Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult Page B

fidgeting on the chair and wishing he could be outside; he’d wanted to check the tin of beer he’d left overnight on the porch to catch slugs. But his mother would not let him leave, would not let him even take a break for the bathroom—not until Nicholas could repeat, verbatim, her lesson. And by that time, Nicholas had conjured images of dark, stinking phantoms wearing ratty black capes, hiding in cars and in the creases of the sidewalk and in the alleys between stores, waiting to pounce on him. When his mother finally told him he could go outside to play, he’d chosen to remain indoors. For weeks after that, when the postman rang the doorbell, he had hidden beneath the couch.
    Although he had got over his fear of strangers, he had never forgotten the consequences, which made Nicholas the one person in a group to stand off to the side. He could be charming if the situation called for it, but he was more likely to feign interest in a frieze on the ceiling than to be drawn into a conversation with people he didn’t know. In some individuals this was passed off as shyness; but in someone of Nicholas’s background and stature and classic features, it seemed more like aloof conceit. Nicholas found he didn’t mind the label. It gave him time to size up a situation and to respond more intelligently than those who spoke too quickly.
    None of which explained why he impulsively asked Paige O’Toole to marry him, or why he gave her the spare key to his apartment even before hearing her answer.
    They walked from Mercy to his apartment in total silence, and Nicholas was starting to hate himself. Paige wasn’t acting like Paige. He’d ruined it, whatever it was that he had liked about her. Nicholas was so nervous he couldn’t fit the key into the door, and he didn’t know what he was nervous about. When she stepped into the apartment he held his breath until he heard her say quietly, “My room was never this neat.” And then he relaxed and leaned against the wall. He answered, “I could learn to live messy.”
    Conversations like that in the first hours after he proposed to Paige made Nicholas realize that there was a great deal he still did not know about her. He knew the big things, the sort of things that make up the talk at dinner parties: the name of her high school; how she became interested in drawing; the street she had lived on in Chicago. But he did not know the little details, the things only a lover would know—What had she named the mutt her father made her give back to the animal shelter? Who taught her to throw a sliding curve ball? Which constellations could she pick out in the night sky? Nicholas wanted to know it all. He was filled with a greed that made him wish he could erase the past, oh, six years of his life and relive them with Paige, so he wouldn’t feel he was starting in the middle.
    â€œThis is all I’ve got,” Nicholas said to Paige, holding out a box of stale graham crackers. He had sat her down on the black leather couch and turned on the halogen lights. She had not said whether or not she would marry him, a detail that Nicholas had not overlooked. To all intents and purposes, he should have wanted her to pass off his proposal as a joke, since he still wasn’t sure what had prompted him to make such a rash statement. But he knew Paige hadn’t taken it lightly, and to tell the truth, he wanted to know her answer. God, he was all knotted up inside over the prospect of her laughing in his face, which told him more than he cared to admit.
    Suddenly he wanted to get her talking. He figured if she would just stop looking at him as though she’d never seen him before in her life, if she would start telling him about Chicago or quote one of Lionel’s little epigrams or introduce any other favorite subject of conversation, then she might happen to mention that, yes, she wouldn’t mind being his wife.
    â€œI’m