Harder (Caroline and West) Read online

I’ve seen that smile in bed, over dinner, in his car, in the bakery, in every corner of our lives together.

  I miss that smile.

  “You can’t ignore me into disappearing,” I say.

  He just chews and swallows, staring, straight ahead.

  I lean close and whisper so only he can hear me. “I’m not leaving until I know you’re okay.”

  Everything about him gets still. He doesn’t even breathe, and I’m holding my own breath in sympathy, so caught up in him that I don’t even realize it until he draws air deep into his lungs and turns toward me. His face bare inches away.

  His thigh hot alongside mine.

  His eyes, his nose, his mouth, his face.

  God.

  There can’t be another woman. Not between me and West – there can’t be, because if there were, I wouldn’t feel like this. I couldn’t feel like this. This alive. This real.

  Not if he didn’t feel it, too.

  “So if I tell you I’m okay, you’ll go?” he asks.

  “I have to believe it.”

  My white shirt is reflected in his eyes, a glare against the darkness of his pupils.

  His nostrils flare. I know he feels something. I know he’s got things he wants to say to me. So why won’t he open his mouth and say them?

  After he left Putnam, West shut down any conversation that included the words move or transfer, any talk of seeing each other again. Everything is black or white for West. His mom went back to his dad, so he had to go back to Frankie.

  All he got of her was one afternoon a week at the McDonald’s near her school. An hour for West to look his sister and his mom over for bruises, interpret their answers to his questions, wait for the day he found out something was wrong.

  The rest of the time, he worked. He slept. He went to the bars with Bo, and every now and then got drunk enough to call and tell me the truth as he saw it.

  We were over. I shouldn’t keep trying to be his friend. I shouldn’t text him.

  We were over, so we shouldn’t be talking on the phone at two in the morning, except we were. Because he’d called me. And once we were talking, we found ourselves joking, meandering around until he said something or I did and we slid down into the dark together, hands where they shouldn’t be, saying everything we’d been holding back.

  Miss you.

  Want you.

  Need you.

  Still love you.

  Baby, I can’t. I can’t.

  He’d tell me I deserved better, but I could never make myself believe there was anyone for me but West.

  I watch the color rise in his cheeks. I look at his throat, where his pulse beats. I feel the heat coming off him, the want.

  He can lie to me in a text. He can lie over the phone. But he can’t sit here and lie to me with his body.

  “Make me believe you’re fine,” I say. “Tell me you don’t miss me. You don’t want me. You’re not thinking about me all the time, as much as I’m thinking about you.” I reach out for his thigh and find a grip above the knee. “Tell me.”

  The muscles in his leg twitch beneath my fingers. West wraps a hand around the back of my neck.

  He leans in close.

  I think he means to say something harsh, to convey the hard truth of our hopeless situation. I should brace myself for it, except I can’t. That hand on the back of my neck makes me soften instantly, everywhere.

  This is how he used to kiss me. Just like this. And when he lets me this close, looks at me this way, I can see right into him and catalog every feeling chasing its way across his face.

  His longing. His lust.

  His need for me, his craving for my softness, his desire to claim something tender in this blighted life of his.

  I can see anguish, too. Agony.

  I watch agony overpower his tenderness, wrestle its way to the forefront, and shut down his expression until all the feeling left is in his lawless, angry eyes.

  “Stay with Frankie,” he says. “That’s all I want from you.”

  He stands and walks out of the room, like that’s a normal thing to do. Get up in the middle of everything, step over the crawling baby, stuff his plate in the garbage can and go.

  Go wherever.

  Go somewhere I can’t follow him.

  I think about borrowing a car, asking for directions out to Bo’s place. I could park and knock on the door, find West, corner him. I could flatten my hands on his chest and shove him.

  Say what you’re thinking. Admit what I mean to you.

  Talk to me about what you’re going to do now that he’s dead.

  Promise you’re coming back to me, convince me you love me, tell me you’re sorry.

  What stops me is how badly I want him.

  I want to follow him around the way Frankie follows me. Push myself up against him, seeking comfort.

  What stops me, too, is what I saw. What West let me see: that he’s hurting badly, and his hardness is the only defense he’s got.

  I’m here for him. Not for myself. Stay with Frankie, he said.

  That’s what I do.

  My third day in Silt is like the first two.

  West makes himself scarce and refuses to answer my texts.

  My dad calls and I ignore him. Four times. I can’t be here and still be thinking about what’s going on back home, not if I want to stay sane. It’s too much.

  And I’m weary of talking to my dad. He’s obsessed with the trial. Talking to my dad about trial stuff ate my entire summer – the trial and West, West and the trial. Lying awake nights in my bedroom at the house where I grew up, I felt sometimes like I was disappearing. Like I was nothing but the aftermath of last year: what happened with Nate, what happened with West.

  Instead of taking Dad’s calls, I do my detective thing in the morning, insinuating myself into conversations, learning the names of all West’s cousins, the personalities of his aunts and uncles, the simmering feuds and complicated webs of animosity that fuel this family’s daily dramas.

  There are a lot of dramas. I can see why West opted out for six years.

