Happy Place

“SHE’S GOING TO be upset that I told you first,” Cleo says.

“I can pretend not to know,” I offer.

She gives me a look.

“Or,” I say, “we can be up-front about it and talk it out.”

She gives me another hug. “You sure you don’t want a ride back?” She checks the time on her phone. She called Kimmy for a ride a couple of minutes ago. She’ll be down to the Warm Cup any second.

“I’ll meet you in a bit,” I say.

First I need to find something for Sabrina. We won’t be leaving this trip with matching tattoos—as it turns out, most artists won’t tattoo a pregnant person, thus Cleo’s true resistance to the idea—but that doesn’t mean we can’t find something to hold on to from this place.

After Kimmy picks Cleo up, I grab a second caramel latte, iced this time, and wander past shop windows. I have no idea where to begin. I’m hoping I’ll know it when I see it. So far, the best option seems to be matching T-shirts that say GOT LOBSTAH on them, or matching T-shirts that say MAINEIAC over a lobster wearing aviators.

I follow a window display filled with lamps and cutesy tea towels around the corner, right to a window display filled with colorful buoys that have been turned into all manner of yard ornaments. I pause to let a grimy Subaru breeze through a stop sign at the next cross street, and that’s when I realize where I am.

Easy Lane. The backdrop to our fight last night. Up ahead, I spot the tattoo shop on the left. My first inclination is to get away from the scene of the crime. Then I notice the glossy gold shop number over the door on my right: 125.

Number 125, on Easy Lane.

It takes me a second to figure out what’s so familiar about that. When I do, I backtrack and check the number of the buoy store. 127. Wrong direction.

I’m looking for 123.

I wait for another car to pass through the intersection, and then jog across.

123 Easy Lane. The site of my personalized surprise.

On the door, a decal reads EARTHEN, along with some hours of operation, but in the glare of bright sunlight, I can’t make out much through the windows.

I check the time on my phone: 9:16 a.m. If I remember correctly, the itinerary said Sabrina’s “personalized surprise” for me would start at nine. I waffle for a moment about going in, then bite the bullet and push the door open.

A gust of warm air meets me.

“Harriet?” a woman’s voice says.

I blink as I wait out my pupillary dilation from the sudden change in light. “Yes, hi!”

I turn toward the voice, wondering if she can tell I can’t see her, or anything at all, yet.

“Your space is all ready in the back,” she says.

“Great.” For some reason it doesn’t occur to me until a half second too late that I could tell her I have no idea why I’m here. Or where here is.

My vision resolves as she leads me to the back of the shop, the floating oak shelves that line the walls coming into focus along with all the kitchenware for sale on them. Bowls, plates, cups, all in candy-colored tones that pop against the gallery-white walls.

The shop’s attendant—a woman with blunt fringe, flared pants, and hoop earrings, all of which look plucked from the seventies—leads me down a hall to a room twice the size of the first one.

I pull up short, no less shocked than when I walked into the cottage and saw Wyn there.

“Feel free to take whichever wheel you want,” the woman says. “No one else has space booked until four.”

I still haven’t managed a syllable when the bells over the shop doors ring behind us, and the seventies demigoddess says, “Let me know if you need help finding anything,” and excuses herself to greet the new customer.

I stand there, computing.

The back wall is all windows, looking out onto the next street. Wooden shelves, like the ones in the front of the shop, stretch from one wall to the other, laden with bowls and vases and mugs. On the right, clay-streaked, pastel-toned aprons hang on hooks, and down the middle of the polished concrete floor sits a long wooden table, potter’s wheels atop it at even intervals, stools pushed up to each of them. On the left wall, there’s a long counter with a sink and a bunch of cabinets and drawers, and from the ceiling, pothos and philodendrons hang like living streamers, catching the light as the pots twirl one way, then back the other.

A lump is rising in my throat.

I couldn’t have mentioned my pottery class to Sabrina any more than three times. I know this, because in general, I find talking about the class embarrassing.

Afraid people will take me too seriously, then be disappointed when they find out how mediocre I am at it. And somehow, nearly as afraid that they wouldn’t take it seriously, that they’d brush it off with a mild Well, everyone needs a hobby when it feels like so much more.

Not a career—I’m not good at it. Something else. The place I go when I feel trapped inside myself. When I’m terrified that all my happiest moments belong to the past. When my body is humming with too much of something, or aching from too little, and life stretches out ahead of me like a threat.

In our few phone calls since I’d started the class, Sabrina asked a couple of blunt follow-up questions about it, and I gave succinct answers, then turned the conversation in another direction. It was one more piece of my life I hadn’t felt ready to share before this week, and yet Sabrina saw it, saw me more fully than I realized.

