Liam cradles her, holds her out of the love that he still feels for her, even though he knows it will make letting go that much harder for the both of them. She presses her lips against his neck as she shifts and cries against him, and he almost tells her it was all a lie, that he didn’t mean it. He does mean it, though. He needs to mean it. He knows it’s selfish, but he has to be away from her, to determine if he even has an identity of his own anymore, aside and apart from her and them. He can’t remember the last time he said I instead of we, and that frightens him. As he gets lost in thought, his body moves naturally, out of a decade of habit, and his mouth responds to the press of her lips on his. She gives herself over to him completely, thinking he’s surrendered, and fists her hands in his hair. At the feel of it, the pull of her hands, he pulls away, and she recoils, the hurt clear in her eyes.
“I’m sorry—I—”
“Don’t,” she says quickly, vaulting to the other side of the car, and it’s a different don’t than before. Don’t go has shifted to don’t touch me in the span of one kiss, mere seconds. Liam bows his head and Harper nods sharply, finality in the motion. “Take me home.” Anger consumes her and it shows in the way she bites out her words. Liam’s lips part, as if to speak, but she cuts him off before he can move his mouth to form a single syllable. “Just fucking take me home, Liam.”
“Harp, I don’t want to end this on bad terms. You’re too important—”
“Don’t do that.”
He closes his mouth and fixates on the gearshift, feeling worse than wounded, though she thinks he’s anything but.
“You’re throwing away a decade, throwing me away, and you think this will end on good terms?” Harper laughs humorlessly and reaches for the door handle, shakes her head as the tears begin again, this time hot with anger. “You’re right, Liam. Maybe you don’t know who the hell you are anymore. Because I sure as fuck don’t know you at all.” She opens the door and the wind whips into the vehicle as Liam opens his to follow her out to the roadside where this all began. When she hears him, she spits out a strained, “Don’t follow me.”
“Harp, come back and I’ll take you home,” he shouts to her as his feet move just a bit slower than hers, letting her leave, but wanting her to stay, as he has never been so unsure of anything in his entire life. “Harper—”
“Don’t fucking worry about it.” She refuses to turn around—to let him see another tear fall from her eyes. With her fists balled tightly, she marches on, dodging two lanes of traffic and crossing the median. “Just go. Go on and find yourself and I’ll find my own fucking way home.”
CHAPTER ONE
Hilary is running out of options. It’s been seven days since she collected her daughter from the roadside, soaked and shivering and nearly catatonic, and still Harper’s cries haven’t stopped. Day seven is much like the six days before it. Harper lies in her bed, still aside from the soft up and down motion of her shoulders as she cries, and doesn’t at all acknowledge Hilary unless it’s to ask or tell her to leave. That’s happened once or twice.
She moves into Harper’s room from just outside the doorway where she stands sentinel during much of the time she’s not at work. As she crosses the carpet and folds herself down at Harper’s bedside, she waits for her dismissal, but it doesn’t come. “What can I do, Harp?” she asks after a bit, her soft voice stained with an ache. The question is met with a deliberate glance away and nothing more, just like the last ten times she’s asked. She waits, but Harper doesn’t answer, doesn’t move, and Hilary studies her in the silence. Her reddened eyes look the same as they did when she was five and afraid of the dark, eleven and cradling a broken arm, seventeen and hiding, curled up on the floor of her father’s closet during his vigil. Hilary palms her forehead and huffs out a breath, grappling for words. “Harper—I just—this is hard to watch, Harp. What—what can I do? Tell me what to do and I’ll—”
Hilary reaches over and strokes her hair for a moment, before Harper twists away. She gets to her feet and despite Harper’s protest, leans over to kiss the crown of her daughter’s head before she turns to leave. The thump of her footfalls against the wooden stairs is drowned out by Harper’s cries—the sound follows her to the ground floor and clear across the house to the kitchen.
