The Beautiful Daughters

by Nicole Baart

  “Nah. I’m a soccer player.” Harper raised a shoulder as if it was obvious. She certainly had the body for it.

  But Adri found out later that Harper wasn’t on the soccer team. Or even a recreational player. She had left home early, sick of summer and sicker of her parents, and figured no one would bother her if she showed up and acted like she was exactly where she was supposed to be. She was right.

  “Where you from?” Will asked, trying to be offhand and failing miserably. Adri exchanged a look with Jackson, but he seemed more amused than annoyed.

  “DC.” Harper pressed her cuticles back with a long, painted fingernail the color of green apples.

  “How’d you end up here?”

  “It was the farthest place from home I got an acceptance letter from.”

  “That bad?” Will asked, the slant of his mouth sympathetic. As if he knew what it was like to be so sick of his dad he was willing to fly across the country with no backup plan.

  The truth was, Adri and Will had been raised on a small dairy farm, more of an acreage than an actual farm, really, in a corner of the country where one couldn’t claim the distinction of “farmer” unless he boasted a couple thousand acres and a combine worth half a million dollars. But Sam Vogt didn’t mind that he was a bit of a joke. He was a hippie, a gentle soul who sang to his chickens when he butchered them and taught his children to love little things. Snow peas in June, a warm bath, fresh-baked bread with honey straight from the comb. Adrienne and William grew up without television or Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, and knew a life so sweet and tranquil that the world beyond the borders of their little homestead, Maple Acres, seemed shrill and explosive.

  “They’re philosophy professors,” Harper said, making her parents’ profession sound like a synonym for ax murderer. “They’ve crammed John Locke and his ilk down my throat from the moment I slipped from the womb.” She laughed at herself or at them, Adri couldn’t tell.

  “John Locke?” Adri didn’t realize that she said the name out loud until Harper fixed her with those mossy eyes.

  “And you thought John Locke was just that bald guy on Lost.”

  It was true. Adri had no idea who John Locke was until Harper explained much later—the famous philosopher and the TV series character—but far more unnerving than her own utter naïveté was the sudden shocking realization that a creature like Harper Penny could exist. She was fierce and bright and attractive in a decidedly handsome way—all angles and lines and broad shoulders that were both beautiful and somehow masculine. With the body of an athlete, the mind of a scholar, and the tongue of a politician, Harper was a force to be reckoned with. And a surprisingly new breed of femininity that Adri couldn’t quite get her head around.

  Women were a bit novel to Adri. Her mother had died after a short battle with breast cancer when the twins were four, and Adri had a single, precious memory of her. A memory that she couldn’t even be sure was real, but that she buried like treasure all the same. She dug it up from time to time—this moment of such inconsequence, a woman’s hands in her hair, plaiting the earth-colored waves so gently that Adri’s lids fell heavy—and savored it. It made her eyes sting hot every time.

  Adri didn’t understand women. They were bright pieces of a dozen different puzzles. She tried to fit them together, to make some sense of womanhood and the mother she had only briefly known, but it was no use. There was no pinning them down. But that didn’t stop her from loving them in secret. From watching and waiting and gathering fragments of the feminine that she admired and respected and weaving them into the fabric of herself. Adri loved pretty things. Mild, peaceful, gentle things. Until Harper.

  “You’re like a little fairy,” Harper told her after they had been friends for less than a month. “You’re so damn cute and sweet. If I didn’t love you so much I’d have to hate you.”

  “Did you just call me a fairy?” Adri tried to sound disgusted. It wasn’t her fault that she had perfectly pointed ears, porcelain skin, wrists so narrow she couldn’t wear bracelets because they slipped off. She wasn’t tiny by any means, but because Harper was Harper, their differences were markedly exaggerated. Adri was lovely and exotic and small. Quiet and bookish and good. And Harper was her counterpart.

  “A princess? You could be my little princess.” Harper narrowed her eyes at Adri and rubbed her chin as if considering the possibilities.

