Harvesting the Heart (9 page)

These
subtle changes took the focus away from the antiques and the sharp
edges that had made the place look so formal. In one afternoon,
Paige had made his apartment resemble any other lived-in apartment.

"When
you took me here last night, I kept thinking that there was something
missing. It—I don't know—it just looked sort of stiff,
like you lived in the pages of an
Architectural
Digest
article.
I picked the flowers on the edge of the highway," Paige said
nervously, "and since I couldn't find a vase, I sort of finished
the peanut butter."

Nicholas
nodded. "I didn't even know I had peanut butter," he said,
still gazing around the room. In the entire course of his life, he'd
never seen a copy of
Mademoiselle
in
his home. His mother would have died rather than see highway
wildflowers on a table instead of her hothouse tea roses. He'd been
brought up to believe that quilts were acceptable for hunting lodges
but not formal sitting rooms.

When
he started medical school, Nicholas had left the decoration of the
apartment in his mother's hands because he hadn't the time or the
inclination, and to no one's surprise it came out looking very much
like the house he'd grown up in. Astrid had bequeathed him an ormolu
clock and an ancient cherry dining room table. She'd commissioned
her usual decorator to take care of the drapes and the upholstery,
specifying the rich hunter-green and navy and crimson fabrics that
she felt suited Nicholas. He hadn't wanted a formal sitting room, but
he had never mentioned that to his mother. After the fact, he didn't
know how to go about changing one into a simple living room. Or maybe
he didn't know how to go about living.

"What
do you think?" Paige whispered, so quietly that Nicholas thought
he had imagined her voice.

Nicholas
walked toward her, wrapped his arms around her.
"I
think
we're going to have to buy a vase," he said.

He
could feel Paige's shoulders relax beneath his hands. Suddenly she
started talking, the words tumbling out of her mouth. "I didn't
know what to do," she said, "but I knew it needed
something.
And
then I figured—I'm baking cookies, did you know that?—well,
I
didn't
know if what I liked would be what
you
liked,
and I started to think about how
I'd
act
if I came home and someone I barely even knew had rearranged my whole
house. We don't really know each other, Nicholas, and I've been
thinking about that all night too: just when I've convinced myself
that this is the most right thing in the world, my common sense comes
tramping in. What's your favorite —butter or chocolate chip?"

"I
don't know," Nicholas said. He was smiling. He liked trying to
follow her conversation. It reminded him of a pet rabbit he'd had
once that he tried to take for a walk on a leash.

"Don't
tease me," Paige said, pulling away. She walked into the kitchen
and pulled a tray out of the oven. "You've never used these
cookie sheets," she said. "The stickers were still on
them."

Nicholas
picked up a spatula and lifted a cookie off the sheet, then bounced
it from palm to palm as it cooled. "I didn't know I had them,"
he said. "I don't cook much."

Paige
watched him taste the cookie. "Neither do I. I guess you should
know that, shouldn't you? We'll probably starve within a month."

Nicholas
looked up. "But we'll die happy," he said. He took a second
bite. "These are good, Paige. You're underestimating your-self."

Paige
shook her head. "I once set the oven on fire cooking a TV
dinner. I didn't take it out of the box. Cookies are my whole
repertoire. But I can do
those
from
scratch. You seemed like a butter cookie kind of guy. I tried to
remember if you ever ordered chocolate at the diner, and you didn't,
I don't think, so you have to be a vanilla person." When
Nicholas stared at her, Paige grinned at him. "The world is
divided into chocolate people and vanilla people. Don't you know
that, Nicholas?"

"It's
that simple?"

Paige
nodded. "Think about it. No one ever likes the two halves of a
Dixie ice cream cup equally. You either save the chocolate because
you like it best, or you save the vanilla. If you're really lucky,
you can swap with someone so you get a whole cup of the flavor you
like best. My dad used to do that for me."

Nicholas
thought about the kind of day he had just come from. He was still on
rotation in Emergency. This morning there had been a six-car pileup
on Route 93, and the wounded were brought to Mass General. One had
died, one had been in neurosurgery for eight hours, one had gone into
cardiac arrest. During lunch a six-year-old girl was brought in, shot
through the stomach in a playground when she was caught in the
crossfire of two youth gangs. And then, in his apartment, there
was Paige. To come home to Paige every day would be a relief. To come
home to her would be a blessing.

"I
take it you're a chocolate person," Nicholas said.

"Of
course."

Nicholas
stepped forward and put his arms on either side of her, bracing her
against the sink. "You can have my half of a Dixie cup anytime,"
he said. "You can have anything you want."

Nicholas
had read once of a five-foot-three-inch woman who had lifted an
overturned school bus off her seven-year-old daughter. He had watched
a
60
Minutes
segment
about an unmarried soldier who threw himself on top of a grenade to
protect the life of a fellow soldier who had a family waiting back
home. Medically, Nicholas could credit this to the sudden adrenaline
rush caused by crisis situations. Practically, he knew that some
measure of emotional commitment was involved. And he realized, to his
surprise, that he would have done such things for Paige. He would
swim a channel, take a bullet, trade his life. The idea shook
Nicholas, chilled his blood. Maybe it was only fierce protectiveness,
but he was beginning to believe it was love.

