And Don't Look Back, page 15
“The way she was what?” Vincent looks curious now.
Harlow forces herself to continue despite the guilt. “She thought somebody was after her. So now I’m wondering if there was some kind of trouble she got into before she left, something completely separate from Eve.”
Vincent’s nodding before she’s even finished speaking. “Could be,” he says. “Did she have any boyfriends that caused issues? Did she owe anyone money?”
It strikes Harlow as darkly funny, how these are the same questions that swirled around Eve. As if both she and her daughter brought their troubles on themselves, by maybe getting involved with the wrong men, or trusting the wrong people with money. As if maybe they should have been smarter, taken their own safety more seriously, and then people wouldn’t have to be asking these questions at all.
Harlow runs her finger around the rim of her coffee cup. “She never had any boyfriends that I knew about,” she says. “No girlfriends, either.” Harlow’s not naive; she’s never thought her mom was completely single and celibate, that there weren’t numerous lovers over the years, but anyone there was never made it to the point of meeting Harlow. “I always felt like she got spooked after my sperm donor, you know?”
“So your father was the last person she was really involved with?” Vincent asks. He pulls a pen and a small black leather-bound notebook from his pocket and flips to a clean page. “What’s his name?”
Harlow’s face warms more, her cheeks burning. “I don’t know,” she says sharply. “He wasn’t important. He isn’t important.”
“He’s important if you want to get these answers,” Vincent says, his voice the same even and calm tone, no reaction either way to Harlow’s defensiveness. “Do you have any idea of his identity? Any way of locating him?”
“He didn’t want anything to do with us,” Harlow says. “That’s all I know about him.”
Vincent shrugs. “Okay,” he says mildly, scribbling something down. “And any financial issues?”
“We got by,” Harlow says, but on this she is less certain. Fifteen thousand dollars, in cash, is a lot for one person to have amassed, especially over a lifetime of bar work and temp jobs, especially while on the run with a child. Money was another thing Harlow didn’t attempt to press her mom on, though: there were questions she knew not to ask, and answers she was never going to get. Now, of course, she regrets being so reticent. Regrets letting her mom control everything, hide every detail she deemed Harlow too young or stupid or naive to know.
Vincent writes something else in the notebook and then closes it. “Okay,” he says, glancing at his watch again. “Here’s what I think we should do. You should, if you can, look at your mom’s financials. Do you have access to them? Bank accounts, any credit cards, things like that?”
Harlow frowns, one hand diving back under the table to worry at a loose thread in the ripped knees of her jeans. “I don’t know,” she says, cautious, thinking of the wad of cash from the safety-deposit box. “She didn’t really let me in to all that. But I can try—maybe I can call around?”
“You should try,” Vincent says. “You want to look and see if there’s any debt she might have had that she kept hidden from you, or any unusual activity on her accounts.”
“Unusual how?”
“Large withdrawals,” Vincent says. “Or large deposits. Any indication she might have been receiving or sending money to anyone. You’d be surprised how often these things come down to money.”
Harlow nods slowly. She doesn’t even know if her mom had credit cards, or if she did, what name they were under. “Okay.”
“A list of acquaintances would be helpful,” he says. “Any friends, former romantic partners, colleagues—anyone who strikes you as important. Then I can start looking into people and assessing their connections to your mother. See if anything particularly… interesting comes up.”
“I can do that,” Harlow says, even though she can count the people her mom might have called friends over the years on one hand.
“And then—” Vincent takes his wallet out and fishes out a couple of bills. “Any details on your father could be useful. You might want to think about doing one of those ancestry DNA tests. Again—you’d be surprised how often custody disputes can turn extremely ugly.”
“Custody?” Harlow repeats incredulously. Is he suggesting my father could have been the one after us? Like, he wanted me? No: not possible. Her mom would not have kept Harlow’s dad away from her if he’d really wanted to be involved. She might have hated him, but she wasn’t cruel like that.
Are you sure about that? a small voice in her head whispers. After finding out all the shit she’s hidden from you—after finding out she did keep your other family from you—you still really think she couldn’t have been capable of that?
“We should follow all potential avenues,” Vincent says. He takes a card from his wallet and hands it to her. It’s not as fancy as Harlow would have expected, his name in plain black font on a somewhat flimsy card, not the glossy weighted paper to match the quality of his rich-boy sweater and watch. “Listen, I have to get going now, but here’s my details. Send over that list of names as soon as possible, and I’ll get things going on my end.”
“Okay,” Harlow says, and she has to look up at him as he stands, towering over her. “Thank you. For meeting me, and helping.” She thinks of that fifteen thousand, several thousand less now, that she’s tucked beneath the floorboards at the house. “How much is this going to cost?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Vincent says, and his bright blue eyes soften, become misty almost. “Everyone in my line of work has a case they couldn’t stop thinking about, long after the fact. So don’t worry about my fee. I’m as curious as you are.”
Harlow tries to hide her surprise, her relief. It makes her feel like she was right to trust him—he’s not after her money; he just wants to help, out of a sense of duty, or something like it. And she’s glad she doesn’t have to pay—that money has to last her. Her mom meant for Harlow to spend it on rent, not on private investigators. “Thank you,” she says.
