The Beautiful Daughters

by Nicole Baart

  Bard was pacing his stall, his restless energy ricocheting off the walls and making the air inside the dusty building feel malevolent. Alive. Adri’s hands shook as she tacked him up, but Bard stayed remarkably still in spite of her clumsy ministrations. It was almost as if he could sense her angst. More likely, he knew what the bridle meant—he could run, and that’s exactly what he wanted to do.

  It was what Adri wanted, too. To run so fast she flew. Or fell. In the moment she swung herself into the saddle, it didn’t matter how the ride ended. She just wanted it to end.

  Adri swept through the house in her understated charcoal dress. Her dark hair was in a neat chignon; her makeup was perfect. And the memorial had been perfect, too. A tasteful mix of bitter and sweet, melancholy and hopeful, though Adri wasn’t feeling very hopeful at all.

  Her father had read “If,” and her heart twisted on the lines that Victoria had chosen: “If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken / twisted . . . Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, / And stoop to build them up with worn-out tools . . .”

  And she wondered if they had been picked expressly for her. Adri’s heart changed the final phrase (“You’ll be a woman, my daughter!”) and knew that in her own inexplicable way Victoria had meant it for all of them. An anthem that allowed for all the broken promises and all the ways that they had tried. Failed, but tried.

  People wandered Piperhall like it was an open house, and in a way, Adri supposed, it was. Maybe one of the guests would remember the summer picnics, be gripped with nostalgia, and approach her with a purchase price. She hoped that would be the case. And yet, there was a part of her that dreaded it, too. For, as much as she longed to be rid of the burden that was the home that housed her memories and her former dreams, at the moment of letting go she found that her fingers held fast.

  “It’s beautiful. All of it. You’ve done a remarkable job.”

  Adri turned to see Mrs. Holt dressed in a cream tailored suit, a fluted glass of wine raised in a toast. To her? “Thank you,” she said. “It was nothing.”

  “Certainly not nothing,” Katherine disagreed. “Piperhall hasn’t looked this good in years.”

  “Agreed.” Clay caught Adri’s elbow from behind and brushed a light kiss against her cheek. Reaching out to Mrs. Holt, he took her hand and pressed his lips briefly to her wrist. “The only things that outshine the floor are the lovely ladies before me.”

  Katherine gave Clay a censorious look and drew back her hand, but Adri could tell it was lighthearted. She hadn’t realized that her lawyer and David’s former tutor knew each other, but then, it seemed everyone in Blackhawk was acquainted.

  “Victoria would have been pleased,” Katherine said, diverting attention back to the memorial. “Very pleased.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Adri sighed, and found herself blinking back unexpected tears. It was beautiful—the mansion, Victoria’s legacy, the evening itself—but it was a fractured kind of beauty, and no amount of cleaning or waxing or maintenance could repair what she longed to fix. If Clay and Mrs. Holt noticed her sudden emotion, they were kind enough not to comment, and before she could be drawn into unwanted conversations about the past or the future of the estate, Adri quietly excused herself.

  When dusk settled over the estate, Will lit the gardenia candles that were scattered throughout the mansion. Though Victoria’s only real family—the intimidating James Galloway and his equally impressive wife—had left almost immediately after the service, many people were still wandering around, taking in the majesty of the place as if they couldn’t get enough. They lapped it up, nibbling on petits fours and thin slices of cucumber soaked in lime juice and sprinkled with sesame seeds and some herb that Adri couldn’t place. There were still bottles of wine to open, and though they had all just mourned the loss and commemorated the life of a pillar in their community, there was a definite celebratory vibe in the air. Adri didn’t quite know what to do with it.

  Wandering outside to the loggia, she leaned with her forearms on the stone railing. It was a cool autumn night, but for once Adri didn’t feel the cold. She closed her eyes for a moment and allowed herself the luxury of a dream, a moment inhabited by the life she should have had, a life with David and the airy wishes that she had held for herself in the days before she realized that they would never be quite the people they were supposed to be.

