Chapter 17 #2
The pact. Three rules, three signatures underneath.
Nina picked it up. She held it carefully. “We did it,” she said. “Just one big adventure left.”
“Yep, we did do it,” Claire said.
“We did it because of you,” Harper said to Nina. “You said yes first on that porch. You held out your hand and said, give me the pen. If you hadn’t done that, then that thing would probably still be blank.”
Nina looked at the napkin. She traced her signature with her finger. Then she traced Claire’s and Harper’s.
“David is everywhere on this napkin,” she said.
“He’s in so many of the things I did this year.
The mole, of course. But also the tattoo and the cooking class.
I signed that napkin because David would have told me to.
So every adventure I went on, I did because of him.
And every adventure changed me into someone who isn’t only about him anymore.
Sometimes that part makes me cry. That he gave me this, and this gave me something different. His memory gave me freedom.”
The room was quiet. Outside, the Beaufort night breathed, warm and slow.
Harper put her hand on Nina’s knee. She didn’t say anything. Harper had learned over the months of grief and growth that the bravest thing you could sometimes do was not speak.
Claire reached over and put her hand on Nina’s other knee. And the three of them sat in the living room in their nest of blankets and pillows.
“I need to say something,” Claire said.
“You always need to say something,” Harper said, rolling her eyes. “It’s part of your charm.”
“I need to say that this year saved me. Not the adventures, but both of you. I was disappearing inside my own life, and you both pulled me out. You didn’t try to fix me.
You just stood next to me while I fixed myself.
I spent twenty-six years making everything beautiful for other people, and this year I made something beautiful for me. And you were there the whole time.”
“We were there because you built the table,” Nina said. “Literally. You set this table. You made the dinner. You changed the napkin color four times. If you hadn’t made that birthday dinner perfect, we wouldn’t have ended up on the porch. And the porch is where everything started.”
“Those napkins were a very aggressive salmon,” Harper said.
“They were dusty rose. The original choice was salmon.”
“You told us it looked like the cafeteria.”
“The original original choice was coral, which also looked like salmon.”
“Different salmon.”
“The coral was sophisticated salmon, and the second one was hospital salmon.”
“Claire, all salmon is the same salmon.”
“That is terribly false, and I will die on that hill.”
Nina was laughing, lying on the blankets with a wine glass balanced on her stomach.
She was laughing about an argument over the color of salmon and the particular insanity Claire had of caring so deeply about napkin colors that she had to change them four times.
The napkin story was something she could listen to over and over, although it didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
But it did matter. The napkins mattered. All those details mattered.
Claire’s obsessive, meticulous, beautiful attention to little things was not a flaw.
It was a gift. It was the same gift that had made that birthday dinner so perfect and the karaoke song list so organized.
It was the gift that gave them matching bathing suits.
Claire Morrison noticed things that other people walked right past. She made them beautiful, and the world was better for it.
The wine ran out. They didn’t open another bottle. They just lay on the floor of Claire’s living room, three women on the eve of their last adventure.
“Are you scared?” Claire said. “About tomorrow?”
“Terrified,” Harper said.
“Yeah, completely and totally terrified,” Nina replied.
“Good,” Claire said. “That’s the whole point of all of this, right? To finish by doing one of the scariest things we can imagine? To prove that we’re different now?”
“I just hope we’re not three flat pancakes by lunchtime,” Harper said, closing her eyes and pretending to pray.
Surprisingly, they all fell asleep on the floor.
Not all at once, of course. Nina first, because Nina always fell asleep first. Claire second, her sketchbook open on the blanket next to her, a pencil still dangling in her hand.
Harper last, because Harper was always last. She was the one who always kept watch, always made sure everyone else was safe before she allowed herself to close her eyes.
The house settled around them. The candles burned low and went out. Crickets and frogs made sounds in the distance. The napkin sat on the coffee table in the dark, faded and worn.
Tomorrow, they would carry it to the airfield, put it in one of their pockets, and jump.
And whatever happened after that would be their next thing, and then the next thing after that, because the pact had never really been about just twelve adventures. It had been about learning to say yes, and they had all learned that lesson very well.
They didn’t need courage anymore.
In the morning, the sun would come up over the marsh, and those three women would wake up, stiff and sore from sleeping on the living room floor. They would drink too much coffee.
They would drive to an airfield, hands shaking, and step out of an airplane.
The world would be bigger from up there than any of them could imagine, but that was tomorrow.
Tonight, they slept, together on the floor like they were at a middle school slumber party, the way that they used to sleep in their dorm at the College of Charleston, tangled up in comfy blankets, safe in each other’s company, dreaming about whatever comes next.