Authors: Bridie Hall
She laughed. “You don’t give up, do you?”
“Nope.”
“God,
Harper ...”
“What?”
“What will I do with you?”
“I
could tell you what I’d want you to do with me.” He wiggled his eyebrows and Isabelle rolled her eyes at him. She refused to say anything more because anything she said would give him more material to use against her.
****
When twenty minutes later the traffic report announced that the road ahead was closed because of a road tanker spilling gas, Harper asked, “What was the next exit?”
They’d just passed a road sign for it.
“Ashburn, I think. But I’m not sure.” Isabelle was relying on Harper paying attention to the road, so she’d only glimpsed at the sign as they passed it.
“We’ll exit the highway there,” he said, entering
the name in his iPhone.
“Maybe we should wait for the road to open,”
Isabelle suggested when the traffic ahead slowed down. She didn’t feel like going off the highway. Taking the local roads could take them longer than waiting right where they were. Changing plans so suddenly was never good. It made her nervous when things didn’t go according to plan. Besides, the sky was turning darker, there were more heavy clouds to the east and they were flowing their way. The soft rain that had started in the morning and still didn’t let up was one thing, but a storm could mean more delay.
“It could take hours. There are hundreds of gallons of that stuff all over the road. It’ll take ages to clean it.”
“But it could take us hours to get home if we do such a long detour. I still think we should wait.”
“Come on, at least we’ll be driving.
Besides, we’ll exit the highway only a few dozen miles earlier than planned, anyway. Sitting here and waiting is no fun. Unless you have something else in mind.”
Isabelle
huffed, annoyed, and he laughed.
“
If that storm catches us, it’ll slow us down even more,” she insisted.
He
looked at the approaching clouds as he turned the indicator on to drive onto the exit ramp. “A bit of rain never hurt anyone.”
“You say that now.”
“Are you suggesting I’m afraid of storms?” he teased her. With his smiling voice resounding in her ears it was much harder to be annoyed.
“What
are
you afraid of?”
“Hm.”
She didn’t know whether he was thinking about it or just stalling.
“Nothing much scares me.”
“Everyone’s afraid of something,” she protested.
“Maybe, but I’m not everyone.”
“You’d be no fun at playing truth or dare,” she wrinkled her nose. “You dare everything and you never tell the truth.”
“While
I must say the first one is damn near true, I will have you know that the second isn’t, Miss Isabelle.”
“Prove it.”
“Let’s not forget that you still have to share a dark secret of your own, Isabelle. I told you about Mom last night, so …”
She’d been hoping he forgot that, but apparently he hadn’t.
“I don’t have dark secrets.”
“
Everyone has dark secrets,” he mimicked her voice from earlier when she said everyone was afraid of something.
“
No, we don’t. But you’ve got to be afraid of something, admit it,” she teased him, at the same time avoiding answering his provocation.
He
was silent as they drove into Ashburn. He was looking for road signs until he found the one pointing in the right direction. He turned, cutting off a woman on a bicycle struggling with a large umbrella. Isabelle watched horrified as the woman gesticulated angrily in the rear-view mirror. Isabelle shook her head.
Despite
it being barely noon, Isabelle rubbed her tired eyes. The time zone change was still messing with her. She tried moving in the seat to relieve the stiffness in her muscles from sitting in the car so long.
But it wasn’t
just her body that was tense. She kept thinking about why Jamie had refused to tell her about his mom leaving them and dad treating Harper like a criminal. She thought he trusted her. She told him about her mother dying and about how Dad seemed to be living on a different planet. He sympathized with her but never mentioned his father being such a dick.
She marvel
ed at how things had changed between Harper and her over the past twenty-four hours. In the months that he’d spent at Jamie’s, she’d come to know him and although she though he was often an obnoxious jerk, she also learned that he was fun to be around. Although his relationship with his younger brother was strained most of the time, he acted like a protective older brother when needed. There was a dichotomy to him, in every aspect of his personality. He joked and loved to have fun, but it turned out that he was much more familiar with sadness than she’d thought. He could be the biggest jerk she knew, but he brought her a toothbrush in the morning without her asking for it. He had lost his way in his teens, but he could joke about it now. There were so many surprising things about him that she’d discovered on this trip. Things that made her see him differently. And not in an unfavorable way. This made her happy and worried at the same time. She didn’t know any more how to react to him. She was beginning to like him in a way she had never imagined possible.
When she looked at him now, she discovered a
sort of duality even in his looks. He seemed strong and yet his features when she glanced at him were almost delicate. High forehead and cheekbones, a straight nose and pouting lips.
“What?” he asked, catching her
gaze. She looked away.
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you staring?”
She th
ought about whether she should stay quiet. But this ride had been so full of unexpected revelations and surprises that it made sense to tell him. To trust him.
“I think I understand now why you’re not happy,” she said after a moment.
“Do you, now?” He looked at her with a mocking expression, but that didn’t deter her. She was talking to Harper, after all.
“You’ve had a lot of crap happen to you. It makes sense.”
“It didn’t happen, I caused most of it.”
“Still, your m
om left. Dad’s been anything but supportive. You and Jamie are at odds.”
“Yeah, well.”
