Harder (Caroline and West) Read online

  “When are you going back?” her dad asks her.

  “Probably in a few hours. After the shortbread, if that’s okay with West.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be okay?” I ask.

  “If we stay that long, Frankie will be up past her bedtime.”

  “It’s fine. She’ll fall asleep in the car.”

  “You could stay over,” her dad says. “We’ve got two rooms empty upstairs even with Alison here, and that air mattress we could put up in the finished part of the basement —”

  “Three rooms, Dad?” Caroline asks. “Really? You’re going to go with that?” She hops up on the countertop next to my left elbow, putting me right in the line of fire between the two of them.

  Her dad glances at me. “Is this how it is, West?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “She’s living with you, taking care of your sister for you, and now you won’t even let her visit overnight for Christmas unless I let you share a room?”

  “No, sir,” I say. “That’s not how it is.”

  “That’s sure what it sounds like.”

  I clear my throat. Try to think of some way to say it that’s tactful, but fuck it. I’m not tactful. “Caroline’s in charge. I just go by whatever she wants.”

  He looks at me for a minute. Makes this hmph kind of noise. “That’s the first intelligent thing I’ve heard you say.”

  Caroline reaches across me and punches him in the shoulder, hard.

  “Hey,” he says. But it’s mild, and he’s looking at her with affection as he rubs his arm and asks, “What about what I want?”

  “You’re not the one who has to sleep in the bed,” she says.

  “I’m not talking about beds anymore.”

  “Fine, then let’s talk about what you’re really talking about – you’re not the one who has to live with it, Dad. I am. So I’m going to make the decisions, and you get to decide whether you support them or don’t, but that’s the extent of it.”

  “When you’re making decisions with my money, going to school on my dime, it’s not the extent of it. I get a say. You owe me a real conversation, not just this garbage about I support it or not but that’s all. I’m already living with it. I didn’t get a choice on that, but we’ve got a choice on this lawsuit.”

  “You don’t have to live with it the way I do,” Caroline says. “You’re not getting deposed. You’re not taking calls from the state senate and telling them, Yeah, you’re right, I could help you, but I won’t, because I’ve got this vendetta I’m in the middle of, so no.”

  “We talked about this. We knew it was going to be hard, that’s just the way these things go. It’s normal to get discouraged at this point in the proceedings, but when you start something, you see it through – that’s what I taught you.”

  “I’m not quitting, Dad.”

  “What you do is you put your finger on what you want, and then you go after it. If you think you can just give up at the first sign of trouble —”

  “I’m not giving up!”

  If I were her dad, I’d back the fuck off, but I guess the two of them are too much alike, because he sounds just as pissed when he replies, “What do you call it, then? Halfway to trial, and you’re going to walk away? We could nail this kid, Caroline! We get a judgment against him, that gives us a lien on his future salary. We’ll make it so he can’t take a step for the rest of his life without this breathing down his neck. Make him pay.”

  I’ve been washing the same plate for a solid minute. The water is running, steam rising off it, and you could cut the tension with a knife.

  Caroline cuts it with one question. “What if I don’t want him to pay?”

  Her dad sets down the plate he was drying and leans his hip into the counter. I might as well be invisible, standing here between them. “Why wouldn’t you want that?”

  “Because there isn’t any justice in it,” she says. “It’s not a scale I can balance. He puts my naked body online, sends his dogs after me, makes my life scary —”

  “Makes your life hell,” her father says.

  “— and I decide, Hey, then I’m going to do it back to him? That’s your solution? That’s not justice. It’s vengeance, and it’s petty.”

  “You don’t understand how the system works.”

  “I do understand,” she says. “You raised me to understand. And what I’m telling you is, the system is broken on this. I don’t need Nate’s money for the rest of his life, I need for what Nate did to me to not be allowed anymore. I want that law on the books. I want a bunch of changes to the laws so that assholes can’t post photos without consent and websites can’t hide behind the Copyright Act with impunity. I want people’s attitudes to change so I don’t get called a slut just because I had sex with my boyfriend and he took some pictures. I want to help make sure nobody else goes through what I did – that Frankie and girls like Frankie won’t ever have to endure that – and what we’re doing, throwing money into a pit with this civil suit, hiding behind Jane Doe – that’s not going to change a thing. So don’t talk to me about justice unless you really want to talk to me about justice, because there are nonprofits you could give the money we’re paying the lawyer that would use it to bring about a lot more justice than this lawsuit that you seem to think I need your permission to walk away from.”

  When she’s finished, the whole house is quiet.

  The whole world feels quiet, with Caroline’s words just echoing around.

  This is what it sounds like, I think, to know exactly what you want.

  This is what it sounds like to thrive.

  I’ve heard her before like this. Every time, it wrecks me, because I’m so fucking proud of her.

  Her dad doesn’t say anything. I watch him, looking for some sign that he’s got pride in her, too.

  What he does surprises me: he sits down at the kitchen table and thinks. You can tell he’s thinking because he looks so much like Caroline, his forehead furrowed and his eyes gone far away.

