by Jodi Picoult
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 Nicholas, in spite of 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 operating 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 understand 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 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 hairpin 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.
