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Mrs. Harrison is not a kind woman. She keeps to herself mostly, and she has a resting scowl that fills neighborhood children with unease. They walk quickly by her house without dawdling and if a ball rolls into her yard, they fetch it at a run.
Harry Potter is different. He is not afraid of Mrs. Harrison. The boy doesn’t seem to be afraid of much. Even at five and six, he meanders slowly down the sidewalk in front of her house the same way he does everywhere – bold and weary like the people he passes aren’t worthy of his fear. The only exception is when that cousin of his is chasing him, and then he darts by quicker than the wind.
Mrs. Harrison watches the Potter boy as he grows up. He’s a strange little creature. He is not a particularly cute child or toddler with his strange squinty expressions and messy hair, but he is uncommonly gentle. He’s a good boy – a kind boy. Over the years, despite the rumors, he’s never been anything but sweet to her.
It's hard not to be a little fond of him.
The Dursleys are not fond of their nephew. They make this apparent in his hand-me-down clothes and hunched shoulders. Petunia seems unable to say a single kind word about the boy, but then, Mrs. Harrison thinks, Petunia seems unable to say a single kind word to anyone.
Petunia is better than Vernon though – that’s for sure. Vernon Dursley is a mean man. You can see it in his eyes, and he has a strange hatred for that boy. Mrs. Harrison can’t imagine that Vernon is any kinder in private than he is in public.
Social Services come calling a couple of times when the boy is small, but the Dursleys always got off without so much of a strap across the wrist. They’re too well connected, and though it is supposedly a secret who reported them, the culprits are always dealt with swiftly and efficiently, as is Petnunia’s custom.
Vernon may have connections, but it is far more dangerous to cross Petunia than him. There are no secrets kept from Petunia Dursley. She can turn the whole neighborhood on a woman in three hours flat. Mrs. Harrison’s never been part of those circles – gossiping busybodies she huffs. Petunia runs rings around the rest of them though; there is no doubt about it. It's certainly a bad idea to be on her bad side.
Mrs. Harrison might risk it, she thinks unhappily as she watches the Potter boy run by her house if she thought it would do any good.
None of the Social Services cases come to anything but trouble, even though she is sure number 4 Privet Drive is an unhappy place to live.
Though that isn’t strictly too for the older boy. He’s a spoiled nasty boy – cruel and troublesome. Still, she chides herself, the boy is just that – a boy. Life is certainly much better for him than his cousin, but she imagines it mustn’t be easy living under the roof of Vernon Dursely.
But for all she feels sorry for him, she can’t help but dislike the boy. He chases his cousin through the streets often, and though she’s never seen it in action, she has a good idea of what happens to Harry Potter when his cousin’s little gang catches him.
The older he gets the less they catch him though. He’s a fast little thing. Clever too, if she had to bet.
He hides in her garden sometimes – always careful not to trample any of her flower beds. He’ll duck behind her house to avoid his cousin.
Mrs. Harrison watches as he changes over the years. His squint is replaced by round glasses that make his deep green eyes appear almost comically big. His hair, if possible, grows even messier. He shoots upwards – though not as much as any of the other boys. He doesn’t widen much at all. The child remains stick thin. He’s a scrappy little thing, and most of all, a very unhappy child. But despite being small and scrappy and sad, Harry Potter is a gentle boy, and Mrs. Harrison is truly sorry to hear that they’ve sent him off to a boarding school for delinquents.
He’s such a bright boy – so kind-hearted. He helps her with her groceries every Tuesday without fail. When Mrs. Fig down the road breaks her leg, he makes it his mission to help around her house.
She fears that place will crush him like a bug.
He doesn’t come home for holidays, and she doesn’t blame him. It’s only the next summer that she sees him again.
The boy is not battered and broken as she had feared. He looks better than when he left even. His frame has filled in slightly. He’s still slight, but he is no longer skin and bones. Even his hair, still wild and untamable, looks healthier – better kept.
There’s something a little off about him. She doubts she would have noticed if it weren’t for the fact that Harry spends an awful lot of his time that summer hiding in her back garden. Occasionally, she joins him back there. They don’t speak much. He’s even more solitary than she is. But she enjoys his presence more than she probably ought to.
Still, there is something different about him, and she isn’t sure it's for the better. It’s more subtle than the physical changes. He carries himself differently. His eyes do not brighten the way they used to. He is more confident, but it’s of a strange breed – more like defiance. His gaze holds a challenge in it.
Mrs. Harrison can’t help but wonder what goes on at that school.
She never gets the chance to ask him. As suddenly as he had reappeared at Privet Drive, he disappears, and it was as if he never existed at all.