Because this week wasn’t about torturing Wyn and me, and it wasn’t just about preserving our delicately balanced found family either. Everything she did, misguided or not, was out of love. Out of knowing us and caring that we’re happy.

I go to the wall of hooks and choose a blush-pink apron, looping it over my neck. Then I go to the drawers on the far side of the room and begin gathering supplies.

I fill a bowl with water and set it on the table along with a couple of tools, a sponge, a hunk of clay.

Not having a distinct plan before I start a project rarely turns out well for me, but I don’t care right now. It doesn’t matter what I make, only that I appreciate the time spent making it. It will feel good to dip my hands in mud, curve over the wheel until my back aches.

I take the stool closest to the windows and pound the clay into a ball. Then I plop it onto the wheel and flatten it with the heels of my hands.

The moment I slip my fingers into the water to start coning the clay up, calm floods me. My thoughts fritter away. I press the foot pedal, maneuvering the lump of muck upward as it centers on the spinning wheel.

I lose myself in the rhythm of it.

Coning it up. Coning down.

I won’t have time to glaze it before I leave Knott’s Harbor, won’t have room to take it home in my luggage once it’s fired. I don’t think about any of that.

Throwing makes my mind feel like the sea on a clear day, all my thoughts pleasantly diffused beneath light, rolling along over the back of an ever-moving swell.

My meditation app often tells me to picture my thoughts and feelings as clouds, myself as the mountain they’re drifting past.

At the wheel, I never have to try. I become a body, a sequence of organs and veins and muscles working in concert.

I ease off the pedal, opening the clay. My elbows lock against my sides, thumbs dipping into the center, and as the clay whips past, a mouth widens within it. My thumbs curve under, thinning the walls beneath the lip.

The earthy smell is everywhere. Sweat pricks the nape of my neck. I’m dimly aware of an ache in my upper spine, but it’s only an observation, a fact requiring no action. There is no need to fix it, to change it.

Just another cloud drifting past.

The loose shape of a bowl appears within my hands. I take the yellow sponge from the table, pressing it lightly against the bottom of the bowl, smoothing the rings. Sweat beads on my forehead now. The ache in my spine snakes through my shoulders.

I take hold of the bowl’s thick lip and draw it upward, stretching the clay, coaxing it higher. When it’s risen as high as it safely can, I bring my hands back to the base, funneling them, collaring the piece upward.

This is my favorite part: when I’ve worked the clay into a stable cylinder, when the slightest touch can shift and shape it. I love the way that everything can so easily fall apart, and the ecstasy of finding a groove in which I know it won’t, without understanding the physics, the why. The clay becomes an extension of me, like it and I are working together.

It reminds me of something Hank told me a long time ago, about growing up on a ranch, training new horses.

He’d been good at it, apparently, and attributed that to his patience. He could wait out any bad mood. The anger of an animal didn’t make him angry. It helps you understand them better, he told me. You don’t want that anger becoming fear. You want it turning into trust.

And while there were a lot of things he’d hated about working at a ranch, he’d loved the feeling of coming to an agreement with another living thing, of understanding each other’s needs, giving space when it was time for it, and pulling close when it was needed.

Wynnie would’ve been good at it too, he told me. He’s always known how to listen.

At first, I mistake the sting for sweat catching in my lashes. Only when I feel the warm trails cutting down my cheeks do I realize I’m crying.

A different kind of crying from the wide variety of it I’ve done this week.

Not sobs. Not tears quaking out of me. A slow, quiet overflow of feeling.

I give a sniffly laugh but keep my hands where they are, shaping this beautiful, delicate thing for no reason other than my own joy.

When I look up and see him standing in the doorway, my stomach buoys, and my heart says, You.

Like it’s summoned him here just by beating.

I rise from the stool, hands smeared with watery clay. “What are you doing here?”

The right side of his mouth rises. “Came to reenact that scene from Ghost.”

At my apparent lack of comprehension, he says, “I woke up and you were gone.”

I wipe my hands on the apron. “I went to get coffee and then I remembered the surprises Sabrina planned. Seemed like a shame to let them go to waste.”

“I figured,” he says. “I went to mine too.”

I check the clock over the door. I’ve been here a lot longer than I realized. Two hours with the same vase. “How’d you find me?”

His head tilts. “You don’t forget an address like 123 Easy Lane.”

“Because of the missed opportunity,” I say.

His smile faintly spreads. “Should’ve been Easy Street.”

“All these Mainers,” I say, “trying their damnedest not to make their towns too adorable.”

He comes closer, peering at the wheel. “What are you making?”