She doesn’t know what to do or how to help her—she’s never been left before. Hilary married Harrison mere months after graduation and they spent the next two decades together building a gratifying life and raising their beautiful daughter. At the time, Hilary couldn’t imagine suffering a greater loss, remembering the spot in her chest that turned cold and vacant as the light faded from her husband’s eyes, but hearing Harper like this, witnessing her barely exist this way, she thinks she may have been wrong. Her husband had never stopped loving her, right on down to his last breath, his final words, and she put him in the ground with that sole comfort holding her up.
She settles herself down at the table and as the sound of her daughter’s heartbreak seeps through the ceiling overhead, she says a silent prayer that it will all be over soon. As she does, the scabs fall away from her old wounds, and she cries over her loss of Harrison, wondering if the loss of love, no matter the kind, ever truly stops tearing someone apart once it starts.
***
The days and nights bleed slowly into and out of each other, all the same to Harper. She is a monument to her grief, devoted only to mourning, and she grieves the loss of Liam whether accompanied by the sun or the moon. From somewhere beneath that same sky, he haunts her, like the phantom pain in her chest he left behind when he tore out her heart. She knows she’ll never get it back, that she’ll forever be empty. So she sits and she cries and nothing changes, nothing matters.
***
“Just take a bite,” Hilary pleads, her weary head cradled in her palm. Harper is bent over the opposite end of the kitchen table, her frail arms limp on either side of the plate Hilary has set in front of her. On it’s the comfort food Hilary’s own mother made for her when she was a child—a golden brown grilled cheese sandwich and a mug of canned tomato soup. Harper’s stomach churns at the sight and smell of it, growls in hunger. She’s barely subsisting on bottles of water and a half-empty box of stale crackers she found beneath her bed, but giving in to more than that feels like she’s giving up on giving up, and she’s not ready to let the darkness go quite yet. She endures these warring thoughts daily, ever since Hilary began dragging her down to the kitchen.
Each day, her stomach wins the back-and-forth and she swallows down a bite or two before pushing the plate away, ashamed of herself for giving in, and stalks back to her room in tears. Today, she eats nearly half the sandwich. After Harper leaves and the slam of her bedroom door sounds, Hilary reaches across the table and eats the other half, the crumbs catching in the split ends of her silvery hair. “Well, that’s another one,” she says to herself around a bite. “Baby steps.”
***
A month is where Hilary draws a hard line. Harper’s grief has turned her into a shadow of her former self—ten pounds off her already small frame crafts her as skeletal, and she has a stench to her that indicates she has rarely, if ever, showered during Hilary’s long absences at the butcher shop. When she comes home from work on the evening of the thirty-second day, she knows Harper has once again ignored her repeated pleas and written instructions to bathe. She can sm
ell her from the threshold of her room, musty with sweat and grime, and though she knows her daughter will fight her as best she can, she has to do something. Against the softly protesting flail of tired limbs, Hilary picks her up and carries her across the hall to the bathroom. It’s a feat, given Hilary’s average stature, but she manages to get Harper into the bathroom, and sets her in the basin of the tub as gently as she can. Hilary watches with an odd expression on her face as Harper dissolves down beneath the layer of bubbles, sinks to the bottom, as if she somehow expected her daughter’s lithe form to float.
“I’m going to have to undress you, if you won’t do it yourself,” Hilary tells her weightily, as Harper sits motionless in the basin. She doesn’t want to have to treat her twenty-six year old like a toddler, but she will if need be. She swallows thickly while waiting for a response that doesn’t come. Harper only stares unseeing at the dripping faucet as her sweatshirt floats loosely around her in the water. Nodding gravely, Hilary rolls up her sleeves and reaches beneath the waterline to pull the hem of her sweatshirt over her head, leaving her in a tank top and ratty pajama shorts. The sweatshirt hits the tile of the bathroom floor with a wet thwack as she discards it, and Harper turns her stare from faucet to floor, her hands moving in slow motion to reach for the little piece of her that’s been taken away. “You can’t have it back, Harp. You need to bathe. This isn’t healthy.”