Petunia mentions that he went back to school early – something about remedial classes. Mrs. Harrison doubts that is the whole truth, but she doesn’t think it would do her or Harry any good to pry.
So another year passes and Mrs. Harrison visits her son in Bristol, crochets mittens for him at Christmas, and watches Jeopardy in the evenings.
And then like clockwork, Harry Potter secretes himself behind her garden wall one fine June day. He’s not nearly so changed – physically at least – as he was after his first year. He’s a little taller but still shorter than most boys his age. He’s more muscular perhaps.
Most striking to Mrs. Harrison though, are the other changes in him.
He’s strangely on edge – like he’s expecting someone to jump him. In fairness, it wouldn’t be so uncommon for his cousin to do just that, but he’s never been particularly frightened of his cousin – weary of him, for sure, but he had never been fearful of Dudley. And it isn’t fear exactly. It’s more like… caution.
He’s lost some of his childish reckless abandon, and it unnerves Mrs. Harrison just a bit.
She asks him about his school a couple of times, and if she only takes his words into account, he seems happy there. He even seems homesick for it, and she hates Petunia and Vernon Dursely just a little more with the revelation.
Again, near the end of the summer, Harry Potter disappears from Privet Drive as quickly as he had arrived. Petunia spouts another excuse – something about being unable to handle the excitement of being home.
The rumor is that he attacked Vernon’s sister over dinner one night. Mrs. Harrison finds it difficult to believe, but then, if the woman is anything like her brother, Mrs. Harrison understands the urge a little too well.
Mrs. Harrison passes her days as she always has, and Harry Potter becomes a distant thought until he reappears at the end of June – looking better fed than he ever did when he lived at Privet Drive full-time.
This year, she actually gets some warning before he goes back to that school of his.
“My friend Ron’s invited me to stay with his family for the last few weeks of the summer holidays.” He tells her one afternoon as he helps her cart her grocery bags into the house. “They’re coming to pick me up in a few days.”
Mrs. Harrison has heard about this Ron a few times. He seems like a good boy from what Harry says, though she knows they had a bit of a row at the end of last year.
“Good.” She tells him. “Maybe you’ll get the chance to enjoy the summer holiday before you go back to that school of yours.”
Harry smiles politely at her words, but he doesn’t say anything more on the matter.
A few days later, she runs into Petunia, who tells her that the boy is back for remedial classes before the start of term with a disdainful sniff when she asks about him.
The summer after his fourth year at that school, he changes the most. He appears one day to help with her groceries. He looks bad – tired and too skinny – but what really worries her is the nasty-looking scab running longways down his left arm.
He notices her gawking at it and winces.
“A boy at school had a bit of an er– breakdown.” He admits sheepishly as he rubs the back of his neck with his good arm. “I tried to stop him and well…”
Mrs. Harrison nods and tries to shove down the outrage she feels on behalf of this strange but kind young man,
He’s grown quite a bit in the past year, but he is still very small for a boy of fourteen – very small and very sad. His shoulders hunch forward, and his expression is both wise and weary beyond his years.
She knows he has nightmares. If his eyebags didn’t give it away, the taunts of his cousin do. He seems both distant and hyper-alert. He’s easily startled but unafraid of anything Dudley or his gang throw at him. They leave him alone after realizing that nothing they do will make him afraid of them, and Harry almost looks disappointed when they do.
Even with his cousin letting up, Harry hides in her back garden more than ever. This time, when she asks about school, he almost looks pained. He seems to consider his answer for a moment before finally sighing. “It was a rough year.”
And this is how she knows that things are bad – well and truly screwed. In all her years of knowing Harry Potter, he has never admitted pain or fear or any sort of difficulty. It terrifies her – more than the hollow look in his eyes or the way he goads his cousin into wailing on him.
It’s the first time she thinks this school will kill him.
Mrs. Harrison half-expects to hear that he’s died in that awful place every time she speaks to Petunia, but she doesn’t. He turns up the next summer as he always has since he was a boy, and Mrs. Harrison lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.
This year, his eyes hold a new kind of despair, and his shoulders hunch forward like the weight of the world is on them. He keeps a bandage constantly wrapped around his left hand. When she asks him about it, he tells her it was a rugby accident. She knows that he is lying. But she doesn’t want to scare him off, so she doesn’t push – even when his eyes darken at the mention of the wound.
This year, when she asks about school, he looks out the window like he’s afraid someone is watching him, but then he sighs, and he tells her.