  Maybe he would come up behind her, settle a sweater over her shoulders, and pull her close. Better yet, his suit coat. Arms around her waist, mouth against her temple. He’d tell her how beautiful she looked. How lovely the night, in spite of the sad slant of the occasion, the woman that they loved in their own fumbling ways and would always miss. They’d talk about Victoria, and for just a heartbeat Adri caught the faintest glimpse of the mother she could have had. The life she imagined for herself wasn’t a flawless world—so very far from it—but Adri’s heart rose all the same.

  And then a breeze lifted and the night grazed her arm. She wrapped her arms around herself, painfully aware that David would never walk through the doors behind her. And equally grateful that he wouldn’t.

  Maybe she was drunk. Adri had lost track of how many glasses of wine she had consumed. She wasn’t the sort to take it too far, but she felt tipsy as she clung to the edge of the grand porch and watched the shadows that flirted with the dozens of gleaming cars in the makeshift parking lot of the circular drive.

  The night was utterly dark and still, the memorial going strong behind her. Adri was utterly alone in the dark. Alone with her memories and regrets. But as she stared into the blackness, a car came down the winding drive. The headlights were thin and indistinct in the distance, and Adri blinked several times to clear her foggy head of the vision that played tricks on her eyes. The light didn’t dissipate.

  Adri watched as the car came, an expensive SUV with tinted windows and a pitted paint job, as if the vehicle had been left out in a hailstorm. She could see it clear as a stop-frame movie as it crawled around the circle, and she marveled at the unexpectedness of such a late guest. The South Dakota license plate. At the way this sorry visitor had arrived hours too late.

  Something inside her stirred.

  The car rounded the corner and came to a stop almost directly below Adri. She watched as the back door opened.

  It was a woman, tall and leggy, dressed in a short, black skirt and a grey hoodie sweatshirt zipped up to her chin. Her hair was yellow in the lamplight, loose around her shoulders and so long it fell halfway down her narrow back. She wasn’t wearing any shoes.

  Adri almost called to her, almost alerted the stranger to her presence and offered directions to wherever she was going. But then the woman pulled back her hair with one hand and ponytailed it at the base of her neck in a gesture so familiar it made Adri feel as if she was being hollowed out. One movement and she was undone, her very heart carved out of her chest, and in its place there was a void that echoed with a thousand might have beens.

  When the woman turned her face up, her name was on Adri’s lips.

  Harper.

  PART III

  HARPER

  16

  Harper was barefoot, and she hated that.

  She couldn’t complain, though, not really, because angels had saved her the night before, and who could argue with the fickle grace of God? She had felt a strong, benign presence with her, leading her to a hidden entrance to the church that would allow her to escape the night and the men who pursued her. And another angel must have stood guard at the gate, for how else could she explain the fact that one moment Sawyer was at her heels and the next he was gone? Harper had crouched in the vast darkness of the cathedral for hours, and when something inside her said, Now, she slipped back into the night and ran, stumbling all the way, to the address she had unintentionally memorized so many months ago.

  It was a different man who helped her—not the same guy from the
Fringe Festival who had taken one look at Harper and plumbed her darkest secret—but he had a kind face, and she liked the soft curls of his short, hippie ponytail.

  “We can get you anywhere you want to go,” he told her, his eyes rich with concern. “Where will you be safe?”

  Harper didn’t feel safe anywhere, not really, but Adri had told her: Wish you were here. So Harper went back.

  The Bridge bought Harper a ticket on the Jefferson Lines bus that left Minneapolis at a quarter to noon on Saturday and was scheduled to arrive in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at 6:10 p.m. Harper had to swallow her pride to allow the purchase, but she didn’t have a choice. She had no money, no wallet. She didn’t even have the little clutch Sawyer sometimes allowed her to carry in case she needed lipstick or a tampon.