  “Your princess?”

  But of course she was Harper’s princess. Or Fairy or ­Adri-Girl or Peanut or Her Highness; the Honorable Queen Adrienne when Harper had had too much to drink. Harper was not just the center of her own universe, she liked to be the center of Adri’s too.

  Adri didn’t mind. Usually.

  And she didn’t mind that Harper had adopted them all, her and Will and Jackson, and made them her own. Adri loved how Harper made her feel: brave and brilliant and glittering, as if she was more than the sum of her agonizingly ordinary parts. As if she was waking up, memories sparking like fireflies at dusk, and she hadn’t even known she was asleep.

  “You coming?”

  The blond girl was several paces ahead of her, hands on hips like Adri had failed her somehow.

  “Yes,” Adri sputtered, staggering into the present as a commuter clipped her shoulder. She forced herself to focus on the terminal, on the backpack that was so heavy her neck was starting to ache. Memories had anchored her to the ground. Adri hadn’t even realized that she had stopped in the middle of the crowd, forcing travelers to veer past her, clogging up the already congested space. “Sorry about that,” she called.

  But the girl had already turned away. Adri had no choice but to follow.

  4

  Adri had forgotten about autumn.

  The kaleidoscope of colors, the warm brushstrokes of copper trees along the river, flaming against yellowed fields and a ribbon of dark water beneath the wheels of the plane as it banked and came in for a landing. It was so different from the hazy blur of monochrome green she had left behind, so bright and unexpected that she spent the last few minutes of the flight from JFK to Sioux Falls Regional Airport with her nose pressed to the window, fogging the scratched, acrylic surface. Below her, the world was on fire, and Adri with it.

  She hadn’t checked any luggage, so after shouldering her backpack and collecting her carry-on from the jet bridge, there was nothing for her to do but face her father.

  Adri wasn’t nervous. She was terrified.

  Although she had rehearsed a dozen different apologies, heartfelt pleas of forgiveness for everything from not phoning enough to shutting him out all those years ago, Adri couldn’t think of a single suitable thing to say to her dad. They had always had a fantastic relationship, all the way through college and even after David asked her to marry him and she said yes. It was obvious that Sam Vogt never believed that David Galloway was the right man for his daughter, but he acted happy for them anyway, and even gave David his late wife’s wedding ring to pass on to Adri. But after the accident, when the lawyers came calling and tipped her world upside down, she simply couldn’t face her dad. It was as if a steel door had slammed between them, and Adri wasn’t sure that she wanted it to open. How could she possibly face him after all that had happened?

  Everyone wanted the truth, but she didn’t even know what the truth was. That didn’t stop them from asking again and again, from making her repeat those final minutes and hours until the memories blurred together in her mind and on her tongue, and she didn’t know if she was telling them what really happened or what they had together made up. A paint-by-numbers masterpiece of who and what and when and where and why. Why? But who could possibly answer that?

  Through it all, Sam never questioned Adri’s story, never demanded an accounting for things she couldn’t begin to explain. And when she ran away, her dad let her go. It was probably the most selfless act of love she had ever experienced. She couldn’t repay him for it.
Worst of all, she couldn’t ask forgiveness for the things that mattered most.

  Sam wasn’t in the little waiting room just beyond security, but as Adri rode the escalator to the ground floor of the Sioux Falls Regional Airport, he came slowly into view. First his ratty cowboy boots. Gray and crisscrossed with deep scratches that scarred the leather black. Then faded jeans, a belt with a John Deere buckle, a plaid shirt tucked in neatly over his flat stomach. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, and his forearms were ropy and muscled, tan from long hours in the sun. He was wearing a Dekalb baseball cap, but as Adri caught his eye he slipped it from his head and twisted it in his hands, working the bill as if it was brand-new instead of falling apart at the seams.