In
spite of himself, in spite of his hasty proposal, Nicholas did not
believe in romantic love. He did not believe in being swept off your
feet, or in love at first sight—either of which would have
accounted for his near-immediate obsession with Paige. When he
had lain awake in bed last night, he wondered if the attraction could
be based on pity—the boy who had grown up with everything
thinking he could light up the life of the girl who had not—but
Nicholas had met women of less pedigreed backgrounds before, and none
of them had ever affected him so strongly he forgot how to use his
voice, how to breathe involuntarily. Those women, the ones Nicholas
could win over with a bottle of house Chianti and a disarming smile,
usually graced his bed for a week before he felt like moving on. He
could
have
done that with Paige; he knew he could have if he'd wanted to. But
whenever he looked at her, he wanted to stand beside her, to shield
her from the world with the simple, strong heat of his body. She was
so much more fragile than she let on.

Paige
was sprawled in what was now his
living
room,
thanks to her, reading
Gray's
Anatomy
as
if it were a murder mystery. "I don't know how you memorize all
this stuff, Nicholas," she said. "I couldn't even do the
bones." She looked up at him. "I tried, you know. I thought
if I remembered them all without peeking, I'd impress you."

"You
already impress me," he said. "I don't care about the
bones."

Paige
shrugged. "I'm not impressive," she said.

Nicholas,
lying on the couch, rolled onto his side to look at her.

"Are
you kidding?" he said. "You left home and got yourself a
job and survived in a city you knew nothing about. Christ, I couldn't
have done that at eighteen." He paused. "I don't know if I
could do that now."

"You've
never had to," Paige said quietly. Nicholas opened his mouth to
speak but didn't say anything. He never had to. But he had
wanted
to.

Both
of Nicholas's parents had, in some way, changed their circumstances.
Astrid, who could trace her lineage to Plymouth Rock, ad tried to
downplay her Boston Brahmin ties. "I don't see all the fuss
about the
Mayflower,"
she
had said. "For God's sake, the Puritans were
outcasts
before
they got here." She grew up surrounded by wealth that was so old
it had always just been there. Her objections were not to a life of
privilege, really, only to the restrictions that came with it. She
had no intention of becoming the kind of wife who blended into the
walls of a house that defined her, and so, on the day she graduated
from Vassar, she flew to Rome without telling a soul. She got drunk
and danced at midnight in Trevi fountain, and she slept with as many
different dark-haired men as she could until her Visa ran out. Months
later, when she was introduced to Robert Prescott at a tailgate
party, she almost dismissed him as one of those rich, have-it-all
boys with whom her parents were forever throwing her together. But
when their eyes met over a cup of spiked cider, she realized that
Robert wasn't what he appeared to be. He seethed below the surface
with that hell-or-high-water pledge to escape that Astrid recognized
running through her own blood. Here was her mirror image—someone
trying to get
in
as
badly as she was trying to get
out.

Robert
Prescott had been born without a dime and, apparently, without a
father. He had sold magazines door to door to pay his way through
Harvard. Now, thirty years later, he had honed his image to a point
where he had such financial holdings no one dared remember if it was
old money or new. He loved his acquired status; he liked the
combination of his own glossy, crystalline tastes butted up against
Astrid's cluttered seventh-generation antiques. Robert understood the
part well—acting stuffy and bored at dinner parties,
cultivating a taste for port, obliterating the facts of his life that
could incriminate. Nicholas knew that even if his father couldn't
convince himself he'd been to the manner born, he believed he
rightfully belonged there, and that was just as good.

There
had been a bitter argument once, when his father insisted Nicholas do
something he had no inclination to do—the actual circumstances
now forgotten: probably escorting someone's sister to a debutante
ball or giving up a Saturday game of neighborhood baseball for formal
dancing lessons. Nicholas had stood his ground, certain his father
would strike him, but in the end Robert had sunk into a wing chair,
defeated, pinching the bridge of his nose. "You would play the
game, Nicholas," he had said, sighing, "if you knew there
was something to lose."

Now
that he was older, Nicholas understood. Truth be told, as much as he
fantasized about living the simple life of a lobster fisherman
in Maine, he enjoyed the perks of his station too much to turn his
back and walk away. He liked being on a first-name basis with the
governor, having debutantes leave their lace bras on the back seat of
his car, getting admitted to college and medical school without even
a half second of self-doubt or worry about his chances. Paige might
not have grown up the same way, but still, she'd left
something
behind.
She was a study in contrasts: as fragile as she seemed on the
outside, she still had the kind of confidence it took to make a clean
break. Nicholas realized that he had less courage in his whole body
than Paige had in her little finger.