted a strange shade of orange.

Nicholas enters, still stretching the gloves on his hands, and all the heads in the room turn toward him. I stand up. There is an audio monitor in the gallery, so I can hear Nicholas’s low voice, rustling behind his paper mask, greeting everyone. He checks beneath the sterile drapes and watches as a tube is set in the patient’s throat. He says something to a nearby doctor, youngish-looking, his hair in a neat ponytail. The young doctor nods and begins to make an incision in the patient’s leg.

All of the doctors wear weird glasses on their heads, which they flip down to cover their eyes when they bend over the patient. It makes me smile: I keep expecting this to be some kind of joke costume, with googly eyeballs popping out on springs. Nicholas stands to the side while two doctors work over the patient’s leg. I cannot see very well what they are doing, but they take different instruments from a cloth-covered tray, things that look like nail scissors and eyebrow tweezers.

They pull a long purple spaghetti string from the leg, and when I realize it is a vein, I t›‹ñ€†feel the bile rise in my throat. I have to sit down. The vein is placed in a jar filled with clear fluid, and the doctors working on the leg begin to sew with needles so small they seem invisible. One of them takes two pieces of metal from a machine and touches the leg, and I can swear I smell human flesh burning.

Then Nicholas moves to the center of the patient. He reaches for a knife-no, a scalpel-and traces a thin line down the orange area of the patient’s chest. Almost immediately the skin is stained with dark blood. Then he does something I cannot believe: he pulls a saw out of nowhere-an actual saw, like a Black & Decker-and begins to slice through the breastbone. I think I can see chips of bone, although I can’t believe Nicholas would let that happen. When I think I am surely going to faint, Nicholas hands the saw to another doctor and spreads the chest open, holding it in place with a metal device.

I don’t know what I was expecting-maybe a red valentine heart. But what lies in the center of this cavity once the blood is mopped away looks like a yellow wall. Nicholas picks a pair of scissors off a tray, bends low toward the chest, and fiddles around with his hands. He takes two tubes that come from that complicated machine and attaches them to places I cannot quite see. Then he picks up a different pair of scissors and looks at the yellow wall. He begins to snip at it. He peels back the layer to reveal a writhing muscle, sort of pink and sort of gray, which I know is the heart. It twitches with every beat, and when it contracts it gets so small that it seems to be temporarily lost. Nicholas says, “Let’s put him on bypass,” to the man who is sitting at the machine, and in a quiet whir, red blood begins to run through the tubes. Below his mask, I think I see Nicholas smile.

He asks a nurse for cardioplegia, and she hands him a beaker filled with a clear solution. He pours it over the heart, and just like that, it stands still. Dear Jesus, I find myself thinking, he’s killed the man. But Nicholas doesn’t even stop for a moment. He picks up another pair of scissors and moves close to the patient again.

All of a sudden a spurt of blood covers Nicholas’s cheek and the front of another doctor’s gown. Nicholas’s hands move faster than I can follow as he reaches into the open chest to stop the flow. I step back, breathing hard. I wonder how Nicholas can do this every single day.

The second doctor reaches into the jar I’ve forgotten about and takes out the vein from the leg. And then Nicholas, sweat breaking out on his brow, pulls a tiny needle repeatedly through the heart and through that vein, using tweezers to place the point and to retrieve it. The other surgeon steps back, and Nicholas taps the jellied heart with a metal instrument. Just like that, it starts to beat. It stops, and Nicholas asks for an internal defibrill-something. He touches it to the heart and shocks it into moving again. The second doctor takes the tubes from the top and bottom of the heart, and the blood stops coursing through the machine. Instead, the heart, still on display, begins to do what it was doing before-squeezing and expanding in a simple rhythm.

Nicholas lets the second surgeon do most of the work from that point-more sutures, including wire for the ribs and thick stitches through the orange skin that make me think of a Frankenstein monster. I press my hands against the sloped glass wall of the gallery. My face is so close that my breath cloudt, ñ€†s the window. Nicholas looks up and sees me. I smile hesitantly, wondering at the power he must feel to spend every morning giving life.

chapter 39

Nicholas remembers having heard once that the person who has started a relationship finds it easier to end it. Obviously, he thinks, that person did not know Paige.

He can’t get rid of her. He has to give her credit-he never thought she’d take it this far. But it is distracting. Everywhere he turns, there she is. Arranging flowers for his patients, wheeling them out of surgical ICU, eating lunch across the cafeteria. It has reached the point where he actually misses her when she isn’t around.

The drawings have got out of control. At first he ignored them, tacked crudely to his office door like kindergarten paintings on a refrigerator. But as people started to notice Paige’s talent, he couldn’t help but look at them. He brings the ones she does of his patients to their rooms, since it seems to brighten them up a little-some of his incoming patients have even heard of the portraits and ask for them at the pre-op exam. He pretends to throw out the ones she does of him, but in fact he has been saving them in the locked bottom drawer of the desk. When he has a minute, he pulls them out and looks at them. Because he knows Paige, he knows what to look for. And sure enough, in every single picture of him-even the ridiculous one of him singing in a bowling shirt-there is something else. Someone, actually. In the background of each drawing is a slight, barely noticeable portrait of Paige herself. Nicholas finds the same face over and over, and every time she is crying.

And now her pictures are all over the entrance hall of Mass General. The whole staff treats her like some kind of Picasso. Fans flock to his office door to see the latest ones, and he actually has to push through them to get into the room. The chief of staff-the goddamned chief of staff!-ran into Nicholas in the hall and complimented him on Paige’s talent.

Nicholas does not know how she has managed to win so many people to her side in a matter of days. Now, that’s Paige’s real talent-diplomacy. Every time he turns around, someone is mentioning her name or, worse, she is standing there herself. It reminds him of the ad agencies’ “block” strategy, where they run the same exact commercial at the same exact time on all three network stations, so that even if you flip channels you see their product. He can’t get her out of his mind.

