I would rather write ten thousand notes than a single letter of the alphabet.
—Ludwig van Beethoven
Chapter 1Harper
September, Three Years Later
“Here it is.” Mom unlocked the front door of our new house, beaming at me. “What do you think?”
I glanced around the small, shabby living room, and my heart sank. Not because it was small and shabby but because of a visceral feeling that some unseen calamity lurked behind the walls. Termites, maybe, or a crack in the foundation Mom didn’t know about because she’d passed on doing an inspection when she’d made the one and only trip to Rhode Island earlier this summer.
Either I was quiet a half second too long or Mom read my face.
“Gee, thanks, Harper,” she said. “You know, I worked really hard to buy this place instead of renting some shitty apartment from another shitty landlord that—”
“Mom, it’s fine,” I said, smiling. “Really. You did good, Maeve Bennett.”
“Yeah?” Her face filled with dubious hope as she brushed a lock of hair out of her face. Once it was sandy blond, but now it was full of gray.
“Yeah,” I said. “My eyes just needed to adjust to the dark.”
She blew a sigh of relief and rallied her enthusiasm.
“Thanks, baby. You’re gonna love this place. Trust me. I mean, wait till you seethat school. It doesn’t matter how much money I have in the bank or what neighborhood we’re in. What matters is how much smarts you got in that brain of yours. You’re finally gonna be at a school that deserves you.”
Then I felt like shit for being so pessimistic. As usual.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, giving her a hug and a kiss on the temple. “This is going to be great.”
I was excited about Castle Hill Academy, but a bit intimidated. Ninety percent of the student populace weren’t living in shabby houses with foundation problems. But Mom was right—where we lived didn’t matter. The Academy was my gateway to MIT, or maybe NYU. Then I could get a great job in the field of chemistry, and my family’s next house would be the opposite of shabby.
My little brother—half brother, technically, though I never thought of him as half of anything—had been tearing around the tiny front yard. Now he burst inside and pushed between me and Mom, singing, “I love it. I love it. I love it!”
He started racing around the tiny living room. Mom had been prescient to name him Dash—the kid loved to run. He made a circuit around the whole house, then jumped on the furniture that came with it. Mom had done well in that department too. The furniture we’d had in our crappy Pittsburgh apartment hadn’t been worth the price of the U-Haul, so we abandoned it. We piled everything we could in a storage bin secured to the roof of Mom’s ancient SUV and crammed the rest in my old blue Prius.
“Do I have my own room?” Dash asked with wide-eyed, seven-year-old enthusiasm.
“You sure do,” Mom said. “Look upstairs. Yours is the smaller one. Harper gets the big one because she’s the big sister.”
“I thought you said this was a two-bedroom,” I said, while Dash thumped upstairs to investigate.
“It is,” Mom said. “I’ll sleep down here on the couch.”
“Mom…”
“You’re going to need your own space to study. I’ll be fine. Plus, with my jobs, I’ll be coming and going, so this will make it easier.”
Easier. I clenched my teeth. That was the thing about Mom. She was admirable yet frustrating as hell. Adamant I have my own space to study and not get a job, so I could focus on my grades and get into a great college. To pay the mortgage on this new house, she’d work nine to five as a receptionist at a local dental office, and clean Airbnbs in whatever time she had left over. But the bulk of my “study time” would be spent babysitting Dash, getting him to and from school, supervising his schoolwork, cooking meals and taking care of the house. Just like I did in Pittsburgh.
Like I did when Mom was drinking.
She went into the postage-stamp-size kitchen with its old linoleum flooring and splayed her hands on the counter that faced the living room.
“I can’t believe it. This is all ours, Harper. We’re homeowners. Wow, we’ve come a long way, baby.I’vecome a long way.” She shook her head, disbelieving. “What a road.”
Like a movie montage, my mind played out that road. Long years of pitfalls and potholes that nearly sent us off a cliff more than once: Mom struggling as a single mother because my father split before I was born. My grandparents dying and Mom struggling harder, a parade of nameless friends and neighbors stepping in. I might’ve been three when the struggle became too much and suddenly there were a lot of bottles lining the counters and littering the floor of our tiny apartment.
Here the montage turned bleary, steeped in whiskey-and-beer uncertainty, watching my mother stumble around drunk. By age six, I was either helping put her to bed when she came home smashed or cowering under the covers, alone and terrified, when she didn’t come home at all.