  Michelle has to go in to the police station for an interview. Joan teaches Frankie and me to play backgammon, and we have a tournament at the kitchen table while she makes chili, knits, and talks on the phone with her daughters, one after the other, each of them pissed about something.

  Michelle comes home with a headache, cries when Joan asks her what the police wanted to know, and falls asleep on the couch.

  Frankie gets bored and wants to play Skip-Bo. When Joan tells her she doesn’t have it, Frankie says she’s got it at the trailer. Also at the trailer are her clothes, her toiletries, her cell phone, the blanket off her bed, and everything else in the world a ten-year-old girl could possibly want.

  “Can we go get it?” she asks. “Please, Caroline?”

  “I don’t have a car, remember? I can ask West.”

  “He’ll say no. They all say no.” She folds her arms and collapses on top of her cards in despair.

  “It’s a crime scene, hon.”

  But late in the afternoon, Joan takes a phone call out to the porch. When she comes back inside, she tells us the police have classified Wyatt Leavitt’s death accidental.

  They’re releasing the body. The funeral will be tomorrow.

  That night, after Frankie falls asleep, Joan walks up the attic steps.

  “You decent?”

  “Yeah.” I’m wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and yoga pants. Decent enough.

  “Come with me.”

  A short drive later, we’re parked in front of a dark trailer with crime-scene tape across the door.

  The knob turns easily under her hand. She shows me how to duck under the tape.

  Breaking and entering, I think. Contaminating a crime scene.

  Technically, it’s not a crime scene anymore. But even if it were, I think I’d be here. I need to see this place. I need to know it, because this is where West came from.

  This is his p
ast.

  I take it in – the musty smell, the cheap paneling over thin walls. The scratched tabletop, its wood grain a sticker half peeled away, revealing the white of the backing.

  Joan comes out of the bedroom with her arms full of clothes and says, “Get me a trash bag from under the kitchen sink.”

  I do as I’m told, thinking about where West would have kept his things. What he might have called his own and how he would have protected it.

  He never wanted me to see this.

  My cell rings. I fumble getting it out of my pocket, inadvertently accepting the call. My father’s voice says, “Caroline?”

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “I’ve been calling you all day.”

  Joan comes out with another load of clothes. I squeeze the phone to my shoulder and hold open the trash bag. She stuffs the clothes inside.

  “Sorry, I’m keeping busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  Trespassing.

  Invading the privacy of the man I love.

  Banging my head against a brick wall.

  Only I don’t think West is a brick wall, as much as he looks like one. The bricks he surrounds himself with are no more real than the wood-grain surface of the tabletop.

  “I can’t talk right now,” I tell my dad.

  “When can you talk?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’ll call you.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that. I set up a meeting for Tuesday, because I have some questions about the complaint. I need you to weigh in on a few things before then. Will you be back? Or…”

  I can’t listen. Outside, the heavy thump of bass draws closer. Lights cut across the window and pan over the wall, illuminating a dark decoration against the wallpaper.

  A spatter pattern.

  Blood.

  I disconnect the phone.

  Joan comes out with a handful of jewelry and Frankie’s Skip-Bo cards. “Let’s get out of here,” she says.

  I want to move. Escape. But I stand another minute in the beating heart of West’s nightmares, because for so many years, escape was impossible for him.

  We ride back to Joan’s house with the windows down. I turn my phone over and over in my hand, thinking about my dad.

  West’s dad is dead. I saw his blood.

  Joan must have seen it, too. Her son’s life, spilled across the walls. Wasted.

  I came here to help, but there’s so little that’s in my power to do. All I can do is stay. Love him. Hope.

  I carry the bags up the stairs so Frankie will see them when she wakes up.

  My fourth day in Silt is the funeral.

  West stands by the coffin with his mother.

  I try not to stare, but I can’t stop. His thighs strain the trousers of his suit. The jacket is so tight across the shoulders, he looks like a thug in a gangster movie. When he bends down to hug one of his little cousins, I notice how shiny the pants are across the backside, and I worry he’s going to split them.

  Maybe he borrowed it, but the ache in my body says no. This is his best suit. This is his suit from before, maybe the suit he graduated high school in, wore to prom, I don’t know.

  It doesn’t fit him, and I want to cry.

  He looks so angry.

  He didn’t want to come. His mom couldn’t talk him into it. His grandma knew better than to try.

  Frankie wanted him here.

  She’s all the way on the other side of the room with her aunt Heather, who has three kids with different fathers and lives on disability in western Idaho. Heather is rubbing her lower back like it hurts. All this standing around talking to people makes my back hurt, and I didn’t get hit by a falling pallet at a warehouse ten years ago.

  We’ve been here for six hours. It’s hot and too dry, we’re tired, and there’s nothing to drink or eat.

  Every few minutes, Frankie looks around until she finds West. Her shoulders ease.

  He’s trying so hard to make this work out for her. As though, if he does that, he won’t have to deal with it himself.

  I suspect he thinks that he is dealing with it, but when he drops his guard his face tells me the truth. When he looks off in the distance and lets that angry mask fall for a second, half a second, an instant, I see.

