Harder (Caroline and West) Page 3

  I have time to take a breath and think, This is going to be weird, before the door is pulled open directly into the kitchen.

  The first thing I notice is that there’s a woman sobbing at the table.

  Like, sobbing.

  Two other women and three kids are crowded into the room with her, but I don’t pay much attention to them, because the second thing I notice is that the woman who opened the door has West’s eyes exactly.

  Nobody has eyes like West’s. Even West doesn’t, since his eyes look one way one day and another way the next, depending on the light and his mood and all kinds of factors I can’t pin down. I’ve wondered what it says on his driver’s license, because there is no word for the color his eyes are.

  It’s trippy, seeing West’s eyes in the wrinkled face of a woman.

  Other than the eyes, the resemblance is scanty. She has to tip her head way back to talk to him, because this woman is short. She’s round in every direction – boobs, hips, butt – with salt-and-pepper hair cut close to her head. She’s takes a drag off a cigarette held in her left hand, and I notice when she puts it to her lips that her fingers seem to take off in a new direction at each swollen knuckle joint.

  “Will wonders never cease?” she says.

  Far from a welcome. I kind of expect her to exhale right in West’s face and then slam the door, but she turns her head to the side instead and says, “Michelle, look who’s here.”

  I know that Michelle is West’s mom. She looks up.

  Her eyes are like dark holes punched into dough.

  “Who’s that?” Her voice is hoarse, terrible to hear. I want to cover my face with my hands.

  “This is Caroline,” West says.

  She blinks. Rubs at her eyes. Blinks again. “Caroline who?”

  Behind a closed door between the kitchen and the other room, a toilet flushes. West asks his grandma, “What’s she on?”

  “She’s been like this all day.”

  “Fuck.” He inhales deeply. “Can we come in?”

  “Introduce us,” his grandmother says.

  “Caroline, this is my grandma, Joan. Grandma, Caroline.” He points across the kitchen. “Aunt Stephanie, Aunt Heather, and my cousins Tyler, Taylor, and… I don’t know that one.”

  “Hailey,” the woman named Heather says.

  “Hailey,” West repeats. “Good to meet you, Hailey. I’m West.”

  I shake West’s grandmother’s hand and offer a weak, “Hi.”

  “I brought her to stay with Frankie,” West says.

  “I’m with Frankie,” Joan replies.

  “You’ve got other stuff on your plate.”

  “I can take care of one kid.”

  The bathroom door opens, and I recognize West’s sister at the same time her face lights up to see him. “West!”

  Relief washes through me – more than I’m prepared for.

  I’ve never met Frankie in person, but when West and I were together, she and I started texting. I don’t know if he’s aware that we never stopped.

  Not that we swap the secrets of our hearts. Frankie’s ten. She sends me pictures of cute boys and really bad jokes. I send her links to stories I think she’d like, or I just ask her how she’s doing.

  How’s school? How’s life?

  I never ask her, How’s West?

  I guess I figured that was over the line, but standing here now, it’s utterly hilarious that I thought I had lines. I mean, I’m in Silt, Oregon. Obviously I have no lines.

  West’s got his arms around Frankie, his face in her hair, his eyes closed, and I can’t look away.

  He wants me to stay here, so I’ll stay here.

  He wants me to watch over his sister, so I’ll watch over her.

  There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for West Leavitt.

  Frankie and I bunk down that night in the attic. It’s one big low-ceilinged room full of boxes and swollen garbage bags, a broken chair, the ironing board and mop bucket. Clashing squares carpet the floor – deep brown shag next to a red Turkish print next to a pink nubbly one.

  Samples from a carpet store is my guess. Not of recent vintage.

  The attic makes my nose run. It started as soon as I lay down, and now my eyes are watering. I keep sneezing.

  Even if I weren’t wired, it would be a joke to think I could sleep.

  Frankie’s beside me, each of us with a sleeping bag on a pallet made of blankets and a thick egg-crate mattress pad. Every time I’m sure she’s finally nodded off, she moves.

