The Beautiful Daughters

by Nicole Baart

  “Yes, actually,” Harper said, reining herself in. “Shoes would be great. I don’t have any with me. In fact, I don’t have anything with me.”

  “You didn’t bring a bag, or a suitcase?” Adri’s mouth formed a little O of disbelief.

  For a moment Harper considered abandoning the charade before it grew out of control, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell the truth. Where would she begin? How could she explain what had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and, before that, in the last five years? It was too much. Her heart and mind couldn’t hold the coiling mess of loose ends and frayed strands of stories that made up the sordid tale of who she was. Of how she had become a stranger even to herself. Harper came up with the easiest and most likely scenario, a tale of a wild party, a reckless girl, and an email that prompted her to do exactly what the old Harper would have done: abandon everything in an absentminded, impetuous act.

  “Nada,” Harper said in response to Adri’s question. “I guess some things never change.”

  “Well”—Adri turned a bit and motioned that Harper should follow—“I’m sure we can find something in the house.”

  “Do you . . .” Harper could hardly get the question out. “Do you live here?”

  Adri gave her a sideways glance. “No. I haven’t been back here since . . .” She didn’t have to finish. But she seemed to struggle with something anyway. She opened her mouth, closed it. Shook her head. “It’s complicated,” she said. “It’ll take some time to explain.”

  They fell into step beside each other, walking slowly toward the staircase and the people enjoying the party inside the mansion. Harper didn’t know if she could face them. “Are we celebrating something?” she asked, trying not to sound too invested in the answer.

  Adri stopped. Turned to look her full in the face. “No. Victoria is dead, Harper. This is her memorial service.”

  For a moment, Harper was speechless. She recovered quickly. “You’re kidding. Adri, I’m so sorry. I know you really cared about her.”

  It was a half-truth and they both knew it. But it was the right thing to say. The appropriate social nicety.

  They had made it to the steps and Harper climbed onto the first one gratefully. The concrete was cold, but it was better than the gravel. She towered over Adri from here, but Adri didn’t make any move to follow her. She just stood looking up at Harper, her expression inscrutable and her hands on her hips.

  Shaking her head slowly, Adri laughed. It was a dry, humorless sound, and there was a note of desperation in it. “I don’t know what to do with this.”

  “With what?” Harper asked, but she already knew.

  “With us. What are we doing here?”

  “Remembering Victoria, I guess,” Harper said, because it was exactly the sort of thing she would have said before everything exploded around them. It was her job. Simplify. Deflect. Remind everyone that life is fun and frothy and worth the cost of admission.

  “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  “What do you want, Adri?” Harper shrugged as if none of it mattered. “It’s been a long time. But you emailed, and I came.”

  “I’m glad you came,” Adri said softly.

  “But you’re not happy.”

  “Of course I’m not happy. Have you been happy the last five years?”

  The drop of acid in Adri’s voice took Harper by surprise. She answered honestly. “No. But what are we supposed to do about that? What are we supposed to say to one another?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Adri sighed heavily and smoothed the fabric of her wool dress over the flat line of her stomach. “Who? What? When? Where? Why?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Maybe that’s what we’re supposed to say to each other. We have to start somewhere.”

  Harper nodded. “I suppose we do.”

  “But not right now. You need shoes.” And then Adri swept up the steps past Harper, her back straight and the clean line of her shoulders betraying that she belonged in the role she was currently filling: lady of Piperhall.

  Harper followed, but before she passed through the double doors and into the spectacular foyer with its sweeping staircase and glittering chandelier, she shoved everything that had come before—Sawyer, her race out of Minneapolis, the humbling journey to Blackhawk—into some cobwebbed corner of her mind. Then she unzipped the sweatshirt and tossed it out of the way. She tugged at the edges of her cocktail dress, hoping to erase some of the wrinkles from her long trek and grateful that she’d at least partially fit in. Finally, she smoothed her hair with her hands and tucked it behind her ears in an effort to pull off the same polished look as Adri. Of course, she knew nothing could quite round off the ragged edges, but she had surprise on her side. Maybe people would see the whole picture and ignore the details.

  Harper had been wrong about the glow of the estate and the event that was taking place there. It wasn’t a party, not quite, and she knew that the second she stepped through the doors. There was a hush in the grand rooms, even though people milled about with glasses of wine. It struck Harper as wrong somehow that all these people were here supposedly to mourn Victoria, but as long as Harper had known David’s mother, she had been a recluse. Or close enough. But she also knew from her time with The Five that this is how small towns did things. They were all interconnected, even if the connections were tenuous at best.

  Nobody paid Adri and Harper much mind as they wove through the wide hallway from the entrance to the back of the house. There was no music playing, not much noise at all except for the quiet murmur of halting conversation. People were starting to leave, and when they saw Adri they reached out to squeeze her arm and assure her that the service had been lovely. Absolutely perfect. Adri smiled and thanked them, but she was a woman on a mission and she extracted herself from what could have been quicksand conversations with admirable grace.

