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that's
when he grabbed my wrist.
    "That's
me," he said, surprised. "Hey, let me see."
    I
tried to pull away. I didn't really care if he looked at the
portrait, but the feeling of his hand against my wrist was paralyzing
me. I could feel the pulse of his thumb and the ridges of his
fingertips.
    I
knew by the way he touched me that he had recognized something
in what I'd drawn. I peered down at the paper to see what I had done
this time. At one edge of the picture I'd sketched centuries of
kings, with high jeweled crowns and endless ermine robes. At the
other edge I had drawn a gnarled, blossoming tree. In its uppermost
branches was a thin boy, and in his hand he held the sun.
    "You're
good," he said. Nicholas nodded to the seat across from him. "If
you aren't keeping your other customers waiting," he said,
smiling, "why don't you join me?"
    I
found out that he was in his third year of medical school and

that
he was at the top of his class and in the middle of his rotations. He
was planning to be a cardiac surgeon. He slept only four hours a
night; the rest of the time he was at the hospital or studying. He
thought I didn't look a day over fifteen.
    In
turn, I told him the truth. I said I was from Chicago and that I had
gone to parochial school and would have gone to RISD if I hadn't run
away from home. That was all I said about that, and he didn't press
me. I told him about the nights I had slept in the T station, waking
in the mornings to the roar of the subway. I told him I could balance
four coffee cups and saucers on one arm and that I could say I love
you in
ten languages. Mimi
notenka kudenko, I
said in Swahili, just to prove it. I told him I did not really know
my own mother, something I had never admitted to my closest friends.
But I did not tell him about my abortion.
    It
was well past one in the morning when Nicholas stood up to leave. He
took the portrait I'd drawn and tossed it lightly on the Formica
counter. "Are you going to hang it up?" he asked, pointing
to the others.
    "If
you'd like," I said. I took my black marker out and looked at
his image. For a moment, a thought came to me: This
is what you've been waiting for. "Nicholas,"
I said softly, writing his name across the top.
    "Nicholas,"
he echoed, and then he laughed. He put his arm around my shoulders,
and we stood like that, touching at the sides, for a moment. Then he
stepped away. He was still stroking the side of my neck. "Did
you know," he said, pressing a spot with his thumb, "that
if you push hard enough here, you can knock someone unconscious?"
And then he bent down and touched his lips to where his thumb had
been, kissing the spot so lightly I might have imagined it. He walked
out the door before I even noticed him moving, but I heard the sleigh
bells tap against the steamed window glass. I stood there, swaying,
and I wondered how I could be letting this happen again.

chapter 2
    Nicholas

    Nicholas
Prescott was born a miracle. After ten years of trying to conceive a
child, his parents were finally given a son. And if his parents were
a little older than the parents of most of the boys he went to school
with, well, he never noticed. As if to make up for all the other
children they'd never had, Robert and Astrid Prescott indulged
Nicholas's every whim. After a while he didn't even need to verbalize
his wishes; his parents began to guess what it was that a boy of six
or twelve or twenty should have, and it was provided. So he had grown
up with season tickets to the Celtics, with a purebred chocolate Lab
named Scout, with virtually guaranteed admission to Exeter and
Harvard. In fact, it wasn't until Nicholas was a freshman at Harvard
that he began to notice that the way he had been brought up was not
the norm. Another young man might have taken the opportunity then to
see the third world, or to volunteer for the Peace Corps, but that
wouldn't have been Nicholas. It wasn't

that
he was disinterested or callous; he was just used to being a certain
type