Nicholas likes to look at the portraits in his drawer just before he goes down to surgery-which, thank God, is the only place Paige hasn’t been allowed into yet. The pictures clear his head, and he likes to have that kind of directed focus before doing an operation. He pulls out the latest drawing: his hands poised in midair as if they are going to cast a spell. Every line is deeply etched; his fingernails are blunt and larger than life. In the shadow of the thumb is Paige’s face. The drawing reminds him of the photo his mother developed years before to save her marriage, the one of her own hands folded beneath his father’s. Paige couldn’t have known, and it strikes Nicholas as uncanny.

He v› t‡leaves the portrait on the desk, on top of the scrawled sheets of assets he is supposed to be preparing for Oakie Peterborough. He has added nothing since the day he met the lawyer for lunch, a week ago. He keeps thinking that he must call to set up a consultation, but he forgets to mention it to his secretary and he is too busy to do it himself.

The operation this morning is a routine bypass, which Nicholas thinks he could do with his eyes closed. He walks briskly to the locker room, although he is not in a hurry; he changes into the soft laundered blue scrubs. He pulls on paper booties and a paper cap and winds a mask around his neck. Then he takes a deep breath and goes to scrub, thinking about the business of fixing hearts.

It’s strange being the chief of cardiac surgery. When he enters the operating suite the patient is already prepped and the easy conversation between the residents and the nurses and the anesthesiologist comes to a dead halt. “Good morning, Dr. Prescott,” someone says finally, and Nicholas can’t even tell who it is because of the stupid masks. He wishes he knew what to do to put them all at ease, but he hasn’t had enough experience at it. As a surgical fellow, he spent so much time clawing his way to the top, he never bothered to consider whom he was crawling over to get there. Patients are one thing: Nicholas believes that if someone is going to trust you with his life and shell out $31,000 for five hours’ work, he or she deserves to be listened to and laughed with. He has even sat on the edges of beds and held his patients’ hands while they prayed. But doctors are a different breed. They are so busy looking behind them for an encroaching Brutus that everyone becomes a potential threat. Especially a superior like Nicholas: with one written criticism, he has the power to end a career. Nicholas wishes he could look over the blue edge of a mask just once and see a pair of smiling eyes. He wishes Marie, the stout, serious OR nurse, would put a whoopee cushion under the patient, or set rubber vomit on the instrument tray, or play some other practical joke. He wonders what would happen if he walked in and said, “Have you heard the one about the rabbi, the priest, and the call girl?”

Nicholas speaks softly as the patient is intubated, and then he directs a resident, a man his own age, to harvest the leg vein. His hands move by themselves, making the incision and opening the ribs, dissecting out the aorta and the vena cava for the bypass machine, sewing up and cauterizing blood vessels that are accidentally cut.

When the heart has been stopped-an action that never loses its effect for Nicholas, who holds his breath as if his own body has been affected-Nicholas peers through magnifying spectacles and begins to cut away the diseased coronary arteries. He sews on the leg vein, turned backward, to bypass the obstructions. At one point, when a blood vessel begins spurting blood all over Nicholas and his first assistant, Nicholas curses. The anesthesiologist looks up, because he’s never seen Dr. Prescott-the famous Dr. Prescott-lose his cool. But even as he does so, Nicholas’s hands are flying quickly, clamping the vessel as the other doctor sews it up.

When it is all over and Nicholas steps back to let his assistant close, he does not feel as if five hours have passed. He never does. He is not a religious man, but he leans against the tiled wall and beneath his blue mask he whispers a prayer of thanks to God. In spite of the fact that he knows he is skilled, that his expertise comes from years of training and practice, Nicholas cent€†annot help but believe a little bit of luck has been thrown in, that someone is looking out for him.

That’s when he sees the angel. In the observation gallery is the figure of a woman, her hands pressed to the window, her cheek flush against the glass. She is wearing something loose that falls to her calves and that glows in the reflected fluorescent light of the operating suite. Nicholas cannot help himself; he takes a step forward and lifts his hand a fraction of an inch as if he might touch her. He cannot see her eyes, but somehow he knows this is only an apparition. The angel glides away and disappears into the dark background of the gallery. Nicholas knows that even if he has never seen her before, she has always been with him, watching over his surgeries. He wishes, harder than he has ever wished for anything in his life, that he could see her face.

After such a spiritual morning, it is a letdown for Nicholas to find Paige in all his patients’ rooms when he is doing afternoon rounds. Today she has pulled her hair away from her face in a braid that hangs down to her shoulder blades and moves like a thick switch when she leans over to refill a water pitcher or to plump pillows. She’s not wearing makeup, she rarely does, and she looks about as old as a candy striper.

Nicholas flips over the metal cover of Mrs. McCrory’s chart. The patient is a woman in her late fifties who had a valve replacement done three days ago and is almost ready to go home. He skims a finger across the vitals recorded by one of the interns. “I think we’re getting ready to kick you out of here,” he says, grinning down at her.

Mrs. McCrory beams and grabs Paige’s hand, which is the nearest one. Paige, startled, gasps and almost overturns a vase of peonies. “Take it easy,” Nicholas says dryly. “I don’t have room in my agenda for an unscheduled heart attack.”

At this unexpected attention, Paige turns. Mrs. McCrory eyes her critically. “He doesn’t bite, dear,” she says.

“I know,” Paige murmurs. “He’s my husband.”

Mrs. McCrory claps her hands together, thrilled by this news. Nicholas mutters something unintelligible, amazed at how easily Paige can ruin his good mood. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” he says.

“No,” Paige says. “I’m supposed to go wherever you go. It’s my job.”

Nicholas tosses the chart down on Mrs. McCrory’s bed. “That is not a volunteer’s assignment. I’ve been here long enough to know the standard rounds, Paige. Ambulatory, patient transport, admitting. Volunteers are never assigned to doctors.”

Paige shrugs, but it looks more like a shiver. “They made an exception.”

For the first time in minutes, Nicholas remembers Mrs. McCrory. “Excuse us,” he says, grabbing Paige’s upper arm and dragging her out of the room.

“Oh, stay!” Mrs. McCrory exclaims after them. “You’re better trtu€†han Burns and Allen.”

