by Nicole Baart
“I said I’d be back. You’re old enough to take care of yourself, Harper.” Julianna wouldn’t look at her daughter, and in that moment Harper grasped that her parents wished they had never had her. Maybe she was an accident. Maybe she was an experiment. Or maybe she was the product of a love that had fizzled and burned out and extinguished their daughter with it. Of course, she couldn’t articulate any of that until much later, but it was that moment, the distant look in her mother’s eyes, that planted the seed which eventually grew into Harper’s twisted understanding of herself.
“Please . . .” But her supplication was useless.
Julianna yanked her sleeve out of her daughter’s grip and left.
Harper shook as she locked the apartment door behind them. It was well past her bedtime, but she couldn’t stand the thought of going to back to her bedroom alone. So she wrapped herself in every blanket she could find and sat down on the couch across from the door to wait for their eventual return. Snow drifted in the broken window, collecting on the sill in little piles that began to melt and drip slush on the floor. Harper drew her neck deeper into the blankets and clutched the cordless phone in her hands, her index finger poised over the 9 so she could dial 911 in a heartbeat if she needed to. They were gone for hours, but Harper never once fell asleep, and she never cried.
She was eight years old.
Harper took the blanket with her not because she wanted to remember but because she had to remember. It was who she was. Forsaken. Harper Penny had to take care of herself.
What could she expect now, from the Vogt family? From these people who were almost strangers? If they had loved her once, it had been a long time ago. In a different life. Any romantic daydreams she had about loving reunions and intimate connections were exactly that: daydreams.
The kitchen was empty when Harper made it to the bottom of the stairs. But there were voices outside, and through the gingham curtains beyond the oval-shaped table, Harper could just make out the silhouettes of people on the porch. She took a deep breath and walked over to the door.
“Good morning!” Sam said brightly, before she had fully emerged into the cool September day.
“I’m not sure that it’s morning anymore,” Harper replied, working a glint into her eye even though she felt sheepish. She let the door fall shut behind her.
Sam consulted his watch. “You’ve got just over half an hour before we have to say good afternoon. You may certainly go back to bed if you’d like.”
“I think I’ll be okay.” Harper forced herself to grin at him before glancing around the porch to find Adri. Her unfamiliar friend was sitting on a low stool in front of several boxes of dusty, red fruit, sorting them into a series of containers ranging from an old-fashioned turkey roaster to a five-gallon bucket. It seemed that her hands knew what to do without the added benefit of eyesight, for Adri continued to grade and arrange the pears as she stared openly at Harper.
“Good morning,” Adri said after a few seconds. She plucked another flushed pear from the box, turned it over in her hands, and set it in a large, white colander. “Did you sleep okay?”
“Like the dead.” Harper smiled. “I always sleep well in that bed. It’s good and firm.” The comment came off cheeky and laced with innuendo, but she didn’t mean it to. “What are you doing?” she asked, stupidly. It was obvious what Adri was doing.
“Sorting pears.” Adri hovered a hand over each receptacle. “The colander is for fresh eating, the turkey roaster for canning, and the bucket for Mr. McAlister’s hogs.”
“There’s a lot in the bucket,” Harper muttered.
“Dad forgot to spray.” Adri gave her father a mild look. “There are a lot of worms in the Red Bartletts this year.”
“I don’t like chemicals.”
“The spray is organic.”
Suddenly, Sam threw up his arms. “Where are my manners? Have a seat, Harper.” He offered her the rocking chair he’d been sitting on, and when she shook her head, he took her by the elbow and gently lowered her into it. “Are you a coffee drinker? I mean, you were, but now? Do you still like your coffee with cream and sugar?”
Harper nodded, completely charmed. “Yes. I can’t believe you remembered.”
“I can’t believe you thought I’d forget.” Sam backed toward the door, arms outstretched as if taking orders. “And something to eat? A slice of toast? A banana muffin or two? I could scramble you a couple fresh eggs.”
