8. Harris
Chapter Eight
HARRIS
I don’t sleep. The sheet twists and tangles about my legs as I try to get comfortable, but nothing helps.
Delphine had it right. There's nothing generous in what I've been doing. I've been getting out of the way early so that when Megan goes, maybe it won’t hurt so bad that it destroys me. But it does, right now, an ache pulsing in my heart that I can’t shift.
I get up before dawn and go to my workshop. In the afternoon, I drive out to Ember Heart.
Bettina Hollis used to work for a big agency and bought a bunch of my photographs before I locked them away.
Now she has a gallery in a converted old feed store halfway up the mountain.
It’s an airy space with the roof beams still showing, and art lovers come from far away for her exhibitions.
She doesn’t act surprised when I come through the door with a box under my arm and instead clears a table.
She goes through every print in silence, twice, and stops a long time on the owl coming off the fence post.
“I love them. I want them all: we’ll put them in the October show. I promise you, Harris, these will sell like hotcakes.”
I say yes, and then I sit in the truck outside for a while with my hands on the wheel.
It’s the last day of the festival and the green is filled with people.
The lights are strung between the lampposts and the band is murdering Love is a Battlefield. Kids are running on the grass with sparklers and there’s a queue at the ice cream truck forty deep. I've got a parcel under my arm wrapped in brown paper.
Gram Donnelly, holding the leash of a huge Doberman with a pink collar, steps into my path as soon as I set foot on the green.
“Harris Trent.”
“Yes, ma'am?”
“My granddaughter's by the bandstand and she's been crying. I was about to tear a strip out of you, but I can tell from your face that you know you’ve messed up. Go make it right, or you’ll have me to answer to.” Gram looks at the parcel, and then at me.
“Well. Go on, then… you're keeping everybody waiting.”
Megan is at the edge of the bandstand clutching a paper cup, and when she sees me coming her expression turns careful.
“Hi.”
“Hi. Can you come off the green for a minute? I can’t hear anything.”
We go behind the bandstand and keep walking.
I clear my throat and open my mouth. Nothing comes out. I try again. “I've spent too long letting you think that I don't mind. That's the first thing. I do mind. I mind so much I can’t sleep or eat.”
She’s looking at the floor.
“You heard me talking to your aunt. I know you did; you left the coffee on the sill.” I make myself look at her.
“What I said you should go, it was the biggest lie I've ever told, because I didn’t want to keep you here. It’s not fair.
You have a life in the city. But I don’t want you to go.
I’m selfish. I want you right here with me. ”
“Harris.”
“I'm not finished.” I hold the parcel out. “Open it.”
She takes it, opening it carefully.
I've never bound anything in my life. It took a few attempts and the covers are heavier than they should be.
Inside the album are sixty photographs in order, from the first winter up on this mountain to Kit in the snow, looking back over his shoulder.
The last picture is the most perfect woman in the world, sitting on a porch with a sketchbook on her knees.
Megan turns to the front and reads the inside cover, and her hand comes up over her mouth.
For the woman who reminded me that beautiful things deserve to be seen.
“I said yes to Bettina Hollis today,” I say.
“Her October exhibition. She's asked me a dozen times and I said no to all of them. But I went back and said yes today because of you; not because you asked me to, you never did.” I run out of air and take a deep breath.
“Everything I've got in that locked room, I took it because I wanted somebody to see it and then I made sure nobody could.
You're the first person I've let in there in eleven years… and you made me realize it’s time to stop hiding.”
Behind us the saxophonist launches into an enthusiastic solo.
“I love you,” I say. “I'm forty next spring, I live up a mountain with a fox, and I'm no good at any of this, but I'm not going to stand here being reasonable with you.”
Megan is looking at me over the top of the album with her eyes streaming.
“You absolute idiot,” she says.
That's not what I was expecting.
“I told my publisher yesterday.” She's laughing and crying at once and hitting my chest with the flat of her hand, once, not hard.
“Alina wants me in the office for a day.
One day, Harris. I told her I'm illustrating from Snowflake Falls, not the city from now on. She said fine, half her artists are in the middle of nowhere.”
I stare at her with my mouth open.
“I gave up my place yesterday. I've been sitting in that cabin trying to work out how to tell a man who told me I should go that I wasn't going, and you're standing there apologizing to me.”
“You gave up your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Before I…”
“Look, I stayed because I've done the best work of my life here and I've laughed more this month than in the two years before it, and because for the first time since I got here I stopped planning when I could leave.” Her voice goes husky. “And also for you. Mostly for you. I love you too.”
I put my hands on either side of her face and kiss her while the band muddles through Purple Rain.
We come out onto the green for the rest of the night. Megan leans back against me and I put my chin on top of her head.
At the far edge of the green, a rust-colored fox comes out of the treeline, sits down at a sensible distance from everyone, and watches the sky turn orange and gold with its one good eye.