by Jodi Picoult
The next day I watched, wide-eyed, as judging went on in three rings at once. Men and women competed together, one of the few sports where they were equal. My mother's class was Four Foot Working Hunter, the highest show class. She seemed to know everyone there. "I'm going to change," she said, and when she returned, she was wearing tan britches, tall polished boots, a high-necked white blouse, and a blue wool blazer. She had jammed her hair into fifteen little barrettes all around her head, and she asked me to hold a mirror while she stuffed her helmet on over them. "Points off," she told me, "if any hair is sticking out."
There were twenty-one horses in her class, the last event of the day. She was the third rider up. While Donegal pranced around the warm-up ring, I watched from the bleachers, keeping an eye on the man jumping the largest stallion I'd ever seen, over fences that were nearly as tall as me. My mother's number was forty-six, tied on her back on a crinkled piece of yellowed card. She smiled at the man who had finished the course, passing him on her way in.
The judge sat off to the side. I tried to make out what he was writing, but it was impossible at this distance. Instead I concentrated on my mother. It took only seconds. I watched Donegal come down the final line on the outside of the ring. As he reared up, his front legs were tight, his knees were high. He didn't take the jump long or chip it; it was right in stride. I saw my mother sit back, holding Donegal slow until the next jump rose in front of them, and then she pulled into her half-seat, chin high, eyes burning straight ahead. It was only when they finished the course that I realized I had been holding my breath.
The woman sitting beside me had on a copper-colored polka-dotted dress and a wide-brimmed white straw hat, as if she'd been expecting Ascot. She held a program, and on the back she was writing the numbers of the riders she believed would win. "I don't know," she murmured to herself. "I think the first man was much better."
I turned to her, angry. "You've got to be joking," I said. "His horse took every jump long." The woman sniffed and tapped her pencil against her chin. "I'll give you five dollars if forty-six doesn't beat that guy," I said, pulling a fold of cash from my back pocket.
The woman stared at me, and for a moment I wondered if this was illegal, but then a smile spread across her onion features and she held out a gloved hand. "You're on," she said.
Nobody else in the class was as good as my mother on Donegal. Several of the horses ducked out at the jumps, or dumped their riders and were disqualified. When the results were announced, the blue ribbon went to number forty-six. I stood up in the bleachers and cheered, and my mother twisted her head around to look at me. She jogged the horse back into the ring so Donegal could be judged sound, then fixed her blue ribbon on the loop of Donegal's bridle. The woman beside me sniffed loudly and held out a crisp five-dollar bill. "One thirty-one was better," she insisted.
I took the money from her palm. "Maybe," I said, "but forty-six is my mother."
At my mother's suggestion, we celebrated the end of summer by camping out in the backyard. I didn't think I would like it. I figured the ground would be lumpy and I'd be worried about ants crawling up my neck and into my ears. But my mother found two old sleeping bags the owners of Pegasus had used in Alaska, and we stretched out on them in the field where my mother rode Donegal. We watched for falling stars.
It had been unbearably hot in August, and I had become used to seeing blisters on the backs of my hands and my neck--the parts that were exposed to sun all the time. "You're a country girl, Paige," my mother said, reaching her arms up behind her head. "You wouldn't have lasted this long if you weren't."
There were things to be said about North Carolina. It was nice to see the sinking sun cool itself against the face of a mountain instead of the domes of Harvard; there was no pavement to breathe beneath your feet. But sometimes I felt so secluded that I stopped to listen, to make sure I could hear my pulse over the singing black flies and the rumble of hoofbeats.
My mother rolled toward me, propping herself on an elbow. "Tell me about Patrick," she said.
I looked away. I could tell her what my father had looked like or that he hadn't wanted me to search for her, but either one would hurt. "He's still building pipe dreams in the basement," I said. "A couple have actually sold." My mother held her breath, waiting. "His hair is gray now, but he hasn't really lost any of it."
"It's still there, isn't it? That look in his eyes?"
I knew what she meant: it was this glow that came over my father when he saw a masterpiece even though he was looking at a concoction of spit and glue. "It's still there," I said, and my mother smiled.