“A pear,” Harper demurred. “I would love one of your pears.”
“Don’t stop at one,” Sam laughed, and he disappeared into the house.
A few beats later, Adri said, “He’s giving us time alone.” She was holding a pear in her hand, and after studying it from every possible angle, she lobbed it to Harper.
Harper caught it, just barely. She wasn’t the athletic sort. And this strange, new Adri, this woman who was all clean lines and self-assurance, baffled Harper. But she just smiled and turned her eyes to the pear before she could blush or burst into tears or do something else mortifying. The pear was a masterpiece, all hues of pink and red. It was absolutely perfect. “Thanks,” Harper said.
“There’s more where that came from.”
“And where did you come from?” Harper asked, trying to regain some of the confidence she was so good at faking. “We were going to ask each other twenty questions or something like that. Remember? Your dad said Africa?”
“Yup. I’ve been there since . . .” She didn’t have to finish.
Since then. Or, almost.
“Wow,” Harper mused. “Where? What exactly are you doing?”
Adri raised an eyebrow at Harper. “I’m a nurse.”
“Well, I know that,” Harper blurted out. She remembered all too well the late-night study sessions and pretest hysteria. Her own English classes were nothing compared to the rigors of the nursing program.
Harper took a bite of the pear. It was ripe and juicy. She wiped her chin with the back of her hand and was grateful that Adri had turned away for a moment to toss an empty cardboard box over the porch rail behind her.
“West Africa,” Adri finally offered. And then it all tumbled out in a well-rehearsed monologue. “I’m the head nurse and medical care provider for a series of orphanages and churches. I hold monthly clinics and assist when emergencies arise. My home base is in the city, but I do a lot of traveling. I live in the bush a good portion of the year.”
It was almost inconceivable. Adri had wanted to travel, but David wasn’t the backpack Europe type of guy, and he certainly wasn’t into roughing it. The way Adri made it sound, she lived off the edge of the map, and Harper had a hard time reconciling the girl she had known with the woman who sat before her. The Adri she knew—the Adri who loved David and who was poised to be the perfect Galloway—would never live in the bush. Whatever that meant. Realizing that the silence had dragged on a bit too long, Harper made herself say, “That sounds really exciting.” And when Adri didn’t seem prepared to offer more, she asked, “How many people work with you?”
“One.”
“One?” Harper exclaimed around the pear she was chewing. “Sounds like a big job for two people.”
“I guess it is.”
Harper tried to understand why Adri was being so short, why she was more or less playing hard to get, when she was the one who had sent the email in the first place and set off the chain of events that included her quite literally running for her life. Harper experienced a quick, characteristic flare of anger, and nursed it until she found herself on familiar ground. She had woken up feeling off-kilter, but frustration helped. It was much easier to be proud when she had a chip on her shoulder.
“I guess you’re a regular Mother Teresa,” Harper said, pushing herself up from the rocking chair and going to lean on the porch railing. Adri would have to turn to see her now, and even if she did, Harper’s b
ack would be to her.
“Don’t be like that.” Adri gave a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry I’m making this harder than it needs to be. I just . . . I don’t know how to act.” Harper glanced over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of the old Adri. For just a moment she shone through, wide-eyed and curious, eager to please. But there was a wisdom in her eyes that made her look so much older than she was. Adri was right. This whole thing was way harder than Harper had imagined it would be.
Harper looked away. She wanted to be standoffish, but she couldn’t. It had been too long. She hadn’t known how she would feel about her former best friend, but seeing her face-to-face, hearing her voice even though she was acting like a jerk, was enough to put Harper over the edge. She still loved Adri as if she was bound to her by an unbreakable covenant. And in a way, Harper supposed, she was.
“I don’t know how to act either,” she said, not turning around. “This isn’t quite how I thought it would be.”
“What did you expect?” Adri asked.
“I don’t know. More hugging?”
