Chapter Twenty-One
Harriet
He barely gets his warning out before we’re picked up in a heavy, furious wind.
It’s rougher than the last time, cutting at my legs until I stumble.
He wraps his other arm around my back and tucks his body around mine until my face is buried in his neck and both of my hands are clenched tight in his flannel.
I close my eyes and hold on, my brain rattling around in my skull.
It feels like we’re being pressed through an impossibly small tube. Pressure, pressure, pressure that doesn’t release. It only gets thicker, heavier, until I’m gasping for breath.
And then it stops. It ends as quickly as it began, dropping us in the middle of a crowded street.
I blink at the bright light around us, vaguely registering a Christmas market in Baltimore.
There are small wooden booths set along a walking path.
Lights crisscrossed overhead. A boat docked in the harbor, wrapped in tinsel.
Somewhere close by, a group of carolers are singing a jazzed-up version of “Silent Night.”
I press my palm to my forehead with a wince.
“Okay?” Nolan asks, pulling back to get a look at my face. His hand squeezes the nape of my neck. The golden ropes are gone now, his eyes back to normal. He ducks down. “Harriet. Are you all right?”
I let my hand drop from my forehead. “Why did that feel like we were being pressed through a meat grinder?”
He makes a face at the metaphor. “We jumped again.” His eyes dart around our surroundings, then snap back to me. “I’ve never—” He winces sharply. “Something isn’t right,” he finishes, shaking his head once.
“Yeah. That seems to be an ongoing theme with us.” I grip his elbows. “Are you okay?”
“A bit jumbled up, to be honest.” He studies me for another minute, his body seemingly moving slower than the rest of him. He tilts to the side, then catches himself with a sharp shake of his head. I watch him come back to himself like he’s breaking above water, blinking the salt out of his eyes.
He turns and looks at the crowd around us. “Do you recognize this place?”
“It’s downtown Baltimore.” I eye him for another second before gesturing toward a mulled wine stand constructed to look like one of those German clock-tower things. “We’re at the annual German Christmas market they set up along the harbor. I haven’t been in years.”
I catch a flash of cherry red behind him.
A familiar head of blond hair, straightened instead of curled.
Past Harriet is wandering down a crowded pathway with a ceramic mug in the shape of a boot clutched between leather-clad hands, studying each craft booth with interest. My mother walks slightly behind, her arm looped through the elbow of a young man with a phone to his ear. The look on her face is … victorious.
“Ah,” I say.
Nolan follows my attention, eyes searching.
“What do you see?”
I point at where the past version of myself has stopped in front of a booth, examining a row of tiny glass ornaments. “There.”
“Where?”
I point again. “There. Right there. At the booth with the glass.” He squints to get a better look. “Is that you?”
“It is.”
“No.”
“It is,” I tell him, laughing.
“Your hair,” he says faintly. “What’s been done to it?”
I snort. He sounds winded. Devastated. “I straightened it.”
“Why?”
Because that’s how the man on his phone two steps behind me preferred it.
Brent. I met him during my first year of law school and we were dating by fall break.
He was charming and electric. Charismatic.
Handsome. Everyone wanted to be his friend, and he wanted me.
Timid Harriet York and her ill-fitting sweaters, sitting in the back of the classroom with her scribbled notes while everyone else tapped away on their computers.
When he gave me his attention, it felt like stepping into the sun.
When we started dating, my mother was ecstatic. Finally, I was meeting her expectations, and it was all because of someone else’s interest in me. Even so, I loved having her approval. For the first time in my life, I felt seen. Truly seen and adored.
But Brent’s preferences were suggestions that slowly turned into demands.
He wanted me to change my hair, my clothes …
the mismatched furniture in my tiny apartment.
He wanted me to be more stylish, refined, professional.
It was for my own good, he said. How would anyone take me seriously otherwise?
And me? I just wanted to be loved. All those things felt like an easy trade-off for his affection and my mother’s approval.
My mom adored Brent and I adored finally being worthy of her attention.
As one half of a whole, I suddenly found myself the recipient of all the affection she had withheld for decades.
Invitations to lunch. Cocktails at the boat house.
Spontaneous shopping trips for clothes that Brent would like.
It seemed the only thing I needed to do to win my mother over was to change everything about myself.
So I did. And I ignored the paper cuts it gave my heart.
“It’s easier to manage when it’s straight,” I deflect, watching the past version of myself try to wave Brent over. He and my mom exchange an amused eye roll. He doesn’t join me at the booth.