  The bus was an hour late, and when Harper finally peeled herself out of her seat, she felt like she had been traveling forever instead of only half a day. She was stiff and disoriented, disappointed to emerge from the stinky, run-down bus and find herself in the creepiest depot she had ever seen. Not that Harper had seen many bus depots.

  There was a woman who was supposed to pick her up, a friend of The Bridge who liked to do what she could, and the arrangement put Harper in mind of the underground railroad. A cab ride, a bus ride, a stranger in a strange car. It was almost disconcerting how well the imagery fit. Harper was on her way to a freedom of sorts, and she had escaped a situation that felt like someone else’s horror story. It was all so blurry and surreal. In fact, Harper couldn’t even bring herself to think about Sawyer and the night before. Or, even more troubling, what he would be doing today.

  While she waited on a bench in the depot for the next conductor to pick her up and transport her the final leg of her journey, Harper fought the familiar, almost irrepressible urge to run. She had escaped, but she didn’t want to stop, not even for a minute. She wasn’t safe yet. Maybe she never would be.

  She was cold, though one of the volunteers at The Bridge had given her a sweatshirt from the little storage room in their offices that was set up like a mini Goodwill store. He had also found her a pair of shoes, but the only ones in her size were plaid Skechers slip-ons lined with faux fur. They looked simply divine with her cocktail dress and the heather-gray sweatshirt. Stretching out her legs before her as she sat in the dumpy bus depot, Harper decided she looked exactly like a homeless person. The thought made her smile.

  “I like your shoes.”

  The girl was sitting a few feet down from Harper. Her skin was the gorgeous shade of coffee with cream, and while she was startlingly pretty, her eyes were thin and guarded.

  “Thanks.” Harper smiled. She intended to leave it at that, but there was something about the girl that plucked a note inside her soul. It was an odd offering, but Harper didn’t stop to think. She just slipped off the shoes and handed them to the girl. “You may have them.”

  Harper was almost grateful that she didn’t get to see the girl’s reaction, because at that moment a forty-something soccer mom with a razor-edge bob and chandelier earrings approached her with a 100-watt smile. “You must be Harper.”

  She crawled into the backseat of the SUV and slept the rest of the way to Blackhawk.

  Just over an hour later, Harper emerged in the middle of what looked to be a party.

  The circular drive in front of the mansion was full of cars. They were spilling out onto the lawns, parked at odd angles all down the long road that was lined with old trees. And the house itself was resplendent with light, casting cheerful shadows on the brown grass like pools of bright water where sunshine danced.

  Harper was seized with dismay. She wanted to keep driving and never come back. What had she been thinking? She couldn’t just show up at the Galloway mansion and expect a warm reception. Email or no, she wasn’t welcome here. It would have been easier, maybe, to knock on the door at Maple Acres. Sam had always acted like a father to her. Or she could have wandered the ATU campus. But Adri’s email had said, I came back. And that could only mean one thing: here.

  Harper stepped out of the SUV because she didn’t know what else to do. The woman who had taken her this far, Carol, she believed, had parked the vehicle at the base of the sweeping double staircase and enthusiastically announced, “We’re here!”

  Harper didn’t even remember that she was shoeless until she opened the door and slid to the ground, where gravel bit into the sensitive pads of her feet and yanked her into a reality that left her breathless. And terrified.

  What if Adri hadn’t meant what she wrote? What if she didn’t wish that Harper had come at all? Or worse, what if she changed her mind when she saw the woman that her best friend had become?

  Fear anchored Harper to the ground. She couldn’t get back in the SUV. Carol was already wishing her a good night, a friendly smile conveying that she hoped Harper’s homecoming would be a warm one. And the party was before her, the windows filled with silhouettes and the mansion itself thick with all the memories that she had tried so hard to forget.

  But Harper didn’t have time to entertain dread. In the moment she lifted her face toward the loggia and the doors just beyond, she realized that there was someone on the terrace.

  “Harper?”

  Her voice was familiar, even after all these years. But the woman who leaned over the edge of the wide railing wasn’t anyone that Harper recognized.

