Chapter 6 Harper
A train wreck.
With her dreams on one rail and reality on the other, the collision today had been spectacular.
Harper collapsed on the stained cushions in the shack’s living room–kitchen space and stared up at the yellow plaster.
She wasn’t mad at Kelsey—she’d spent the past decade trying to support Harper’s writing, not harm it—but she was furious at herself.
Why hadn’t she been ready to pitch her script to a producer willing to listen?
For years, she’d dreamed about the opportunity to present a story, but when given the opportunity, in the perfect time and place, she’d bombed.
An ocean breeze ushered its salty self through the window, clanging her mom’s suncatcher against the glass.
The scene from Evan’s living room an hour ago, the producers staring at her like she’d lost her mind, looped through her head.
The cloud of kitchen smoke, acrid and gray.
The poor pigs, blackened to a crisp, their croissant blankets covered with foam.
If only the wind would blow away every bit of this debacle. Or, at least, her memory of it.
How was she supposed to face Evan and his rats again this afternoon?
The smoke had goaded Evan and Marlo from the master suite, clearly unprepared to encounter the team. When Wendi arrived with a tray of drinks, the glasses swimming in a spilled puddle, she’d deployed the fire extinguisher.
As Kelsey tried to explain what happened, leaving out the parts of Harper’s forlorn pitch, Evan looked like he might blow.
“Make yourself scarce,” Kelsey had whispered in her ear.
“I’m not going to—”
“Now!”
So she’d run like a coward back to her cave, abandoning Kelsey to Evan’s blast.
As much as she appreciated her friend’s efforts, Harper should have insisted that she wasn’t ready to pitch the story. And she should have set a timer for the blanketed pigs.
Should have. Could have. Wished she would have. Her roving mind was a disaster in the making, the cyclone of stories destroying her everyday life. If only she could wiggle deep into her own rabbit hole so no one in the outside world could find her.
Then again, maybe that’s what got her into trouble in the first place. Chasing the elusive rabbit through her imaginary wonderland until she collided with reality.
Their shack had been a happy place when her mom was alive, Angeline Rayne handling the greatest catastrophes on Evan’s estate with dignity and grace.
But her death last year, no surprise, changed everything.
Harper had already been working her mom’s job for months, and after her mom died, Wendi asked if Harper could take over full-time.
Temporarily—they’d all agreed—until Evan found a new housekeeper or Harper was hired for production work.
Caring for Evan’s property was a round-the-clock job. Her mom had thrived in her work, but Harper found little joy in it. She was happiest sitting out on the cliff, lost in one of her stories.
Closing her eyes, Harper listened to the waves rolling in from someplace exotic like Papua New Guinea or Japan and crashing against the cliff, their journey ending abruptly on the shore.
If only those same waves would sweep her away.
The clock above the TV ticked a slow rhythm.
Seconds then minutes. Finally, she tossed the pillow onto the rug and inched herself up.
The couch shared space with a kitchenette, table, two chairs, and a bookcase.
Near the kitchenette, one door led into the bedroom and another into a tiny bathroom.
With her father long gone, moving to Albuquerque with his wife soon after Harper was born, she and her mom had made a happy home out of this place for fifteen years.
Beyond the curtains and pillows, she didn’t have much decor. She’d framed a picture with her mom from earlier years, propping it up on the case that housed Harper’s DVD library and her mom’s collection of books.
Harper stared at the shelves, wishing for one more conversation between them. While her mother never did much writing, she loved to read squeaky-clean romance and watch old movies. They’d made biweekly trips to the Santa Barbara library to check out a trove of books.
Harper had loved reading as a child, but as she grew older, she preferred making up her own stories.
Endings in the real world were all askew, but in the story world, she could control what happened to her characters.
She could give the heroic ones—those who actually had courage—a happily ever after.
Every birthday since she turned eight, her mom had given her a fancy pen with a plume and a notebook to record her many ideas. She’d filled those notebooks with bits and pieces of characters and plots, often inventing characters and adding them to the plotline of her favorite book or movie.
