32 SinkSwim
32
Sink or Swim
Taking risks wasn’t something I was great at. The same goes for following my impulses. I’ve always been scared of the uncertain, of doing something rash, of consequences, of being wrong, of things not turning out as I’d hoped. What am I saying? I’ve always been afraid of everything.
I was an expert at hiding my feelings. At least from other people. They were always still there inside, though, quivering, multiplying, expanding. And they always cut into me, causing wounds that never quite healed.
For hours, walking through the city, I repeated my mother’s words in my head. With every step, I felt my wounds finally beginning to heal and the sharp edges of my feelings smoothing out like mermaids’ tears under the ocean—softy, shiny, precious, so clear you could see right through them. They gave me a different vision of the world, one that was nonetheless incredibly real.
And in that world I had a purpose: to live. For my mother. For me. For both of us. She had given me a beautiful gift—my life—and secrets, lies, errors, and my own insecurities had wasted it for years in unhappiness. But there was still time to change. I could still start over. Connect with my own life, be a part of it. Flow. Follow my heart.
With every step I took, another fear fell away. Another mistake. Another doubt. Another regret. Another obligation.
When I stopped, there was nothing left but myself. My mind blank, my heart unburdened. For the first time, I had no plans, just a certainty: I wasn’t going back to my father’s home.
I was tired and my feet hurt. I looked up and saw a sign for a hotel on the next block.
I walked there and asked for a room, went up and took a shower, put on a robe, wrote my brother and sister and told them not to worry about me. Then I ordered a bunch of food from room service and spent the evening watching TV.
At some point—I don’t remember when—I fell asleep.
No more insomnia, no more bad dreams.
Alex looked up and sighed with relief when she saw me. Then she stood, walked over, and stopped me in the hall.
“Where have you been all morning? Your father won’t stop asking about you. He’s losing his mind because you weren’t at the PR meeting.”
“Is he in his office?”
“Yeah, but if I were you, I wouldn’t go in. He’s in a terrible mood, and he said no one should bother him.”
“Luckily I’m not no one.”
I walked past her and opened the door without hesitation, not even bothering to knock. My father was sitting at his desk. When he looked up, I saw his expression change to furrowed brows, squinting eyes, disgust, impatience, and behind them, a fear and insecurity I’d never known how to make out before.
“What do you think I’m paying you for? To do nothing? Don’t think you’re special. You’re an employee like anyone else. You can’t just come and go as you please. You have obligations, and this morning’s meeting was a wash because you didn’t show. Are you never going to do anything right?”
I took a deep breath and didn’t break eye contact with him. It was hard, but I kept a grip on myself.
“I’m quitting. And I’m moving out.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I’m done.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Maybe. It’s possible.”
“Harper, I’m advising you…”
I shook my head and walked toward him.
“Do you never get tired of being so bitter all the time? Isn’t it exhausting, being so angry?” He opened his mouth to reply, surprised at my resentment, but I didn’t give him the chance to speak. “It’s not my fault Mom died. It was her decision. She never regretted it, and I’m not going to regret being alive now. She was right when she said you were a man who couldn’t handle pain and suffering. They made you sad and selfish and they blinded you to all the good things life’s given you.” My voice was trembling, but I didn’t let up. “I’m going to live my dreams, and I’m going to be happy. For her and for me. Because, in case you didn’t know, that’s what life is—trying to be happy. That’s the whole point. I’m…I’m sorry you never learned that. And I’m sorry you think it’s my fault you’re miserable, but there was no way I could have changed anything!”
He didn’t say a word. He’d gone pale, and his hands were shaking.
“I give up. I’m not going to keep trying to win your affection. I know it’s impossible, and I’d rather swim alone than sink with you.” To my surprise, I managed to smile at him. “I’m going to be a writer, and I’m going to do whatever I can to get my grandmother’s bookstore back. That’s my dream, and it was Mom’s dream, too.”
I turned around and walked out without looking back.
“Harper?”
Dustin’s voice stopped me just as I reached the elevator. He walked over with that same patronizing, condescending expression I’d always hated and, when he reached me, grabbed my elbow and tried to drag me off somewhere more private. I jerked away as if his fingers burned like acid, and I didn’t care if it hurt his feelings. The poor idiot. If he didn’t get away from the Westons, he’d soon be a lifeless puppet with no backbone whatsoever.
“Harper, you can’t keep doing this. You need to grow up. You need to start focusing on the things that really matter: your dad, the company…”
“You’ve got something in your teeth.”
“Really?” He hid his mouth with one hand and started digging around with the other. “Where?”
