Assassin's Apprentice: Chapter 36

36.

Thomas led Harper through the clinic’s dark waiting room, past the homey overstuffed pastel green sofas and the distressed wood coffee tables from the Pottery Barn catalogue. She walked cautiously in the dark, outstretched arms waving in front of her like windshield wipers. Thomas walked straight through the room as if it were fully lit. She tried to imitate his walk—which was more like a swimming motion, the way a seal knifes water—but she immediately cracked her shin against the coffee table. She didn’t cry out, not wanting him to witness her clumsiness. She limped after him.

Harper felt funny being here. The paintings on the walls were just dark blotches now, but Harper remembered them from when she was pregnant: brightly colored landscapes of various fields full of flowers or orchards overflowing with ripe fruit. Scenes of fertility, but without people in them. During her pregnancy, Harper had stared at them often while waiting for her appointments with Vivian. She had even asked Viv about them, why no people? “The fertile fields are to make the pregnant women feel good,” she had explained. “All those bright colors and lusty blooms. Part of the whole Earth Mother thing. But there are no people because I don’t want the pregnant women seeking abortions to feel any worse than they already do.”

Harper had been impressed by so much thoughtfulness going into office decorations. Her own dank office back in Harpo City had only an old painting of a rodeo by some long-dead sheriff in the 1920s, and a calendar courtesy of Tompkins Mortuary, each month featuring a photograph of a different rural cemetery somewhere in Wyoming. The only other wall hanging was the photograph of her father being sworn in as sheriff, her mother beaming at his side. Her mother had nailed the frame to the wall over her father’s protests. Fifteen nails to make sure he wouldn’t take it down in embarrassment. “You’re leaving it up if for no other reason than for people to see what a good-looking wife you have,” she’d told him.

Harper had put up nothing new, nor taken down anything old. She’d never decorated because she’d never really felt like it was her office, more like she was house-sitting. Watering the plants, waiting for the real owners to return. Now she could see how stupid and self-destructive that was. Perhaps that attitude was a nudge of her own back-row domino, the one that had started the toppling that resulted in the current disasters. She was her own assassin.