Shelby shrugged. “What’s not to like about a miracle?”
The time spent with Harper passes quickly, as the best times often do. Shelby knows she’s changing as the months go by. Her hair is chin-length now, angled, and she looks chic, despite her ragged clothes. She’s not as skinny as she used to be when she was made out of angles and pain. Occasionally she dabs on lip gloss and some black eyeliner. Now when Harper tells her she’s beautiful she half believes him. Her perfect day is the one when he picked her up in a rented car and they drove to Jones Beach to go swimming in the salty waves, then sunned in the sand with thousands of other beachgoers. She felt alive. She wonders if she might love him. She’s aware of the way her heart pounds when she’s with him. Sometimes Ben’s image rises in her mind while they’re in bed, and Shelby says I’m sorry out loud before she can stop herself. Harper laughs and says she is the sorriest girl he ever met. Sometimes she dreams of Ben. He sits on the edge of the bed in her dreams and watches her sadly. Hey, stupid, he says. Miss me yet?
Shelby’s mom asks when they’re going to meet Harper, and Shelby always says, Soon, but Harper is always too busy. He has so little time for her. Less and less it seems.
“He sounds like your father,” Shelby’s mom says when Shelby comes out for a visit. “He’s always working too.” Shelby’s mom serves her lemonade and hands her a postcard. “This arrived last week.”
There is an inked drawing of a box with something trapped inside. Eyes peer out. Shelby turns the card over. Save something. She keeps staring at the box. What is it looking out at her?
“Did you see him leave the card?” Shelby asks her mom.
“He comes at night,” Sue tells her. “I think he doesn’t want to bother me.”
Shelby laughs. “He just wants to bother me.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s what he wants,” Sue says.
“Then what?” Shelby runs her fingers over the drawing. There are little animals inside the box. Sad eyes. Foxy faces.
“I think he wants the best for you,” Shelby’s mom tells her.
Then summer is over, gone as quickly as it arrived. The days are crisp and filled with brilliant orange light. At sunrise a shimmer of color spirals over the asphalt. Shelby usually walks her dogs along the river, up to five miles on her days off. But today she’s in a cab on her way to Central Park. It isn’t easy to find a cabbie willing to take a fare with dogs, especially a huge Great Pyrenees, but finally one stops. He’s curious about Pablo. “I never saw anything like him,” he tells Shelby as she herds the dogs into the back of the cab. “I thought he was a polar bear.”
“They used this breed to find people in the French Alps,” Shelby says. “They were search and rescue dogs.”
Shelby gazes out the window. Save something. She thinks about that when she’s at the animal hospital on Mondays, and then when everyone leaves and she and Harper stay on to be together, she tries to convince him to start over. They’ll go to California and change their names. He’ll never have to go home again. That’s why she’s going to see him on an off day, since they never get together on the weekends. Shelby looks casual, wearing jeans and an old sweater and hiking boots. She wants it to seem like a coincidence when she runs into Harper, rather than the desperate act of someone who is willing to humiliate herself by plotting out an accidental meeting on the path she knows he walks on Sunday mornings.
If this is love, it makes her do stupid things. From the start Harper has been saying he’s waiting for the right time to leave his wife, but nearly a year has passed and that day has yet to come. She wants more than Mondays, and those weekends when his wife goes to see her parents in Buffalo. She has never been to his apartment, never gone out to a restaurant with him, never seen his dogs. Maravelle has met him only once, and then accidentally, as he was leaving to rush home before his wife returned from a visit to her parents. Maravelle and Jasmine had arrived so they could take Shelby with them to Rockefeller Center to see the tree. Harper hugged them both; he’d heard so much about them he felt he knew them and he wished he could stay, but he was already out the door.