“No, I just wanted you to shut up. Now listen. You’re the one who needs to grow up. No one here gives a damn about you. Least of all my father. You’ll never be good enough for him. Do you honestly think he wants us to be together because he likes you? I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but he only wants to see me unhappy and he knows with you I will be. You’re a good guy deep down. I know you are. Get out of here while you still have time, before it eats you alive.”
The elevator doors opened and I walked inside. Dustin just stood there gawking at me. As the doors slid close, I raised my hand and said, “Bye now!”
That same afternoon, I got my things from Léry and moved to a modest apartment on the Plateau that I found in the classified ads online. It had a little living room with a kitchen, one bedroom, and one bathroom, but that was all I needed.
I called Hoyt and Hayley to give them my new address and tell them not to worry. Then I called Mr. Norris to make an appointment. I’d need his help to get Shining Waters back.
“Are you telling me you don’t know who bought the shop and the house?”
“What I’m telling you is they were purchased through the shell company whose name is on the contract, the same company that made the bank transfer, and they were acting as intermediaries. The owner is someone else.”
“Yeah, but who?”
“That’s private. There’s no way of knowing.”
“Can’t you just ask? Have you told them I have very personal reasons for wanting to buy them out?”
“Theoretically, I could try, Harper, but there’s something called confidentiality…”
“What about public records? There must be something on file. They’ll have to pay real estate taxes. There must be a name, an address…”
“I’ve tried. There’s nothing.”
I sighed and sank back in my chair. I didn’t want to lose hope, but there seemed to be no way to find the new owners of the bookstore. Mr. Norris bent over his desk and attempted to look reassuring.
“I’ll keep trying. I promise.”
“Thanks.”
I walked out of his office still clinging to a desperate hope and walked toward the Plateau. My mind was clear, my heart was alive and healed. Or almost. There were still some memories that made it ache. But the ache wasn’t something bad, because it reminded me of the person I loved most in the world. I needed to think of him now and then. The recollection of him made me whole.
I stopped on the sidewalk in front of my grandmother’s old house. Nothing had changed, despite the passing months. It even seemed as if someone was living there. The entryway was clean, so were the windows, and there were flowering plants on the balcony. Someone had even put up a new mailbox.
I crossed the street, pulse racing, and rang the doorbell. I needed to know who was living there.
I waited.
Nothing.
Silence.
I knocked and knocked again until there was nothing left to do but accept that no one was home. I looked in the mailbox. No letters with the new owner’s name. But I wouldn’t give up. Whoever lived there might be the owner of the bookstore, too, I thought. I sat on the steps, ready to wait as long as I had to.
The hours passed, and the cold sank in. I shivered. All I had on were jeans and a thin jacket over my wool sweater. The temperature was low for the end of April.
I stuck it out until the sun set and I could no longer feel my feet. Then I started worrying I’d catch cold. I got up, numb, and walked off, sad that I hadn’t found what I was looking for, but hopeful, because if someone was living there, maybe I could talk to them, and all wasn’t lost.
I walked to the bookstore before returning home. Someone had painted graffiti on the plywood covering the windows, and some of it had gotten on the frames. I was angry; it was my fault that the place was falling into the ground. I couldn’t understand why someone would buy it and then just leave it abandoned.
I couldn’t take the nostalgia.
The idea that I had lost all that forever.
I spent the next few days trying to find out all I could about the buyer or buyers. I asked the neighbors, dug through the mail a second and third time…and found out nothing. Whoever it was didn’t seem to spend much time at either place. At the bookstore, no one ever answered the doorbell and the lights never came on, and at the house, no one opened the windows or even moved the curtains.
My impatience was killing me.
Luckily, the impulse to write had returned. My head was full of ideas, thoughts, emotions that were begging to be expressed.
I bought a desk at a secondhand shop and set it up under the window at the apartment. Next to it, I placed a bookshelf and an apple-green rug I found at a flea market. That corner, with its views of Baldwin Park, was the nicest spot in my apartment. I spent hours and hours there, typing nonstop. Putting my story on the page. Reliving it from another perspective, with the necessary distance to make it art.
My work was my refuge, and not even the uncertainty about what the future might bring could lessen the pleasure of my newfound freedom. I was living outside of time, paying no attention to the hour, without a routine. It was chaos, and I loved it.
I learned to feel good. To care for myself. To enjoy every last moment.
I learned to think in the now. Not to rush. To be happy.
But I never did learn to forget him, to stop missing him. To erase the impression of his hands touching me and his lips covering mine.