“We were never huggers.” Adri rose and came to stand beside Harper. They both looked out over the farm, over the outbuildings and the pasture where Harper had caught her very first glimpse of Piperhall. Back then David had been nothing more than a dream, and there were many days afterward when Harper secretly wished he would have stayed that way. It was true that she sought him out. And, God help her, it was true that she loved him when it was the last thing that she ever should have done. But in moments of perceived clarity, times when she was just a shade from drunk, or maybe waking up in the morning, when her mind was as soft and malleable as clay, she realized that she had opened up Pandora’s box. Meeting David had been the beginning of the end.
“This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be,” Harper said, more to herself than anything. But Adri was at her shoulder and she gave a dry, little laugh. She didn’t sound bitter, just sad, and Harper had to stop herself from giving her old friend a one-armed hug. “So,” she said, taking a tiny bite of the pear. “Africa. Nursing. Anything else new and noteworthy? Is there a who?”
Adri paused.
“Are you married?” Harper breathed. She hadn’t thought to look for a ring. It hadn’t crossed her mind to imagine that Adri might have found love again. Weren’t they too broken for that?
“No,” Adri said, a split second too late. Her tell was a quick drumming of her fingers, and she did that now, playing an imaginary piano on the porch railing.
“Liar.” Harper hadn’t meant to say it, but it slipped out before she could stop herself.
Adri looked at her full-on, and Harper found herself peering back, searching for the girl she had known, deep inside her friend’s hazel eyes. She wasn’t there, but Adri was the first to smile, and there was something hopeful in the slant of her pretty mouth. “I’m not in love with him,” Adri said.
Harper’s heart brimmed. “But you could be?”
“No, I don’t think so. It’s just . . .”
The possibility. Just the possibility of something more was enough to undo Harper, and she could see that Adri was the same sort of wistful. She loved it that they had something in common.
Adri shook her head. “Enough about me. Your turn. Where have you been? What have you been doing? Are you writing?”
Writing? Harper’s appetite disappeared at the sudden reversal in conversation. She dropped the pear over the edge of the porch and watched it disappear, half-eaten, into the bushes. “No,” she managed. “I’m not writing.” Harper had almost forgotten that about herself, the volumes of poems, the raw explorations of her soul that compelled her to scrawl barely discernible hieroglyphics across a blank page. The way she could take a pen and make it bleed emotion she hadn’t even known she felt. There was one poem that she had burned over a candle in their apartment sink because she couldn’t discern who it was about: I love you, and I hate you for obvious reasons. It had been a very long time since she had picked up a pen.
“That’s too bad.” Adri ducked her head, admitted something with a shy smile. “I watched for you. Online, I mean. For a book contract or a volume of poetry. You never showed up.”
Harper screwed up her mouth as if to say, “You’re joking, right?” But Adri wasn’t joking, and there was a time when Harper had longed for exactly that. Had believed it could be true.
“So, no writing. What have you been doing? Where have you been?”
These were questions Harper couldn’t answer. So simple, and yet so very complicated. “Minneapolis,” she said, as if it didn’t matter at all. She stood up tall and stretched her arms up over her head, yawned to prove that she was bored with herself. There was no story here. “Lots of little jobs. I was a teacher’s aide in an ESL classroom.” True. “A secretary for about a day.” Also true. “A clerk in a used bookstore.” A lie, but a plausible one.
So many lies. And Adri believed them.
But there was something in the way Adri held herself that made Harper wonder just how much she did believe. Maybe the years had stripped it all away. Maybe time had bent the edges of all the pretty little lies that Harper had hung. Maybe the truth was one small act of violence away. A plunge over the side into the gaping hole between them.
A fall headlong.
18
After the pears were sorted and harper had chugged down not one but three cups of sam’s dark coffee, a sort of lull fell over the farm. It was sunday, a fact that harper had forgotten in the mayhem of the days leading up to her quaint breakfast on the porch, and a realization that made her feel downright terrible.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to Sam. “I know that you like to attend church on Sunday mornings. I must have messed that all up.”