  Coffee burbles and drips into the pot. Caroline picks up the dish towel and angrily dries what’s left of the dishes in the sink. At a loss, I start washing again. We finish up. Caroline puts the dishes away.

  I lean back against the sink with my arms crossed, trying to understand what this even is.

  Where I’m from, men are only good for two things. We learn how to fight, and we learn how to fuck. There isn’t anything much else for us – no jobs you can raise a family on, no other ways to live unless you go looking for them, and even then there’s no guarantee you’re going to find something better.

  I found Evan and Rita Tomlinson. They were enough to get me out of Silt, but not enough to teach me some better way of life.

  I’ve never watched anybody do what Caroline and her dad are in the middle of doing. They’re arguing, but she’s safe.

  This house where she grew up looks like a temple to me, and it’s not the money, it’s that there’s love all over the walls, and good food, and Christmas presents for people they barely know, and shortbread cookies for my sister.

  They can do all that and still argue with each other.

  They can argue without fucking up their love.

  They raised their voices, just like I did. Lost their tempers. But then her dad sat down at the table and shut the fuck up and thought about what Caroline said to him.

  He’s still considering it.

  And I think, hell, Caroline’s got to be right. She’s so fucking smart, and she brought me here and had this argument right in front of me, so she has to be showing me what she thinks I need to see.

  Showing me how to do this.

  It’s not impossible. It’s just something I have to learn.

  I’m good at learning, even if I’m complete shit at everything else.

  Out of the blue, Caroline’s dad asks me, “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “Nate.”

  “I’d like to see him get what�
�s coming to him. But to be honest, short of the death penalty, I’m not sure there’s anything that could happen to him that I’d think would be as bad as what he deserves. And I figure, even before the pictures, he already screwed up and lost Caroline, so he’s got a lifetime of regretting that ahead of him.”

  Caroline’s giving me an oh-please kind of look.

  “What? He does. He had you, and he lost you. Stupidest move of his life. You’ll be in the White House someday, and he’ll be telling his sad drinking buddies at the lonely bar where he wastes his time, She was mine once, but I fucked it up.” I glance at Caroline’s dad. “Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “He said fuck,” Caroline explains.

  He blinks. “Oh. That.” He waves his hand. “The White House?”

  Color climbs her cheeks. “West wasn’t supposed to say.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s —”

  I can just about hear the words that come next. Childish. Stupid. Impossible.

  Not for me.

  And right then, that’s when I get it. I really finally get it – how we box ourselves in.

  How we take something that’s hard and make it harder for no good reason.

  When I think about what kind of life I want my sister to have – who I want her to be like, what I want her to see, what I want to model for her so she’ll have a clue how to flourish, to thrive – I can’t think of any better model than the woman I love, lecturing her dad on what justice is.

  Caroline is going after what she wants.

  I’ve got to be the same way. Both of us do. It’s the only way to live that makes any sense.

  Go after deep and make it deeper.

  Accept that life is going to be hard – that everything worth having is worth fighting for – but don’t fucking make it harder than it has to be.

  Don’t put yourself in between the life you’ve got and the one you want.

  I walk straight to her, pull her close, and look down into those deep brown eyes of hers. I say, “Caro, it’s not. Whatever it is you’re thinking about saying, it’s not true. And even if it turns out to be true down the road, if you go after it but you can’t get there – let it happen when it happens. Don’t write the end over the beginning.”

  The gap between her teeth peeks out when she smiles. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “A smart woman said it to me.”

  She comes up on her toes and gives me a kiss – chaste but full of feeling.

  Her dad clears his throat.

  She stops kissing me, but she doesn’t unwind her arms from around my neck, and I don’t step away from the feel of her body pressed against mine.

  He can fucking get used to it.

  “All right, kids,” he says.

  He wipes his hands down his face. I’ve seen him do that once before, when he came to talk to me at the jail in Putnam.

  It’s what he looks like, I’m guessing, when he’s giving in to Caroline’s way of doing things.

  “We’ll have to draw up an ironclad settlement agreement,” he says. “Make sure you get assigned copyright over all those pictures, nondisclosure… I guess we can let go of admission of guilt. He’ll sign if he doesn’t have to admit he did it.”

  “Everybody already knows he did it,” she says. “Everybody who counts.”

  She’s looking at me when she says it.

  I hear the front door open, Frankie chattering, footsteps heading our way. She sounds happy, and it occurs to me that I gave her that.

  I gave her this Christmas. This family. Caroline.

  As far as I’m concerned, everybody who counts is right here, exactly where I want them.

  If I have to fight to keep my sister here, I will.

  Late that night, I wake up to the sound of Frankie screaming.

  “Daddy!” she’s saying. “Bo!”

  And then, “Don’t!”

  I peel back the covers and tuck Caroline in.

  I walk to my sister’s room and stand in the open doorway. “Frankie. Frankie. Franks, it’s okay.”

  After half a minute, she stops thrashing. Then I can hear her sniffling and rummaging around for the box of tissues we keep on the floor by her bed.

  I grab her a tissue and sit by her waist. Hand it over. Rub my hand up and down her back.

  “You’re okay,” I tell her. “You’re safe. I’m here.”

