by Jodi Picoult
Judy sat down beside Nicholas and balanced Max on her lap. She touched Nicholas's wrist and lifted his hand to the baby's mouth. "I think I've found out what's making him such a monster," she said gently. "There." She pressed Nicholas's finger to the bottom of Max's gums, where a sharp triangle of white bit into his flesh.
Fay and Nikki crowded closer, eager to change the subject. "A tooth!" Fay said, as animated as if Max had been accepted to Harvard; and Nikki added, "He's just over three months, right? That's awfully early. He's in a hurry to grow up; I bet he crawls soon." Nicholas
stared at the downy crown of black hair on his son's head. He pressed down
with his finger, letting Max bite back with his jaws, with his
brand-new tooth. He looked up at the sky, a day without clouds, and
then let the women run their fingers over Max's gums. Paige would have wanted to he here, he thought suddenly, and then he felt anger searing through him like a
brush fire. Paige should have wanted to be here.
chapter 25
Paige
If had never been there, but this was the way I had pictured Ireland from my father's stories. Rich, rolling hills the deep green of emeralds; grass thicker than a plush rug, farms notched into the slopes and bordered by sturdy stone walls. Several times I stopped the car, to drink from streams cleaner and colder than I had ever imagined possible. I could hear my father's brogue in the cascade and the current, and I could not believe the irony: my mother had run away to the North Carolina countryside, a land my father would have loved.
If I hadn't known better, I would have assumed the hills were virgin territory. Paved roads were the only sign that anyone else had been here, and in the three hours I'd been driving across the state, I hadn't passed a single car. I had rolled down all the windows so that the air could rush into my lungs. It was crisper than the air in Chicago, lighter than the air in Cambridge. I felt as if I were drinking
in the endless open space, and I could see how, out here, someone could easily get lost.
Since leaving Chicago, I had been thinking only of my mother. I ran through every solid memory I'd ever had and froze each of them in my mind like an image from a slide projector, hoping to see something I hadn't noticed before. I couldn't come up with an image of her face. It drifted in and out of shadows.
My father had said I looked like her, but it had been twenty years since he'd seen her and eight since he'd seen me, so he might have been mistaken. I knew from her clothes that she was taller and thinner. I knew from Eddie Savoy how she'd spent the past two decades. But I still didn't think I'd be able to spot her in a crowd.
The more I drove, the more I remembered about my mother. I remembered how she tried to get ahead of herself, making all my lunches for the week on Sunday night and stowing them in the freezer, so that my bologna and my turkey and my Friday tuna fish were never fully thawed by the time I ate them. I remembered that when I was four and got the mumps on only the right side of my face, my mother had fed me half-full cups of Jell-o and kept me in bed half the day, telling me that after all, I was half healthy. I remembered the dreary day in March when we were both worn down by the sleet and the cold, and she had baked a devil's food cake and made glittery party hats, and together we celebrated Nobody's birthday. I remembered the time she was in a car accident, how I had come downstairs at midnight to a room full of policemen and found her lying on the couch, one eye swollen shut and a gash over her lip, her arms reaching out to hold me.
Then I remembered the March before she left, Ash Wednesday. In kindergarten, we had a half day of school, but the Tribune was still open. My mother could have hired the baby-sitter to take care of me until she came home, or told me to wait next door at the Manzettis'. But instead she'd come up with the idea that we would go out to lunch and then make afternoon Mass. She had announced this over the dinner table and told my father that I was smart enough to take the bus all by myself. My father stared at her, not believing what he had heard, and then finally he grabbed my mother's hand and pressed it to the table, hard, as if he could make her see the truth through the pain. "No, May," he'd said, "she's too young."