  “Harper, is that you?”

  As Harper watched, the woman hurried to the east-facing staircase and skipped down the steps on heels that sang a snappy welcome. Or a ballad of reproach. She rushed across the gravel, and even in the dark, Harper could see that her mouth was parted in disbelief and her eyes wide, bottomless pools of something that looked a lot like longing. A short distance from Harper she stopped so abruptly that it appeared as if she had hit an invisible wall. But she pressed through. An uncertain step forward. Another.

  “Oh, my God. Harper.”

  Adri folded her in a hug, the sort of layered, uninhibited embrace that contained all their history in the circle of her arms. But Harper’s own arms were pinned to her sides, and she was so muddled by exhaustion and the unreality of the situation, she found herself incapable of responding at all. She almost burst into tears. She almost laughed. She almost screamed at the wind. Instead, Harper did nothing at all.

  When Adri realized the hug was one-sided, she backed up. Pressed her palms together in front of her chest as if she was praying. The expression on her face was a damaged thing. Crooked hope, a splintered expectation. She looked like she wanted to cry, but there was a lopsided smile on her face.

  “What are you doing here?” Adri asked, whispering as if Harper might disappear in a wisp of smoke.

  Harper just stared. She couldn’t believe that after all this time they were here. Together. Standing in the shadow of the mansion where their lives began to slowly unravel. Adri was real. And so very lovely in a chic dress that managed to be modest and sexy at once. She was as cool and welcoming as a lake in summer, and Harper could hardly breathe for the feeling that she had been thrust underwater.

  Harper grabbed the edge of her soul and gave it a good, hard shake. Somewhere deep inside life stirred, and she grasped at the first thing that floated to the surface. A playful wink. It didn’t make any sense at all, but words followed it as if she had planned to act like this all along.

  “I got your email!” Harper said. Her voice was shiny and fake in her own ears. “It sounded like an invitation, so I came.”

  Adri knotted her hands together. “It was an invitation,” she said. But Harper could tell by the way she worried her fingers that Adri hadn’t expected Harper to show up quite like this. Shoeless and wild-eyed. Glassy bright and hard like a polished stone.

  “Excuse me.” Harper spun on her heel, a painful experience in the jagged gravel, and stuck her head inside the SUV. “Thanks for the ride,” she said, trying to a
ppear unruffled. “I really appreciate it.”

  Carol gave her a serious look, the sort of question in her eyes that made Harper realize that the woman was willing to take her wherever she wanted to go. But there was nowhere else for her to go. “Thank you,” she said again, and meant it.

  Harper slammed the door and slapped the window twice to signal it was safe to drive away. A puff of exhaust, the glow of taillights, and then Harper and Adri were alone.

  “Who was that?” Adri managed.

  “A friend.”

  Adri didn’t question her further, but doubt hung heavy in the air around them. Harper couldn’t stand the thought of telling Adri more, so she pulled a strand of story from the night and began to weave it into something that sounded almost believable. “I look ridiculous, don’t I?” she laughed, bending one leg at a ninety-degree angle so that her bare foot dangled off the ground. “Bit of a crazy party,” she said conspiratorially.

  “Would you like a pair of shoes?” Adri sounded completely bewildered, but she motioned over her shoulder like a good hostess.

  Hostess? Harper realized that she had no idea what the situation was at Piperhall. When she left Adri that summer over five years ago, she never looked back. She forced herself not to. And she had no idea who this woman before her was. What she did, where she lived, who she loved. But she looked as if she belonged at the estate.

  Adri was nothing short of elegant.

  Harper couldn’t tell how long her hair was because it was pulled back in a sophisticated bun. But that didn’t stop little ringlets from escaping and framing the fine angles of her face. Adri’s skin glowed gold in the reflected light between shadows, and her eyes were so dark they seemed endless. She was stunning, willowy and classic in her gray dress and understated heels. Harper loved her in a stab of emotion so overwhelming that she stumbled forward a little.