  Sam’s hair was still dark, but thinner on the top than Adri remembered, and his temples were more salt than pepper. He was clean-shaven, and yet even from a distance she could see that there was no five-o’clock shadow—his beard, if he chose to grow one like he had when she was a child, would be white. When had he aged? When had the middle-aged handyman she remembered crossed the fine line from the prime of his life to what she could plainly see were the golden years? For he seemed golden to Adri. Indistinct as a dream. So soft around the edges that she didn’t dare blink for fear he’d disappear.

  But before she could grieve the years she had lost, Sam took a few hurried steps and swept Adri into his arms. As her toes skimmed the ground, she wondered how she could have imagined, even for a moment, that her father was on the brink of retirement. He was as fit as ever. Wiry and strong as the young man who had carried her on one shoulder and Will on the other. “Look at you,” he said against her hair, though of course, he wasn’t looking at her at all. “Just look at you.”

  She could have said the same thing. And honestly, there wasn’t much else they could say. How to make up for lost time? How to reconcile the two halves of her life? The woman she had been with the woman she was?

  That seemed to work well for Sam Vogt. He was a man of few words. But when he backed away and cupped Adri’s face, everything that she needed to know was contained in his eyes. It didn’t matter to him what had happened or why. It didn’t matter how far she ran or how hard she tried to shut him, and everyone else, out. She was still his little girl. And she was home.

  “Thank you,” Adri said, though she wasn’t entirely sure what she was thankful for. A hundred little things. Everything.

  Her father just nodded and reached for her backpack.

  Adri relinquished her pack and carry-on, and the two walked out of the airport and into the cool sparkle of a perfect fall day. The sky was sharp and blue, the sun glittering white. It felt fierce to Adri, the clean zest of the air was strangely intimate as it grazed her skin and raised goose bumps. She shivered.

  “Are you cold?” Sam smiled at her, but his words were flecked with concern. “It’s almost seventy degrees, sweetheart.”

  “That cold?”

  Sam laughed. “Guess that’s cold to you.”

  “The kids wear sweatshirts when the temperature drops to eighty-five,” Adri said. “They huddle under blankets and complain about how they’re freezing to death.”

  “I have a jacket in the truck,” Sam told her. “You want to run?”

  They jogged across the parking lot, and when Adri caught sight of her father’s battered pickup truck, she was as surprised to see it as she was to realize that Beckett was still alive. He was lounging with his head on the open tailgate in the bed of the truck, watching them come with what Adri interpreted to be a look of warm but tired welcome.

  “Beckett!” She tore up the final yards at a sprint, and was rewarded for her efforts when the ancient Great Dane rose carefully on his front paws and greeted her with a sloppy kiss. Resting on the tailgate, he towered over her, but Adri didn’t mind. He was at perfect hugging height, and when she wrapped her arms around his chest he seemed to tremble with contentment.

  “How old is he?” Adri asked, roughing Beckett’s brindle neck and tugging his ears as her father hoisted her carry-on and backpack into the bed of the truck.

  Sam rested his arms on the pickup and took stock of his daughter, his dog. “Nine? You and Will bought him for me your first year of college.”

  “For Christmas.” Adri smiled.

  “So I wouldn’t be alone.”

  “We put him in a box and tied it with a red ribbon.”

  Sam laughed. “And Beckett ate the box.”

  “Not entirely. He chewed on it a bit.” Adri massaged the dog’s great, floppy ears as he settled down again in the truck. Her father had never had the heart to dock them, and Beckett’s favorite form of affection was a lengthy ear rub. She loved indulging him. “I can’t believe he’s still around. I thought Danes weren’t supposed to live very long.”

  “He has hyperthyroidism, but we’ve got pills for that.” Sam shrugged. “He won’t make it much longer, but we’ve had a good run. Beckett’s a good boy.”

  Adri pressed her cheek against the dog’s head and stifled a shiver. She hadn’t cried for Victoria, or about leaving Africa and the impossible situation with Caleb. But she felt like she might cry over Beckett, even though she had assumed that he was long buried in the grove behind the machine shed.