Him. Just him.
And every night, when I got in bed and the silence overtook the room, I’d fall asleep thinking of his eyes, his smile, of all we’d had. And it hurt. It hurt bad.
May started, the weather changed, and the temperatures rose in southern Quebec. I traded my desk for the damp grass and the shadows of the trees. Lying back in the park, I’d squint and stare at the bits of sky visible between the leaves.
I was trying to decide how to end my novel, and I wound up thinking about the differences between real life and fiction. But also about how similar they were. How they both have a beginning, they both descend into confusion, they both have conflicts, trials and errors, harmony, resolution. How both can have a happy ending, how all love stories deserve one, whether they’re imagined or whether they really happen.
Except for mine, of course. My own love story had just broken off in the middle.
Forever.
Forever : a word that could describe the greatest happiness or the vilest sorrow.
Out of the blue, a guy walked over, a few years older than me, interrupting my thoughts and getting in the way of my sunlight. I moved to the side. I was like a lizard, trying to soak up every ray. Shielding my eyes, I saw it was my brother.
“You know you’re sitting on an anthill, right?” he said.
“No, I’m not.”
“You’ll see when all the ants crawl in your ears and start eating you from the inside out.”
I smirked.
“Those kinds of jokes only worked when we were little,” I replied.
“You say that like you ever grew up, shorty.”
“Yeah, yeah…” I sat up. “What are you doing here?”
“Megan’s away on a trip and I didn’t feel like eating alone.”
“Well, I guess I’m proud to come in second.”
He sat down next to me, apparently unworried about the grass staining his costly tailored suit. He opened a paper bag, took out a couple of sandwiches, and offered me one.
“Thanks. I’m starving, actually.” I took a bite of pastrami. “And this is delicious.”
We smiled at each other and talked with our mouths full. I guess we’d never really learned our manners, or else acting like children brought us back to the old days, and we were trying to relive them.
“How’s it going?” he asked, pointing at my laptop.
“I’m almost done, but I don’t know how to tie it all together. You know me—always indecisive.”
“I’ve got an idea. Just kill everyone. A giant massacre, no mercy.”
“I can’t kill them! It’s a story of love and love lost.”
“So is Romeo and Juliet , and everyone dies in it.”
I rolled my eyes, tore off a little scrap of bread, and threw it at him, hitting his cheek.
“Why are you so weird?” he asked.
“Why are you ?”
“I guess it’s in the genes. Thank God I got the good ones.”
“Yeah, and I got the good-looking ones,” I responded, crossing my eyes.
I giggled and gave him a hug, and as I rested my head on his shoulder, he told me, “I saw him.” I knew who he meant. “We ran into each other in a bar downtown.”
I waited a few seconds, trying to absorb the news. Losing him had hurt me, and I’d had to bury my feelings for him to keep them from haunting me. But the wall I’d built to protect myself was weak and full of cracks, and it was hard to keep my emotions from seeping in.
“How was he?”
“Good. I mean, he looks good. We talked a little while, but I didn’t get much out of him. He isn’t spending much time in Montreal. He’s more or less living on Lennox Island. He’s super-involved in the reservation there.”
“I love that place.”
“The thing is, though…he’s changed, or something’s changed between us. I think he’s avoiding me on purpose. Me! It sounds stupid to say this, but I miss him!”
That made me feel guilty. I knew how important Trey was to my brother.
“I’m sorry, Hoyt. It’s all my fault.”
“Don’t worry. We’re adults, and these things happen. He disappeared for a while when his mother died, too, but eventually he came back. He always ends up coming back.”
“Was he…was he with someone?” I asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yeah.” I was masochistic in that way.
“He was with the same girl.” He paused, contemplating me. “Why don’t you just call him and try to see him, Harper?”
“No!”
“You could fix what you had.”
“He told me if I let him go, he was never coming back. Anyway, he’s with someone else. He’s put it behind him.”
Hoyt shook his head. He wasn’t the type to give up easily.
“I’d be happy to go find him and drag him here by the balls.”
“You know how mad that would make me. And you promised you wouldn’t.”
He threw up his hands. “I’d do anything for you.”
“Then trust me and let me resolve things my way.”
There was a battle going on inside him. He was a natural protector and couldn’t sit still when the people he cared about were suffering. But he respected me too much to overstep my bounds. I knew he had given up when he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and took out the letter our mother had written me, handing it to me.
“Hayley and I talked, and we decided you should keep it. Mom wrote it for you. Here. I need to go. You’re good, right?”
“Better than good,” I said.