  The main living space of the grand house had been transformed into a chapel, and there were white chairs set up in narrow rows. A podium stood at the front, and there were vases of calla lilies everywhere. Harper thought it looked more like a wedding than a funeral service, but she held her tongue. Perhaps Adri had been working with a very specific set of instructions.

  This part of the house was mostly empty, but clustered in the kitchen behind the expansive marble countertop Harper saw a trio of men, their heads tipped together in quiet conversation. She didn’t have to study them to confirm what her heart knew in a glance: Sam, Jackson, Will.

  Harper didn’t mean to thrill at the sight of them, but goose bumps rose along the curve of her spine. She had loved Sam like a father, Jackson like a brother.

  And Will.

  The truth was, Harper couldn’t even begin to grasp what she felt for Will. They had been friends, best friends, just like the rest of them. And if Harper had been in love with anyone, it had been David. Always David. But there had been times when she felt Will’s attention like a fingertip brush against her shoulder. It was faint, undemanding, and she had never experienced anything like that before. Everything with Harper was all or nothing, a passionate free fall that made her feel vibrant, alive. Will was a whisper. And she hadn’t been listening hard enough to hear what he had to say. But that didn’t stop her from wondering. All these years later, wondering.

  The men looked up when Adri clicked her way into the room, and what happened after that was a whirlwind that Harper couldn’t really even begin to describe. There was a shout, a scattering of words that evidenced their shock. And then she was in the midst of them all. Enveloped in hugs that lifted her right off of her bare feet. Someone even spun her around. She wasn’t sure who.

  A glass of white wine was thrust into her hand, and there was a string of merry toasts, all of which seemed mildly out of place with the memorial chairs still set up behind the
m and the mourners in the library. But Harper sipped and laughed along with them, and when Will swiped his thumb across her cheek, Harper was surprised to realize that she was crying.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said, grinning at her with a joy so pure it almost took her breath away. “Seriously, what are you doing here?”

  “Adri emailed me,” Harper said, trying to stagger her way back to the nonchalance of the image she was trying to portray. “I had to come.”

  “But . . .” Sam looked between Adri and Harper. “But you’re too late,” he said. “Adri is going back to Africa on Monday.”

  “Africa?” Harper exclaimed.

  But Adri was already shaking her head. “Not yet,” she said. “I can’t go back now.”

  17

  When harper woke in the morning, beckett was standing next to her bed, his graying muzzle resting on the faded quilt, his eyes trained on her face. It would have scared harper, but for the fact that there wasn’t an ounce of malice in the dog. The second she saw him, she felt comfort like a balm.

  “Well, look at you,” she said, reaching out a hand to tousle his ears. “Good morning, gorgeous.” It had been so long since she had seen him, she could hardly believe he was still alive. Of course, he must have been around when they returned to Maple Acres the night before, but she barely remembered a moment past the toasts and champagne. Exhaustion had hit her hard, and Harper feared that she had let her careful facade crumble a little. Will had slipped an arm around her waist as they headed toward the car, and she knew it was out of necessity, not affection. She had been teetering.

  “Have you been here all night?” Harper pushed herself up on her elbow and gave Beckett a one-armed hug. He seemed pleased, and, backing away, turned a few circles before settling down on the rug beside the bed. “It’s morning,” she chided. “Shouldn’t you be waking up instead of getting ready for a nap?” Harper squinted at the alarm clock on the nightstand. She had never needed glasses, but in the last several months she had started to wonder if she needed them. The fuzzy numbers seemed affirmation of her poor eyesight. Ten after eleven? It couldn’t be. Harper leaned closer. It was.

  “Shit,” she breathed, struggling out from under the sheets. They were tangled around her legs and the quilt had slipped halfway off the bed. It must have been a wild night. Not that Harper could recall any of her restless dreams. She never did.

  Finally free, Harper scrambled to the small closet in the spare room. Back in the day, she had kept a change of clothes there. Not that she stayed at Maple Acres very often. A handful of times. Maybe more. But it felt like a second home to Harper all the same. Definitely more of a home than the apartment that she had shared with her parents in DC.

  Unfortunately, the closet was empty save a handful of old winter coats and a zipped garment bag. Putting her hands on her hips, Harper spun to survey the room and spied a small bundle on the chair next to the bureau. Adri must have snuck in at some point and put it there—a thick sweater and a white cotton skirt with a wide elastic waistband. Harper lifted the pile and discovered also a pair of underwear and a lightweight, wireless bra, a cross between a sports bra and a half-cami. Adri must have scrounged for items that would fit her. The two women were so far from the same size, it must have been a difficult task. But the clothes were certainly ­better than nothing, and Harper was grateful for the mismatched outfit as she slipped on the skirt and tugged the sweater over her head. Her cocktail dress would have been absurdly inappropriate.

  Catching a glimpse of herself in the bureau mirror, Harper stopped. The outfit wasn’t her style—wasn’t any style, to be honest—but she wasn’t sure what her style was anymore. Sawyer had been dressing her for so long, Harper didn’t really even know what she would pick out if given the chance. The skirt was pretty. Full and soft. Just a little short because her legs were so long. And the sweater was a well-worn cable knit, old enough to be comfy without being ratty. Harper decided she liked it, even if she felt a bit like she was stepping into a new identity.