“No problem,” Vincent says, and he raps on the table, two quick knocks like punctuation at the end of a sentence. “Speak soon.”
Then he’s gone, back out into the driving rain, fading into the gloom.
Harlow takes a mouthful of now-lukewarm coffee and tries not to think about the thing that has never, would never have before this, occurred to her:
Was it my father she was running from?
* * *
Harlow jumps out of the car and runs through the rain again, this time to the salon. But when she nears, she notices the darkness behind the windows: nobody inside, no music making the windows vibrate, and no Sloane behind the desk. She steps back and examines the opening hours. Today: closed.
Harlow swears. There goes her distraction. She hides in the doorway as she texts Sloane. hey where are u? she taps out. salon’s closed?
Sloane’s response flies back: always closed thursdays. shopping with Ruby rn, hit u up later?
Harlow slides her phone into her back pocket without replying and sprints back to her car. Once she’s inside, the rain becomes percussion on the roof, and she cranks the heat high as she thinks about what Vincent Harris said, that thing about her father—
“Don’t,” she tells herself, hands forming a loose hold on the steering wheel. Don’t think about it, don’t think about him—
It’s useless, of course. Now all she can think about is this phantom man somewhere out there who she has, before now, never truly given more than a moment’s thought to. And maybe that is the real strange thing, maybe she’s the weird one for not caring more, but it isn’t some exaggeration or some act that she hides her longing behind—Harlow has really never thought about the man who contributed half her DNA in any way more than Huh, that’s interesting. Why would she think about him? For all Harlow’s frustration with her mom’s secrets, her penchant for hiding things, the one thing that never bothered her was how little her mom was willing to share about her father. What did Harlow need to know about him that she couldn’t parse from the fact that he didn’t have any interest in being her father, or in being with her mom? Every feature on her face belongs to her mom—to her entire matrilineal side, actually. Her skin the same shade of warm brown as her mom’s, her eyes that look like Christina’s, the smile that all four of them share. And she learned everything about life from her mom: how to ride a bike, how to wing her eyeliner, how to change a flat tire. He, whoever he was, wasn’t any part of that. He didn’t want it, and Harlow didn’t want him.
Except.
You’d be surprised how often custody disputes can turn extremely ugly.
Harlow leans her head against the window, the rain running rivulets on the other side. Vincent Harris has put it in her mind, and she would like to ignore it but when she tries it out as a puzzle piece, it’s alarming how well it seems to fit. My mom finds out she’s pregnant, Harlow thinks. She doesn’t want him involved. He won’t agree to that. So she takes off, so that he can’t ever have me.
Or maybe: He says he’s not interested, and I’m born, and we live our lives for a couple years, and then out of nowhere he shows up. Says he’s ready, except now Mom doesn’t want him at all. So she takes off.
Or: He doesn’t care, but his family does. They have money, lawyers, and my mom has nothing, and she knows what will happen and she doesn’t want to lose me so—she takes off.
Harlow knocks her head against the glass repeatedly, softly, but enough to start a dull ache throughout her skull. I’m almost eighteen, she thinks. Not that long to go until she becomes a legal adult, not subject to custody or the whims of one parent over the other. But her mom showed no sign of slowing down, of giving up their transitory life once Harlow’s birthday came and she would be free from any potential court-ordered anything to do with him.
She watches one lone raindrop sliding down the glass, a solo race to nowhere. If this is it, if she’s on the right track now—why would her mom have continued to keep her hidden after so long? What kind of man must he have been, to elicit such fear, to put the panic in her mom’s eyes that Harlow saw during every late-night escape?
She closes her eyes and envisions a different version of events—not a father wanting to see his child, but demanding it. Forcing it, forcing contact, forcing her mom to say yes, tight grip on fragile bones, harsh threats in a soft tongue. The kind of man who wouldn’t let a thing like legality or technicality stop him from taking what he wanted. Harlow. Her mother. Taking what he saw as his.
No. Harlow bites down on her cheek and opens her eyes, flicking the radio on and turning it up loud, as if she can blast the thoughts away. Suddenly she is exhausted and overwhelmed. Can’t think about it anymore, not today.
The voice is there and doesn’t even scare Harlow this time. Can’t, the voice says, or won’t?
25
Harlow drives home, her mind turning everything—her father, Christina, the memory of fear in her mom’s eyes, the image of a faraway Eve—over and over as she winds through the woods. Right when she pulls up to the house, she gets a text. It’s Sloane: wanna come over and order pizza and get stoned???
Harlow doesn’t even have to think about it. send ur address, she types back, and when Sloane does, she puts it into her phone and then swings a circle in front of the house, retracing her path up and out of the trees this time.
Sloane’s house isn’t hard to find, a ticky-tacky box in a development of identical ticky-tacky boxes. Harlow follows the numbers upward until she gets to 147, and then she pulls into the driveway, parking behind Sloane’s car.
Sloane answers the door in sweatpants and a white tee scattered with tiny holes and thin enough that Harlow can see her pink lace bra beneath it. “Welcome to Casa Prescott,” Sloane says in what Harlow thinks is supposed to be a British drawl. “Do come inside. But take your shoes off, because Addy Prescott hates outdoor shoes inside.”