But well after midnight, the door to my room opened, and in the slice of light that fell across my bed I saw the shadow of my mother. She came in and sat in the dark and pressed into my hand twenty cents, bus fare. She held out a route map and a flashlight and made me repeat after her: Michigan and Van Buren Street, the downtown local. One, two, three, four stops, and Mommy will be there. I said it over and over until it was as familiar as my bedtime prayers. My mother left the room and let me go to sleep. At four in the morning, I awoke to find her face inches away from mine, her breath hot against my lips. "Say it," she commanded, and my mouth formed the words that my brain could not hear, stuffed as it was with sleep. Michigan and Van Buren Street, I murmured. The downtown local. I opened my eyes wide, surprised by how well I had learned. "That's my girl," my mother said, cupping my cheeks in her hands. She pressed a finger to my lips. "And don't tell your daddy," she whispered.
Even I knew the value of a secret. Through breakfast, I avoided my father's gaze. When my mother dropped me off at the school gates, her eyes flashed, feverish. For a moment she looked so different that I thought of Sister Alberta's lectures on the devil. "What's it all for," my mother said to me, "without the risk?" And I had pressed my face against hers to kiss her goodbye the way I always did, but this time I whispered against her cheek: One, two, three, four stops. And you'll be there.
I had swung my feet back and forth under my chair that morning, and I colored in the pictures of Jesus outside the lines because I was so excited. When Sister let us out at the bell, blessing us in a stream of rushed words, I turned to the left, the direction I never went. I walked until I came to the corner of Michigan and Van Buren and saw the pharmacy my mother had said would be there. I stood underneath the Metro sign, and when the big bus sighed into place beside the curb, I asked the driver, "Downtown local?"
He nodded and took my twenty cents, and I sat in the front seat as my mother had said, not looking beside me because there could be bums and bad men and even the devil himself. I could feel hot breath on my neck, and I squeezed my eyes shut, listening to the roll of the wheels and the lurch of the brakes and counting the stops. When the door opened for the fourth time, I bolted from my seat, peeking into the one beside mine just that once, to see only blue vinyl and the lacy grate of the air conditioner. I stepped off the bus and waited for the knot of people to clear, shielding my eyes from the sun. My mother knelt, her arms open, her smile red and laughing and wide. "Paige-boy," she said, folding me into her purple raincoat. "I knew you'd come."
I had asked a man with spare tufts of gray hair, who'd been sitting on a milk can at the side of the road, if he'd heard of Farleyville. "Yuh," he said, pointing in front of me. "You almost there now."
"Well," I said, "maybe you've heard of a salon called Bridal Bits?"
The man scratched his chest through his worn chambray shirt. He laughed, and he had no teeth. "A sa-lon," he said, mocking my words. "I don't know 'bout that."
The corners of my mouth turned down. "Could you just tell me where it is?"
The man grinned at me. "If it be the same place I'm thinking of, and I'm bettin' it ain't, then you want to take the first right at the 'baccy field and keep goin' till you see a bait shop. It's three miles past that, on the left." He shook his head as I stepped back into the car. "You said Farleyville," he said, "di'n't you?"
I followed his directions, messing up only once, and that was because I couldn't tell a tobacco from a corn field. The bait shop was nothing but a shack with a crude fish painted on a wooden sign in front of it, and I wondered why people would come all the way out here to buy wedding gowns. Surely Raleigh would be a better place. I wondered if my mother's shop was secondhand or wholesale, how it could even stay in business.
The only building three miles down on the left was a neat pink
&nb
sp; cement-block square, without a sign to herald it. I stepped out of the car and pulled at the front door, but it was locked. The big show window was partially lit by the setting sun, which had come up behind me as I drove, to wash over the tops of the tobacco plants like hot lava. I peered inside, looking for a seed-pearl headpiece or a fairytale princess's gown. I couldn't see beyond the showcase itself, and it took me a minute to realize that set proudly behind the glass was a finely stitched saddle with gleaming stirrups, a furry halter, a spread wool blanket with the woven silhouette of a stallion. I
squinted and then I moved back to the door, to the handwritten sign I hadn't noticed the first time, bridles & bits, it said. closed.