“I can do it,” she says, but her voice is just as frail as her body. Hilary picks up a washcloth from the rack above the tub and sets it in her waiting hand, staring down at her skeptically, eyebrows raised and head cocked. “I can do it,” Harper repeats, her hand balling around the cloth as she submerges it in the lukewarm water. She pulls it out from beneath the surface and makes a show of rubbing it down her arm. “Really.”
“You’re sure?” Hilary asks, reaching across the expanse of the tub to grab a bottle of body wash. She hands the bottle off to Harper, who only answers her with a hard gaze. “Okay. Well, if you need anything, I’ll be out in the hall.”
***
“I should get out of the house,” Harper says absently as she wipes the remnants of her finished sandwich from the corners of her mouth and sets her napkin on the table beside her clean plate. Hilary is in the middle of making one for herself, as Harper hasn’t left as much as a crumb in the past few days, but she doesn’t mind the extra work. She smiles at her daughter’s words as she flips the bread in the pan and hums a positive reply, not wanting to sound too excited by her obvious progress. “Can I take Dad’s truck?”
“It’s yours, so I don’t see why you couldn’t,” she says with a shrug, flipping the bread again. She taps the spatula on the countertop as she turns around to smile at the back of Harper’s head. “Going anywhere in particular?” As she watches Harper’s shoulders shrug, she turns to grab the shopping list off the refrigerator. “Well, how do you feel about going to Safeway? We’re running low on milk.”
“I can do that.”
Hilary sets the list beside her on the table and watches as she scans it, her index finger moving over the items on the list. There isn’t a lot written there, so she won’t have to be out for long, and Hilary thinks this is a step in the right direction, one that will put her back into the world and further away from her wrecked remains. And it’s a big one, because it’s one Hilary hasn’t forced her to take. Harper looks up from the list and smiles. It isn’t a big smile, not like it used to be, but it’s a glimmer of hope, and Hilary nods while grinning back at her.
“Do you mind if I add some things to this?” Harper asks, her hand already reaching for the pen that sits atop the newspaper in the center of the table. “I kind of want some pasta.”
***
A week later, Hilary finds Harper on the couch in the living room, her stare focused on the blank television screen, with a book resting open in her lap. When she left in the morning, Harper had just started the novel, but now she has nearly half of it pinned under her thumb. She shifts her gaze and watches as her mother hangs up her coat and removes her scarf. When Hilary meets her stare, Harper offers her a smile, inclines her head and hooks her thumb in the direction of the kitchen. “I made fried chicken,” she says, setting the book on the coffee table as she rises. “It’s probably cold by now and the bird’s obviously not from the shop, but it’s good, I promise.”
“Did you eat?” she asks, moving through the room to the adjacent kitchen. Harper trails behind her, stretching her limbs as she goes, and leans back against the countertop while her mother removes the foil from the dish on the table. “Doesn’t look like you have.” Harper wrings her hands and stares as Hilary drops a thigh onto one plate and a breast onto another, and motions for Harper to join her at the table. She makes a face but not a move, and Hilary’s quick to ask, “What? Not hungry? Is everything okay? Harper, you can’t keep doing this—”
“I’m fine. Really. I was just thinking,” she starts, slowly inching closer to the table as if not to frighten a skittish animal or a small child. Hilary has a nervous look in her eyes, one Harper easily recognizes, and she knows her mother thinks she’s slipped. Harper smiles reassuringly as she reaches the table and sits beside her, and Hilary’s relief becomes obvious when her hands unclench her napkin and she relaxes into her chair. “I was thinking about maybe going over to Rhodes tonight.”
“Harp,” Hilary sighs, reaching over and covering Harper’s hands with her own. “I don’t know if that’s the best idea.”
