Harder (Caroline and West) Read online

  “He did not.”

  “He did too.”

  “What a vile excuse for a human being,” I say. “You should totally ditch him.”

  And then we’re laughing, leaning into each other, holding on tight, and I’m glad I saw her with Krish, even if it was kind of gross.

  I’m glad I see West all over Putnam, even if he’s living in his little bubble of isolation.

  It would be great if I had godlike powers to make the world less cruel. I could change everything. I could bend West’s life toward mine instead of away from it, make everything different so he never would have chosen to do what he did, never could have chosen it.

  I bet Bridget feels the same way – like she’d change whatever went wrong in Krishna’s life to fuck him up, and then he’ll stop jerking her around and admit they have something. But who would Krishna be if he weren’t… well, Krishna? And who would West be if I changed his whole life to make it so he never disappointed me? Not West.

  I don’t want anyone but West.

  I’d rather fuck up and have something – some messy undefinable not-quite-relationship that feels awful but also transcendent, electric, important – than keep away from him and have nothing at all.

  I’m going to figure out a way to get him back. Everyone can think I’m stupid if they want to, and tell me I shouldn’t, and say I’ll regret it. Everyone can believe it’s a bad idea – even me.

  Maybe it is a bad idea.

  I don’t care. I’m doing it anyway.

  My phone rings at the library that same afternoon, drawing nasty looks. It’s four o’clock, a quiet time for serious study, and I forgot to set it on vibrate.

  I fumble in my bag until I find it way down in the pocket where I don’t usually put it, and by then it’s been ringing so long I’m hot with embarrassment. I decline the call, a local number I don’t recognize, and go back to my response paper.

  A minute later, the phone starts to vibrate in my pocket, and I feel… I don’t know. Weird.

  Weird like the hair is standing up on the back of my neck.

  Weird like when people say they just have a feeling. That déjà vu thing.

  I accept the call, shutting my laptop and shoving it in my bag.

  “Ms. Pia… Pia…”

  “Piasecki,” I say.

  “This is Jeff Gorham. I’m the counselor at Putnam Elementary, and I have Frankie Leavitt here needing a ride home. I haven’t been able to reach her brother. I’ve got you listed as an emergency contact on the ride form, is that right?”

  I have no idea. But as I push out the library door and into the overcast fall afternoon, I say, “Uh, yeah. Did you try his cell?”

  “Frankie did.”

  I hear a garbled voice on the other end of the line, and then the counselor again. “Would you be able to swing by and pick her up?”

  I glance at my watch. I have a meeting in an hour, but the elementary school isn’t far. “Sure. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  My car is parked on the east side of campus. I find myself rushing to get to it. Jogging, impatient, freaked out. Those words – emergency contact – set off some kind of alarm in the back of my brain.

  Plus, you know, the obvious thing. West.

  He must have put my name down on that form, but I bet he hated doing it.

  I bet he’s going to hate this even more.

  When I pull up outside the school, Frankie’s sitting on the steps with a guy who looks young enough to be a Putnam student. I step out of the car, wave in her direction, and wait to see if they’re going to beckon me over. I don’t know what kind of rules govern who gets to pick up a ten-year-old from a public school.

  I guess all Frankie has to do is tell him I’m the one she’s been waiting on, because in a second she’s free. She walks to my car with her head down. When she gets in, her backpack hits the wheel well with a heavy thump.

  “Sorry,” she says, before we’ve even pulled away from the curb. “I missed the bus. I didn’t know Mr. Gorham would call you.”

  “That’s all right,” I say. “Where should I take you?”

  “Home, I guess.”

  “Which is…?”

  She points straight ahead. “That way.”

  The whole drive feels unauthorized, like I’m breaking some law. Guilty, too, because she’s texted me a bunch of times since they got to town, but I’ve been trying to disengage. I’ll wait a day or two to reply, then respond in short, generic phrases. Afraid she’ll cling and I’ll have to explain that her brother and I are… whatever we are.

  “So you tried to call West?” I ask.

  “I told Mr. Gorham I did, but I didn’t want to bug him at work. I thought I could just walk. Mr. Gorham said no.”

  “How far is the walk?”

  “I don’t know, a few miles, I guess. You go left up here.”

  After the turn, I study her surreptitiously. Her eyes are puffy as if she’s been crying.

  “Did you miss the bus?”

  She shrugs, turning her face toward the window. I guess that means no, but she doesn’t want to talk about it.

  “You need anything to eat? A snack or something?”

  “Nah. There’s plenty at home.”

  “When will West get back?”

  “Around twelve-thirty.”

  “At night?”

  “He works swing shift.”

  “What are his hours?”

  “Three-thirty to twelve, mostly. Sometimes they run ten-hour shifts and he works four-thirty to two.”

  “And you’re just by yourself at home every night?”

  “No. He’s got four days on, three days off.”

  “You’re too young to be alone that much.”

  Frankie’s expression turns mulish. “Go right here.”

  We end up at a small white farmhouse in the country. Where most people would have grass, huge metal sculptures litter the dirt. Gravel has been laid down between them in a kind of path.