I sank to the ground in front of the threshold and drew up my knees. I rested my head against them. All this time, all these miles, and I'd come for nothing. My thoughts came in waves: my mother wasn't working here; she was supposed to be at a completely different kind of store; I was going to have Eddie Savoy's head. Pink clouds stretched across the sky like fingers, and at that moment the final streak of sun left in the day lit the inside of the tack shop. I had a clear view of the mural on the ceiling. It matched like a twin the ceiling I
remembered, the one I'd painted with my mother and had lain beneath for hours, hoping that those fast-flying horses might champion us far away.
chapter 26
Nicholas
Astrid Prescott was sure she was seeing a ghost. Her hand was still frozen on the brass door handle where she'd pulled it open, silently cursing because Imelda had disappeared in
search of the silver polish and so Astrid had been disturbed from her study. And consequently she'd come face-to-face with the same ghost that had haunted her for weeks, after making it perfectly clear that the past was not to be forgiven. Astrid shook her head slightly. Unless she was imagining it, standing on the threshold were Nicholas and a black-haired baby, both of them frowning, both of them looking like they might break down and cry.
"Come in," Astrid said smoothly, as if she'd seen Nicholas more than once during the past eight years. She reached toward the baby, but Nicholas shrugged the diaper bag off his shoulder and gave it to her instead.
Nicholas took three resounding steps into the marble hall. "You
should know," he said, "I wouldn't be here if I wasn't at the end of my rope."
Nicholas had been awake most of the night, trying to come up with an alternate plan. He'd been on unpaid leave for a full week, and in spite of his best efforts, he hadn't found quality day care for his son. The British nanny service had laughed when he said he needed a woman within six days. He had almost hired a Swiss au pair--going so far as to leave her with the baby while he went grocery shopping--but he'd returned home to find Max wailing in his playpen while the girl entertained some biker boyfriend in the living room. The reputable child care centers had waiting lists until 1995; he didn't trust the teenage daughters of his neighbors who were looking for summer employment. Nicholas knew that if he was going to return to Mass General as scheduled, the only option open to him was to swallow his pride and go back to his parents for help.
He knew his mother wouldn't turn him away. He'd seen her face when he'd first told her of Max. He'd lay odds she kept the photo of Max--the one he had left behind--right in her wallet. Nicholas pushed past his mother into the parlor, the same room he'd pulled Paige from indignantly eight years before. He found his eyes roaming over the damask upholstery, the burnished wood tables. He waited for his mother's questions, and then the accusations. What had his parents been able to see that he'd been so blind to?
He put Max down on the rug and watched him roll over and over until he landed beneath the sofa, reaching for a thin carved leg. Astrid hovered uneasily at the door for a moment and then put on her widest diplomat's smile. She had charmed Idi Amin into granting her free press access to Uganda; surely this couldn't be any more difficult. She sat down on a Louis XIV love seat, which afforded her the best view of Max. "It's so good to see you, Nicholas," she said. "You'll be staying for lunch?"
Nicholas did not take his eyes off his son. Astrid watched her son, too large for the chair he sat upon, and realized he did not look right in this room at all. She wondered when that had happened.
Nicholas shifted his gaze to his mother, a challenge. "Are you busy?" he asked.
Astrid thought about the photographs spread across her study, the old Ladakhi women with heavy feather necklaces, the bare brown children playing tag in front of ancient Buddhist monasteries. She had been writing the introduction to her latest book of photos, centering on the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. She was three days late on her deadline already, and her editor was going to call first thing Monday morning to badger her again. "As a matter of fact," Astrid said, "I haven't a thing to do all day."
Nicholas sighed so gently that even his mother did not notice. He sank against the stiff frame of the chair, thinking of the blue-and-white-striped overstuffed love seats Paige had found at a fire sale for the living room in their old apartment. She had sweet-talked a drummer she met on the street outside the diner into helping her bring the couches home in his van, and then she spent three weeks asking Nicholas whether they were too much sofa for such a little room. Look at those elephant legs, she had said. Aren't they all wrong? "I need your help," Nicholas said softly.