Reaching the hallway, Nicholas leans against the wall and releases Paige. He wanted to yell and to complain, but suddenly he can’t remember what he was going to say. He wonders if the whole hospital is laughing at him. “Thank God they don’t let you in surgery,” he says.

“They did. I watched you today.” Paige touches his sleeve gently. “Dr. Saget arranged it for me, and I was in the observation room. Oh, Nicholas, it’s incredible to be able to do that.”

Nicholas does not know what makes him more angry: the fact that Saget let Paige watch him doing surgery without his consent, or the fact that his imagined angel was really just his wife. “It’s my job,” he snaps. “I do it every day.” He looks at Paige, and that expression is back in her eyes-the one that probably made him fall in love with her. Like his patients, Paige is seeing him as someone who is flawless. But he has a sense that unlike them, she would have been just as impressed if she’d watched him mopping the hospital’s halls.

The thought chafes around his neck. Nicholas pulls at his collar and thinks about going right back to his office and calling Oakie Peterborough and getting this over. “Well,” Paige says softly, “I wish I were that good at fixing things.”

Nicholas turns and walks down the hall to see another patient, a transplant recipient from last week. When he is half inside the room, he glances around, to find Paige at the door. “I’ll change the damn water,” he says. “Just get out of here.”

Her hands are braced on either side of the doorway, and her hair is working its way out of her braid. Her volunteer uniform, two sizes too big, billows around her waist, falls to her shins. “I wanted to tell you,” she says, “I think Max is getting sick.”

Nicholas laughs, but it comes out as a snort. “Of course,” he says, “you’re an expert.”

Paige lowers her voice and peeks into the hallway to make sure no one is around. “He’s constipated,” she says, “and he spit up twice today.”

Nicholas smirks. “Did you give him creamed spinach?” Paige nods. “He’s allergic.”

“But there aren’t any welts,” Paige says, “and anyway it’s more than that. He’s been crabby, and, well, Nicholas, he just isn’t himself.”

Nicholas shakes his head at her and takes a step into the patient’s room. As much as he doesn’t want to admit it, when he sees Paige standing in the doorway, arms outstretched as if she is being crucified, she looks very much like an angel. “He’s not himself,” Nicholas repeats. “How the hell would you know?”

chapter 40

When Astrid hands Max over to Nicholas that night, something still is wrong. He has been crying on and off all day. “I wouldn’t worry,” Astrid says to m heto Ni="1e. “He’s been a colicky baby.” But it is not his crying that bothers me. It’s the way the fight has gone out of his eyes.

I stand on the staircase while Nicholas takes Max. He hoists the diaper bag and some favorite toys over his free arm. He ignores me until he reaches the door, about to leave. “You might want to get a good lawyer,” he says. “I’m meeting with mine tomorrow.”

My knees give out under me, and I stumble against the banister. I feel as if I have been swiftly punched. It isn’t his words that hurt so much; it is knowing that I have been too late. I can run in circles until I drop, but I cannot change the course of my life.

Astrid calls out to me as I pull myself up the stairs to my room, but I do not listen. I think about phoning my father, but he’ll only lecture me on God’s will, and that won’t give me any comfort. What if I don’t happen to like God’s will? What if I want to keep the end from coming?

I do what I always do when I am in pain; I draw. I pick up my sketch pad and I draw image after image on the same page until it is nothing more than a dismal black knot. I flip the page and do this all over again, and I keep on doing this until little by little some of the rage leaves my body, seeping through my fingertips onto the page. When I no longer feel I am being eaten alive from the inside, I put down my charcoal and I decide to start over.

This time I draw in pastels. I rarely use them because I’m a lefty and they get all over the side of my hand and make me look strangely bruised. But right now I want color, and that is the only way I can think of getting it. I find that I am drawing Cuchulainn’s mother, Dechtire, which seems natural after thinking of my father and the whims of the gods. Her long sapphire robes mist around her sandaled feet, and her hair flies behind her in a sleek arc. I draw her suspended in midair, somewhere between heaven and earth. One arm reaches down to a man silhouetted against the ground, one arm reaches up toward Lugh, the powerful god who carries the sun.

I make her fingers brush those of her husband below, and as I do it I get a physical jolt. Then I lengthen her other arm, seeing her torso twist and stretch on the page as she reaches into the sky. It takes all the effort in my fingers to make Dechtire’s hand touch the sun god’s, and when it does I begin to draw furiously, obliterating Dechtire’s porcelain face and the solid body of her husband and the bronze arm of Lugh. I draw flames that cover all the characters, erupting in fiery sparks and bursting across the sky and the earth. I draw a blaze that feeds on itself, that shimmers and flares and sucks away all the air. Even as I cannot breathe anymore, I see that my picture has turned into a holocaust, an inferno. I throw the scorching pastels across the room, red and yellow and orange and sienna. I stare sadly at the ruined image of Dechtire, amazed that I have never before seen the obvious: when you play with fire, you are likely to get burned.

I fall asleep fitfully that night, and when I wake, sleet is rattling against the window. I sit up in bed and try to remember what has awakened me, and I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I know what is coming. It is like that feeling I used to have about Jake, when we were so closely connected that I could sense when he stepped into his home at night, when he thought of my name, when he needed He‘€† to see me.

I jump out of bed and pull on the pants and shirt I wore yesterday. I don’t even think to find socks, tying up my sneakers over bare feet. I gather my hair into a tangled ponytail and secure it with the rubber band from a bag of gummy fish. Then I pull my jacket off the doorknob and run downstairs.

When I open the door, Nicholas stands before me, assaulted by the ice and the rain. Just beyond him, in the yellow interior light of his car, I can see Max, oddly silent, his mouth in a raw red circle of pain. Nicholas is already closing the door behind me and pulling me into the storm. “He’s sick,” Nicholas says. “Let’s go.”

chapter 41

He watches the hands of people he does not know poke and prod at his son’s body. John Dorset, the resident pediatrician on call last night, stands over Max now. Every time his fingers brush Max’s abdomen, the baby shrieks in pain and curls into a ball. It reminds Nicholas of the sea anemones he played with on Caribbean beaches as a child, the ones that folded around his finger at the slightest touch.

