Harder (Caroline and West) Read online

  Eleven tries. A week in the kiln for each one. This thing is worth a fucking fortune in fuel and labor.

  I place it on the grating carefully, close the observation window, and push my hands into the gloves. They’re bulky. The nozzle is hard to hold on to. When I first pull the trigger, the hammer jumps from the compressed hit of air, and I almost drop it.

  “Good,” Laurie says. “Just do that back and forth evenly.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until it’s done.”

  It’s meticulous work, satisfying. After I get the hang of it, I relax enough to say, “I wanted to thank you for watching Frankie last night.”

  “No thanks necessary. It was fun.”

  “She behaved herself, I hope?”

  “Always,” he says. “And I was happy to see your truck wasn’t out here when I went to bed.”

  A minute passes. Laurie comments, “Rikki says you’re doing well in Studio Art.”

  “I’m spending three times as long on that class as everything else, just praying to get out of there with a B.”

  “She says you have an interesting mind.”

  “I have the least interesting mind in there.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  I tilt my head toward the sandblaster. “This kind of stuff is easy for me. Machines, problems, figuring out one step after the next. But Rikki wants me to be creative, and I’m not.”

  Laurie seems to accept this. He’s quiet for a while. Then he asks, “You ever use a wheel to grind glass?”

  “No.”

  “Want to try?”

  I do.

  I want to see the kiln, too, and find out what it costs to run it for a week. Ask what happens when you scale it up – what kind of logistics problems does he mean? How’s he going to cast a giant hammer? Can he make it in pieces?

  “I’d better get back to my reading,” I say.

  I draw my hands out of the box and turn the art back over to the artist.

  He takes the hammer and holds it lightly with his fingertips, flipping it one way and the other.

  “How’s the factory?” he asks.

  “I’m giving notice. I need to find something where I’ll be home more with Frankie.”

  “You want to work for me?” he asks. “I need an assistant. Flexible hours. Decent money.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Stuff like this. Finishing. Polishing. Answering email or phone calls. Whatever I don’t feel like doing, to be honest. I’m behind on this commission. I could use the help.”

  “Shouldn’t you hire an art major?”

  He waves the hammer in dismissal, making me worry he’s going to drop it. “I’ve been trying, but I can’t find any who know fuck-all about tools. You seem like you know tools. And like I said, Rikki thinks your mind is interesting.”

  “I guess – yeah. I would. As long as you know what you’re getting. You need references or something?”

  He laughs. “You’re twenty-one years old, you’re raising your kid sister, studying your ass off, doing night shifts at a window factory. You could be an ex-con and I’d still probably hire you. Under the table, though, okay? I don’t want to deal with taxes.”

  He holds out his hand.

  I shake it.

  I mean, fuck, of course I shake it. Even if the money’s only so-so, the job’s perfect.

  But when his fingers grip mine, I’m not thinking about Frankie or the paycheck. I’m thinking about what’s inside that workshop.

  Compressors and welders and kilns, polishing equipment, all kinds of shit I don’t know the names of. Tools to learn how to use. Systems to work out.

  It takes me a minute to figure out why my heart’s beating so fast. It’s been such a long time.

  I’m excited.

  That night, Caroline’s in my bed.

  She sits with her back cushioned by my pillow, her hair down over her shoulders and her arms, tongue toying with her tooth gap, typing on her laptop.

  I’m at the desk, supposedly studying for a Spanish quiz, but Spanish is easy. Caroline is right there. On my bed.

  “Quit looking at me,” she says. “I’m trying to think.”

  “It’s late.”

  “It’s only eleven.”

  “Frankie’s sleeping. It’s late.”

  Fingers hovering over the trackpad, she smirks. “I’m almost done.”

  “You said that an hour ago.”

  “Maybe I want you to spend some time wanting what you can’t have.”

  “I been wanting what I couldn’t have since I went back to Oregon last March.”

  She takes her hand off the trackpad. “You could’ve had me, though,” she says. “All you had to do was ask.”

  I drop my feet from the desk and clasp my hands together. I promised her no bullshit, but it’s hard to know how to find explanations without it.

  I owe her an explanation.

  “I never wanted to leave Silt,” I say.

  But that’s not what I mean.

  I take a breath, try again. “I never wanted to, because it never seemed possible. When I was a kid, I was too young to aim that high. I wanted to get through the day, the week, whatever. I wanted to get enough to eat, or if my dad was around, to not get beat. Or I wanted my mom and dad to get married, because I had this idea that things would get better if they were married. But then Frankie was born, and by the time I was old enough to think about leaving, I knew I couldn’t leave without her. So when I dreamed about what I wanted to happen, it was always about her leaving.”

  Caroline puts her laptop down on the floor by the bed. Pats the spot next to her on the mattress.

  “In a minute,” I say. “I want to get this out first.”

  Rubbing my hands together, I reach for the words. “When I came here my first year – I wasn’t really here, I think. My body was here, but my head was in Silt, with Frankie, and everything I did my first two years – everything with you – it’s like I let myself get close to what I wanted, but I wouldn’t really take it. I was following this plan for what I was supposed to do that was all about what Frankie was going to need me to be. And you – God, I was so fucking hard on you, pushing and pushing you away when you were all I wanted. I felt like I had to do that, because I wasn’t here, right? I had to convince myself I wasn’t here so I could be there, with her.”

