What You Leave Behind Read Free Page A

her—she’s never been left before. Hilary married Harrison mere months after graduation and they spent the next two decades together building a gratifying life and raising their beautiful daughter. At the time, Hilary couldn’t imagine suffering a greater loss, remembering the spot in her chest that turned cold and vacant as the light faded from her husband’s eyes, but hearing Harper like this, witnessing her barely exist this way, she thinks she may have been wrong. Her husband had never stopped loving her, right on down to his last breath, his final words, and she put him in the ground with that sole comfort holding her up.
    She settles herself down at the table and as the sound of her daughter’s heartbreak seeps through the ceiling overhead, she says a silent prayer that it will all be over soon. As she does, the scabs fall away from her old wounds, and she cries over her loss of Harrison, wondering if the loss of love, no matter the kind, ever truly stops tearing someone apart once it starts.
     
    ***
     
    The days and nights bleed slowly into and out of each other, all the same to Harper. She is a monument to her grief, devoted only to mourning, and she grieves the loss of Liam whether accompanied by the sun or the moon. From somewhere beneath that same sky, he haunts her, like the phantom pain in her chest he left behind when he tore out her heart. She knows she’ll never get it back, that she’ll forever be empty. So she sits and she cries and nothing changes, nothing matters.
     
    ***
     
    “Just take a bite,” Hilary pleads, her weary head cradled in her palm. Harper is bent over the opposite end of the kitchen table, her frail arms limp on either side of the plate Hilary has set in front of her. On it’s the comfort food Hilary’s own mother made for her when she was a child—a golden brown grilled cheese sandwich and a mug of canned tomato soup. Harper’s stomach churns at the sight and smell of it, growls in hunger. She’s barely subsisting on bottles of water and a half-empty box of stale crackers she found beneath her bed, but giving in to more than that feels like she’s giving up on giving up, and she’s not ready to let the darkness go quite yet. She endures these warring thoughts daily, ever since Hilary began dragging her down to the kitchen.
    Each day, her stomach wins the back-and-forth and she swallows down a bite or two before pushing the plate away, ashamed of herself for giving in, and stalks back to her room in tears. Today, she eats nearly half the sandwich. After Harper leaves and the slam of her bedroom door sounds, Hilary reaches across the table and eats the other half, the crumbs catching in the split ends of her silvery hair. “Well, that’s another one,” she says to herself around a bite. “Baby steps.”
     
    ***
     
    A month is where Hilary draws a hard line. Harper’s grief has turned her into a shadow of her former self—ten pounds off her already small frame crafts her as skeletal, and she has a stench to her that indicates she has rarely, if ever, showered during Hilary’s long absences at the butcher shop. When she comes home from work on the evening of the thirty-second day, she knows Harper has once again ignored her repeated pleas and written instructions to bathe. She can smell her from the threshold of her room, musty with sweat and grime, and though she knows her daughter will fight her as best she can, she has to do something. Against the softly protesting flail of tired limbs, Hilary picks her up and carries her across the hall to the bathroom. It’s a feat, given Hilary’s average stature, but she manages to get Harper into the bathroom, and sets her in the basin of the tub as gently as she can. Hilary watches with an odd expression on her face as Harper dissolves down beneath the layer of bubbles, sinks to the bottom, as if she somehow expected her daughter’s lithe form to float.
    “I’m going to have to undress you, if you won’t do it