Harder (Caroline and West) Read online

  “It’s okay if you’re crying.”

  “I’m not. I’m gathering my strength to fight another day.”

  “Okay. Does you gathering your strength but not crying mean that now would be a bad time to give you your Christmas present?”

  Slowly, she sits up. Her eyes aren’t red, but her throat and cheeks are flushed.

  I think if she’s going to be president, we’ll have to work on her poker face at some point.

  “You already gave me a bunch of presents,” she says.

  “Those were from Frankie.”

  “Since you paid for them, they were from you. I love my scarf.”

  She wore it earlier over her pajama T-shirt – orange and blue and red, with silvery threads shot through it. It looked good.

  Felt good, seeing her wear something I’d bought her.

  I release her hand so I can get up and dig around on the top shelf of my closet. The jewelry store box is dense as a rock in my hand. The leather bracelet seems stiff and clumsy when I hold it out to her, a symbol I’m not sure about.

  What if she doesn’t want the reminder? Maybe I should have buried it in the backyard.

  But Caroline extends her wrist and lets me put it on her. My name pressed into leather, snugged around her skin.

  She traces the letters with one finger. Smiles at me.

  “It’s okay?” I ask.

  “It’s good.”

  She draws close and kisses me, and it feels good. Like I’ve righted a wrong, restored something that was out of balance.

  When she eases away, I press the jewelry box into her hand. She takes it with eyes so huge, I wonder for a second what the fuck I did wrong. Then I figure it out and laugh. “It’s not a ring. But good to know it’s too soon for that.”

  “It’s not – I didn’t mean —”

  “It’s fine, Caro. Open it.”

  Inside are the heavy silver links I bought her.

  “Pretty,” she says, lifting the bracelet out. “What’s this on it?”

  The light catches the charm when she lifts it to the light. She answers her own question. “It’s a comb. West —”

  “I thought I’d give you both,” I say. “The comb, and the watch chain. It’s… maybe that’s not a good present, but I thought —”

  And then her arms are around me, so I don’t have to say the rest of it.

  “West.”

  She’s crying for real now.

  “I didn’t mean to make you cry. It just reminded me, is all.”

  I’ve thought so many times of her telling me not to write a story over us. Not to give myself a role – good guy or bad guy, sheriff or villain, because life’s more complicated than that.

  That conversation was never about the story she read in English. It was about me.

  It was Caroline telling me I fucked up, but I could have another chance.

  When I went to the jewelry store, I was going to see about silver combs to give her. I thought she should have a keepsake of the moment she offered me what I most needed – what I didn’t even know I needed.

  But then I thought, No, I don’t want her to have half.

  I want her to have everything.

  She kisses me. “It’s perfect.”

  When I kiss her back, she drags me on top of her, the cool silver links dripping down my neck from where she’s clutched her fingers around them. “You’re perfect,” she says.

  “I’m so fucking far from perfect.”

  She kisses my lips, my cheeks, my closed eyes. “Close enough for me.”

  I roll to my side, and we lie there for a few minutes, legs intertwined, looking at each other.

  Close enough.

  “Frankie.”

  I tap her door again. “Open up.”

  “Leave me alone!” she shouts.

  “Franks, honey, it’s Christmas. You’re crying. I’m not leaving you alone.”

  “I’m not crying!”

  She throws something at the door that hits hard enough to make me take a step back. Caroline’s behind me, hands cupping her elbows.

  “You want me to try?”

  Twenty minutes. Twenty lousy minutes on the phone with my mom on fucking Christmas Day, and me in the next room the whole time monitoring the call, but it still ends up this way – with my sister flinging the phone down, busting out in sobs, and running from the room.

  Mom didn’t even call until right before Frankie’s bedtime. I tried her earlier, hoping to get it over with, but she answers the phone when she feels like it, and Christmas is no exception.

  Usually, we get her when she’s on her way somewhere in the car and she wants to fill ten minutes with pointless chatter.