"I think that's what made me fall for him," she said, "that and the way he promised to show me Ireland." She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes. "And what does he think of the fine Dr. Prescott?"
"He's never met him," I blurted, cursing myself for making such a stupid mistake. I decided to tell her a half-truth. "I've just barely kept in touch with Dad. I ran away from Chicago when I graduated from high school."
My mother frowned. "That doesn't sound like Patrick. Patrick only wanted you to go to college. You were going to be the first Irish Catholic woman President."
"It wasn't college," I told her. "I was planning on going to the Rhode Island School of Design, but something else came up." I held my breath, but she did not pressure me. "Mom," I said, eager to change the subject, "what about that rodeo guy?"
She laughed. "That rodeo guy was Wolliston Waters, and we ran around together with the money we stole from the Wild West show. I slept with him a couple of times, but only to remember what it was like to feel another person next to me. It wasn't love, you know; it was sex. You've probably seen the difference." I turned away, and my mother touched my shoulder. "Oh, come on, now. There had to be a high school guy who broke your heart."
"No," I said, avoiding her eyes. "I didn't date."
My mother shrugged. "Well, the point is I never got over your father. Never really wanted to. Wolliston and I, well, more than anything we were in business together. Until one morning I woke up and he'd taken all our cash and savings, plus the toaster oven and even the stereo. Just disappeared, like that."
I rolled onto my back and remembered Eddie Savoy. "People don't just disappear," I told her. "You of all people should know that."
Overhead, stars shifted and winked against the dark night sky. I opened my eyes wide and tried to see the other galaxies that hid at the edges of ours. "There was nobody else?" I asked.
"No one worth mentioning," my mother said.
I looked at her. "Don't you--you know--miss it?"
My mother shrugged. "I have Donegal."
I smiled into the darkness. "That's not really the same," I said. My mother frowned, as if she was thinking about this. "You're right; it's more fulfilling. See, I'm the one who trained him, so I'm the one who can take credit for whatever Donegal does. With a horse I've made a name for myself. With a husband I was nobody." Barely moving a muscle, my mother covered my hand with her own. "Tell me what Nicholas is like," she said.
I sighed and tried to do with words what I would ordinarily do a sketch. "He's very tall, and he has hair as dark as Donegal's mane. His eyes are the same color as yours and mine--" "No, no, no," my mother interrupted. "Tell me what Nicholas is like."
I closed my eyes, but nothing came clearly to mind. I seemed to be seeing my life with him through shadows, and even after eight years I could barely hear the patterns of his voice or feel the touch of his hands on me. I tried to picture those hands, their long, surgeon's fingers, but couldn't even imagine them holding the base of a stethoscope. I felt a hollow pit in the base of my chest, where I knew these memories should be, but it was as if I had married someone a long time ago and hadn't kept contact since. "I really don't know what Nicholas is like," I said. I could feel my mother's eyes on me, so I tried to explain. "He's just a different man these days; he works ex-tremely hard, and that's important, you know, but because of that I n't get to see him all that
much. A lot of the time when I do see him I'm not at my best--I'm at a fund-raising dinner table and he's sitting beside a Radcliffe girl making comparisons, or I've been up half the night with Max and I look like the wild woman of Borneo."
"And that's why you left," my mother finished for me.
I sat up abruptly. "That's not why I left," I said. "I left because of you."
It was a what came first, the chicken or the egg dilemma. I had left because I needed time to catch my breath and get my bearings and start with a clean slate. But obviously, this tendency had been bred into me. Hadn't I known all along I would grow up to be just like my mother? Hadn't I worried about this very thing happening when I was pregnant with Max--and with my other baby? I still believed these events were all linked together. I could honestly say that my mother was the reason I'd run away, but I wasn't sure if she had been the cause or the consequence of my actions.
My mother crawled into her sleeping bag. "Even if that was true," she said, "you should have waited until Max was older."
I rolled away from her. The scent of the pine trees on the ridge behind us was so overwhelming I was suddenly dizzy. "That's the pot calling the kettle black," I murmured.
