What You Leave Behind (4 page)

“You think I don’t fucking miss him, too?” Austin erupts, caught off-guard by her almost-accusation of him purposely trying to wound her further. His hand clamps over his mouth immediately, as if he could grab the words and push them back in. His lashing out was a knee-jerk reaction, the culmination of his loneliness and a genetically predisposed fiery temper, and he knows it, is sorry that it spilled out at Harper. He’s done the one thing he would never want to do—cause her pain—and he’s done so as a result of her assuming he meant to. There’s no winning for him. He toes the rung on the bottom of his stool and closes his eyes as his hand laces into his disheveled, honey-colored hair, tugging at it as he sighs bleakly. “Harp, I’m sorry. I—I didn’t mean to—But I do—I do, Harp. I miss him, too. A lot.” His voice has always been a little rough, but the words are soft, burdened with a heavy ache and full of repentance, and Harper finds herself disarmed. She turns to face him and finally sees that hollow glint in his eyes that matches her own—two halves of nothing. She slides her beer over and nudges it against his knuckles until he looks down at it and cracks a tiny, mournful smile. “I think you need that more than I do,” he tells her.

The song winds to a close and Austin can’t fathom how three minutes could ever feel so endless. Playing it was a stupid decision, one he didn’t fully think through. He just wanted someone else to say all of the things he couldn’t bring himself to admit. A new song queues up over the sound system, the precise opposite of a heartbreaking ballad, and Austin can see Harper’s relief in the way her whole body seems to release at the sound.

She sips slowly from her bottle and Dylan brings Austin another without a word. It sits untouched and unnoticed before him, as he can’t seem to look away from the severe slant of Harper’s jaw, the jut of her collarbones. All of her angles appear sharp and wrong, and the skin that barely blunts their edges lacks the luminescence he used to marvel at. There was a dewy glow to her pale skin even in the dead of winter, like it absorbed the luster of the moon in the same way other girls’ had soaked up sun in the summertime. If he didn’t already hate Liam for leaving, he would hate him for this, for decimating such a thing of beauty.

After a while, Harper reaches the end of her beer and glances over at Austin. When their eyes meet, he quickly looks away, his long lashes concealing his solemn green eyes as they cast downward. She meekly asks, “Has he—Liam—has he called you?” It’s so quiet that, to Austin, it almost sounds like a secret, one she’s attempting to keep from herself. He shakes his head and fights himself to meet her gaze, trying his best to appear stronger than he feels he is, than either of them could possibly be in the wake of such a thing. Harper nods curtly and her stare shifts away from him to the line of tap handles behind the bar, the liquor bottles beyond them. “He hasn’t called me, either,” she says with a blunt, solemn laugh. “Not that I really expected him to.”

“Look, I don’t know if you thought he did, but I just want to go on record and say that Liam—he didn’t—I didn’t know he was leaving,” Austin admits. “I mean, he didn’t even say goodbye. Not to me. Not to anyone.” He can’t look at her then, can barely get the words out of his mouth as he picks at the edge of the bar top with a ragged fingernail. “Two decades of friendship and I—I had to find out from your mom.” Austin reaches for the otherwise untouched beer in front of him and takes a swig of the lukewarm liquid. He downs half the bottle in one go, and when he’s done, he thinks he feels the crush of loneliness subside just a little. But then he talks of that night, and the pain pulses again. “That night, when he—I was coming in here, as Hilary was leaving—totally fucking frantic and all red-faced, like she gets—and she spat at me in passing something about how my—and I quote—
asshole best friend
left you on the side of the road somewhere near Medford. I didn’t know he left me, too. Left all of us.”

Austin clears his throat as the details of the night come back to him, and he struggles to keep himself composed. It brings back so much that he doesn’t want to remember. He was six the last time he saw his mother, and he can still remember the way her platinum hair shimmered beneath the Arizona sun as she loaded suitcases into her station wagon and drove away. He lost his father that day, as well. He lost the man that taught him to play guitar and watched Sylvester Stallone films with him on Sunday afternoons, and gained a drunk who blamed him for the divorce and liked to break his spirit and his bones, in kind. Eventually, he lost that man, too. On his eighteenth birthday, his father woke him with a punch to the face and a kick to the ribs, and told him, “Get up. You’re moving the fuck out today, boy.” Not for the first time, Austin fought back, even got in a clean punch to his father’s jaw, one to his temple. Unfortunately for Austin, that was exactly what his father wanted, and as Austin was dragged away from his childhood home in handcuffs, his father waved from the porch, a vicious grin on his mouth. Austin had known loss, had been left and forced to leave, and he learned that losing the ones you love, in any respect, never gets easier.