Max hadn’t gone to sleep easily last night, although that wasn’t cause in itself for alarm. It was the way he kept waking up every half hour, screaming as if he were being tortured, fat clear tears rolling down his face. Nothing helped. But then Nicholas had gone to change the diaper, and he’d almost passed out at the sight of so much jellied blood.

Paige trembles beside him. She grabbed his hand the minute Max was brought into the emergency room, and she hasn’t let go since. Nicholas can feel the pressure of her nails cutting into his skin, and he is grateful. He needs the pain to remind him that this isn’t a nightmare after all.

Max’s regular pediatrician, Jack Rourke, gives Nicholas a warm smile and steps into the examination room. Nicholas watches the heads of the two doctors pressed together in consultation over the kicking feet of his son. He clenches his fists, powerless. He wants to be in there. He should be in there.

Finally, Jack steps out into the pediatric waiting room. It is now morning, and the staff nurses are starting to arrive, pulling out a box of Big Bird Band-Aids and sunny smiley-face stickers for the day’s patients. Nicholas knew Jack when they were at Harvard Med together, but he hasn’t really kept in touch, and suddenly he is furious at himself. He should have been having lunch with him at least once a week; he should have talked to him about Max’s health before anything like this ever happened; he should have caught it on his own.

He should have caught it. That is what bothers Nicholas more than anything else-how can he call himself a physician and not notice something as obvious as an abdominal mass? How can he have missed the symptoms?

“Nicholas,” Jack says, watching his colleague pick up Max and sit him upright. “I have a good idea of what it might be.”

Paige leanwas

Jack ignores her questions, which infuriates Nicholas. Paige is the baby’s mother, for Christ’s sake, and she’s worried as hell, and that isn’t the way to treat her. He is about to open up his mouth, when John Dorset carries Max past them. Max, seeing Paige, reaches out his arms and starts to cry.

A sound comes out of Paige’s throat, a cross between a keen and a wail, but she doesn’t take the baby. “We’re going to do a sono gram,” Jack says to Nicholas, Nicholas only. “And if I can verify the mass-I think it’s sausage-shaped, right at the small bowel-we’ll do a barium enema. That might reduce the intussusception, but it depends on the severity of the lesion.”

Paige tears her gaze away from the doorway where Max and the doctor have disappeared. She grabs Jack Rourke’s lapels. “Tell me,” she shouts. “Tell me in normal words.”

Nicholas puts his arm around Paige’s shoulders and lets her bury her face against his chest. He whispers to her and tells her what she wants to know. “It’s his small intestine, they think,” Nicholas says. “It kind of telescopes into itself. If they don’t take care of it, it ruptures.”

“And Max dies,” Paige whispers.

“Only if they can’t fix it,” Nicholas says, “but they can. They always can.”

Paige looks up to him, trusting him. “Always?” she repeats.

Nicholas knows better than to give false hope, but he puts on his strongest smile. “Always,” he says.

He sits across from her in the pediatric waiting room, watching healthy doddering toddlers fight each other for toys and crawl all over a big blue plastic ladder and slide. Paige goes up to ask about Max, but none of the nurses have been given any information; two don’t even know his name. When Jack Rourke comes in hours later, Nich olas jumps to his feet and has to restrain himself from throwing his colleague against the wall. “Where is my son?” he says, biting off each word.

Jack looks from Nicholas to Paige and back to Nicholas. “We’re prepping him,” he says. “Emergency surgery.”

Nicholas has never sat in Mass General’s surgical waiting room. It is dingy and gray, with red cubes of seats that are stained with coffee and tears. Nicholas would rather be anywhere else.

Paige is chewing the Styrofoam edge of a coffee cup. Nicholas has not seen her take a sip yet, and she’s been holding it for a half hour. She stares straight ahead at the doors that lead to the operating suites, as if she expects an answer, a magical ticker-tape billboard.

Nicholas had wanted to be in the operating room, but it was"›‹¡€† against medical ethics. He was too close to the situation, and honestly he didn’t know how he would react. He would renounce his salary and his title, just to get back the detachment about surgery that he had only yesterday. What had Paige said after the bypass? He was incredible. Good at fixing. And yet he couldn’t do a damn thing to help Max.

When Nicholas was standing over a bypass patient whom he hardly knew, it was very easy to put life and death into black-and-white terms. When a patient died on the table, he was upset but he did not take it personally. He couldn’t. Doctors learn early that death is only a part of life. But parents shouldn’t have to.

What are the chances of a six-month-old making it through intestinal surgery? Nicholas racks his brain, but he can’t come up with the statistics. He does not even know the doctor operating in there. He’s never heard of the damn guy. It strikes Nicholas that he and every other surgeon live a lie: The surgeon is not God, he is not omnipotent. He cannot create life at all; he can only keep it going. And even that is touch and go.

Nicholas stares at Paige. She has done what I can never do, Nicholas thinks. She has given birth.

Paige has put down the Styrofoam cup and suddenly stands. “I’m going to get some more coffee,” she announces. “Do you need anything?”

Nicholas stares at her. “You haven’t touched the coffee you just bought.”

Paige crosses her arms and rakes her fingernails into her skin, leaving raw red lines that she doesn’t notice at all. “It’s cold,” she says, “way too cold.”

A collection of nurses walks by. They are dressed in simple white uniforms but wear felt ears in their hair, and their faces are made up with whiskers and fur. They stop to talk to the devil. He is some kind of physician, a red cape whirling over his blue scrubs. He has a forked tail and a shiny goatee and a hot chili pepper clipped to his stethoscope. Paige looks at Nicholas, and for a second Nicholas’s mind goes blank. Then he remembers that it is Halloween. “Some of the people dress up,” he explains. “It cheers up the kids in pediatrics.” Like Max, he thinks, but he does not say it.

Paige tries to smile, but only half her mouth turns up. “Well,” she says. “Coffee.” But she doesn’t move. Then, like the demolition of a building, she begins to crumble from the top down. Her head sinks and then her shoulders droop and her face sags into her hands. By the time her knees give way beneath her, Nicholas is standing, ready to catch her before she falls. He settles her into one of the stiff canvas seats. “This is all my fault,” she says.