From behind me came my mother's voice. "When you were born, they were just starting to let men in the delivery room, but your father didn't want any part of it. He actually wanted me to give birth at home, like his mother had, but I vetoed that. So he took me to the hospital, and I begged him not to leave me. Told him I couldn't go through with it. I was all alone for twelve hours, until you decided to make your appearance. It was another hour until they let him in to see you and me together--it took that long for the nurses to comb my hair and give me my makeup so I'd look like I hadn't been doing anything at all for the past day." My mother was so close I could feel her breath against my ear. "When your father came in and saw you, he stroked your cheek and said, 'Now, May, now that you've got her, where's the sacrifice?' And do you know what I told him? I looked at him and I said, 'Me.' "
My heart constricted as I remembered staring at Max and wondering how he could possibly have come from inside me and what I could do to make him go back. "You resented me," I said.
"I was terrified of you," my mother said. "I didn't know what I'd do if you didn't like me."
I remembered that the year I was enrolled in Bible preschool my mother had bought me a special coat for Easter, as pink as the inside lip of a lily. I had bothered her and begged and pleaded to wear it to school after Easter. "Just once," I had cried, and finally she let me. But it rained on the way home from school, and I was afraid she'd be angry if the coat got wet, so I took it off and stuffed it into a little ball. The neighbor's daughter, who walked me home every day because she was nine years old and responsible, helped me jam the coat inside my Snoopy book bag. "You little fool," my mother had said when my friend left me at the door, "you're going to catch pneumonia." I had run up to my room and thrown myself on the bed, angry that I had disappointed her yet again.
But then again, this was the woman who let me take a bus across downtown Chicago when I was five because she thought I was trustworthy. She had tinted clear gelatin with blue food coloring because that was my favorite color. She taught me how to dance the Stroll and how to hang from the monkey bars with my hem tucked a certain way so that my skirt didn't fall up over my head. She had given me my first crayons and coloring book, and had held me when I messed up, assuring me that the lines were for people with no imagination, She had turned herself into someone who was larger than life; someone whose gestures I practiced at night in the bathroom; someone I wanted to be when I grew up.
The night closed around us like a choked throat, suffocating the witched sounds of the squirrels and the whistling grass. "You weren't all that bad as a mother," I said.
"Maybe," my mother whispered. "Maybe not."
chapter 30
Nicholas
For the first time in years, Nicholas's gloved hands shook as he made the incision in the patient's chest. A neat red line of blood spilled into the hollow left by the scalpel, and Nicholas swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. Anything but this, he thought to himself: climbing Everest, memorizing a dictionary, fighting a war from the front line. Anything had to be easier than doing a quadruple bypass on Alistair Fogerty himself.
He did not have to look under the sterile drapes to know the face connected with the hideously swabbed orange body. Every muscle and line had been etched into his mind; after all, he'd spent eight years absorbing Fogerty's insults and rallying to meet his boundless expectations. And now the man's life was in his hands.
Nicholas picked up the saw and switched it to life. It vibrated in the circle of his hands as he touched it to the sternum, carving through the bone. He spread the ribs and he checked the solution in which the leg veins, already harvested, were floating. He imagined
Alistair Fogerty standing in the background of the operating suite, his presence hovering at Nicholas's neck like the stale breath of a dragon. Nicholas looked up at his assisting resident. "I think we're a11 set," he said, watching his words puff out his blue paper mask as if they had meaning or substance.
Robert Prescott was on his hands and knees on the Aubusson rug, rubbing Perrier into a round yellow spot that was part vomit and part sweet potatoes. Now that Max could sit up by himself--at least for a few minutes--he was more likely to spit up whatever he'd last eaten or drunk.
Robert had tried using his baby-sitting time to go over patient files for the next morning, but Max had a habit of pulling them off the couch and wrinkling the papers into his palms. He had gummed one manila binder so thoroughly it fell apart in Robert's hands.
"Ah," he said, sitting back on his heels to survey his work. "I don't think it looks any different from the rosettes." He frowned at his grandson. "You haven't done any more of that, have you?"