  How are you guys doing? she’ll ask, but she doesn’t want to know.

  Frankie has a harder time than I do with the calls. Some afternoons I’ll come in from working with Laurie to find her shut in her room, her hand-drawn STAY OUT sign taped to the door, and I’ll look at Caroline and mouth, Mom called?

  Yeah, she’ll mouth in response.

  Then she’ll make cookies, or I’ll download an episode of a show Frankie likes and use it to pry her out of her isolation.

  Tonight, Mom was more emotional than I felt like dealing with. “I miss you guys, oh my gosh,” she said when I was on the phone with her. “Like fucking crazy.”

  There was a looseness to her speech, the way it spilled out of her, that made me reluctant to turn the call over to Frankie, but I figured, it was Christmas. I couldn’t really say no.

  I should’ve said no.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I say.

  “You could give her a minute to cool off.”

  “She’s not mad, though. Not really. She’s hurt, and I don’t want to leave her be.”

  I tap at the door again. “Frankie. Open up, or I’ll take the knob off the door and let myself in.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I can, actually.”

  “You’re not my dad!”

  “I’m your brother and the guy who’s paying the rent around here, so open the door, Franks. I’m serious.”

  “No.”

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “West —” Caroline says.

  I turn around, put my back to the door, and slide down it.

  “I don’t know how to be her father,” I say.

  “You’re doing great.”

  “I’ve been at it for weeks. Asking her questions. Being here, trying to let her know I’m listening, talking to the fucking counselor, talking to the gifted-and-talented teacher, filling out the fucking paperwork, but I’m not getting anywhere.”

  Caroline slides down next to me. Touches my arm. “You are.”

  “She won’t even let me in the fucking room.”

  “It’s just the holiday,” Caroline says. “Talking to your mom. Her feelings are running high, but she’s going to come around.”

  “She’s pissed at me for taking that top away from her.”

  “It was the right thing to do.”

  The top was from Mom, low-cut and completely wrong for a ten-year-old.

  We sent Mom a photo book. It was Caroline’s idea. We picked out the best snapshots of Frankie and took some more of Iowa, the farm and the sculptures, me with Laurie, Caroline with Frankie, and put them together in an album.

  So she’ll see what she’s missing, Frankie said.

  When I asked if she got it, Mom said, “It’s nice,” then changed the subject.

  She’s back with Bo, fighting with my uncle Jack, on the outs with most of the Leavitts. She told me Leavitts have no loyalty.

  I guess she forgot I’m a Leavitt. That her daughter is, too.

  I just don’t want her in my life anymore – for my own sake and for Frankie’s. I don’t want her carelessness, her gusts of passion, her brief forays into thoughtfulness that leave you feeling like shit when she forgets all about you. I want Frankie to have more.

  Through the door, I can hear the s
oft sound of her crying.

  I stand up. Tap the door again. “Frankie, look. I need you to open this door. I’m going to count to ten. That’s all you get. Ready? Ten —”

  Caroline interrupts, “Are you sure you don’t want me to try?”

  “Nine.”

  “West?”

  “I’m sure. Eight. Seven.”

  “Can I do anything?” Caroline asks.

  “Yeah. Go get me the screwdriver out of the junk drawer in the kitchen. Six.”

  “Flathead or Phillips?”

  “Five. Phillips.”

  She rises to her toes, presses her lips against mine, and says, “I love you.”

  “Four. Love you, too, baby. Three.”

  Frankie cracks the door open on two. Her eyes are red. “What do you want?”

  “To borrow your new purse. Jesus, Franks, what do you think I want? To talk to you. Let me in.” Gently, I push her shoulder so she’ll move aside, and then I walk into her room and close the door.

  There’s a neat pile on her desk of everything she got for Christmas today, stacked up and organized in a kind of display that she’s put on for herself. It’s such a kid thing to do, such a Frankie thing, it makes me feel too much at once.