  Before he left, West took his sister out on the porch and talked to her for a while. Then he went into the living room with his mom and spoke to her in a low rumble while his grandma draped an afghan over Michelle’s shoulders.

  I stayed in the kitchen talking to Frankie while West’s aunts talked to each other and his cousins argued loudly about who got to sleep in which bed when they got back to Stephanie’s that night.

  After Michelle fell asleep, Joan drew a pocket door closed between the living room and the kitchen, and the whole crew of aunts and cousins cleared out. Frankie was only too happy for the opportunity to ask me a dozen more questions. What was my trip like? How many airplanes? Were they big or small? Where did I get my sweater? How much did my shoes cost? How long was I going to be staying, and why hadn’t she known I was coming?

  I did my best to answer, but I was tense waiting for West’s reappearance. When he finally came back through the pocket door, he went straight to Frankie.

  When will you be back? she asked.

  Tomorrow after work. Caroline’s gonna keep an eye on you.

  Anything in particular I’m supposed to do? I asked.

  Stay with her. Call me if anything gets strange.

  I wanted to say, Define strange, but he looked so tired, I decided to let it go.

  Things are already strange. I assume they can only get stranger.

  I sneeze loudly and then sniff, wishing I’d packed tissues. Stupid allergies. Dust and mites, mold and dander – all it means is that I never know when someplace is going to set me off. I keep Claritin in my purse, but all I found when I fished around was an empty plastic pill bubble, half-squashed.

  I’m going to have to go down the narrow wooden staircase that brought me up here and try to find Joan. Ask if she’s got something I can take.

  I hope she’s not asleep already.

  When I shift to my side, preparing to move, Frankie says, “Caroline?”

  I freeze. In front of me, there are bare two-by-fours with wiring stapled to them. A water stain, dark at the edges, bowed plywood in the middle. A small square window and the moon outside, nearly full.

  Behind me, there’s a little girl whose father is dead.

  West wanted me here, with her. But what did he want me to say?

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think he’ll leave again?”

  “Who, West?”

  “Yeah.”

  I turn toward her and prop myself up on one elbow.

  Her sleeping bag is close enough to mine that I can see it rise and fall with her breath.

  Hers is My Little Pony. Mine’s Spider-Man.

  Her eyes are so big in the dim lighting. She’s got her mother’s brown eyes and sharp chin, but the rest of her is West – cheekbones like wings, eyebrows that come to a peak, a wide mouth, and thick, dark hair. She’s beautiful and so young, her front teeth a little too big for her face.

  “I don’t know,” I say honestly.

  “But what do you think?”

  “I think… I guess he’ll do whatever he decides is best.”

  She’s quiet. Then, “Did he ask you to come?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you, then?”

  “I thought… I could help.”

  She rises to her elbow, mirroring my position. “What can you do?”

  “Not much,” I admit. “Keep you company, if you want me to.”

  “Can I tell you something?” she asks.

 
; No. Don’t tell me anything. I don’t know what I’m doing. But that’s just cowardice. I’ve learned to ignore it. “Sure.”

  “Mom told them I wasn’t there. But I was. I saw what happened.” Her eyes gleam, wet. “I saw.”

  “Do you want to… talk about it?”

  She shakes her head. Her tears brim over.

  I disentangle my arms from the sleeping bag and put them around her, pulling her close and rubbing her thin small shoulders. “Shh,” I say to this shaking girl. “Shh, shh, it’ll be all right.”

  I have no idea if it will.

  After a while, her breathing settles and slows. I can tell when she falls asleep – she gets heavier against me.

  I’ve been holding back a sneeze for a while now, inhaling deeply and squeezing my eyes shut. As soon as I can, I ease out from beside her and slip down the stairs.

  West’s grandma sits with a mug at the table, knitting. A wall-mounted TV flashes a muted newscast. A radio plays oldies, while a crackling noise pours out of what I think might be a police scanner.