But she couldn’t keep writing if she didn’t have a place to live. Wendi was probably on the telephone in the big house, calling local employment agencies. Evan would probably have a new housekeeper by the week’s end. One with no aspirations to become a screenwriter.
Another warm breeze, a stir of palm fronds, as she battled for control. She could spend the night in a hotel or with a church or college friend. But finding a more permanent place in Southern California for the coming weeks and months wouldn’t be so simple.
Perhaps she wouldn’t have to move far. Someplace inland, an hour or so from Santa Barbara, where she could afford to share an apartment while she waited tables or worked at a coffee shop like half the screenwriters on the West Coast.
Voices warred in her head. The dreamy one that told her to keep working on a story, and the stern, practical, typically silent one that insisted it was time for her to give it up. But how was she supposed to stop writing when she saw stories everywhere?
If only she could find a job that wouldn’t endanger anyone when her mind skipped away.
Harper scanned her collection of DVDs and the books from her mom’s small library, most of them written decades ago.
She hadn’t read these old stories since her mom died, but she kept them shelved to remember the woman who’d loved her well.
Perhaps she could slip between the covers of one of her mom’s old books where things seemed to make sense, at least in the end.
As Harper scanned the spines, she stopped at a Via Belle book. An author who’d lived near her mom’s hometown.
Angeline had read almost everything Via Belle wrote, immersing herself in the love and mystery and suspense, all woven together with spiritual threads.
Victims were rescued in Via Belle’s stories.
Justice was always served. And the hero and heroine encountered, in some way, the God of the universe.
In fact, after years of difficult choices, her mom renewed her own faith back in 1994, after rereading Sparrow Island.
Tony would have torn Via Belle and her squeaky clean morals into a thousand pieces, but there was no denying the change in her mother or the impact it had on Harper’s life.
In Via Belle’s world, the hero and heroine always made the right choice, at least in the end, and when they did, good things followed.
As a girl, Harper often dreamed about the happily ever after, but her real world collided with Via Belle’s imaginative one when a drunk driver crossed the line more than a year ago, injuring both Harper and her mom.
Harper checked out of the hospital two weeks later and took over the housework.
Another month went by before her mom returned to Evan’s estate.
Sadly, her mom never recovered from her injuries.
While her mom clung to her faith in those last months, Harper learned a hard lesson about bad things happening to the best of people, because if right choices in the real world meant a happily-ever-after end, her mom would have lived a solid hundred years.
She pulled one of Via Belle’s books off the shelf and hugged the memories as she settled back on the couch. In her mom’s last months, they’d read several of these books together, and she’d wondered at the author’s prolificness.
What was Via’s secret in creating so many stories that readers loved?
Harper had enjoyed Silver Summer and Grace Haven, but Sparrow Island was her mother’s favorite. She’d owned an autographed copy of it since she was a girl.
Staring at the title in her hands, Harper opened Lavender Ridge to read the short biography inside. It was Via Belle’s thirty-first novel, and Harper had a momentary twinge of jealousy at the woman’s tremendous success, at what must have been a charmed life to conjure up such happy endings.
Unrealistic, she’d once called a Via Belle story when she was a teenager. No one—she told her mom—really lived that way. But the truth was—she wanted to believe that goodness still reigned in this world. That even though some endings were sad, happily ever afters still came true.
Either way, her time working on the Cantor estate had come to an end.
She crossed into the bedroom and yanked a duffel bag out of the closet. With a quick brush to dust it off, she tossed the bag on her bed and began stuffing clothes inside. The photo with her mom was next and then a few books.
“Harper?” Kelsey called from the screen door.
She sighed, wanting to hide, but eventually she’d have to face this disaster. “Come in.”
Kelsey rushed across the room to hug her. “I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Harper said. “I should have prepared a pitch. It’s my dream after all.”
Kelsey sat beside the duffel. “And it’s a good one.”
“Tony saw humor in all the wrong places.”
“It doesn’t matter what he thought. You’re not going to quit.”
Harper glanced out at clouds rolling in over the palm trees. She couldn’t see the ocean from here, but knowing it was there, a short walk away, soothed her. In the days ahead, she’d miss its proximity. “I’ll never stop writing, but I don’t think I can pitch another producer in my life.”