“Nah,” Sam said, waving her apology away. “I spent a lot of time in prayer this morning. I had to watch Adri climb the pear trees.” He gave Harper a worried look and drew his finger across his throat to show her just how confident he was in Adri’s tree-climbing abilities.
“Please,” Adri scoffed. “I’ve been doing that since I was six.”
“You’ve been getting stuck in them since you were six,” Sam corrected.
“Whatever.”
“Either way, I’m sorry for disrupting your routine.” Harper’s guilt would not be assuaged.
“Bah.” Sam patted her on the arm. “Routines should be routinely disrupted. Keeps things interesting. But now, a little downtime before I have to milk this afternoon.”
“Thank you,” Harper said. “For everything.” She caught herself a split second before she made a complete idiot of herself by reaching out to cup the softening curve of Sam’s jaw. It was a startling impulse, but one championed by the deep and latent love she felt for the kind man before her. She forgot sometimes that he wasn’t actually family. Harper tucked her hands behind her back and turned to Adri. “You?” she asked. “What are you up to?”
“I have to make a call,” she said.
“Okay, I think I’ll grab a book off your shelf and read for a bit, if you don’t mind.” It was the first thing that popped into Harper’s mind, but she was surprised at how wonderful, how luxurious it sounded. A book. At her leisure. It was unheard of.
She followed Adri upstairs and closed herself in the bedroom across the hall. The little bookshelf was exactly where she knew it would be, and it still had the books Harper remembered: old Nancy Drew hardcovers, a few dime store paperbacks, and a collection of moldy classics that ranged from The Swiss Family Robinson to Wuthering Heights. She ran her fingers over the spines, but the choices overwhelmed her and she curled up on the bed instead.
Harper didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but the farmhouse was small and she really couldn’t help it that she overheard Adri on the phone with Caleb. Adri hadn’t told Harper her coworker’s name, or even that he was the second half of her medical missions duo, but it was easy enoug
h to piece together from the few lines that filtered across the narrow hallway. Harper imagined Adri sitting cross-legged on her bed, tracing the neat stitches of the patchwork quilt back and forth, her fingertip a tiny train that couldn’t jump the rails. Harper could picture her doing it, though the Adri she saw had skin so pale it was almost translucent, hair pulled back at the crown by a clip that was missing a rhinestone.
It was uncanny to hear Adri’s voice after all this time, and even more incomprehensible to know that she loved the man on the other end of the line. And it wasn’t David.
But maybe Harper was being melodramatic. She was prone to it, she knew, and she could be imagining the way Adri lengthened her words just a little, drawing them out as if she had to concentrate on each syllable or else they would tumble from her lips in a tangled thrill of emotion. Harper had seen Adri in love before. In fact, she had never known Adri not to be in love, and she caught the same lilt in her friend’s voice now. It made Harper want to run across the hall and jump on the bed to ply Adri for details.
Of course, she didn’t do that. She couldn’t.
Harper crossed her arms behind her head and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. But only minutes later, a knock on her bedroom door startled her, and she sat upright so quickly she felt dizzy. “Come in,” she called, much too loudly for the small space.
Adri opened the door a crack and considered Harper through a wedge that opened onto the hallway beyond. “I don’t know how to ask this . . .” she said, holding the edge of the door as if it were a lifeline.
“Ask away,” Harper assured her, breathless.
“I mean, it’s totally up to you.”
“Okay.”
“And I don’t want you to think that I have any expectations.”
“But?”
“But . . .” Adri paused. “How long do you plan to stay?”
Harper almost laughed. Adri’s buildup had prepared her for a much more weighty question. But then, just as quickly as she relaxed, a tide of fear swept over her and she realized that it was one of the most baffling questions Adri could possibly have posed. Harper had no idea how long she planned to stay. Or where she would go when she left. And no idea whether she would leave on her own two feet, or if Sawyer would come knocking one day and drag her back.