  Proud I could give her that stuff so she could have a good Christmas, the kind of Christmas kids are supposed to have.

  Pissed at whatever my mom said to ruin it.

  But over all that, just this pure hit of love for my girl.

  I sit on the unmade bed.

  “What?” she says.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You’re looking at me funny.”

  “I was just thinking how much I love you,” I confess.

  Her eyes dart away, guilty.

  This is how it is with us now. I keep reaching for her, but I never seem to catch her. She doesn’t want me to. “What’d Mom say?” I ask.

  “Nothing.”

  “It wasn’t nothing. You talked for a long time.”

  “We just talked about Christmas and presents and stuff. She’s living with Bo again.”

  “I know. She told me.”

  “She asked did I want to come home.”

  “No.” The word is out of me before I know what’s happening. I’m standing, towering over Frankie. “No fucking way.”

  She shrinks back. I have to calm down, I know I do, but what the fucking fuck? What kind of person would do that – just ask Frankie does she want to come home, a casual question dropped into a Christmas phone call without checking with me first, without fucking asking whether I thought it would be a good idea?

  Who does she think she is?

  That I know the answer only makes me angrier. She’s Frankie’s mom. I’m just a fraud.

  “Tell me what she said,” I demand. “Every word.”

  Frankie eyes me skittishly. “She said I could come home if I wanted. She said she misses me, and you probably…”

  “I probably what?”

  Frankie shrugs at the floor. “You have Caroline.”

  “And that means what, exactly?”

  Another shrug. “You don’t want me anymore.”

  “Did I say that? Did I ever fucking say that?”

  “No, but you don’t have to. You hate me!”

  “I don’t hate you!”

  “You’re yelling at me. You’re mad, you get mad, you never used to but you do now, and I hate you! I want to go home. I miss Mom. I miss Dad.”

  “You don’t fucking miss Dad.”

  “I do, too! He loves me!”

  “Loved you,” I say. “He’s dead.”

  It’s nasty. Such a nasty thing to say, but he was a bastard and she wants him more than me. It’s the worst thing she could say, the starkest evidence of my failure.

  She wants to go back to Silt, and I would rather die than go with her.

  I would rather die than send her.

  Her face crumples. “I hate you!”

  And then she’s facedown on the bed, crying again.

  Caroline’s in the open doorway, saying my name. Her hand lands on my arm. I come back into my body, the aching tension, the bitter taste in my throat.

  I hear myself. Everything I said.

  I’m not a good parent. Not a good person.

  I can’t become one – I don’t know how. Because Caroline’s wrong. It’s not about parenting books, patience, trying harder. It’s about me. I’m short-tempered and angry and violent because I was born this way, born to it. Fucking cursed from the start.

  Both of us. Me and Franks.

  When I try to touch my sister, she smacks my hand away. “Leave me alone.”

  There’s nothing I can do.

  “West,” Caroline says again.

  “Can you sit with her?” I ask.

  Because at least I can give Frankie that much. Someone who knows how to love her.

  Someone who will say the right things when I can’t.

  Because of the snowstorm and how everything happened with Christmas, Caroline decides not to stay over at her dad’s even for the few nights of break she’d originally planned. What she really wants, she says, is to drive down for dinner with her family and come back the same night.

  She wants me and Frankie to come with her.

  I have a feeling she’s scared to leave the two of us alone. She dragged us out the day after Christmas to shop sales and spend gift cards at the mall in Des Moines. Frankie hasn’t said anything more about moving home to Silt.

  I’m trying not to think about it.

  I’m not even angry. I just feel hollow, knowing I can’t give my sister what I want her to have. Not if she won’t let me.

  Not if I don’t know how.

  Caroline says I’m overreacting. She says my mom’s trouble, but we already knew that. She says I’m a good father, a good man, that everybody’s got flaws.

  Caroline points out that I raised my voice, but I didn’t attack my sister physically, didn’t insult her verbally, didn’t bad-mouth my mother, didn’t hit anyone or throw anything, didn’t get drunk or high or shoot anybody.