“I thought it had to be some misunderstanding, so I called you, but it went to voicemail. When I called him, Sly answered and told me he’d left his phone at home, that he was with you, and asked if I had a message for him. I told her to ask him what in the fuck was going on and to tell him to call me. She read the note back to me as she wrote it, and I laughed as proper Mrs. Barnes said
fuck
, and then we talked about Sunday brunch as she walked the note upstairs to Liam’s room. That’s when she found a note of his own. It said,
Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I love you both. I’ll come back eventually. I promise.
Nothing else. He didn’t even tell Sly and Dan where he went. He was just—he was gone.”

As Austin quiets, Harper wrestles with the words that want to escape her mouth in reply. Thrice over, she opens her mouth and sharply takes in a breath, as if she’s going to speak, but stops herself just shy of doing so. She isn’t sure she should ask, if she wants to know or if Liam’s reason for leaving even matters now, so she picks at the label on her beer bottle and stares at her hands. Austin sees her hesitation and tries not to guess her words, busies himself with his own bottle, watching as the liquid swirls about behind the green glass as he spins it in his hands.

“What is it?” Austin asks finally, after so many minutes tick by and their silence turns the air around them so thick that he’s nearly choking on it. She doesn’t answer him right away, but he sees her lips move soundlessly in his periphery, and he sighs as he turns away from his bottle to face her full-on. He reaches over and presses a hand to her hip, pushing just hard enough against the sharp bone there to swivel her atop the stool, turning her to face him. He has to fight himself to remove his hand once he’s done so, and he watches as his fingers lose contact with the softness of her sweater, the dents he’s made in it with his press smoothing out in his absence. He folds his hands in his lap, the want to touch her once again pushed aside, as it has been for years, and he levels his stare on hers as he implores, “Just say it.”

“Do you know why?” Harper asks slowly as she stares at him with eyes full of such sorrow. Her voice is a rattle and barely held together. His hands twitch in his lap, ache to reach over and hold her together, hold her at all. “I know you didn’t know he was leaving, but can you think of any reason why he did? Was there—was there someone else? Someone at OHSU? He said—was I not enough or—”

“No.” Austin says the word firmly, but he frowns around it as a chill of sadness courses through him at the sight of her desperation. He wishes he could give her the answers she needs, that he knew more or could help in some way. It pains him to be so useless. “I honestly have no idea what the fuck he was thinking. He never mentioned a word about it to me before—before he left.” Harper nods and bites her lip to keep from sobbing as tears slowly drip down her cheeks. Austin lets himself touch her then, his rough palms scratching over her soft skin as his hands settle over hers, his fingers pressing strongly against the backs of her hands, as if he could transfer what little strength he has left to her through his touch. “It’ll be okay, Harp. He’ll come back."

The words linger in the air, the despondency at the core of both Harper and Austin too heavy to let them be buoyed by such an intangible hope.

“It hurts a little less every day,” Harper admits after a while. “But I don’t feel better being here. I just feel… haunted,” she says wearily as she stands, a hand in the air to signal Dylan over. “I should go,” she tells both of them at the same time, while her hands dig in her purse for her debit card. Austin is faster and while she has her head bent, searching through her belongings, he hands Dylan a twenty. Harper finds her card just as Dylan walks off, and with wide eyes, tells Austin, “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know. But you haven’t worked in weeks,” he shrugs.

“Thank you,” Harper concedes. She gives Austin a smile, and is pleased when she realizes it doesn’t feel forced, and leans over to pull him into a half-hug. The crook of her elbow squeezes his shoulder hard, as he palms her back and digs in his fingers just enough to feel the protrusion of her ribs. He’s always wanted to touch her, but not like this, and his hands feel burnt with guilt and sadness when she pulls away. She smiles still, but it dwindles when she sees the color has drained from his face. She presses her palm to his stubble-covered cheek and he tries desperately not to close his eyes and lean into her touch as she says, “You look terrible.”

