['Ginnis]

Harper straddled her Ducati tightly with her thighs to the brink where it nearly hurt to sit. The air resistance against her on her bike was intense and the knotting curls that leaked from the base of her silver helmet whipped about in the wind. The speedometer steadily climbed, her acceleration constant. If there was a terminal velocity for horizontal motion, her goal would be to reach it in less than ten seconds. At almost two hundred kilos and a top speed of a hundred and sixty miles per hour, her bike wasn’t just a hazard to humanity; it could quite blatantly punch Mother Nature in the face.

That was how Harper liked it though. She was by no means a social outcast, but her beef with the general public was enough to label her as a rebel. She escaped the world
whenever she could, usually by going zero to sixty in four seconds flat. Tonight was no exception. Forty miles outside of the docile streets of Monterey, the crashing waves of the Pacific pounded the rugged northern California coastline. A few thousand meters off the dangerous coastline the anchored yachts of the rich and famous glowed eerily in the dense fog that engulfed the region nightly.

Begrudgingly, Harper slowed down as she wound through the bobby pin curves of the coastal highway. She usually hated taking the scenic route. It didn’t allow for the intense speeds of the flat and straight inland highways, roads where dense forests lined the sides and one could go miles without so much as a call box or gas station. Tonight however, she owed it to someone to wind along the salty shoals at a responsible speed.

Twenty slow paced miles later she took an unmarked and unpaved turn, and began a steady ascent to the top of the cliffs. The route was broken in by the tire treads of thousands of scenic tourists who drove up in their ultra-chic rental cars and admired the sunrises, sunsets, and the sparkling ocean panoramic that the upward overview offered. To the extent of Harper’s knowledge, no one ever came up here at night. Most were detoured by the danger that lay in the curving seaside road below. Not even the more daring, spoiled teenagers considered parking up here under the stars. It was a shame, Harper thought. Past experience had proven their subtle mystique to be quite sensual.

She smiled to herself sadly, and then revved the bike’s nine hundred and ninety nine cc V-twin engine to abolish the memory. Sentimentality wasn’t exactly her strong suit and any connection to her inner emotion made her feel vulnerable. She had come to mourn, but she wasn’t quite ready to allow herself to do so just yet. She made a sharp turn left and continued through the woodsy side road, the dense canopy obstructing the stars, her bike shaking on the unleveled ground. She’d regret this when she cleaned out her exhaust, but her conscience weighed heavier on her than the bill she’d pay at the dealership tomorrow afternoon.

As the tree’s parted she could again see the stars through the drawn visor of her helmet. A few scattered clouds blanketed the diamonds that lay on the velvet sheet of the night sky. The full moon burned against the dark canvas with an undeniable vigor. When she reached the lookout, she skidded to a stop and pulled off her helmet, shaking out her matted hair and inhaling the brisk night air. Her lungs burned as a small cloud of steam puffed before her face and the exhaust pipe of her bike nearly generated enough heat to power a tiny locomotive.

She stepped off her bike and rested her helmet on the seat. Undoing the top button of her leather riding jacket she walked over the stone wall barrier built to keep people from falling down the lethal hundred foot drop and becoming goo on the wet asphalt road below. That was assuming you had a narrow enough fall. Assuming you were just a few feet off and your fall increased by quite a few more hundreds of feet and instead of being an omelet on the road you found yourself food for the fish. Most probably decapitated food for the fish.

Harper looked out to the fog, then back up at the stars and closed her eyes. David and she had spent some fairly intimate moments here many years ago. She thought about the nights spent sleeping under the stars in the bed of his broken-down ’97 Dodge Ram, remembered waking up with an empty bottle of Napa wine at their feet and his perfect eyes closed. If it hadn’t been David’s amazing personality Harper had fallen for so long ago, it had most indubitably been his eyes. A deep green with a cloudy ring of grey around the pupil, she had found herself lost in them countless times. Sometimes it was the thing she missed most about him.

Her hand subconsciously drifted over her stomach and rested above her lap. A warm and steamy tear began to well as she thought about the past. Perhaps if she hadn’t been pregnant, perhaps if there hadn’t been an intense hope for the future, perhaps if she hadn’t lost the baby, perhaps then it wouldn’t hurt so much. There was always a perhaps.