  “West, come sit by me.”

  “I’m almost done.”

  She walks over and knocks at my hands until I move them apart. Then she straddles my lap. She puts her palms on my shoulders, resting comfortably on my thighs. “You were too far away,” she says. “Now you can tell me the rest.”

  I wrap my arms around her and hold her first. Feel how soft she is. Move her hair behind her shoulders and inhale against her neck.

  “So you went back to Silt,” she says.

  “Yeah, but before that, when we got together, those weeks last spring – you have to understand, Caro, then I was here. I was with you, and being with you was the only thing I’d done that was just for me in…”

  “Forever,” she says.

  “Ever,” I reply. “It was the only thing I’d done for me ever.”

  “And then you went back to Silt.”

  “You saw what it’s like there. There’s no place for me to want anything. It’s just what I can want for Frankie. At least, that’s how it feels. Maybe that’s not how it is. Maybe I could’ve called you up, said, ‘Come help me do this,’ and we would’ve been okay there, but it didn’t feel like anything I could let myself do.”

  “Tell me how it felt.”

  She’s stroking my head, my neck. I’m so tense, my back teeth ache.

  “It felt like if I tried to do that, I would ruin you. Not even that I would be doing it. That Silt would, my family, just the way it is there – where I come from ruins people. Good people. And I’d have to watch it happen. I’d be responsible for it, because I wanted you and drew you to me across all those miles. I
couldn’t.”

  I get my hands in her hair and kiss her. “I couldn’t.”

  She smiles, but it’s the sad kind, the kind that hurts. “You were ten when Frankie was born.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The same age she is now.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Do you ever think about that – your sister with a baby?”

  “Christ. No.”

  “But it’s the same, right? If Frankie were in your shoes, if she had a baby brother born and nobody to take care of him but her —”

  It gives me chills. “Don’t.”

  She runs her hands up and down my arms, warming away the goose bumps. “It’s cruel even to think about, isn’t it? She’s a kid. She’s too young. But so were you.”

  “I was old enough.”

  “You were always as old as you had to be. That’s the part that breaks my heart.” She resettles herself on my lap, pressing closer. “How old were you when you met the Tomlinsons?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “How old the first time? With Mrs. Tomlinson?”

  I didn’t tell her. She never asked me directly, and I avoided the subject, never wanting her to have to think about me fucking an older woman, a married woman, a woman I gave what she wanted so she’d give me what I needed.

  I fucked Mrs. Tomlinson because that was what I had to do to get out of Silt.

  Caroline knows it.

  She’s figured it out. I can see it in her eyes.

  “Baby, don’t you think —”

  “How old?” she repeats.

  I blow out a long exhale. “Sixteen.”

  “Did you want her?”

  “She was pretty. I wasn’t a virgin.”

  “But she was the one who initiated it.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t have…”

  I’m forced to stop, the memory choking me hard for a second. How fucking terrified I was the first time in her car, when she sucked me off in the parking lot of the golf course and I watched out the window for Dr. T to drive up. How scared I was to say no, how furious that I had to say yes.

  Furious at how I responded to her when I knew even at sixteen that she couldn’t be right in the head. That what she wanted from me wasn’t sex – it was something else. Some hit of power, of danger.

  I was so furious at Dr. T for not knowing about it. For never putting a stop to it. It would’ve ruined my chance at Putnam, but there were times I still wished to fuck he’d figure it out.

  Resting my head against Caroline’s shoulder, I breathe in the scent of her hair. “She was his wife,” I say. “And I already knew he could be my ticket out of there if I played it right.”

  “It’s illegal what she did to you.”

  “I consented.”

  “Sixteen-year-olds can’t consent to sex with adults. You were indebted to her, afraid of her husband and what you would lose if you told her no.”

  Something in her tone tells me it’s a question, and she needs the answer. Not for herself, but for me. She needs me to acknowledge that what she’s saying, this story she’s telling – it’s my story.

  It is.

  But I never saw it that way. I never let myself see it that way. I just thought about it as what I had to do, and I didn’t let myself wonder why Rita Tomlinson wanted to fuck a minor or what it meant for me that I was the minor she decided to fuck.

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  “West?”

  I lift my head and say it again. “Yes.”

  “If that happened to your sister in six years —”

  Rage. Shame. All over me. God, this is why I don’t do this, why I never wanted to do this, because it’s too fucking awful. “Please don’t.”

  “I want to make sure you hear me.”

  “I hear you. But don’t go there. Please.”

  She strokes her hands over my head, down my neck, across my shoulders, along my arms. My chest. My back. Everywhere she can reach.

  She holds me, and it helps. Slows me down. Brings me back into my body.

  Even though my life before her isn’t something she can fix, it helps.

  “That’s why I don’t want to hear it,” she says. “I don’t want to hear you tell me how worthless you are, or why you’re sorry for what you did to me with that woman. I know what you did and what it meant. I know. And it wasn’t about sex. It was about – God, I don’t even have the word for it. Hopelessness. Despair.”