  Sawyer would hate it.

  The thought made Harper go clammy all over. She put a hand to her throat as if to shove down the panic and tried to focus on the minutes before her, not the hours and days and weeks that she couldn’t control. For now, she was okay. She was dressed and passably presentable—now that she was staring at her own reflection, she could see that her hair was washed and her face scrubbed clean of the makeup that had looked caked the night before. Harper remembered in flashbulb bursts: Adri handing her a towel and an oversized T-shirt to sleep in, and leading her to the bathroom. The hot water and soap that smelled tart like rhubarb. And then, the bed. Spare, but warm and empty. Harper loved sleeping alone.

  Now the tiny room. Sunshine on the wall. The old dog. It was a little slice of heaven, and Harper had to blink hard against the tears suddenly threatening to spill down her cheeks. She felt like she had woken up in a whole new world.

  The house wasn’t big, and Harper strained to hear movement as she opened her bedroom door. Surely Will and Jackson were long gone—she knew somehow that they didn’t live here, that Jackson was now married to Nora Engbers, even though she couldn’t place the conversation—but Adri had told her that she’d be across the hall if Harper needed anything, and, of course, this was Sam’s home. Her sister, her father. At least, that’s how she thought of them. And while she thrilled at the knowledge that they were likely only a floor away, at the hope of spending time with them and tying together the threads of story that she was just beginning to unravel, Harper was petrified, too. What if they walked away? What if the place where she once tried to put down roots had eroded, and she had washed away from their lives as easily as a half-grown weed?

  The very first time Harper ever stepped foot in little Blackhawk, Iowa, was the day she arrived as an enrolled freshman at Anderson Thomas University. She hadn’t gone on a campus visit or even popped in during a happy cross-country family trip. The truth was, her parents were too busy fighting with each other to invest much attention into their daughter’s choice of school, and happy vacations were such a far-fetched concept in the Penny family narrative they seemed downright fanciful.

  So Harper started her life in Iowa alone. It was a perfect late-summer day, and when she got out of the cab she had taken from the Omaha airport, she breathed deep and turned her face toward the sun. She was surrounded by redbrick buildings, some so old that the ivy twining up their sides boasted woody vines the size of her wrist. The campus was pedestrian-only, and lush green belts stretched between crisscrossing sidewalks that led to places Harper longed to go. It was simple and stately, not grand, but appealing in its own understated way. Harper was enthralled.

  The website hadn’t captured any of this. How the sun glinted off the clock tower or the way the breeze cooled the sweat on the back of her neck. If Harper had known, she would have come in July. June even. A year ago. This was nothing less than a haven.

  Terms like diversity, self-governance, and personal responsibility had prompted Harper to apply to ATU in the first place, but if she was really honest with herself, there were only two things that contributed to her decision to go halfway across the country for college: proximity to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and distance from her parents. Any worries about the wisdom of her decision were erased completely when she arrived at ATU. She was exactly where she was supposed to be.

  That knowledge released something inside her, and Harper found herself shouting. Whooping, really. She kicked off her sandals and did a cartwheel in the grass, her shirt pooling around her neck as the world spun upside down.

  “I should charge you for the peek,” Harper said later, laughing, as the cabdriver unloaded her suitcases and piled them on the lawn in front of the campus center.

  He didn’t respond, but put out his hand for the money and then left her standing in the middle of everything she owned in the world.

  Harper�
�s life fit into three oversize relics she had purchased from a rummage sale for two dollars apiece. It took Harper weeks to decide what to take with her in the suitcases. She wasn’t the sentimental sort, and even if she had been, there was little in her life that she would have wanted to take with her. In the end, she separated her luggage into clothing categories: formal, informal, and miscellaneous. Makeup, curling and flat irons, hair dryers, and a collection of expensive, scented lotions rounded out her belongings, but at the last minute Harper threw in a plush, robin’s egg–blue blanket that she took off the back of the couch in the apartment where she had grown up. She told herself she just needed something to keep the lotion bottles from cracking against one another.

  But the blanket was the only memento she took with her.

  Harper grew up in a tumultuous household. The Pennys fought all the time, and on one particular night when Harper was still young enough to play with dolls and wear Hello Kitty pajamas, it hadn’t ended well. It never did, but this time a window was broken in the chaos. Julianna and Arthur never hit each other, but they liked to hit things and throw things and destroy things. And that night, when the glass shattered and the shock of it stunned them into silence, Arthur grabbed his coat and swept out the apartment door without a backward glance. Not to be outdone, Julianna raced toward the door herself.

  Harper had been in the kitchen, sitting with her back against the cupboard and peeking from between her laced fingers as if she was a small child watching a horror film. And in a way, the situation was exactly that.

  “No!” Harper shouted when Julianna reached for her own coat. She hadn’t meant to scream, but her voice echoed in the still apartment like a gunshot.

  Julianna barely glanced toward the kitchen. “I’ll be back.”

  “No! Don’t go!” Harper peeled herself up from the ground and stumbled the short distance to her mother. She grabbed her by the coat sleeve. “Please, don’t go!”