  Bright pink letters across the front of her long white sleep shirt say “San Francisco.”

  Her arms are pale, the flesh loose and veined with red fireworks.

  “She asleep?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tough kid.”

  I guess she is. She kind of has to be.

  “You want some coffee?” Joan asks.

  “Is it decaf, or…?”

  “I don’t drink decaf.”

  “No, I’m good. I was just going to duck into the bathroom for a second.”

  The toilet seat is freezing. There’s a hole in the plaster above the head end of the tub, positioned so I imagine someone creating it with the back of their skull. Tapping until they dented the sheetrock, pounding until the plaster crumbled.

  I sneeze three times on the toilet.

  “You have a cold?” she asks when I come out.

  “Allergies.”

  “You need Sudafed or something?”

  “Any kind of antihistamine would be great.”

  She gets up carefully, the movements of a woman who’s no longer comfortable in her body. A minute later, she’s back with a bottle of generic allergy medicine and a glass of water.

  “Thanks.” I take the pills, then sneeze again.

  She pours herself more coffee and sits.

  “You and West are close,” she says.

  My head is full of snot. It’s too late for me to feel clever, too dark outside for bullshit. “We were.”

  “He left Frankie with you.”

  “He doesn’t want me here.”

  She gives me a pitying look. “Doesn’t want to want you here, more like it.”

  We’re quiet. The kitchen fills with the crackling murmuring gibberish of the scanner and the love-complaint of some long-ago vocalist on the radio.

  “He tell you how long it’s been since he let me get a look at his face?” Joan asks.

  “He said six years, but he didn’t say why.”

  “His daddy – my son. Last time he took up with Michelle before this, it ended bad, and West was in the middle of it. West come over here, told me I had to choose sides. Everybody had to choose. Either him and his mom and Frankie, or my Wyatt. Nobody was gonna be neutral anymore.”

  She pulls the sugar bowl close and spoons more into her mug.

  “I guess you chose your son.”

  “I thought West would come around.”

  I smile at my fingernails. “West doesn’t really come around.”

  “Not for six years, he didn’t.”

  I wish I’d taken her up on the coffee. Sleep is an impossibility here, and I’m envious of her steaming mug.

  The idea of swallowing that bittersweet heat.

  “My son was no good.” She addresses this remark to her clinking coffee spoon, slowly revolving. “I don’t know why. It wasn’t anything I did, I don’t think. The other three came out okay. But Wyatt was always full of himself. A bully.”

  She drinks deeply from her coffee, then frowns at it. “Too much sugar now.”

  I feel like I’m supposed to say something, so I say, “I’m sorry.”

  “Michelle’s no better. You saw what she’s like. She’ll be sniveling for weeks – months, maybe – and never give a single thought to what it does to her daughter or what she leaves her son to deal with.”

  It’s eerie when Joan finally looks at me. West’s eyes. A stranger’s face. Familiar strength that I know how to count on. “Did you come to take him back with you?” she asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  She drains the mug and stands to set it by the sink. Looks through the window at the moon.

  “Take him out of here,” she says quietly. “He’s not going to get another chance.”

  I spend the next morning washing dishes and shelling peas with Frankie at Joan Leavitt’s kitchen table.

  Afterward, Joan tries to teach us both how to knit. Frankie catches on faster than I do. I keep wrapping the yarn around the needle, which makes holes.

  Joan says I’m good at making holes.

  For lunch, she warms up canned tomato soup and fixes grilled cheese sandwiches with Kraft singles and margarine. There’s a constant stream of traffic in and out of her kitchen – friends, neighbors, extended family, a woman with four children who I eventually figure out from the conversation is from Joan’s AA chapter. Joan is her sponsor.

  I’m not introduced. The company ebbs and flows. Joan pops outside for a cigarette and pops back in, running water in the sink, talking on the phone, turning up the radio. Always, if her hands aren’t otherwise occupied, she’s knitting. She has a red bag that snaps to the belt loop of her pants, and she carries the needles in her hands and knits without looking, twelve-inch squares in brown and blue, green and red.