“Honestly,” I say, “I’ve barely been paying attention.”

“Looks like a vase.”

“You might need glasses,” I say.

His gaze lifts. “Is it hard?”

“I think what’s hard about it,” I say, “is that you need to do less than you realize. And overthinking it and trying too hard to control it messes it up. At least in my experience.”

He gives a half-hearted smile. “Life.”

“Do you want to try?” I ask.

He very nearly rears back. “I wouldn’t want to ruin it.”

“Why not?” I say.

“Because,” he says, “it looks so nice. You’ve worked so hard.”

I snort as I cross toward the apron hooks and choose a pale yellow one for him. “It’s wet clay,” I say, handing the apron over. “It’s not breakable.”

“It looks breakable,” he says.

“I mean, you could knock it over or collapse it, but nothing’s going to shatter. And I’m not going to have time to finish it anyway, so if we put the clay back when we’re done, it’s no big deal.”

“Is that sad?” His brows peak up in the middle. “Working on something you won’t get to finish?”

“I’ve had a nice time.”

Wyn’s smile grows. “She did good, then.”

“She did,” I agree. “What was your surprise?”

“Kayaking,” he says.

I laugh. “I love that yours was exercise and mine was sitting very still and playing with mud.”

“Care to guess what Cleo’s and Kimmy’s were?” he asks.

“Did they go?” I say, wondering if Cleo had a chance to talk to Sabrina yet.

He nods.

“Cleo,” I say, considering, “went to an agricultural museum, and Kimmy went to a hallucinogenic swap meet.”

“So close. They got a couples’ massage.” At my expression, he adds, “You look surprised.”

“I am surprised,” I say.

“Why?”

“I guess now that I know couples’ massages were on the table, I’m surprised she didn’t send us to one too.”

“I’m not,” he says. “You hate being touched by strangers.”

My heart keens. Another little reminder of how well these people know me against all odds, all the pieces of me I’ve come to see as difficult or unpleasant, the parts I never voluntarily share but have sneaked out here and there across years.

I swallow the building emotion and tip my head toward my stool. “Sit down.”

Wyn slips the apron over his neck and perches, his face etched with consternation.

“Relax.” I shake his shoulders as I cross to the next stool. I drag it up to his and sit. “It’s like driving. Get your hands a little damp.”

“Oh, I never drive with damp hands,” he says.

“Well, that’s your first mistake,” I say. “It’s illegal to drive with dry hands.”

He says, “I think the laws are different in Montana.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “There are no laws in Montana. If you have a big enough hat, you can just claim whatever you want, and it’s yours.”

“True,” he says. “I once owned a slew of Walmarts that way.”

“Until a guy with a bigger hat came along,” I say. “I’m not going to make you do this, Wyn. I thought you wanted to.”

“I do,” he says. “I’m stalling because I’m afraid I’m going to ruin it.”

“I already told you,” I say. “You can’t ruin it. That is the whole point. Now get your hands damp.” I lean forward to drag the bowl of water closer, and with a slight grimace, he dips his hands into it.

“Good,” I say. “Now use your left hand to give slight pressure to the side of the vase. Your right is more for balance, to keep it upright.”

He sets his palms against the structure’s sides. “Now what?”

“Ease onto the pedal,” I say.

He does, and because he’s Wyn, he does so beautifully. But as soon as he reaches full speed, he pushes too hard, and I dive to catch his right hand, steadying it before the would-be vase can topple. “Told you I’d ruin it.”

“So dramatic,” I tease, brushing my nose against his neck. “You didn’t ruin it. We’re just changing the shape of it.”

I lean across him to put my other palm on the outside of his left hand, matching the pressure, the vase narrowing and funneling upward.

“Now we really are doing the Ghost thing,” he says.

“Not quite,” I say, “but I don’t think my arms are long enough that I could sit behind you and do this.”

“Definitely not,” he says. “But you’re welcome to sit in my lap.”

“Excuse me,” I say. “I’m the one in charge here. Everyone knows the person sitting in the lap is the amateur.”

“So you want me to sit in your lap,” he says.

“I don’t have a death wish,” I say.

“Glad to hear it.” His gaze flickers back to the clay. Somehow, we’re keeping it from collapsing or tipping over. It flares out, narrows, and flares again, wonky but standing.

I catch myself staring at him, without any intention of replying.

When he looks up, my heart trips.

His mouth curls. “What?”

“I have to tell you something,” I whisper.

His foot lifts off the pedal, his smile falling. “Okay.”

I try to steel myself. I feel like Jell-O. I wish we were in the dark, on opposite sides of the kids’ room. It’s so much harder to say things in the light of day.