  I saw him watching Frankie talk to an older teenage cousin, everything raw in West exposed in his face – protectiveness, aggression, fear, love.

  God, I miss his face.

  I miss the mornings when I’d wake up before him and look and look until I could close my eyes and see him there, the tangle of his eyelashes, the shape of his mouth, the scar in his eyebrow.

  I miss the nights when I’d sit on the couch and he’d be on the floor below me, book open on his lap, one arm thrown over the cushion behind him, and his fingers heavy on my thigh. How he’d read something interesting and turn to tell me, his smile cockeyed and bright, my world full of him all the way out to the edges.

  When he looks in my direction, I catch his gaze and hold it, and it’s my yearning that propels me across the floor toward him. It’s the click of our connection, as powerful as ever, magnetic even from across a room. It’s my hope that maybe I can say something, maybe —

  But a couple gets there ahead of me, the woman touching West’s elbow and sharing condolences. A beautiful woman with black hair, older than me by a decade, perfectly made up. I envy her poise and her boobs and her fuchsia wrap dress, but mostly I envy that she’s touching West and I’m not.

  I look away.

  Right into the open coffin.

  I don’t know whose idea that was. I’d assumed it would be closed, because hello, gunshot wound? But I guess they just pack the holes full of whatever and slap a suit on the body, because there’s West’s dad, laid out like…

  He looks so much like West.

  It’s creepy how much he looks like West.

  Like West, dead.

  I’m not tricked, I’m not stupid, but my heart is, apparently, and my body’s in a galloping panic, sweating and hot, tears in my eyes.

  Look away.

  The woman is hugging West. Up on her toes, pressing her breasts into his chest. It’s a little too much hug, you know? With hips in it, and hips aren’t supposed to touch when you hug at a funeral.

  Look away.

  Separated from them by a few feet, there’s a man talking to West’s mom. Older, distinguished gray hair, great suit. Michelle is crying again, although it’s dignified funeral crying. He’s offering her a hankie, and the hug is still going on to his right. His mouth looks like mine must – tugged down at the corners, as if he’s wishing the hug would die a painful death.

  As though he’d like to tear the hug off them, throw it on the ground, step on it.

  Look away.

  Coffin again. I burp, taste vomit, wobble a little on my heels, and stagger, prompting me to reach out to steady myself.

  White satin lining, cool against my skin.

  I remember reading that funeral homes charge the grieving a fortune for stuff like satin linings and urns to put the ashes in, and you don’t get any choice because it’s not like they’ll let you turn up with a reusable Ziploc tote and say Fill ’er up.

  Everything costs money. West’s grandma is living on Social Security and her dead husband’s medical benefits from a union job he had with the railroad. If she didn’t own her house outright, she wouldn’t be able to get by. As it is, Michelle’s been giving her money for groceries.

  Michelle “borrows” about five hundred bucks a month from West, sometimes more. She’s not working since Wyatt got killed. This dusty pink carpet, the tasteful hush, the rows of side tables full of flowers – West is paying for it. Paying to embalm the man whose fists crashed into his face.

  I look at the corpse again, because that’s all he is now, a corpse. I stare at his face until I can see the makeup – mascara on his lashes, creamy foundation, blush.

  Not West. Just some asshole who donated the sperm.

  I’m
glad he’s dead.

  The man who’s been talking to West’s mom touches his wife’s elbow and leans down to say something in her ear. She lets go of West finally, smiling, nodding.

  They say their goodbyes and move away.

  West glances at me. Cuts to the coffin. Mumbles, “Stay with my mom.”

  He walks away.

  Damn him.

  Damn him for lying to me, damn him for not talking to me, and damn him for pretending there was ever someone else.

  There was just West, here, convincing himself he could never come back to me. That there wouldn’t ever be a way for us to be together again.

  West deciding I’d be better off if he let me go.

  What’s she look like? I’d asked him. Does she make you laugh? Do you love her?

  No reply.

  I spent a day fuming, analyzing, talking, drinking, and came back at him with Do her knees go weak when you kiss her? Does she smile when you fuck her? Does she say your name?

  I was drunk and bold that night. Righteous, shouting.

  West hung up on me.

  My best friend, Bridget, had to pry the phone from my hand, because I was shaking with anger. I didn’t feel the tears until she wiped them away.

  I study his retreating back, his stifled shoulders moving through the room. Moving away from me.

  I understand him better than anyone alive. I just don’t know what the fuck to do about him.

  West’s grandma liberates me.

  She whispers, “Go on,” and takes Michelle’s arm.

  I weave between the rows of chairs set up for the service in half an hour, out of the room and down the broad main hallway of the funeral home, with its fussy old-fashioned couches and its wall art no one could ever possibly object to – mostly shepherdesses and cows, with a seascape thrown in for good measure.

  West is nowhere in sight. He must have gone outside to smoke.

  Near the exit doors, I see the man who’d been talking to West’s mom by the coffin. I start to pass him, and he says, “You’re Caroline, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He extends a hand. “Evan Tomlinson. May I speak with you for a moment?”

  Tomlinson. Dr. Tomlinson. West calls him Dr. T.

  This is the man who paid for West to go to Putnam. “Of course.”