In Harmony(99)

He thought it was simple—disobey my father and love him. Love him no matter what. But he didn’t know what he was asking. He didn’t know what I knew. What my father could do to him. Staring in his eyes, I saw the love for me, but I also saw the ruination of everything he’d worked for. His dreams crushed by accusations my father could make. Endless resources and the influence of a multi-billion-dollar company behind them.

I’d die before I let that happen—before I let Isaac take on a crime he was innocent of while Xavier walked free.

The choice tore me in half. Whatever I decided would be my ruination. Live a life without Isaac. Or stay with him and watch him lose everything.

I had no choice.

My father was in the audience, watching.

I drew in a shaky breath, my eyes pleading for forgiveness as I uttered the simple lie that unraveled us for good.

“At home, my lord.”

Isaac’s eyes flared again. His fingers loosened their hold on my arms but didn’t let go. He turned his face to the audience. The stage lights wouldn’t let him find my father in the crowd, but I knew he spoke only to him.

“Let the doors be shut upon him,” he whispered, “that he may play the fool nowhere but in's own house.”

Isaac let go and I fell to my knees. I had a line but it was lost as I struggled to draw breath between the choking sobs that were strangling my throat. Isaac started to turn away, done with me. Done with us.

Then he whirled back around, shaking, unable to contain the pain any longer. He let it all out, spitting words that hit me like slaps to the face.

“If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry. Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.”

His voice rose, cracking, as tears filled his eyes. “Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough,”—he jabbed his finger at his own heart—”what monsters you make of them!”

He stood over my sobbing form, breathing heavily. Gathering up his pain, calling it home and pressing it back inside. He spoke his final line in a voice devoid of all emotion. All pain. A tone that promised his silence from that moment forward.

“Farewell.”





There is a willow grows aslant a brook

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do “dead men’s fingers” call them.

There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, And mermaid-like a while they bore her up,

Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element. But long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.



—Act IV, Scene VII





Three years later…



Willow



I woke up to a sticky Indiana summer morning, the heat laying on me like a second, damp blanket. Air conditioning was on the long list of household improvements to my rental in The Cottages. I’d only been back in Harmony for three months, and food and rent ate up most of my little salary from the HCT. I didn’t have much left over for home renovations.

I kicked the covers off to get some air on my skin. My bed was the same four-poster queen-size from my parents’ house in Emerson Hills. It had moved with me to Canada, to Billings, Montana, and then to Austin, Texas. Three times in three years my dad was relocated, chasing the oil profits. My mother finally gave up packing and hauling furniture and insisted on pre-furnished homes with every move. It was wasteful and silly, but it was her way of protesting being dragged around North America.

I didn’t protest. I had no voice. No money. Nothing. The only thing I asked was to take my bed, including the sheets and blankets. If I pressed my nose to the linens and inhaled, I imagined I could still smell Isaac there—gasoline and smoke, peppermint and aftershave.

“Isaac.”

I let his name sigh out of me as I lay on the bed in my cottage, my hand pressing over my heart. No matter how often I thought of him—and it was constant—the ache in my chest never diminished. Missing him never got easier.

I shook off the sadness before it weighed me down, and got out of bed. I padded across the hardwood floors, through the living area, decorated with my own little touches. Wooden comedy and tragedy masks I found at a swap meet in Texas. A colorful Cheyenne throw rug I’d bought in Montana, soft under my feet as I crossed into the kitchen.

I started the coffee and my gaze lingered on the framed poem hanging next to the kitchen window. Angie wrote it for me in Mr. Paulson’s English class in high school. She sent it to me in Canada, before she left for Stanford.



Willow Tree



Its limbs the long hair

of a sad girl,

reaching for the

ground.

‘Sturdy as an oak,’ they say.

A willow is stronger.