He tells her about his godfather who wanted to file for custody – his godfather who is dead. He tells her about a boy named Tom – the same boy that gave him the scar that runs down his left arm. He tells her about how Tom killed a boy – Cedric. He tells her that he watched another child die at that blasted school of his, and they still sent him back with his scars still red and angry.
What scares her more than all these horrors though, is that Harry seems to be choosing his words carefully – like he’s leaving important things out.
And when he is finished, she tells him gently – gentler than she ever had a mind to be with children who weren’t her own – “Harry, life isn’t supposed to be this heavy.”
Harry lets out a low bitter laugh that doesn’t suit him at all. “No,” He says his eyes drifting to some point in the past that she cannot see. Suddenly, he looks so very young and so very tired. “No, I don’t think it is.”
Mrs. Harrison is once again struck by the thought that he might not make it to next summer.
But once again, she is proven wrong.
This year she does not find him in her back garden or waiting in her driveway like he always belonged. She opens the door to find him standing there, and for a moment, she is struck by how much he has grown. He’s a man now – no longer a skinny sad child with no friends in the world.
He tells her that he’s reconnected with some old friends of his parents that have offered to take him in. He tells her that he’s leaving. He doesn’t have to tell her that he won’t be coming back.
“I’m not going back to school.” He says it defensively – like he thinks she’ll argue with this.
“Good.” She spits, and then softer, she says. “Every time they sent you off to that place, I thought, 'that place will kill that boy.'”
“Me too.” Harry snorts humorlessly. His words are venomous, but his eyes are tired.
That old feeling that she is sending him off to somewhere that will chew him up and spit him out – kill him slowly if not quickly – has not dissipated with the knowledge that he isn’t going back to school.
“I should have done more to get you out of that place.” She isn’t sure where she is talking about – the boarding school where children die or the house that sent him there.
“I should have protected you.” She does not say it, but he hears it.
“You were there. Always,” Harry argues – stubborn as he was when he was a child.
Mrs. Harrison can see number 4 Privet Drive from her seat at the kitchen table – can see the Dursely’s car in the driveway. Petunia will be starting dinner about now. In an hour or two, Vernon will pull the buns down to the road.
She hates them.
“What was that ever worth?” She asks bitterly.
Harry is silent for a moment, and then he reaches out and touches her hand lightly. Mrs. Harrison knows he is not one for physical contact and neither of them has ever initiated it before. It feels monumental somehow.
“It was worth an awful lot,” Harry says gently – almost reverently – and Mrs. Harrison wonders what she did to deserve the fondness in his eyes – how she gained this strange boy’s loyalty.
He squeezes her hand before standing and placing his cup in the sink. “I’ll have to be heading back.”
She nods and walks him to the door.
“Come visit.” She says just as he’s making his way down the porch steps. “Someday, if you’re in town. Maybe next summer. My door will always be open.”
Harry Potter's expression is pained now, and she can’t quite figure out why. Mrs. Harrison realizes suddenly that there is something else he hasn’t told her – some crucial detail that she is missing.
His eyes are glassy, though he was never much of a crier – even as a wee lad – and his voice comes out choked.
“I’ll really try.”
Mrs. Harrison believes him.
She still isn’t sure that she’ll ever see him again.
Nine years later, a man walks down Privet Drive at the end of June. He holds the bundle in his arms a little tighter when he passes number 4, but he does not tremble. When he knocks on the door of number 9 Privet Drive, a very old woman totters out.
She has more wrinkles than she used to, but then again, so does he, and somehow, she seems exactly the same as he remembers.
He tells her about his wife – one of his old school friend’s sister. He tells her about his friends and his colleagues. He tells her he’s a teacher now – teaching kids at the same school he once attended.
“It’s not perfect,” He tells her cautiously. He obviously still remembers her dislike of that place. “But it’s better now. We’re making it better.”
She tells him she is glad, and it is the truth.
Mrs. Harrison was never the kind of woman to coo over babies and tell the parents how beautiful they were, but when it comes to little James Potter, she is head over heels. She thinks that, perhaps, old age has softened her.
She cannot be bothered to care.
“You once told me the world wasn’t supposed to be this heavy.” He says quietly. His eyes are dark with some horror that she doubts she will ever know of, but there is a lightness in him that he lacked when he was younger. “It took me a long time to realize how right you were.”
He glances down at the sleeping child in his arms and he runs his fingertips across the boy’s smooth forehead.
“But you figured it out eventually?”
“Eventually,” he admits.
“Good.”
And when she sends him home – with demands to bring his wife and those friends of his next time he comes – for the first time since the boy was eleven years old, she does not doubt that he will return.