“This isn’t your fault,” Nicholas says. “This could have happened to any kid.”

Paige doesn’t seem to have heard him. “It was the best way to get even,” she whispers, “but He should have hurt me instead.”

“Who?” Nicholas says, irritated. Maybe there is someone responsible. Maybe there is someone he can blame. “Who are you talking about?”

Paige looks at him as if he is crazy. “God,” she says.

When he had changed Max’s diaper and seen the blood, he didn’t even stop to think. He bundled Max in a blanket and ran out the door without a diaper bag, without his wallet. But he hadn’t driven straight to the hospital; he’d gone to his parents. Instinctively, he had come for Paige. When it came right down to it, it didn’t matter why Paige had left him, it didn’t matter why she had returned. It didn’t matter that for eight years she’d kept a secret from him he felt he had every right to know. What mattered was that she was Max’s mother. That was their truth, and that was their starting point to reconnect. At the very least, they had that connection. They would always have that connection.

If Max was all right.

Nicholas looks at Paige, crying softly into her hands, and knows that there are many things that depend on the success of this operation. “Hey,” he says. “Hey, Paige. Honey. Let me get you that coffee.”

He walks down the hall, passing goblins and hoboes and Raggedy Anns, and he whistles to keep out the roaring sound of the silence.

They should have come out to report on the progress. It has been so long that the sun has gone down. Nicholas doesn’t notice until he goes outside to stretch his legs. On the street he hears the catcalls of trick-or-treaters and steps on crushed jewel-colored candy. This hospital is like an artificial world. Walk inside and lose all track of time, all sense of reality.

Paige appears at the door. She waves her hands frantically, as if she is drowning. “Come inside,” she mouths against the glass.

She grabs at Nicholas’s arm when he gets through the doorway. “Dr. Cahill said it went okay,” she says, searching his face for answers. “That’s good, isn’t it? He wouldn’t hold anything back from me?”

Nicholas narrows his eyes, wondering where the hell Cahill could have gone so fast. Then he sees him writing notes at the nurses’ station around the corner. He runs down the hall and spins the surgeon around by the shoulder. Nicholas does not say a word.

“I think Max is going to be fine,” Cahill says. “We tried to manually manipulate the intestines, but we wound up having to do an actual resection of the bowel. The next twenty-four hours will be critical, as expected for such a young child. But I’d say the prognosis is excellent.”

Nicholas nods. “He’s in recovery?”

“For a while. I’ll check him in ICU, and if all is well we’ll move him up to pediatrics.” Cahill shrugs, as if this case is just like any other. “You might want to get some sleep, Dr. Prescott. The baby is sedated; he’s going to sleep for a while. You, on the other hand, look like hell.”

Nicholas runs a hand through his hair and rubs his palm over his unshaven jaw. He wt s¡€†onders who bothered to call off his surgery this morning; he forgot it entirely. He is so tired that time is passing in strange chunks. Cahill disappears, and suddenly Paige is standing beside him. “Can we go?” she asks. “I want to see him.”

That is what shocks Nicholas into clarity. “You don’t want to go,” he says. He has seen babies in the recovery room, stitches snaked over half their swollen bodies, their eyelids blue and transparent. Somehow they always look like victims. “Wait awhile,” Nicholas urges. “We’ll go up as soon as he’s in pediatrics.”

Paige pulls away from Nicholas’s grasp and stands squarely in front of him, eyes flashing. “You listen to me,” she says, her voice hard and low. “I’ve waited an entire day to find out if my son was going to live or die. I don’t care if he’s still bleeding all over the place. You get me to him, Nicholas. He needs to know that I’m here.”

Nicholas opens his mouth to say that Max, unconscious, will not know if she is in the recovery room or in Peoria. But he stops himself. He’s never been unconscious, so what does he know? “Come with me,” he says. “They usually don’t let you in, but I think I can pull strings.”

As they make their way to the recovery room, a string of children in pajamas parades through the hall, wearing papier-mâché masks of foxes and geisha girls and Batman. They are led by a nurse whom Nicholas has seen once before; he thinks she baby-sat for Max what seems like years ago. They are singing “Camptown Races,” and when they see Paige and Nicholas they break out of their line and puddle in a crowd around them. “Trick or treat,” they chant, “trick or treat. Give me something good to eat.”

Paige looks to Nicholas, who shakes his head. She stuffs her hands into the pockets of her jeans and turns them inside out to reveal an unshelled pecan, three nickels, and a ball of lint. She picks up each object as if it is coated in gold and presses the treasures one by one into the palms of the waiting children. They frown at her, disappointed.

“Let’s go,” Nicholas says, pushing her through the tangle of costumed kids. He goes the back way, coming from the service elevator, and walks straight to the nurses’ station. It is empty, but Nicholas steps behind the desk as if it is his right and flips through a chart. He turns to tell Paige where Max is, but she has already moved away.

He finds her standing in the recovery room, partially obscured by the thin white curtains. She is absolutely rigid as she stares into the oval hospital crib that holds Max.

Nothing could have prepared Nicholas for this. Underneath the sterile plastic dome, Max is lying perfectly still on his back, arms pointed over his head. An IV needle stabs into him. A thick white bandage covers his stomach and chest, stopping at his penis, which is blanketed with gauze but not restricted by a diaper. A nasogastric tube feeds into a mask that covers his mouth and nose. His chest rises and falls almost imperceptibly. His hair looks obscenely black against the alabaster of his skin.

If Nicholas didn’t know better, he would think that Max was dead.

He has fo ha¡€†rgotten that Paige is there too, but then he hears a choked sound beside him. Tears are streaming down her face when she steps forward to touch the side rail of the crib. Reflected light bathes her face in silver, and with her ringed, haggard eyes she looks very much like a phantom when she turns to Nicholas. “You liar,” she whispers. “This is not my son.” And she runs out of the room and down the hall.

chapter 42

They’ve killed him. He’s so still and pale and tiny that I know it beyond a doubt. Once again there has been a baby and it did not live and it is all because of me.