The glowing lights of high-beams rested upon her as a sleek black Jaguar pulled up via the covered road towards the scenic overlook. Harper opened her eyes and wiped away the tears with the back of her wrists quickly. When she realized who the interloper was, a feeling of rage welled in the pit of her stomach. The ritzy car came to a slow stop after steering away from her bike. The driver of the vehicle got out to open the left backseat passenger door. An older woman, draped in a minx collared wool coat and wearing leather gloves stepped out, her conservative paten leather heels catching the light of the moon. She quietly instructed him to wait in the car, and then approached Harper wearily.

“It’s cold out here,” she pointed out the obvious. Beatrice McGowan felt no need for pleasantries, especially with the riff-raft she considered Harper to be. Unlike the evening gown debutantes and courtesans she had sought for her well endowed son, Harper’s dirty finger nails and spunky attitude had never appeased the fifty year old woman. David, on the other hand, had fallen in love with them.

“It was about ten degrees warmer thirty seconds ago, Beatrice” Harper said quietly.

“Well, isn’t that lovely, Melody?”

Harper winced. She hated her Christian name nearly as much as she hated her present company. Beatrice had never been able to accept David’s fall from high society. He had graduated top of his class at his Ivy League campus, had worked for several years with high end law firms and businesses before leaving the high end business elite for a sabbatical in Monterey. That’s what the McGowan’s had told their fellow economic elite about their son; he was simply on a sabbatical. Never once had they used the term “finding himself” in fear that it would raise a few well manicured eyebrows and spark whispers of a less than respectable nature. Gossip was the crux of one’s reputation at the country club. For it to be known that the sole heir of the McGowan family fortune was presently driving a pick up truck and living in a simple apartment on the outskirts of social aristocracy was for Beatrice and her husband’s name to be removed from every high end guest list there was.

“Why are you here?” Harper asked. She found no reason to cover up her antagonism towards the woman.

“Why, David loved this place,” Beatrice played her offended tone as if it were rehearsed. Harper had little reason to suspect that it wasn’t. “Can’t a mother come to remember her dead son in a place he adored?”

“What about her dead grandchild?”

“Come again?”

“You heard me,” Harper seethed. After the miscarriage, after everything, there had been no contact between the two women. Harper’s memory flashed back to the heated argument where Beatrice and Rodney McGowan had gone so far as offer to pay for an abortion following David’s death.

“I believe that its best we take this time to remember David, and not the contempt of the past, Melody.”

“And I believe it’s best for you to get back into your car and get the hell out of here.” Why bother being polite when the person you were talking to knew you abhorred them?

“I have just as much a right to be here as you do,” the woman huffed. “He was, after all, my son.”

“He was a disappointment to you and you know it,” Harper hissed.

“What kind of a monster would I be to think such a way of my darling baby boy?” Beatrice gasped. “Why, I raised him with my own two hands, you know.”

"Funny,” Harper actually laughed. “From what I recall David telling me, his nannies raised him with their own two hands. All fifteen of them.”

“Have you such a sincere lack of tact to mock a grieving mother?” Beatrice sounded appalled.

“Yes.”

There was silence between the two women. Harper gnashed her teeth to the point where her childhood filling began to wear beneath her grinding molars. The sharp taste of metal made her stop and with little care as to how Beatrice would take it, she spat over the side of the barrier. Beatrice pretended not to notice, and as she pulled her minx coat tighter around her shoulders, she spoke.

“You know what I miss most about David?” she asked lighthearted as if she were the only one who ever thought about him. “His eyes. They were the most brilliant shade of blue.”

Harper’s cheeks flamed with rage as she glared at the horrid woman who stood smiling in fond reminiscence beside her. If the price of winning the right to bereave David’s death from the woman was to listen to her twist his existence carelessly, she would more than gladly forfeit it. No matter how intimate the lookout was to her memory of David, she would not stand for mourning with the cruel and bitter woman.

“His eyes were green,” she told her, her voice not wavering in the least and surprisingly calm, yet cold, for the wrath she felt. She turned on her heels and marched back to her Ducati, jammed the helmet on her head, fired up all one hundred and thirty nine horses and ripped down the road, letting the dust fly from her tires like the flames of anger she could not subdue inside herself.