Whatever hesitation Astrid might still have had, whatever warnings she had been trying to heed to go slowly, all of that shattered when Nicholas spoke. She stood and walked over to her son. Silently, she folded him in her arms and rocked back and forth. She had not held Nicholas like this since he was thirteen and had taken her aside after she'd embraced him at a school soccer match and told her he was too old for that.
Nicholas did not try to push her away. His arms came up to press against the small of her back; and he closed his eyes and wondered where his mother, brought up with afternoon tea parties and Junior League balls, had got all her courage.
Astrid brought iced coffee and a cinnamon ring and let Nicholas eat, while she kept Max from chewing on the fireplace tools and loose electrical cords. "I don't understand," she said, smiling down at Max. "How could she have left?"
Nicholas tried to remember a time when he would have defended
Paige to the end, railed at his mother and his father, and sacrificed his right arm before letting them criticize his wife. He opened his mouth to make an excuse, but he could not think of one. "I don't know," he said. "I really don't know." He ran his finger around the edge of his glass. "I can't even tell you what the hell she was thinking, to be honest. It's like she had this whole different agenda that she never bothered to mention to me. She could have said something. I would have--" Nicholas broke off. He would have what? Helped her? Listened?
"You wouldn't have done a damn thing, Nicholas," Astrid said pointedly. "You're just like your father. When I fly off for a shoot, it takes him three days to notice I'm gone."
"This isn't my fault," Nicholas shouted. "Don't blame this on me."
Astrid shrugged. "You're putting words in my mouth. I was only wondering what reasons Paige gave you, if she's planning on coming back, that sort of thing."
"I don't give a damn," Nicholas muttered.
"Of course you do," Astrid said. She picked up Max and bounced him on her lap. "You're just like your father."
Nicholas put his glass down on the table, taking a small amount of satisfaction in the fact that there was no coaster and that it would leave a ring. "But you aren't like Paige," he said, "You would never have left your own child."
Astrid pulled Max closer, and he began to suck on her pearls. "That doesn't mean I didn't think about it," she said.
Nicholas stood abruptly and took the baby out of his mother's arms. Nothing was going the way he had planned. His mother was supposed to have been so overwhelmed with gratitude to see Max that she wouldn't ask these questions, that she would beg to watch her grandson for the day, the week, whatever. His mother was not
supposed to make him think about Paige, was not supposed to take her goddamned side. "Forget it," he said. "We're going. I thought you'd be able to understand what I was getting at."
Astrid blocked his exit. "Don't be an idiot, Nicholas," she said. "I know exactly what you're getting at. I didn't say Paige was right for leaving, I just said I'd considered it a couple of times myself. Now give me that gorgeous child and go fix hearts."
Nicholas blinked. His mother pulled the baby out of his arms. He hadn't told her his plan; hadn't even mentioned that he needed her to baby-sit while he worked. Astrid, who had started to carry Max back to the parlor, turned around and stared at Nicholas. "I'm your mother," she said by way of explanation. "I know how you think."
Nicholas closed the top of the baby grand piano and spread out the plastic foam pad from the diaper bag, forming a makeshift changing table. "I use A&D on him," he said to Astrid. "It keeps him from getting diaper rash, and powder dries out his skin." He explained when Max ate, how much he took, the best way to keep him from spitting strained green beans back in your face. He brought in Max's car seat/carrier and said it would work for a nap. He said that if Max decided to sleep at all, it would be between two and four.
He left Astrid his beeper number in case of emergency. She and Max walked him to the door. "Don't worry," she said, touching Nicholas's sleeve. "I've done it before. And I did a damn good job." She reached up to kiss Nicholas on the cheek, remembering the change in course her life had taken on the day her once-little son was able to look her in the eye.
Nicholas set off down the slate path, unencumbered. He did not turn back to wave to Max or even bother to kiss him goodbye. He rolled the muscles bunched in his shoulders from the cutting straps of the diaper bag and the uneven weight of an eighteen-pound baby. He was amazed at how much he knew about Max, how much he'd been able to tell his mother about the routine. He began to whistle and was so proud of his accomplishments that he didn't even think about Robert Prescott until he reached his car.