I run out of the room where they’ve laid Max out, down the hall and the staircase and through the nearest door I can find. I am suffocating, and when the automatic door slides open I gulp in the night air of Boston. I can’t get enough. I fly down Cambridge Street, passing teenagers dressed in bright neon rags and lovers entwined-Rhett and Scarlett, Cyrano and Roxanne, Romeo and Juliet. An old woman with wrinkled skin the shade of a prune stops me with a withered hand on my arm. She holds out an apple. “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she says. “Take it, dearie.”

The whole world has changed while I have been inside. Or maybe I’m not where I think I am. Maybe this is purgatory.

The night sweeps from the sky to wrap my feet. When I laugh because my lungs are bursting, the dark streets echo my shrieks. Surely, I think, I am going to hell.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I am aware of the place I’ve come to. It is in the business district of Boston, filled with pin-striped executives and sweaty hot dog carts during the day; but at night, Government Center is nothing more than a flat gray wasteland, a stage for the dance-crazed wind. I am the only person here. In the background I hear the flutter of the wings of pigeons, beating like a heart.

I have come here with a purpose in mind. I am thinking of Lazarus and of Christ Himself. It isn’t right for Max to die for my sins. Nobody ever asked me. Tonight, in return for a miracle, I am willing to sell my own soul.

“Where are You?” I whisper, choking on my words. I close my eyes against the gusts that blow across the plaza. “Why can’t I see You?”

I spin wildly. “I grew up with You,” I cry. “I believed in You. I even trusted You. But You are not a forgiving God.” As if in answer, the wind whistles over the glowing windows of an office building. “When I needed Your strength, You were never there. When I prayed for Your help, You turned away. All I ever wanted was to understand You,” I shout. “All I ever wanted were the answers.”

I fall to my knees and feel the unforgiving cement, wet and cold. I lift my face to the scrutiny of the sky. “What kind of God are You?” I say, sinking lower to the pavement. “You took away my mother. You made me give up my first baby. You’ve stolen my second.” I press my cheek against the rough concrete surface and know the moment it scrapes and bleeds. “I never knew any of them,” I whisper. “Just h thgn="jay ow much can one person take?”

I can feel Him before I raise my head. He is standing inches behind me. When I see Him, haloed by my pure white faith, it suddenly makes sense. He calls my name, and I fall right into the arms of the man who, I know, has always been my savior.

chapter 43

“ Paige,” Nicholas says, and she turns around slowly. Her shadow, stretching ten skinny feet in front of her, approaches him first. Then she comes forward and falls right against him.

For a moment Nicholas does not know what to do. His arms, acting on their own, fold around her. He buries his face in her hair. It is fragrant and warm and jumps at the ends, as if there are live sparks. He is amazed that after all this time, she fits so well.

The only way he can get her to walk is by bracing her against his side, one arm locked around her shoulders. He is really just dragging her. Paige’s eyes are open, and she seems to be looking at Nicholas but not seeing him. Her lips move, and when Nicholas leans close enough he can hear the hot whisper of her breath. He thinks she is saying a prayer.

The streets of Boston are dotted with costumed clusters of people-Elvira and the Lone Ranger and PLO terrorists and Marie Antoinette. A tall man dressed as a scarecrow hooks his arm into Paige’s free one and starts to skip, pulling Paige and Nicholas off to the left. “Follow the yellow brick road,” he sings at the top of his lungs, until Nicholas shrugs him off. Sputtering lamps cast shadows that creep down the alleys on the backs of dead October leaves. Nich olas can smell winter.

When he reaches the parking garage at Mass General, he picks Paige up in his arms and carries her to his car. He sets her down on her feet while he slides Max’s car seat over to one side, pushing a little terry-cloth clown rattle and a sticky pacifier. Then he helps Paige into the back seat, laying her on her side and covering her with his jacket. As he pulls the collar up under her neck, she grabs his hand and holds it with the strength of a vise. She is staring over his shoulder, and that’s when she begins to scream.

Nicholas turns around and comes face-to-face with Death. Standing beside the door is an impossibly tall person in the flowing black robes of the Grim Reaper. His eyes are hidden in the folds of his hood, and the point of his tinfoil scythe just grazes Nicholas’s shoulder. “Get out of here,” Nicholas says, and then he shouts the words. He pushes at the cloak, which seems as insubstantial as ink. Paige stops screaming and sits up, struggling to get out. Nicholas closes her door and pulls himself into the car. He drives past the gaping face into the tangled streets of Boston, toward the sanctuary of his home.

“Paige,” Nicholas says. She doesn’t answer. He peeks into the rearview mirror, and her eyes stare wide. “Paige,” he says again, louder. “Max is going to be fine. He’s going to be fine.”

He watches her eyes as he says this, and he thinks he can see a glimmer of recogshaneral finition, but that might just be the murky light in the car. He wonders what pharmacies are open in Cambridge, what he could prescribe that might snap Paige out of this. Normally he’d suggest Valium, but Paige is calm now. Too calm, really. He wants to see her scratching and crying out again. He wants to see a sign of life.

When he pulls into the driveway, Paige sits up. Nicholas helps her out of the car and starts to walk up the steps of the porch, expecting her to follow. But as he puts the key into the lock of the front door, he realizes that Paige is not standing beside him. He sees her walking across the front lawn to the blue hydrangeas, the place where she slept when she was camping outside the house. She lies down on the grass, melting the early frost with the heat of her skin.

“No,” Nicholas says, moving toward her. “Come inside, Paige.” He reaches out his hand. “Come with me.”

At first she doesn’t budge, but then Nicholas notices her fingers twitching where they lay at her sides. He realizes this is a case where he will have to go more than halfway. He kneels on the cold ground and pulls Paige into a sitting position, then up to her feet. As he leads her into the house, he looks back beneath the blue hydrangeas. The spot where Paige’s body was lying is as clearly defined as a chalked murder outline. Her silhouette is obscenely green against the frost, as if she has left in her wake an artificial spring.