“I promise I won’t binge drink, if that’s what you’re thinking. I know, when Dad died things got a little out of control, but I haven’t—I just—I don’t know. I just think going there might be good for me.” She slides her hands from beneath her mother’s and tugs down the sleeves of her sweater, pulls them over her hands. It’s a nervous habit, and as she does it, she finds she is suddenly very unsure of herself. She hadn’t considered the ramifications of showing up there, to that place that became home to her and Liam over the years. They had their first date at Rhodes Gastropub and Speakeasy, when they were sixteen—a basket of buttermilk onion rings and a pair of Weinhard's Root Beers, with a side of awkward conversation and stolen glances. In the years that followed, it turned into their magnetic north, the place where Harper, Liam, and their various friends studied, hid from rain, snow, and the summer sun, discovered age-old musical treasures in the jukebox and newer gems in the speakeasy, and just generally existed. It was where they had all kinds of firsts and lasts and everything between, and she quite honestly missed it. But every inch of the place would remind her of him and she hadn’t thought of that until now. “I’ll just—I’ll have one drink and see what happens.”
“Look, I can’t stop you—I won’t stop you—but if you need me, you call. You hear me?” Harper nods and tries not to notice the worried pinch of her mother’s eyebrows. “One drink.”
She collects her things quickly and pulls on her coat under the watchful eye of her mother, who has worriedly torn the skin of the chicken thigh to pieces. Harper smiles again, trying to reassure her that this will end well, that it won’t hurt, even though she’s no longer nearly as confident as her smile lets on. Keys in hand, she offers a wave, resolutely pulls open the front door, and steps out into the night.
CHAPTER TWO
Austin yearns for a bit of melancholia—some Hank Williams, a little Johnny Cash, a heavy dose of Merle Haggard—and feeds his hard-earned lumberyard money to the jukebox with gentle murmurs of appreciation on his tongue. It gives him synthpop, instead—a laughing bass beat that mocks him and his solemn mood. His heavy, leather boot collides with the side of the machine just hard enough to make the song skip and sputter to a stop. Disheartened, he stalks away from the machine and over to the bar. The empty beer bottle in his grip connects with the heavily lacquered wooden bar top with a sharp clatter, and earns him an annoyed glance from the bartender and namesake of the pub, Dylan Rhodes. Austin regards him with nothing more than an indifferent glance and a haughty, beckonin
g-type gesture for another beer, a motion at which Dylan snorts.
“You may think that rough and tumble routine is endearing, man, but all it does is make you look like a fucking jackass,” Dylan tells him, though he swaps Austin’s empty for a fresh beer, as instructed. Austin leans across the bar, his mouth set in a cocky half-smirk, grabs the bottle and twists the cap off with his forearm. He rockets the cap at Dylan’s face and walks off as it connects, his half-smirk shifting to full-blown and devious satisfaction. “One day, I’m going to ban you from this place, Hayward,” Dylan calls after him, rubbing at the spot on his cheek where the bottle cap nicked him. He could easily do more than that—his physique that of a linebacker—but he has a tendency to go easy on Austin, recognizing more than a bit of himself in his wayward nature. “Wait and see, lumberjackass.”
“You go on and do that, Dylan. See how well that works out for you and your bottom line,” Austin calls over his shoulder casually, before tipping his head back and taking a long pull from the bottle. “We keep you in business.”
“We?” Dylan laughs the question at Austin’s back as he continues to cross the bar. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re a few short of we these days.”
Austin doesn’t let Dylan bait him, pretends not to hear him, just as he’s pretended for weeks that his loneliness isn’t a fact, and that he hasn’t been abandoned—again. He keeps his eyes trained on the door, hoping that Liam will walk in with Harper on his arm. They’ll order up a pitcher and some shots, give a salute to life and love, and throw darts until the bell signals last call. He stares, but the door only gives way to familiar strangers—the scholarly-looking old men who come in after work to drink brandy and dissect Shakespeare’s themes, the artsy-type women who gather in the corner over a bottle of organic red and discuss Ayurvedic cleanses and the Ashland Culinary Festival, the occasional misguided young tourist with a big city sense of entitlement and a fake ID, as if Dylan would fall for that kind of thing—and Austin begins to feel the slow creep of the desolation he’s been denying. Staring down at his boots, he tries to shake the feeling, but it settles into his spine and he sinks down into a booth to try to fight it off, beer his only weapon for battle. When he reaches the bottom of his bottle, his empty arsenal, and resigns himself to defeat, that’s when he hears her.