I close my eyes so I won’t have to see his reaction, won’t see if the world suddenly ruptures at the words: “I think I hate my job.”

I wait.

Nothing.

No eardrum-destroying groan as the earth splits in two. My parents and coworkers don’t come barreling into the room with pitchforks. My phone doesn’t ring with the calls of every teacher, tutor, and coach who ever wrote me a recommendation letter or gave me a research position or sent a congratulations email.

But all of those things were, arguably, a long shot.

The only thing that matters right now, the only thing I’m afraid of, is Wyn’s reaction.

All those sensations that tend to precede a panic attack bubble up in me: itchy heat, a tight throat, a sudden drop in my stomach.

“Harriet,” he says softly. “Will you look at me?”

On a deep breath, I open my eyes.

His brow is grooved, his eyes and mouth soft. Quicksand.

“Did something happen at the hospital?” he asks.

My stomach sinks a little lower. I wish it were that simple, a concrete moment when everything went wrong. I shake my head.

Wyn’s clay-covered hands gingerly catch my wrists. “Then what?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Will you try?” he asks.

I swallow. “It’s not supposed to be about me. I’m supposed to be helping people.”

“It is about you,” Wyn says.

How do I sum it up? There isn’t any one thing I would change. It’s that for some reason, I spend ninety percent of my time excruciatingly unhappy, and the more I try to tamp it down, the more the unhappiness grows, swells, pushes up against my edges.

It’s that when I’m not here, I feel like a ghost. Like my skin isn’t solid enough to hold the sunlight, and my hair isn’t there to dance on the breeze.

“I’m not good at it, Wyn,” I choke out.

He jogs my hands. “You’re brilliant.”

“But what if I’m not,” I say. “What if I’ve put everything I have, all my time and energy, into this, and money. God, the money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans, some of which my parents had to cosign because I don’t have good credit, and I—I’ve built a life where all I do is wait. Wait for the surgery to be over. For the day to end. Wait to be here, where I feel . . .”

Wyn’s lips part, his eyes painfully soft.

“Like myself. Like I’m in the right place.”

The right branch of the multiverse, I think. Where you’re still so close I can touch you, taste you, smell you.

“I loved school,” I say. “But I hate being in hospitals. I hate the smell of the antiseptic. The lighting gives me headaches, and my shoulders hurt because I can’t relax, because everything feels so—so dire. And every day, when I go home, I don’t even feel relieved, because I know I have to go back. And I . . . I keep waiting for it to change, for something to click and to feel how I thought it would, but it hasn’t. I get better at what I’m doing, but the way I feel about doing it doesn’t change.”

Wyn’s hands tense, his eyes dropping as his voice frays. “Why wouldn’t you tell me this?” he asks.

“I am telling you.”

“No,” he says roughly. “When I was there. When you needed me, and I couldn’t get to you no matter how hard I tried. Why wouldn’t you let me in?”

“Because I was ashamed,” I say. “You’d followed me across the country, and things were so hard, for you and for us. I was terrified of making them worse. I wanted to be who you—who everyone—thinks I am, but I can’t. I’m not. I never wanted to let you down.”

He stares at me for three seconds, then lets out a gruff, frustrated laugh.

“I’m not joking, Wyn.”

He scoots forward, and my knees slot in between his, both my wrists still cradled in his muddy hands, his thumbs sweeping back and forth, a slight tremor in them. “I’m not laughing at you. I just feel so stupid.”

“You? I’m the one who devoted the last ten years of her life, and a lot of imaginary money, to something she hates.”

“I . . .” He darts a glance at our hands. “You were in pain, and I didn’t even notice, Harriet. Or I did, but I thought it was about me. I fucked up, and I lost you for it.”

I shake my head ferociously. “You had bigger things going on.”

“There was nothing bigger than you,” he says raggedly. “Not to me. Not ever.”

Blood rises to my cheeks, my throat, my chest. It’s painful to swallow. “Maybe that’s what made it so hard. You built your whole life around my plans. You left our friends and missed time with your family—with Hank—and now I can’t hack it. You did all of that for me, and I’m not even the person you thought I was.”

“Harriet.” The tenderness in his voice, his hands, rips open all those hastily stitched sutures in my heart. “I know exactly who you are.”

I look up, voice shrinking. “Really? Because I don’t.”

“I knew who you were before we even met,” he says. “Because everything our friends told me was true.”

“You mean you saw a naked drawing of me,” I say.

He smiles, his hands moving to touch my jaw, neither of us bothered by the clay. “I mean that you have the weirdest laugh of anyone I’ve ever met, Harriet,” he says softly. “And it feels like taking a shot of tequila every time I hear it. Like I could get drunk on the sound of you. Or hungover when I go too long without you.