She thought he’d go on but he fell silent, so she said, “When Mom died, I thought I could never be happy again. I cried a lot, every little thing set me off. When something like that happens, a part of you goes missing and you keep wondering, even years later, ‘how could I ever be the same again without that vital part?’ And you’re not.” Isabelle looked at him. “But that’s okay. Because how much you miss them is who you are. The change in you is part of who you are.”
She remembered how she’d never seen Dad cry, not even at the funeral. It didn’t make sense to her. Why wouldn’t he cry? Didn’t he love M
om? All sorts of questions swirled in her six-year-old mind. Until one day, she’d overheard him talking to his sister on the phone.
“If I let go, Corrie, she’s got no one anymore,” he’d said, his voice
contrasting his words by breaking, the last word being half swallowed by grief.
He may be absent and distracted, but in his heart
, he was a better father than most fathers she knew, Isabelle thought.
“You miss her a lot?”
Harper said and it sounded like a statement, not a question. She found sympathy in his eyes. Dark and soft and consuming.
“Every day,” she nodded. “You?”
He shrugged. “It’s different when someone deserts you.”
“That makes it worse, doesn’t it?”
“I probably miss more the idea of a mother than the actual person. I was five when she left, so I don’t even remember much about her.”
Again, they fell silent. For a second
Isabelle missed those first few hours of their trip with the bantering and Harper’s jibes and teasing and the smirks. Their conversation veered off into darker and darker themes this morning. It was becoming depressing. But she loved that it made her appreciate him so much more. There was a side to him that she hadn’t known before, a sensitive core that was usually hidden under leather jackets and crass jokes.
“Sometimes ...”
Harper started and then stopped.
When he didn’t seem to have any intention
of continuing, she asked, “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
He
glanced at her and then returned his eyes to the road.
He shook his he
ad. “It’s just that sometimes, I wish Mom was dead, too. It’s a horrible thing to say. But at least that way you know they didn’t have a choice, you know? My mom had a choice and she chose to abandon us. Maybe she has a new life somewhere, maybe she is dead, for all I know, but you always wonder, you know? Maybe if she stayed, things would have been better. Maybe not. I don’t know.”
His eyes met hers in an almost apologetic gaze.
It made sense, what he said, Isabelle thought. Her heart ached for that little boy of five who had to fend for himself because all the adults in their selfishness forgot that he existed. She ached for this grown-up who was afraid of being alone, but also of letting anyone close.
She covered his hand on the steering whe
el with hers. “I know.” His skin was warm. His thumb caressed her finger, slowly, gently. He glanced at her and he looked ... different. Something about him changed, or maybe something in her changed and she saw him differently.
Before she knew it, her fingers were entwined with his. She knew he was aski
ng her a question with his warm, gentle hand, but she couldn’t answer. She pulled her hand away and lowered her eyes to her lap. They drove on in silence.
Half an hour later, the dark clouds were right above them.
Isabelle watched them worriedly.
“We should get something to eat,”
Harper said and slowed down to stop at a gas station.
“I think it’ll start pouring any second now,”
Isabelle warned.
Harper
checked the sky. “Nah, we’ve got fifteen minutes at least. We can get some sandwiches and eat them in the car.”
“If you say so.”
They got out and Harper set off towards the low building.
“Can you get me the same as for yourself? I’ll stretch my legs,”
Isabelle said. She wanted to take the advantage of the short stop. Once it started pouring, it wouldn’t stop till they got home and they still had about an hour and a half of driving ahead of them.
She rounded the building,
staying under the jutting roof of the station. Surprised, she discovered a small bench on the side of the building. It was turned towards the dark woods that started a couple of hundred yards away. There was a narrow roof above the bench to keep it protected from the elements. The scene resembled an Edward Hopper painting. Forlorn, inexplicably touching, a place where she could envision deep conversations happening between total strangers or where extraordinary things could be found in the most unusual places.
When
Harper exited the station, she called to him.
“Hey, we can eat back here.”
He raised his eyebrows and followed her. “Shouldn’t we return to the car? If it starts pouring we’ll get soaked,” he said. There was no roof between where he’d parked the car and the station. They’d have to cross twenty yards unprotected from the rain to get to it.
“Not so brave anymore, are you?”
Isabelle teased. “Relax. You were right, we still have some time,” she said, looking at the sky and the clouds that looked as if they were chasing their own shadows.
Harper
shrugged and handed her a sandwich and a bottle of water.
“It was either that or
Mountain Dew.”
“Water’s great,” she said. “Thanks.”
She sat on the bench and Harper joined her. They ate in silence for the first few minutes, until Harper said, “If it weren’t for the smell of gas, this could be idyllic.”
Isabelle
chuckled. “You
are
romantic.”
“Of course. Did you ever doubt it?”
Isabelle looked at him, finishing her sandwich. “Yes, I did. Until this morning.”
“This morning?”
At that instant, it started raining.
“Oh my god,
” Isabelle exclaimed, startled by the sudden downpour.
Harper
looked alarmed, then he started laughing.
“It’s not funny,”
Isabelle said, swatting his arm. “We can’t even get to the car now.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll wait it out. It can
’t rain this heavily for an hour.”
“Let’s hope you’re right this time.”
“Hey, it was your idea to eat here.”