Max squealed to be picked up--that was his latest thing, that and a razz sound that sprayed everything within three feet. Robert thought he had lifted his arms too, but that might have been wishful thinking. According to Dr. Spock, whom he'd been rereading in between patients, that didn't come until the sixth month.
"Let's see," he said, holding Max like a football under his arm. He looked around the little parlor, redecorated as a substitute nursery/ playroom, and found what he had been looking for, an old stethoscope. Max liked to suck on the rubber tubes and to hold the cold metal base against his gums, swollen from teething. Robert stood up and passed the toy to Max, but Max dropped it and puckered his lips, getting ready to cry. "Drastic measures," he said, wheeling Max in a circle over his head. He switched on a Sesame Street cassette he'd bought at the bookstore and started to do a jaunty tango over the clutter of toys on the floor. Max laughed--a wonderful sound, really, Robert thought--every time they whipped around at the corner.
Robert heard the jingle of keys in the door and jumped over the walker so that he could push the Stop button on the tape deck. He slipped Max into the Sassy Seat that was balanced on the edge of the low walnut coffee table and handed him a colander and a plastic mixing spoon. Max stuck the spoon in his mouth and then dropped it on the floor. "Don't say anything that might give me away," Robert warned, leaning close to Max, who grabbed his grandfather's finger and pulled it into his mouth.
Astrid walked into the room, to find Robert thumbing through a patient file and Max sitting quietly with a colander on his head. "Everything's all right?" she asked, sliding her pocketbook onto the nearest chair.
"Mmm," Robert said. He noticed that the file he was supposed to be reading was upside down. "Not a peep out of him the whole time."
When the hospital grapevine made it known that Fogerty had collapsed while doing an aortic valve replacement, Nicholas postponed his afternoon rounds and went straight to his chief's office. Alistair had been sitting with his feet propped up on the radiator, facing out the window toward the stacks and bricks of the hospital's incinerator. He was absentmindedly breaking the spiked
leaves off his spider plant. "I've been thinking," he said, not bothering to turn around. "Hawaii. Or maybe New Zealand, if I can stand the flight." He swiveled in the wide leather chair. "Do call out the eighth-grade English teachers. Definition of irony: getting into a car accident while you're putting on your seat belt. Or the cardiac surgeon discovering he needs a quadruple bypass."
Nicholas sank down into the chair that sat across from the desk. "What?" he murmured.
Alistair smiled at him, and Nicholas suddenly realized how very old he seemed. He didn't know Alistair at all, out of this context. He didn't know if he golfed, or if he took his Scotch neat; he didn't know if he had cried at his son's graduation or his daughter's wedding. Nicholas wondered if anyone knew Alistair that well; if, for that matter, anyone knew him, either. "Dave Goldman ran the tests," Fogerty said. "I want you to do the surgery." Nicholas swallowed. "I--"
Fogerty held up a hand. "Before you humble yourself, Nicholas, keep in mind that I'd rather do it myself. But since I can't and since you're the only other asshole I trust in this entire organization, I wonder if you might pencil me into your busy schedule."
"Monday," Nicholas said. "First thing."
Fogerty sighed and leaned his head against the chair. "Damn right," he said. "I've seen you in the afternoon; you're sloppy." He ran his thumbs over the armrests of the chair, worn smooth by the habit. "You'll take on as many of my patients as you can," he said. "There will have to be a leave of absence."
Nicholas stood. "Consider it done."
He watched as Alistair Fogerty turned his chair to the window again, charting the rise and fall of the chimney smoke. His echo was limply a whisper. "Done," he said.
Astrid and Robert Prescott sat on the floor of their dining room under the magnificent cherry table that, with all the leaves in place, could seat twenty. Max seemed to like it under there, as if it were some kind of natural cave that deserved exploration. Spread in front of his chubby feet was an array of eight-by-ten glossies, laminated so that his saliva wouldn't stain the surfaces. Astrid pointed to the smiling picture of Max himself. "Max," she said, and the baby turned toward her voice. "Ayee," he said, drooling.