Nicholas leads her into the house, grinding wet mud into the light carpeting. As he peels off Paige’s coat and towels her hair dry with a clean dishcloth, he looks over the smudged footprints and decides he likes them; they make him feel as if he knows where he’s been. He tosses Paige’s coat onto the floor, and then her damp shirt and her jeans. He watches each piece of clothing fall like a bright jewel against the sickly palette of the rug.

Nicholas is so fascinated by the splashes of color blooming across the living room that he does not notice Paige at first. She shivers in front of him, wearing only her underwear. When Nicholas turns to her, he is amazed by the contrasts of color: the tanned line of Paige’s neck against the milky skin of her chest; the severe imprint of a birthmark against the whiteness of her belly. If Paige notices his scrutiny, she says nothing. Her eyes stay lowered, and her hands rub up and down her crossed arms. “Say something to me,” Nicholas urges. “Say anything.”

If she is really in shock, the last thing she should be doing is to stand half naked in the middle of a cold room. Nicholas thinks about bundling her in the old wedding-ring quilt they keep somewhere in the damn house, but he has no idea which closet it’s in. He puts his arms around her, and the chill of her skin shudders down his own spine.

Nicholas leads her upstairs to the bathroom. He closes the door and runs the hottest water into the tub, letting the steam cloud the mirrors. When the water fills the tub halfway, he unhooks Paige’s bra and slips off her underpants. He helps her into the tub and watches her teeth chatter and the mist rise around her. He stares beneath the ripple of the water at the stretch marks on her hips, now painted an airy silver, as if giving birth is really nothing more than a distant memory.

Automatically, Nicholas picks up the ghtÁ€†dinosaur-print washcloth and begins to soap Paige as he does Max. He starts with her feet, leaning half into the tub to clean between the toes and to massage the arches. He moves up her legs, sliding the washcloth behind her knees and over her thighs. He rubs her arms and her stomach and the shoulder-blade hollows of her back. He uses the buoyancy of the water to lift her, slipping the washcloth over her bottom and through her legs. He washes her breasts and sees the nipples tighten. He takes the Tupperware cup he keeps on the bathtub ledge and pours clean water over Paige’s hair, tilting her head back as the dark-red strands grow sleek and black.

Nicholas wrings out the washcloth and hangs it up to dry. The water is still running in the tub, the level rising. As Paige starts to move, water splashes onto his shirt and in his lap. She reaches forward and makes a low, throaty sound, stretching her hand toward Max’s rubber duck. Her fingers close over the yellow head, the orange bill. “Oh, God,” she says, turning to Nicholas. “Oh, my God.”

It happens very quickly-Paige lurches out of the tub and Nich olas rises up to meet her. She wraps her arms around his neck and clutches at the fabric of his shirt until it pulls over his head. All the time he is kissing her forehead, her cheeks, her neck. His fingertips circle her breasts as her hands struggle to unbuckle and unzip. When they are both naked, Nicholas leans over Paige on the white tile and gently brushes her lips. To his surprise, she locks her fingers into his hair, kissing him greedily and refusing to free him.

It has been so long since he felt his wife next to him, holding him, surrounding him. He recognizes every smell and every texture of her body; he knows the points where their skin will meet and become slick. In the past he has thought mostly of his own body-the heavy pressure building between his legs and the moment he knows to let go and the catch of his heart in his throat when he comes-but now he only wants to make Paige happy. The thought runs through his mind over and over; it is the least he can do. It has been so long.

Nicholas can gauge by Paige’s breathing what she feels. He pauses and whispers against Paige’s neck. “Will this hurt?”

She looks up at him, and Nicholas tries to read her expression, but all he can see is the absence of fear, of regret. “Yes,” she says. “More than you know.”

They come together with the fury of a storm, clawing and scratching and sobbing. They are pressed so close they can barely move, just rocking back and forth. Nicholas feels Paige’s tears against his shoulder. He holds her as she trembles and closes softly around him; he cries out to her when he loses control. He makes love with a violence bred of passion, as if the act that creates life might also be used to ward away death.

They fall into a deep sleep on the bed, on top of the comforter. Nicholas curls his body around Paige as though that might protect her from tomorrow. Even in his sleep he reaches for her, filling his hand with the curve of her breast, crossing her abdomen with his arm. In the middle of the night he wakes up, to find Paige staring at him. He wishes there were words to say the things he wants to say.

Instead he pulls her against him and begins to touch her again, much more slowly. In the back of his mind he thinks he should not be doing this, but he cannot stop himself. If he can take her away for a little while, if she can take him away, what’s the harm? In his profession, he never stops fighting against impossible odds, but he learned a long time ago that not all outcomes can be controlled. He tells himself this is the reason he’s trying so hard now not to become involved, not to let himself love. He can fight till he drops, yet somewhere in the back of his mind he understands the margins of his power.

Nicholas closes his eyes as Paige runs her tongue along the line of his throat and spreads her small hands across his chest. For a quick moment he lets himself believe that she belongs to him every bit as much as he belongs to her. Paige kisses the corner of his mouth. It is not about possession and limits. It is about giving everything until there’s nothing left to give, and then searching and scraping until you find a little bit more.

Nicholas rolls over so that he and Paige are facing each other on their sides. They stare at each other for a long time, running their hands over familiar skin and whispering things that do not matter. They come together two more times that night, and Nicholas tallies their lovemaking silently. The first time is for forgiving. The second time is for forgetting. And the third time is for beginning all over again.

chapter 44

I wake up in my own bed, in Nicholas’s arms, and I have absolutely no idea how I got there. Maybe, I think to myself, this has all been a bad dream. For a moment I am almost convinced that if I walk down the hall I will find Max curled in his crib, but then I remember the hospital and last night, and I cover my head with the pillow, hoping to block out the light of day.

Nicholas stirs beside me. The white sheets contrast with his black hair, making him look immortal. As his eyes open, I have a fleeting memory of the night before, Nicholas’s hands moving over my body like a running line of fire. I startle and pull the sheet up to cover myself. Nicholas rolls onto his back and closes his eyes.

“This probably shouldn’t have happened,” I whisper.