  “I used sex to make you leave me. It was… that was something special between us. Sacred, even. And I turned it into a weapon. Turned it on you.”

  “What else did you have to use?” she asks.

  It’s like thawing from a freeze. It burns. It takes my breath away, and I have to drop my head again and breathe.

  It’s harder than I thought it would be.

  Harder still when she says, “It hurt me so bad, West. I don’t want you to think I’m being Mother Teresa here, pretending it didn’t.”

  I’m shaking. “Caro.”

  “No, I should say this. I should level with you, because it hasn’t stopped hurting. Sometimes I think about it and I can’t stand it, like I really can’t stand it, and I have to do something to get out of my head or I’ll just be so full of hate. So mad at you. I don’t know if I was ever as mad at Nate, even, because what he did was nasty, but what you did was so fucking personal.”

  I expect her to draw farther away from me.

  She puts her arms around me instead. Her hot cheek presses against my neck.

  “What helps,” she says, “is when I’m looking out the window of the truck and seeing you with her, sometimes I can flip that. So I’m looking in it, at me. Imagining what you were feeling to make you do that. And you know, West, it’s fucking awful from that direction, too. It hurts. I almost can’t stand it, because it means I have to accept how badly I failed you when you went home to Silt. How badly everyone failed you.”

  “I wasn’t your responsibility.”

  “You were,” she says. “You were, and you still are. And the good thing is, when I put myself outside the truck, after I do it, I’m not… I’m still mad, but I’m mad at the whole world, you know? I’m just as mad for you as I’m mad at you, and I can kind of see how it will be easier to feel that way next time. That eventually, it’s the only way I’ll feel. That Silt was this awful thing that happened to both of us together, instead of something you did to me.” She kind of laughs. “I mean, I’m not quite there yet. But I’m trying.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “More sorry than you’ll ever know.”

  “I know you are,” she says. “I’m sorry, too. But now you’re here.”

  “I’m trying to be here. I’m trying so hard.”

  She holds me. We stay like that until I can breathe again, and I start to feel more than just guilt and shame.

  Until I can feel her warmth and smell her body.

  Caroline on my lap. My dick wakes up.

  It seems fucked-up that it’s even possible for me to want her after what we just talked about, but I do. And she wiggles against me, letting me know she wants me, too.

  “So tell me something, West,” she says. “What do you want?”

  No way Caroline can know I asked Frankie the same thing over pancakes this morning.

  No way can she know that nobody ever asks me that. Nobody but her.

  She kisses along my jaw. “What do you want, West?” she whispers.

  She kisses my eyebrows and my forehead and the tip of my nose. “What do you want?”

  I take her chin and guide her mouth to mine. I grab hold of her sweater.

  I’m going to show her.

  The sweater is long – down below her hips when she’s standing up – and I pull it off over her head because I like the contrast of the waistband of her black leggings against the pale skin of her stomach. Her bare breasts and her soft cotton-covered thighs.

  “I thought about you like this in Silt,” I say.

  “Oh, yeah?”
/>   “When you were staying at my grandma’s. That time I was over for dinner, sitting by you on the couch, it was all I could fucking think of – getting just enough of your clothes off to put my mouth on you. Slide my fingers inside you.”

  “We were in a room full of people.”

  “I know. All day at work, you were texting me, trying to get under my skin, and I was thinking about getting you upstairs alone at Joan’s on those mismatched pieces of carpet. She still have those?”

  “Yeah. You had a lot of plans.”

  Not plans. Urges. Needs.

  Impulses I kept shutting down, because I was so sure I had to.

  “At the airport, I saw you before you even came outside,” I confess. “You were fussing with your bag behind the glass, and I wanted you to stay right there so I could watch you. You looked amazing. You looked like…”

  Like water in the desert. Like color in a black-and-white movie.

  Stupid clichés. She looked like Caroline. Like herself.

  I could hardly believe she was real.

  “I drove twenty miles over the limit all the way to Eugene,” I say.

  She drops her forehead onto mine. “You idiot.”

  “I knew as soon as you came through the door, I’d ruin it. There wasn’t any way not to ruin it, and it made me so fucking angry, so that’s what you ended up seeing when you did come outside. How angry I was at the world for making me and you impossible.”

  “We’re not impossible.” She tilts her hips into me. “We’re right here.”

  I smooth my hands over her ass. “I should’ve just told you how bad I wanted you. How I wanted you in the truck on the way from the airport. At the funeral home in that family room with the door locked. How I couldn’t stop thinking how you’d bite your wrist if I bent you over the back of the couch. Bite my shoulder if I lifted you up against the inside of the bathroom door.”

  Her pupils are huge. “You looked at me sometimes like… but you wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “I felt so black. So dark. And it wasn’t right, you know? It was sick to want you like that, to want some quick fuck when you were trying to help me.”

  “Maybe it would have made you feel better.”

  “It would have made me feel like complete shit. And that sounded good, too – getting something I wanted that much, then getting punished for it.”