What You Leave Behind Read Free Page B

yourself,” Hilary tells her weightily, as Harper sits motionless in the basin. She doesn’t want to have to treat her twenty-six year old like a toddler, but she will if need be. She swallows thickly while waiting for a response that doesn’t come. Harper only stares unseeing at the dripping faucet as her sweatshirt floats loosely around her in the water. Nodding gravely, Hilary rolls up her sleeves and reaches beneath the waterline to pull the hem of her sweatshirt over her head, leaving her in a tank top and ratty pajama shorts. The sweatshirt hits the tile of the bathroom floor with a wet thwack as she discards it, and Harper turns her stare from faucet to floor, her hands moving in slow motion to reach for the little piece of her that’s been taken away. “You can’t have it back, Harp. You need to bathe. This isn’t healthy.”
    “I can do it,” she says, but her voice is just as frail as her body. Hilary picks up a washcloth from the rack above the tub and sets it in her waiting hand, staring down at her skeptically, eyebrows raised and head cocked. “I can do it,” Harper repeats, her hand balling around the cloth as she submerges it in the lukewarm water. She pulls it out from beneath the surface and makes a show of rubbing it down her arm. “Really.”
    “You’re sure?” Hilary asks, reaching across the expanse of the tub to grab a bottle of body wash. She hands the bottle off to Harper, who only answers her with a hard gaze. “Okay. Well, if you need anything, I’ll be out in the hall.”
     
    ***
     
    “I should get out of the house,” Harper says absently as she wipes the remnants of her finished sandwich from the corners of her mouth and sets her napkin on the table beside her clean plate. Hilary is in the middle of making one for herself, as Harper hasn’t left as much as a crumb in the past few days, but she doesn’t mind the extra work. She smiles at her daughter’s words as she flips the bread in the pan and hums a positive reply, not wanting to sound too excited by her obvious progress. “Can I take Dad’s truck?”
    “It’s yours, so I don’t see why you couldn’t,” she says with a shrug, flipping the bread again. She taps the spatula on the countertop as she turns around to smile at the back of Harper’s head. “Going anywhere in particular?” As she watches Harper’s shoulders shrug, she turns to grab the shopping list off the refrigerator. “Well, how do you feel about going to Safeway? We’re running low on milk.”
    “I can do that.”
    Hilary sets the list beside her on the table and watches as she scans it, her index finger moving over the items on the list. There isn’t a lot written there, so she won’t have to be out for long, and Hilary thinks this is a step in the right direction, one that will put her back into the world and further away from her wrecked remains. And it’s a big one, because it’s one Hilary hasn’t forced her to take. Harper looks up from the list and smiles. It isn’t a big smile, not like it used to be, but it’s a glimmer of hope, and Hilary nods while grinning back at her.
    “Do you mind if I add some things to this?” Harper asks, her hand already reaching for the pen that sits atop the newspaper in the center of the table. “I kind of want some pasta.”
     
    ***
     
    A week later, Hilary finds Harper on the couch in the living room, her stare focused on the blank television screen, with a book resting open in her lap. When she left in the morning, Harper had just started the novel, but now she has nearly half of it pinned under her thumb. She shifts her gaze and watches as her mother hangs up her coat and removes her scarf. When Hilary meets her stare, Harper offers her a smile, inclines her head and hooks her thumb in the direction of the kitchen. “I made fried chicken,” she says, setting the book on the coffee table as she rises. “It’s probably cold by now and the bird’s obviously not from the shop, but it’s