Harlow unlaces her boots and leaves them at the bottom of the stairs, neatly lined up together. “Your mom and I feel the same,” she says.
Sloane rolls her eyes. “Whatever. Come on, let me give you the tour.” She swings one arm to the left. “Here you will find the usual rooms of a house.” Then she points upstairs. “And up there, even more rooms! Let’s go.”
Sloane bounces up the stairs, and Harlow follows at a slower pace, taking in the framed pictures that line the staircase—a selection of Sloane’s school pictures, shots of the salon’s grand opening, Sloane and her mom cheek to cheek across the years. “Is it just you and your mom?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah,” Sloane says over her shoulder. “My parents got divorced when I was, like, four or something. I don’t really see my dad much.”
Me neither, Harlow wants to say. It was just me and my mom too, she wants to say, but then she’d have to tell Sloane about her mom’s death and open everything up, and that’s not why she came over. She wants to take a break from thinking about everything. She does not want to tell Sloane about theories and ideas and wild speculation about her mom’s state of mind when she ran from this cold town. She does not want to bring up her father or the private investigator or Marcy Sheffield. And she does not want to think about how the longer she’s in Crescent Ridge, the less sure she becomes of what little she thought she knew. No: Harlow is sick to death of all of it.
She can’t help imagining what she’d be doing right now if things were normal—well. As normal as my life ever got, she thinks. Like, if that eighteen-wheeler hadn’t hit them, and her mom hadn’t died, and they’d carried on speeding through the night until they reached their new town, then by now she’d be settled in to a new school with a new identity and a group of people she called her friends. Maybe goth girls this time, the kind who wear impossible platforms and pure-black lipstick and always have a tampon to spare in the school bathrooms. Maybe right now she and her new goth girl friends would be getting bubble tea and smoking in the back seat of someone’s mom’s car.
“Harlow.” Sloane’s at the top of the stairs now, waiting. “Earth to Harlow.”
Harlow looks up at her standing there, the soft roll of her belly curving over the waistband of her sweats, the way Sloane’s eyes slant down at her. Then again, in all of her hypothetical right nows, she wouldn’t have Sloane.
“I’m coming,” Harlow says. “What was that about getting stoned? Because right now I’d like to be high enough that it feels like my brain is no longer connected to my body.”
Sloane takes Harlow by the wrist as she reaches the top of the stairs. “I have exactly the strain for you,” she says. “Jesus, you’re like ice. You wanna borrow a sweater?”
* * *
They spend all afternoon in Sloane’s bedroom, which is like the inside of a disco ball, or at least that’s how Harlow’s stoned brain sees it: pink walls, trinkets everywhere, clothes spilled on the floor, tiny twinkling lights wrapped around fake-flower garlands and draped from the ceiling. She eats breadsticks one after another after another as Sloane flips through her high school yearbook, telling stories Harlow laughs at without following about people whose names she can’t keep up with. They watch an old cheerleader movie and blow raspberries against their palms any time one of the characters says something egregiously homophobic, and then decide that they can probably dance just as well as them and attempt the routine from the end credits, tripping over the piles of shoes that Sloane keeps littered across her floor and laughing so hard they can’t breathe. They lie down, heads touching, on Sloane’s bed and watch the galaxy projected on the ceiling swirl and shimmer, and Harlow takes another hit off the joint Sloane rolled and realizes this is the first time she has had fun being Harlow.
“What?” The word comes out of Sloane slowly, like she’s on half speed. “Say again?”
Harlow frowns. “Did I say something?”
“Something about being Harlow,” Sloane says, and she moves, hooking her leg over Harlow’s. “Something about fun.”
“Oh,” Harlow says, barely able to think about her words with Sloane’s leg on hers like that, with Sloane’s hair tickling her shoulder. “I think… oh, yeah. I never got to be Harlow before. You know? So it’s like, did I even ever do shit I liked? Or was I pretending to have fun because that was what the fake me would have done? And how do I even know where the other versions of me stop and actual Harlow me starts? It’s weird.”
“You’re not fake,” Sloane says, not understanding Harlow’s real point. “You’re just weird. I’m weird. Everyone’s weird.”
“We could have been friends,” Harlow said. “If I met you. In one of those other places. But I wouldn’t have been me. Harlow me. I would’ve been, like…” She catches herself before she starts in on the fake names. Nonono we’re not going there remember, this is distraction time, nice time, this is Sloane who thinks we’re normal, remember?
“Boring,” Harlow finishes instead. “I would’ve been too boring for you.”
Sloane makes a noise like she’s choking, but it’s laughter. “Hello? You have a mysterious vanished relative. You, like, inherited a haunted house—”
“It’s not haunted.”
“If you say so.”
“I told you I don’t like it when you say that.”
“Um, no, you didn’t.”
Harlow squints at the ceiling, her eyes following a planet-shaped swirl traveling past the light fixture. “No, I didn’t, did I,” she says, remembering and laughing. “Well. I don’t. And I don’t want to talk about that place anyway.”