  I’ve heard of this place. Laurie Collins, the guy with the woman’s name who makes all these sculptures, is a permanent visiting artist. He’s famous at Putnam because he’s the one who made the giant metal phallus sculpture, but I think he’s famous more generally, too. The college tour guides make a big deal out of him.

  “You’re staying with Professor Collins?”

  “No, over the garage.” She points to the side of it, where a wooden staircase leads up to a door.

  I pull to a stop. The farm seems like a nice enough place. Pleasant, perfectly safe. The farmhouse has cheerful yellow curtains and a bright blue door.

  But there’s no traffic, nobody in sight.

  It must be so quiet in that apartment when she’s alone.

  “Thanks for the ride.” She opens her door.

  “Hold up.”

  Frankie stops.

  “I’ve got a meeting soon, but maybe you want some company? You could come with me. We’re just making posters for this march. The Student Government office has huge rolls of paper and giant markers, and we can decorate them however we want. And then after maybe we could grab dinner? Unless you’ve got homework.”

  “I do,” she says, “but if I get home early enough I can do it before bed.”

  “What time is bed?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “So if I get you back by seven, that should be enough time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Unless you don’t want to hang out with a bunch of college students…”

  A muscle twitches in her jaw. She looks so much like her brother, it wrenches my heart. “I’ll come.”

  “Good.”

  She drops back into the car.

  I make a three-point turn in the driveway, and we’re off.

  The farther we get from the apartment, the better I feel about the decision I’ve made. We go to my meeting, where she turns out to be surprisingly adept at making posters. I take her back to the house for dinner, introduce her to Bridget and Krish
na in the kitchen, feed her some kind of curry thing that Krishna whipped up on a dare when Bridget bet him he didn’t know how to cook a meal. The mood is lighthearted, which I guess means Krish and Bridget are on again.

  Bridget sends me a look that says, What do you think you’re doing?

  I send her one back that means, We’ll talk later.

  Krishna teases Frankie until she’s laughing so hard she falls out of the chair and makes her lip bleed.

  When it gets dark, I drive her back to the farm. The farmhouse is blazing with light, the shapes of people visible through the curtains. She’s talked all afternoon about the sculptor, Laurie, and his wife, Rikki, who’s also an art professor. Frankie hangs out sometimes in Laurie’s shed while he works on his art. It’s clear they’ve got a bond going.

  West must know it. He must have arranged it so Frankie has these adults to go to. He wouldn’t leave her unprotected and alone.

  Except that she obviously needed someone today, and she didn’t call her brother.

  “About the bus,” I say on an impulse. “You didn’t miss it, right? You just didn’t want to get on.”

  She’s bent over in the seat, zipping her backpack.

  “You don’t have to tell me what’s happening,” I say, “but if you want me to pick you up sometime, you can just text. We’ll hang out.”

  Frankie lifts the pack onto her lap, compressing a strap in her hands. “You mean it?”

  “Sure. I can’t be, like, your personal chauffeur, but if you’re having some kind of problem…”

  She toys with the door handle. “I feel like a freak here.”

  “How come?”

  “The other kids… They’re just different than the kids back home. I don’t fit. And… there’s this kid on the bus. He looks at me. Says things.”

  “Mean things?”

  She nods. “About the way I look.”

  Her body, I guess. Her breasts. Man, kids are mean. “Did you try telling the bus driver?”

  “She wouldn’t do anything.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “If I report it, he’ll say I’m making it up, and she’ll take his side. Then he’ll turn it into a thing where I have a crush on him and I’m just trying to get attention.”

  I wrinkle my nose. We never moved to a new town, but I remember how kids who came to our school from outside the state might as well have arrived from another planet. They had different slang words, accented different syllables. Sometimes they had toys or games we didn’t know about, or they wore a brand of jeans we’d never seen before, and these contrasts seemed enormous.

  “Did you talk to West about it?”

  She shakes her head. “He’s mad at me.”

  “What for?”

  “He just is. He acts mad all the time, but like he doesn’t want me to know. It’s my fault we had to move here.”

  “I thought you moved so he could come to school.”

  She shakes her head again, but she doesn’t say anything.

  I don’t know what to tell her. The silence lasts half a minute. There aren’t any crickets chirping. The night’s cool. Summer’s over.

  I look at her with her hand on the door handle, her hair in her eyes.

  This kid.

  The thing is, I love this kid. Not the way West does, but my own way, because she’s so young and sweet. Because she tries so hard to be tough, and because her mouth and her stubborn jaw are the same as her brother’s.

  I reach out to touch her arm. “When you just can’t, call me. I’ll come get you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  “West won’t like it.”

  “That’s his problem. If he doesn’t like it, he can talk to me, okay?”

  She smiles slightly. “It was fun tonight.”

  “It was.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The door slams behind her. I watch her climb the steps to the apartment, fish a key out of her backpack, go inside.

  I know she’s right. West isn’t going to like it. But I sit there watching her shut herself into her empty apartment, and the hair stands up on my forearms.

  I’m so looking forward to it.

  Every time my phone buzzes after that night, I think it must be West.

  Usually, it’s Frankie.

  Frankie, wanting me to see the earrings she bought on a recent trip to Walmart.