“So do you,” he echoes woefully, pulling her hand away from his cheek. He watches as it drops to her side before he looks back up at her, a wry smile on his mouth. “I feel a little better, though. Seeing you, knowing I’m not the only one suffering… It’s nice to have that in a way. That sounds awful, I know, but it’s true.” Harper nods, understanding and not faulting him, and hugs him again, a crushing appreciation for common sorrow. He can hardly bring himself to let her go this time, let her escape into the night and take with her that feeling of kinship. “We’ll get through this, Harp,” he says, as much to himself as to Harper, as he releases her. “I promise you.”

Austin watches as Harper goes and the pain in his chest returns, but it’s not the same as before. It’s changed, worsened. He aches for her, as he always has, but the feeling ripping through him is no longer loneliness. It’s a guilty hope, a remorseful yearning. Because for the briefest amount of time, with the ghosting memory of the feel of her skin beneath his, he finds himself thinking, in the wake of this destruction, he might one day have the chance to love her the way she should be loved.

CHAPTER THREE

When Harper awakens, it’s early enough that she’s not sure if the absolute blackness of the sky is the dead of night or the dark before the dawn. Sleep comes easier now than it has during the three months prior, but she still finds herself awake at odd hours, eating Cheerios at two in the morning, dead asleep at four o’clock in the afternoon. The glowing numbers of her alarm clock tell her it’s closer to dawn, thirteen minutes shy of six in the morning, and she draws her legs out from beneath her heavy down blanket, slowly deciding to rise to the day. Normally—though her sense of normalcy has become skewed as of late—if Harper were to awaken before her six o ’clock alarm, she would use that extra time to send Liam a good morning text and read the news on her phone in the oversized armchair in the corner, just sit and listen to the patter of rain on the roof tiles or the howl of wind through the branches of the oak tree, the sounds of dawn. She hasn’t set her alarm or had a routine morning since the fifth of September, but today, waking so close to what was once normal for her, she grabs her phone from where it sits on her end table, flicks on her bedside lamp, and curls up in the cream-colored velour chair. She doesn’t even look at the icon for her text messages, doesn’t feel a pang of longing or nostalgia, as she seeks out the news—her staples of local, world, weather, and politics.

“Oh, you’re awake.” As Harper looks up from her phone, she sees Hilary, her brows pinched in confusion, standing just inside the doorway. She smiles and cocks her head to the side, as if to say,
Isn’t that obvious?
“I was just heading out. Saw your light was on, and figured I’d turn it off.” Hilary’s dressed in her work attire, black pants and a mint green Meat and Eat button-down, an apron bearing the same logo tucked beneath her arm, and Harper’s gaze slides to her closet where her matching uniforms have sat unused. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s okay,” Harper echoes and she’s nearly surprised by how easily and honestly the words spill from her mouth. She can’t tell if they fall so effortlessly from her lips because she’s finally perfected the lie, or if it’s because she finally means them. “I’m okay,” she reiterates, thinking it as a question, but the words come steadily, not forced or an apparent, flimsy guise of well-being. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she confirms without hesitation.

“Good.” Hilary gives Harper a smile, one that reaches all the way to the crinkled corners of her eyes. “I’m happy to hear that.”

“Thank you.” Again, the words that come from Harper’s mouth take on their own meaning as they escape, and the thank you feels too earnest for something as simple as her mother checking in on her. She gets to her feet, leaving her phone on the seat behind her as she stands, and crosses the room to Hilary, searching for the right words. “Mom,” she says softly as she approaches, and reaches up to hug her mother’s neck. At five-foot-two, she’s a whole head shorter than Hilary, and she stands on her toes as she wraps her arms around her, just how she did as a child. “Thank you for—for everything.”

“Oh, Harp, it’s nothing—”

“No, it is. It’s—it’s something.” As they release one another, Harper looks up as her mother’s eyes start to brim with tears. “I know I haven’t been the easiest person to deal with—outright fucking horrible, really, and I—I just—thank you for not giving up on me.”