“You see the best in everyone, and you make the people you love feel like even their flaws are worth appreciating. You love learning. You love sharing what you learn. You try to be fair, to see things from other people’s points of view, and sometimes that makes it hard for you to see them from your own, but you have one. And even when you’re mad at me, I want to be close to you. None of it—none of my favorite things about you, none of what makes you you—has anything to do with a job. That’s not why I love you. It’s not why anyone loves you.”

“Maybe not,” I manage, “but it’s why they’re proud of me. It’s the thing about me that makes them happiest.”

He studies me. “Your parents?”

I dip my chin.

“Come here,” Wyn says.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because I want you to,” he says.

“What happened to your Montana manners?”

“Come here, please,” he says.

I let him drag me across his lap, one of his arms roped around my back, his other hand resting on my knee, clay smudging into my jeans. “Your parents love you,” he says. “And everything they do—and push you to do—is because they want you to be happy. But that doesn’t mean they’re automatically right about what’s best for you. Especially when you haven’t told them how you feel.”

“I feel so selfish even talking about this,” I admit. “Like everything they did for me doesn’t even matter.”

“It’s not selfish to want to be happy, Harriet.”

“When I could be a surgeon instead?” I say. “Yeah, Wyn, I think it might be selfish.”

“Fuck that,” he says. “A happy potter’s better for this world than a miserable surgeon.”

Warmth spills across the bridge of my nose. “I’m not a potter, Wyn. This isn’t something I’m making money on.”

“Maybe not. And it doesn’t ever have to be, if you don’t want that,” he says. “But that’s the point. Your job doesn’t have to be your identity. It can just be a place you go, that doesn’t define you or make you miserable. You deserve to be happy, Harriet.” He brushes a strand of hair away from the curve of my jaw. “Everything’s better when you’re happy.”

“For me,” I say.

“For me,” he says, vehement. “For Cleo and Sabrina and Parth and Kimmy, and your parents. For anyone who cares about you. The world’s always going to need surgeons, but it’s going to need bowls too. Forget what you think anyone else wants. What do you want?”

I try to laugh. The back of my nose stings too badly to let out a full-blown snort. “Can’t you just tell me what to do?”

His arms close around me. I burrow into his chest, breathe him in, and feel my body calm. “What if . . .” I brace myself, grab hold of every last scrap of courage, and frankly, it’s not all that much. I pull back enough to look up into his face, my voice whittling down to filament. “What if I came to Montana?”

His gaze drops, his lashes splaying across his cheeks. “Harriet,” he says, so thickly, like my name hurts to say, and my own heart flutters painfully. Because I know him.

I know what an apology sounds like in Wyn Connor’s voice.

His eyes rise, the green of them mossy and warm. The heaviness that presses into my chest threatens to crack my ribs, puncture my heart. My eyes fill up, but somehow, I find the strength to whisper, “Why not?”

“Because you can’t keep doing what other people want,” he says, voice gravelly. “You can’t follow me, like I followed you. I won’t be enough.”

“But I love you,” I choke out.

“I love you too,” he croaks, his hands moving restlessly over me. “I love you so much.” He kisses a damp spot on my cheek, then lets our foreheads lean together. “But you can’t follow me. I did that, and it tore us up, Harriet. I can’t let you build your life around me. It would break us all over again, and I can’t. You have to figure out what you really want.”

My heart feels like it’s being stretched on a medieval rack, pulling apart bit by bit. “What if all I really want is you?”

“Right now,” he murmurs. “What about later? When you wake up and realize I’ve let you give everything up for me. I can’t do that.”

Those months of watching him drown, thrash against a life that didn’t fit him, surge back to the forefront of my mind. He’d built his life around me, and it almost crushed us. Starved our love until it was unrecognizable.

I loop my arms around his neck and breathe him in, one last sip to tide me over for years to come. “I don’t want to keep feeling like this.”

“It’ll get easier,” he promises hoarsely, his hand brushing my hair behind my ear. “Someday you’ll hardly remember this.”

The thought is searing. I don’t want that. I want any universe but that one. All the rest, where it’s him and me, scattered across time and space, finding our way to each other again and again, the one constant, the only essential.

I can’t bear to let him go yet. But it’s like he said.

We’re out of time.

“We should get back,” I whisper.

Wyn lifts his chin toward the vase, asks damply, “Should we scrap it?”

I shake my head. “Maybe they can ship it once it’s been fired.”

“You really want it?” he says.

I study it in all its wavy, wonky glory, my rib cage so tight I can’t get a good breath, a firm beat of my heart. “Desperately.”