Look at little Harriet, that look seems to say, indulging in her whimsical nonsense.
How long did I ignore those condescending looks? How many times did I make excuses, bending myself into whatever shape they wanted? How much of myself did I lose?
“Actually,” I correct, feeling a surge of fierce protectiveness toward this past version of myself. She had no one to look out for her. Not even herself. “I hate it when it’s straight. It takes forever and it makes my head look flat.”
Nolan makes an offended sound. “Your head doesn’t look flat.”
“It does. It looks like a pancake.”
Nolan is quiet next to me, observant. He watches as I pick up an ornament and hold it up to a strand of Christmas lights, delighting in the rainbows it paints over the sleeve of my sleek jacket. The past version of me laughs and Nolan shakes his head.
“I don’t like it.”
“I figured as much.”
His attention is fixed on the other version of me, his blinks a little too slow and heavy. I frown at him.
“Nolan, are you—”
“It doesn’t look like you,” he continues. “It’s too … contained.”
“My hair?”
“Yes, your hair. But … everything else, too.”
“And, what? I can’t be contained?”
He shakes his head, eyes narrowed. Past me is halfway down the street now, moving farther and farther away from Brent and my mother. They don’t even notice.
“No,” Nolan says, matter-of-fact. “You’re boundless.”
“Boundless,” I repeat, unimpressed.
“Aye. Boundless,” he says again. “I could spend an eternity studying you and still not know what you might do next. You give so much of yourself, so freely. You’re … wild with your attentions. Miraculous. I’ve seen so many lives, Harriet, but I’ve never seen someone live like you.”
My mouth goes dry. “Me?”
His gaze slants down to me. “You,” he says.
I blink up at him. No one has ever spoken about me like that before.
Like I’m something to be treasured instead of something to be tossed away.
Miraculous. I roll the word around on my tongue.
It’s delicious. Special. My cheeks burn hot.
My hands tingle. It feels like I’m freefalling through the ozone, picking up speed, the edges of me catching fire.
At first I think his words have sent me into some sort of tailspin, but then Nolan’s arm snaps out and bands around me.
I realize it’s his magic. Again. It rushes up around us with a roar, grabs me by the back of my jacket, and whips me backward.
I feel like I’m at the end of a very long tether—running, running, running—then yanked to a sharp stop.
We go backward, but this time we don’t settle.
Our feet barely skim the ground in a new memory—a stone dock, extending out over the water, young Nolan coiling rope on the deck of a small boat— before we twist away again, landing somewhere else.
A low-lit tavern, a man playing a fiddle in the corner.
Nolan’s father, his mouth bracketed in concern.
You’re spending too much time out there, Nolan. What are you looking for?
Away again. A little girl with wild hair, bent in half, digging through the bottom shelves of the antiques shop. Aunt Matilda, laughing. What are you looking for?
A lighthouse on the water, a lone figure with his elbows braced on the railing. A long, formal table. Flickering candles. A gravestone with a faded, weathered notebook. Another with a bouquet of wildflowers.
A man sitting alone at a table set for one, eating his dinner.
A woman sitting alone with her arms crossed over the back of the couch, watching the boats in the harbor.
What are you looking for?
Memories twist and braid together. Mine, his, mine again.
On and on it goes until I have to squeeze my eyes shut against it, pressing myself into Nolan.
He drags me closer, his arms tight around me.
I can’t hear what he’s saying, but I can feel the vibrations of his voice, rattling through his body and into mine.
I catch fragments. Harriet and hold on and got you and won’t let you go.
His hand threads through my hair and he cups my neck, holding on tight.
Won’t let you go, I tell myself, trying to quell the fear. He won’t let you go.
Almost as soon as I think it, we land on solid ground. The sound rushes out in a vacuum until my legs are shaking and my ears are buzzing.
Stained glass lights. A record player in the back. Crowded shelves and a music box tipped on its side.
Time unceremoniously dumps us in the middle of the Crow’s Nest, back to where we started. I stumble against the counter at my back, my stomach taking a nosedive.
“What the hell was that?” I breathe, looking over to Nolan.
But Nolan isn’t looking at me. He’s staring at the mistletoe on the ceiling like he’s never seen it before, swaying on his feet. His face is pale, his hands clenched into fists.
“I think,” he says slowly, his voice thick. “I think something is wrong.”
And then he collapses to the floor.