Chapter 5 #2
“Rules,” Claire said, because Claire was not going to enter any body of water without establishing a firm protocol first.“We go in together, we go in up to our waist at least, we stay in for thirty seconds.”
“Thirty seconds?” Nina said. “That seems a little long. It’s half a minute in freezing water. Half a minute is a lifetime, you know.”
“Oh, come on, we can do thirty seconds,” Harper said. “I sit through board meetings that feel longer than thirty seconds in the Atlantic.”
They linked arms, three women in matching bathing suits at dawn on Folly Beach, the sky turning pink at the edges and the ocean seeming to wait for them.
“On the count of three,” Claire said.
Harper braced herself. “On three.”
“One,” Nina said.
Claire shivered. “Two.”
And then nobody said three.
They just ran like they were running for their lives, like an ax murderer was chasing them.
The water hit Harper’s feet first, and it was so cold that it did not even feel cold. It felt like she had been shocked with electricity. It felt like she had been slapped awake by the entire Atlantic Ocean and all the fish in it.
It seemed like the ocean was not impressed by three women in polka dots.
She gasped. Claire screamed.
Nina made a sound that sounded somewhere between a war cry and a prayer.
They kept running and splashing through the shallows, the water climbing their legs, their thighs, their waists, and Harper’s whole body was screaming.
Her brain was also screaming that she had lost her mind. Beneath all the screaming, a feeling she had not felt in years remained.
She was awake. Completely, entirely, and shockingly awake. Not the type of caffeine and willpower awake that she normally ran on every day.
This was different. This was every nerve in her body firing at once. Every cell suddenly remembered it was alive.
The cold was brutal and magnificent as they stood waist-deep in the December Atlantic, throwing their heads back and laughing.
Claire started counting. Of course, Claire was counting.
“Fifteen! Sixteen! Seventeen!”
Nina was shaking. Her teeth were chattering so loud they could almost hear it over the waves. Out of the three of them, Nina was the petite one. Over the last year, she’d lost weight, and Harper worried the cold would snap her little bones in half soon.
Nina’s arms were wrapped around herself, but she was grinning, not smiling, grinning. The full, silly grin of a woman who had just remembered that her body could do things besides grieving.
“Twenty-five! Twenty-six!”
“I can’t feel my legs anymore!” Nina shouted.
“That’s how you know it’s working!” Harper shouted back.
“Thirty!” Claire yelled.
They turned and ran back through the shallows, stumbling and splashing, half falling onto the beach, where they collapsed in a pile of wet polka dots and laughter so big that it echoed off the dunes.
After being in the freezing cold ocean, the hot chocolate tasted like a religious experience.
They sat in the open back of Claire’s SUV with their legs dangling, towels hanging around their shoulders, passing the thermoses back and forth.
The parking lot was still pretty empty. A few more early morning joggers had appeared.
The man with the metal detector had moved farther down the beach, searching for whatever it was that made people get out of bed at dawn to sweep the sand with an electric stick.
The sun was fully up now, and Folly Beach looked like a postcard.
Harper took a long drink from the thermos. The bourbon and chocolate hit her chest like a warm hug, and she closed her eyes.
She was wet and cold and sitting in a parking lot at seven o’clock in the morning in a bathing suit, but she felt more alive than she had felt in her corner office for years.
“I have a question,” Nina said. She was holding Claire’s thermos with both hands, her dark hair dripping onto the towel. “Who picks month three?”
“Well, we should just keep the rotation,” Claire said, because there was no way that Claire was going to have an unstructured situation. “You picked month one, Harper picked month two, so I pick month three.”
“Well, then what?”
“Then we just cycle back to Nina, Harper, Claire. Four rounds of three, twelve months.”
Harper nodded.
“A very organized rotation, Claire.”
“Well, I am a third-grade teacher, so organization is kind of my thing. I could get us in a single-file line like that!” She snapped her fingers.
“You organized the karaoke song list by genre before we even got over to the bar.”
“Oh, that was just basic categorization,” Claire said, waving her hand.
“Claire, you made a spreadsheet.”
“Spreadsheets are important to life.”
Nina laughed.
It was becoming a regular thing to hear Nina laugh again.
Harper liked it. She liked seeing Nina with her hair down, Nina getting into the car without sitting in the driveway for ten minutes first.
“I have an idea for month three,” Claire said.
Before she could say it, Nina shook her head. “Wait, actually, can I just go out of order?”
Claire and Harper both looked at her.
“But the rotation—”
“I know the rotation says it’s Claire’s turn,” Nina said, “but I have something, something I’ve been thinking about since our birthday dinner, and if I don’t say it right now, I’m going to talk myself out of it.”
Harper recognized that voice. It was the voice Nina used when something really mattered, so much that she could barely get it out, like when she told them she was pregnant with Lucia, or the same voice she used on the phone the morning David died.
“Go ahead,” Harper said.
Nina was looking out at the ocean, which felt like it had nearly killed them about twenty minutes ago.
“A cooking class. Oaxacan food. David’s grandmother’s recipes. There’s a woman in North Charleston, Senora Morales. Anyway, she teaches out of her home kitchen. She’s from the same region as David’s family. Elena told me about her months ago, and I just kept meaning to sign up, but I never did.”
She paused.
“I was too scared because… Going there felt like admitting I needed to learn the things David already knew, like the recipes he grew up with and the food his grandmother made. He was the one who always cooked that stuff. He was the one who carried on that part of his family, and learning them from a stranger felt like admitting he’s really gone and that somebody else has to teach me now.
Like maybe I didn’t take the time to learn from my soulmate before he was gone. ”
Nobody spoke.
A pelican dove into the surf, and Harper thought of David, who had been exactly that kind of man, all heart, no pretension, bobbing down and getting the fish every time.
“But I promised Lucia,” Nina continued. “I promised her that I would write it all down. David’s recipes, Elena’s recipes, everything. But I can’t write down what I don’t know.” She looked at Claire and then at Harper. “So that’s my pick, if you’ll let me go out of turn.”
Harper reached over and took the thermos from Nina. Not because she wanted a drink, but because she wanted Nina’s hands free so she could hold them.
Harper Ellis, who touched people the way cats touch water, held Nina’s cold, wet hands.
“You don’t need anybody’s permission to go out of turn. It’s your pact, too.”
“We’re there,” Claire said. “You just tell us when. And I think this pact only works if we let each other get what we need out of it. There’s no right way to do it.”
“Did Claire Morrison just say there’s no right way to do something?” Harper said, smiling.
“Don’t tell anybody I said that. Also,” Claire said, “I cannot cook Oaxacan food. I burn rice. I will be the worst student Senora Morales has ever had in her kitchen.”
“That’s fine,” Nina said. “I think that’s part of the adventure.”
“Burning rice is not an adventure. It’s a fire hazard.” Harper smiled.
She looked at her two best friends, each of them wrapped in towels and shivering in a parking lot. But she could feel something changing inside of her.
She picked up her phone under the towel where nobody could see and listened to Jordan’s message. His voice was the same, warm and unhurried, the voice of a man who never rushed through anything.
“Hey, Harper, it’s me. Listen, I know it’s been a while. I just wanted to say a belated happy birthday. I know I’m really late. I hope fifty is treating you well.”
Then a pause.
There was a sound in the background, maybe a saw or a sander.
“I think about you sometimes. I hope that’s okay. Anyway, you know where to find me.”
Harper listened to it twice and then tucked her phone back under the towel. She pulled her towel tighter around her shoulders and watched the sun finish rising.
She didn’t call him back, not yet. But not yet was different from never.