“Probably not,” Nicholas says tensely. He rubs his hand across his jaw. “I called the hospital at five,” he says. “Max was still sleeping soundly, and his vitals were good. The prognosis is excellent. He’ll be fine.”

He’ll be fine. I want to trust Nicholas more than anything, but I will not believe him until I see Max and he lifts his arms and calls for me. “Can we see him today?” I ask.

Nicholas nods. “At ten o‘clock,” he says, and then he rolls out of bed to step into paisley boxer shorts. “Do you want to use this bathroom?” he says quietly, and without waiting for an answer, he pads down the hall to the smaller one.

I stare at myself in the mirror. I am shocked by the shadows above my cheeks and the reent D‡d cast of my eyes. I look around for my toothbrush, but of course it isn’t there; Nicholas would have thrown it out months ago. I borrow his, but I can barely brush my teeth because my hands are shaking. The toothbrush clatters into the bowl of the sink and leaves a violent blue mark of Crest. I wonder how I ever became so incompetent.

Then I remember that stupid list of accomplishments I made the day I ran away from home. What had I said? Back then I could change a diaper, I could measure formula, I could sing my son to sleep. And now what can I do? I rummage in the drawers beneath the sink and find my old makeup bag, tucked into a corner behind Nicholas’s unused electric razor. I pull out a blue eyeliner and throw the cap into the toilet. 1., I write on the mirror, I can canter and jump and gallop a horse. I tap the pencil to my chin. 2. I can tell myself I am not my mother. I run out of space on the mirror, so I continue on the white Corian counters. I can draw away my pain. I can seduce my own husband. I can-I stop here and think that this is not the list I should be making. I pick up a green eye pencil and start writing where I left off, angrily listing the things I cannot do: I cannot forget. I cannot make the same mistake twice. I cannot live this way. I cannot take the blame for everything. I cannot give up.

With my words covering the stark bathroom in flowered curlicues of green and blue, I become inspired. I take the pale-lime shampoo from the bathtub and smear it over the tiled walls; I draw pink lipstick hearts and orange Caladryl scrolls on the tank of the toilet. Nicholas comes in sometime after I am finishing a line of blue toothpaste waves and diving aloe vera dolphins. I flinch, expecting him to start yelling, but he just smiles. “I guess you’re done with the shampoo,” he says.

Nicholas doesn’t take the time to eat breakfast, which is fine with me, even though it is only eight o’clock. We may not be able to see Max right away, but I will feel better knowing I am closer to my child. We get into the car, and I notice Max’s car seat pushed to the side; I wonder how it got that way. I wait for Nicholas to back out of the driveway, but he sits perfectly still, with his foot on the brake and his hand on the clutch. He looks down at the steering wheel as if it is something fascinating he has never seen before. “Paige,” he says, “I’m sorry about last night.”

I shiver involuntarily. What did I expect him to say?

“I didn’t mean to-to do that,” Nicholas continues. “It’s just that you were in such bad shape, and I thought-hell, I don’t know what I was thinking.” He looks up at me, resolved. “It won’t happen again,” he says.

“No,” I say quietly. “I suppose it won’t.”

I look up and down the thin stretch of street that I once imagined I’d be living on for most of my life. I don’t see actual objects, like trees and cars and fox terriers. Instead I see eddies of color, an impressionist painting. Green and lemon and mauve and peach: the edges of the world as I know it run muddy together. “I was wrong about you,” Nicholas is saying. “Whatever happens, Max belongs with you.”

Whatever happens. I turn my face up to him. “And what about you?” I say.

Nicholas looks at me. “I don’t know,” he says. “I honestly don’t know.”

I nod, as though this is an answer I can accept, and turn away to look out my window as Nicholas backs out of the driveway. It is going to be a cold, crisp fall day, but memories of the night before are everywhere: eggshells scattered through the streets, shaving cream on residential windows, toilet paper festooned through the trees. I wonder how long it will take to come clean.

At the hospital, Nicholas asks about Max and is told that he’s been moved to pediatrics. “That’s a good start,” he murmurs, although he is not really speaking to me. He walks to a yellow elevator bank, and I follow close behind. The doors open, smelling of antiseptic and fresh linen, and we step inside.

An image comes to me quickly: I am in that Cambridge graveyard with Max, who is about three. He runs between the headstones and peeks from behind the monuments. It is my day off from classes; finally, I’m getting my bachelor’s degree. Simmons College, not Harvard-and that doesn’t matter. I am sitting while Max runs his fingers over the old grave markers, fascinated by the chips and gulleys of aging stone. “Max,” I call, and he comes over, sliding to his knees and getting grass stains on his overalls. I motion to the pad I’ve been drawing on, and we lay it across the flat marker of a revolutionary soldier. “You pick,” I say. I offer him an array of crayons. He takes the melon and the forest green and the violet; I choose the orange-yellow and the mulberry. He puts the green crayon in his hand and starts to color in the image of a pony I’ve done for him, a Shetland he’ll ride that summer at my mother’s. I cover his chubby hand with mine and guide his fingers gently over lines I have drawn for him. I feel my own blood running beneath his flushed skin.

The doors of the elevator hiss open, but Nicholas stands frozen. I wait for him to take charge, but nothing happens. I turn my head to look at him-he’s never like this. Nicholas, coolheaded and unflappable, is scared to face what’s coming. Two nurses pass. They peer into the elevator and whisper to each other. I can imagine what they are saying about me and about Nicholas, and it doesn’t affect me at all. Another mark for my accomplishment list: I can stand on my own in a world that is falling apart. I can stand so well, I realize, that I can support someone else. “Nicholas?” I whisper, and I can tell by the flicker of his eyes that he has forgotten I am there but he’s relieved to see me just the same. “It’s going to be fine,” I tell him, and I smile for what seems like the first time in months.

The jaws of the elevator start to close again, but I brace them with my strength. “It’s only going to get easier,” I say with confidence, and I reach across the distance to squeeze Nicholas’s hand. He squeezes mine right back. We step off the elevator together and take those first steps down the hall. At Max’s door, we stop and see him pink and quiet and breathing. Nicholas and I stand calmly at the threshold. We have all the time in the world to wait for our son to come around.