  This is supposed to help, I guess. Counting all the ways I didn’t fuck up.

  It doesn’t help. It makes me grateful she’s willing to talk to me at all when I’m such a truculent pain in the ass, but it doesn’t alter my conviction that I don’t have what it takes to be a parent.

  But Caroline gets what Caroline wants, so off we all go two days after Christmas to the Piasecki homestead.

  Caroline’s from the kind of family with a dining room, and a dining room table, and a tablecloth that’s old, with a lace strip down the middle and candles and dishes that match.

  I get through dinner by saying either please or thank you at the end of every sentence and otherwise keeping my mouth shut.

  Frankie does good. She’s completely baffled by the gravy boat, and she drops cranberry sauce on her lap, but she’s ten, so nobody minds. Caroline braided her hair and picked out her clothes. She’s shiny and bright in the candlelight, pretty as a picture in a book.

  When Caroline sits beside her sisters and her dad, I can see her face reflected in theirs – her eyes from her dad, nose and chin probably her mother’s legacy.

  Janelle is the loudest, and kind of bossy. Alison’s just home from a stint in the Peace Corps. She’s thin and quiet, overwhelmed-looking.

  Caroline’s dad is like a band director at the top of the table, big gestures and big hands waving around, jowls and disapproving eyebrows that would be intimidating except that when he smiles at his girls, he looks like Santa Claus – all soft belly and sparkling eyes.

  He smiles at Frankie that way, too, so I can’t make myself dislike him no matter how many suspicious looks he sends my way.

  I’ve met him exactly twice. The first time, I did the best I could to come across as a moronic horndog. The second time, I was in jail. If it takes him a decade to warm up to me, it’s no worse than I deserve.

  Caroline doesn’t like i
t, though. Every time he gives me some tiny measure of shit, she gives it right back to him, and the conversational temperature rises degree by degree, until the both of them are a little hot.

  Everywhere I look, I see something to remind me what kind of childhood Caroline had. School pictures on the wall. Framed kid drawings. A bedraggled brown paper football-looking thing in the center of the table that Caroline says is supposed to be a turkey Janelle made in kindergarten.

  I can’t get worked up about her dad’s disapproval because I’m too busy looking around this place, thinking, This is what safe looks like.

  Not the size of the house. Not the neighborhood or the leather sectional sofa or the turkey on the table, but the way these people are together, familiar and affectionate, tuned in to one another, telling Frankie funny stories from when the three girls were little whose punchlines don’t depend on anybody getting hurt or humiliated.

  I can’t send my sister back to Silt.

  I won’t. Not if there’s any chance she could have this instead.

  After dinner, everybody’s got presents to exchange, which is awkward because Frankie and I didn’t have enough warning to buy anything, but they’ve got stuff for us. Nice stuff – a pair of leather gloves with fur in them for me, a set of birthstone earrings and a cashmere scarf for Frankie.

  I can’t sit still through it. I end up ducking out to use the bathroom, then pass by the kitchen, where all that dirty china’s stacked up by the sink just begging to be washed.

  I’m about halfway through the dishes when Caroline comes in, picks up a towel, and gets to work drying.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  “Yeah. Frankie being good?”

  “She’s great. She went out with Janelle to get butter so they can make Christmas shortbread.”

  “She wasn’t begging, was she?”

  “It was Janelle’s idea. And you know it’s fine if she’s not perfectly polite. Everybody understands.”

  Caroline’s dad comes in. He stops short when he sees us by the sink.

  “Coffee?” Caroline asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll make it,” she says. “You can dry the dishes.”

  To me, she notes, “It’s actually his job. I’m usually the one who washes. I can’t get the dishes dried well enough to meet his exacting specifications.”

  So then it’s me and Mr. Piasecki, side by side at the sink, and Caroline bustling around the kitchen grinding beans and measuring.