  Her living room is draped in her knitting – two afghans on the couch, one on the La-Z-Boy, an overflowing basket of yarn in the corner. There’s a set of stitch pattern reference books tucked beneath the coffee table.

  I sit with one thigh touching the afghan wrapped around West’s mom and the other leg pressed up against Frankie, who seems to need that.

  All day long, she pushes herself against me.

  She’s an alarming blend of kid and woman. Knobby knees and boobs, careful eye makeup and huddled posture. I understand why West loves her. Frankie is everything soft in him, every impulse right at the surface. Loud and funny, hot-tempered, quick to forgive.

  Your hair’s so pretty, she tells me.

  Show me how you do your makeup.

  Teach me how you make your scarf look like that.

  She doesn’t say anything more about what she witnessed.

  She doesn’t cry.

  I wonder if I should tell someone that she saw the shooting, but who would I tell? Her mom knows the truth, whatever it is. Her grandmother, her aunts and uncles – either they know or they don’t. I can’t imagine breaking Frankie’s trust, turning over what she told me to somebody whose allegiances aren’t clear.

  The only person I can see myself telling is West, and West isn’t here.

  In the afternoon, we hear that Bo has been taken in for questioning again. West’s mom bursts into tears. She cries about Wyatt being dead. She cries about Bo being in jail. I can’t figure out which thing she’s more upset about.

  Frankie stares at the TV, her eyes wide and wet.

  I put my arm around her, and we watch soap operas.

  West doesn’t text. He doesn’t call. He doesn’t come, even though he said he would.

  That night, I comb through the online version of the Coos Bay paper on my phone after Frankie’s gone to sleep, trying to fill in the blanks.

  Shots reported at the trailer park. A gunshot wound to the chest. Ambulance to the hospital. Dead on arrival.

  The neighbors say an argument got out of hand.

  The paper says there were only two witnesses: Michelle and Bo.

  Bo’s been ques
tioned, released, questioned again.

  I want to make a narrative out of these plain, blank facts. I want a story I can tell myself, but there’s only Michelle’s tear-streaked face. Frankie curled into a ball on the couch, her head on my lap as she watches TV. People coming in and out the door into the kitchen, talking to Joan, leaving food, running errands.

  I text West.

  What are you doing?

  When are you coming over here?

  Should I get a car?

  He ignores me.

  Even when we were dating, West never wanted me to know about Silt.

  Here I am, though, and before he forces me back out of his life, I’m going to learn as much about this place and these people as I can.

  My second day in Silt is the same as the first, except I listen harder, pay closer attention, and send West four hundred texts.

  How’s it going?

  What’s up?

  Need anything?

  He doesn’t respond, so I try random declarations.

  Watching Days of Our Lives w/ Frankie.

  Having split pea soup.

  SP soup looks like snot, but tastes good. Discuss.

  Then I give up and just start typing whatever comes to mind.

  When do you get off work?

  Am I going to see you tonight?

  Think I’ll go out for a beer.

  Shoot pool in a short skirt.

  Check out the local nightlife.

  Do you like Raisinets or Sno-Caps better?

  Milk Duds or Junior Mints?

  Ocean or mountains?

  I want to see you.

  Come for dinner.

  To my surprise, he does. His aunts and his grandma crowd around the table in the kitchen with his mom, and there are cousins big and small with paper plates, fruit salad with whipped cream and marshmallows, stringed chicken cooked all day in a Crock-Pot.

  When he takes his plate to the couch, I follow. I sit beside him and ask, “How was your day?”

  “Got a lot of texts.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  He stares at the TV with his plate balanced on his lap and bites into a pull-apart roll slathered in butter. “Nope.”

  But he slants me a look, and the smart-ass tilt to his mouth makes me flush with heat.