  She quiets.

  I run my fingers through her hair.

  “Tell me what happened,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve asked.

  Maybe I didn’t really want to know.

  Maybe I was afraid of what I’d hear.

  Frankie draws a deep breath. “I was at a sleepover.”

  “At whose house?”

  “Keisha’s.”

  “Where’s Keisha live?”

  “Bandon.”

  “How’d you get home?”

  She’s quiet.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  She’s so quiet.

  I miss my chattering girl who never shut up. My Frankie from before, who ran to me when I came in a door, who hassled me for piggyback rides and never got sick of sucking up as much of my time and attention as I could spare.

  I left that girl to come here, and I never got her back.

  What I’ve got now is this new Frankie, who sasses me, hassles me, ignores me, but never tells me what’s in her heart.

  I want my sister back, and the only way I can think to get to her is to wade through all this mess between us. This story she doesn’t want to tell, these changes in her life she’s afraid to talk to me about, the reality she doesn’t want to face: that we’re not ever going back to Silt.

  We’re refugees.

  “Tell me what really happened.”

  “I was asleep,” she says.

  Just like that.

  “Dad was gone, he’d been gone a couple days, and I guess Bo knew that because he never came around, but he came around that night. It woke me up when Mom answered the door. I heard them talking. She let him in.”

  Frankie sits up suddenly. She crisscrosses her legs. Her knee overlaps my thigh.

  “They weren’t doing anything,” she says. “They were just talking. But Dad came home, and he was on something, I think.”

  “On what?”

  “I don’t know. He was almost always on something.”

  “Fuck.” The word comes out of me, not a curse but a prayer. Months too late to do any good. Don’t let him hurt her. Don’t let anything hurt her.

  “He was talking too fast, super angry, and they were all yelling. I think Dad hit Mom, because I heard her kind of yelp, and then Bo said something and they were fighting. I hid under the covers. They were crashing around until… until it was too quiet. And Mom said, ‘Wyatt, don’t.’”

  The hair on the back of my neck stands up at the way she delivers those words, straight out of her nightmare.

  “That’s when I went out there.”

  I’m clutching my knees. I want to keep her from seeing whatever she’s about to see, and even though I know distantly that it’s happened already, it doesn’t seem to matter.

  Don’t go out there, Franks. You’re gonna get hurt.

  “Bo was on the floor, wiping blood off his mouth. Dad had —”

  She shudders and leans into me hard. I put my arm around her. When she speaks again, her voice is high, forced. “Dad had a gun. He was pointing it at Mom, right at her head.”

  I pull her onto my lap. She twines her arms around my neck and drops her head on my shoulder, so much like the baby she used to be that I can remember viscerally the heavy, damp weight of her. Holding her, jiggling her until she was drowsy, putting her down in the middle of mom’s bed for a nap, and then peeling carefully away, chilled from the loss of her body heat. Her lips slack and open to any of a thousand kinds of harm.

  “Have you told anyone this?” I ask.

  She nods. “Aunt Stephanie. And Caroline. But I did
n’t tell them all of it.”

  I hold her tight. “I’m glad you told Caroline. You can tell her anything you need to. But now I want you to tell me.”

  After a minute, she begins again. “Mom tried to send me back in. But Dad said, ‘No, stay, you should see this, you should see what happens to —’”

  She stops.

  “It’s okay. Tell me the parts that matter.”

  “I was so scared. I wanted to be brave, like you would’ve been if you were there, but I was so scared and I didn’t know what to do. I told him to put the gun away. He pointed it at me. Don’t talk back to me, Francine. Mom was crying, and Bo was moving, but I wasn’t paying attention with the gun on me. I was looking at Dad. And then Dad —”

  She chokes on another sob.

  “It was so loud, West. And red, bright bright red, everywhere, and I didn’t understand what was happening until Bo started apologizing. I didn’t even know Bo had a gun. He shot Dad. It was my fault, because if I hadn’t come out Dad wouldn’t have pointed his gun at me, and Bo wouldn’t have killed him, and Mom —”

  Now she’s crying. It’s awful, fucking awful to hear it. My baby. My Frankie.

  “The gun went off, and she went right to Dad. She crawled on top of him like she could put him back together with her hands. I don’t —”

  “Frankie.”

  I can’t listen anymore. I’m rocking back and forth, pressing her head into my chest, willing her to shut up with everything I’ve got, because there’s knowing something bad happened and then there’s knowing.

  There’s knowing your dad, high, pointed a gun to your sister’s head and might have killed her.

  There’s knowing your mom didn’t try to save her and didn’t go to her afterward.

  There’s knowing that, and there’s pain so huge from knowing it that the pain doesn’t have anyplace to go. It just ricochets around inside you, howling.

  “I did the wrong thing,” she sobs.

  “No.”

  “I should’ve called the police. I didn’t think. I tried to think what you would say to do, but I couldn’t, and you weren’t there, West.”

  I wasn’t there. I can’t change it. I tried, I fucking tried to be there for her, but I couldn’t.

  “You did great,” I say. “You did everything perfect.”