  Frankie, wondering whether she should be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz or Catwoman for Halloween.

  Frankie saying, hey whats up?

  Saying, theres no good pizza in this town.

  But it’s a week and a half before she texts me to ask if I can pick her up from school again. I’m at the library. The vibration of the phone in front of my face wakes me up from a doze, and my cheek feels overwarm where I propped it in my hand.

  I wipe drool from the corner of my mouth, checking to see if anyone’s around to notice.

  Nope. It’s a quiet Friday afternoon in October, a glorious fall day, and I guess most people have the sense to spend it outside.

  Sure, I text back. What time?

  Now.

  10 min.

  When I get to her school, she’s sitting on a low concrete wall. The buses haven’t left yet, but I spot her right away because she’s alone, her arms wrapped around her knees, her eyes on her feet. She’s wearing black leggings and a dark top. When she shoulders her backpack, I feel a little bit like crying at her bony knees and skinny calves, her breasts too big and too soft, this baby-woman all alone.

  I wish I could scoop her up and shelter her from how mean life can be. Especially how mean it is to girls, smart girls, girls with boobs, girls with no boobs.

  I can’t, so I take her shopping.

  Putnam hasn’t got any decent stores to shop at, but we go to the Mattingly’s outlet. Mattingly’s makes athletic uniforms. Their outlet store is full of shiny polyester emblazoned with the names and logos of obscure high-school sports teams. I buy her gigantic two-dollar basketball shorts – black with yellow insets – and a matching shirt that says “Prairieville Hornets.”

  Then we hit the Salvation Army thrift store and try on all kinds of ridiculous stuff – prom dresses, overalls, a sweater dress from before I was born, T-shirts and low-rise jeans that show our ass cracks.

  We go for burgers at the student union and run into Krishna, who hangs out with us for a while. It’s a good afternoon for all of us, I think. A nice break from the routine.

  When I drive Frankie home, she says she wants me to come in and see her costume.

  I agree with indecent haste.

  The apartment isn’t very big. There’s just the kitchen and a living room plus a short hall with two bedrooms and the bathroom in between. The kitchen is divided off from the living room by a half wall topped with those wooden spires you find on a banister. There’s a lot of dark wooden cabinets.

  The sink is empty, gleaming, and someone’s draped a neatly folded dishrag over the faucet.

  West.

  In the fridge, there’s a plate with a homemade burrito on it and a sticky note bearing West’s handwriting. Microwave about 2 min. Salsa & sour cream after.

  There’s a carton of cigarettes in the freezer next to a half gallon of fudge ripple ice cream.

  I dish out two bowls when Frankie comes back, and then I make her get out her homework.

  The kitchen clock ticks. Ticks. Ticks. It seems to slow down with every passing minute.

  When I was thirteen or so, I used to babysit a lot, and I remember this sense of anticipation – this greediness for the moment I got the kids to bed and I could roam through the house, eat frosting from the plastic tub in the fridge, open and close closet doors, bedside table drawers, bathroom cabinets.

  Frankie keeps asking me to stay a little longer.

  “Sure,” I tell her. “Just until you’ve taken your bath.”

  “Sure, I’ll help you pick out
an outfit for school tomorrow.”

  “I’ll sit by your bed and talk for a few minutes.”

  “I’ll rub your back until you fall asleep.”

  “Sure. I’ll do that.”

  And then she’s snoring softly, and I’m walking on tiptoe across the hallway to West’s bedroom.

  There’s a T-shirt thrown carelessly onto the unmade bed.

  A stack of books on his desk – a different desk than he had last year, a bigger mattress, an ivy-green comforter with huge pink roses that must have come with the other furnishings in this apartment because he would never buy such a thing.

  Condoms in the drawer by the bed.

  Lotion on top of the table, a box of tissues.

  In his closet, a half-full basket of laundry, which I lift out in one big scoop and press to my face.

  West’s detergent. West’s scent overlaid with sawdust and sweat, musty dirty laundry smell.

  I run my finger along the line of shirts hung up in his closet, clothes I’ve seen him wear, clothes I’ve taken off him.

  I open every drawer, rummage under the bed, and I don’t know what I’m looking for until I find it at the bottom of a stack, tucked inside a manila folder.

  A note I left him one morning. A snapshot of the two of us that I liked enough to get it printed and give him a copy – me and West at the bakery, goofing around, flour on his nose and on my cheekbone, light in our eyes.

  A printout of an email I sent him after he left Putnam.

  I love you, and I’ll miss you, and I want everything good for you, West. Everything wonderful. I want you to be happy. I want you to be whole.

  Two hundred dollars in twenties, tucked inside a Christmas card.

  I close the folder and put it away.

  I stand in his dark bedroom feeling elated and guilty.

  The next thing I know, I’m in the kitchen. I take the carton of cigarettes out of the freezer and methodically open every package and empty them out into a pile on the kitchen table.

  I break them open, roll them between my fingers, emptying the loose tobacco into a mound.

  I don’t know why. I just do it. I do it and keep doing it, swallowing over the ache in my heart and the numb cold I’m rolling between my fingers until it’s done and I can’t take it back.