  “The jacket,” her father said, snapping his fingers. He swung open the door of the truck and grabbed a gravel-colored Carhartt coat off the bench. Walking around the bed, he settled it over Adri’s shoulders. “Better?”

  She swallowed hard and nodded, suddenly shy. It was unnerving to be here. She felt disoriented and confused, like she was masquerading as a girl she only barely knew. And yet this place was home, the lift of the breeze familiar. Her father was almost exactly as she remembered him. Even Beckett still cocked his head at her like her was listening to her thoughts. She grabbed his muzzle and shook her head, willing him to know that she was not the same Adrienne, the person he thought he knew. But as his whiskers prickled against her palms, Beckett seemed to regard her with bland forbearance, as if he knew better than her how far life had dragged her from home. From herself.

  Adri pursed her lips and nudged Beckett off the open tailgate. Swinging it shut, she turned to her dad. “Ready?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  They drifted home, each long stretch of road splitting golden fields like the clean cut of a knife. Sam was a deliberate man, careful in everything he did from shaving to driving. The speedometer floated at an even fifty-five, and he kept his window rolled down just enough to slip his hand above the glass and rest it on the top of the pickup as if anchoring the vehicle to the road. Adri was cold, but it was a faraway feeling, an afterthought in the hulking shadow of the almost visceral reaction she felt to the world around her.

  When Sam turned down the road that led into the heart of Blackhawk instead of bypassing the town on the way to the farm, Adri didn’t complain. He was giving her a tour of sorts, reacquainting his daughter with the place she had called home for the first twenty-one years of her life. It was a bittersweet walk down memory lane.

  Blackhawk was a postage stamp of a town, an orderly map of neat streets cutting north and south, east and west. The buildings along Main Street were a hundred years old, stately and restored, almost too pretty for the mundane trades they housed: a flower and gift shop, a small stationery store, a salon called La Rue. And then they were through the heart of the quaint municipality, driving slowly through the scalloped edge of town, where the houses were bigger and the lots sprawling. The hills began to rise toward the east, and on the top of the bluffs the redbrick buildings of Anderson Thomas University stood tall and imposing among the trees. To the west was the road home.

  Iowa in September was a Willa Cather novel, windswept by the longing and loss of My Ántonia, rich with the bittersweet anthology of the untold stories of poet farmers. Adri had always known that people who work the earth have a certain eternity written
on their hearts, an understanding that the ground beneath their feet bears much more than the simple drudgery of a crop that can be measured and valued by an elevator in the nearest town. Her father was one such daydreamer, the kind of man who spoke volumes in silences and heard God whisper in the song of distant stars keeping watch over the land that he plowed.

  Even Harper, who had grown up in the city all her life, saw the complex hues of a life lived in rhythm with the land, the very first time she visited the Vogt farm. It was less than a month after classes had started at ATU. Harper had been nagging Adri to take her home—it was just on the other side of Blackhawk, after all—but Adri had demurred. She was afraid that showing Harper where she had come from would somehow tip the balance of their unlikely friendship. What if Harper realized she was a country mouse from a shabby farm with none of the sparkle that Harper seemed to see in her?

  But Harper seemed utterly charmed. “It’s an upside-down fairy tale,” she said, rubbing the smooth curve of the porch banister with an absent, almost awe-filled motion. “It’s beautiful, but somehow premonitory.”

  Harper was given to such melodramatic proclamations, and Adri didn’t flinch. Nor did she tell Harper that her father had turned each spindle of the porch on a lathe in the shed behind the milking parlor. It was a detail too rich and provincial to be believed. “It’s not a fairy tale, upside down or right side up. It’s a farm.” She pushed herself up from the porch steps and took off in the direction of the pasture.

  Harper jogged to catch up. “Oh, I know. But it’s so dissonantly idyllic. I always assumed rural life was harsh and unsentimental, peopled with women wrinkled before their time and men who were downright . . .” she gestured toward the holding pen where Adri’s father was getting ready for the afternoon milking, “bovine.”