Harder

by Robin York

  Stoned on the taste of him, high on possibility, I tell him, “It’s going to be okay.” Not because I believe it, but because I want to. “We’ll get through this.”

  And that’s all it takes for me to wreck it.

  All it takes for him to take his hands off me and draw away.

  When he opens his eyes, I can see my error written there. Because what sounds like hope to me isn’t hope to West. It’s just a reminder that he can’t have anything he wants.

  “There’s no we.” He steps back. Brushes his hands over his thighs. “I don’t need anything from you.”

  I know what he’s doing. Of course I do.

  He does, too—he has to, because his words are so patently ridiculous. My chest is still heaving. My lips are wet and full. My whole body aches, and West is saying, “You should think about going home.”

  It hurts.

  God. It hurts so much.

  But even as it hurts, I don’t believe him. I’ve had West inside my body. I’ve locked my gaze with his for that first deep thrust, and I know what he looks like when he wants me. I know how he kisses when he’s hurting, how he craves the oblivion our bodies can make together, the comfort afterward, the tired quiet space to talk in, to tell me what’s weighing him down.

  I know better than anyone how to read the language of West denying himself what he wants.

  So I let him walk down the hill alone. I watch his broad back get smaller, watch him pull off his suit jacket and ball it up and throw it in the Dumpster outside the funeral home. I watch him disappear around the corner of the building, and I count off the time in my head.

  Ten minutes.

  Then I’m going after him.

  The funeral home is hushed. Quiet as a doctor’s office or a chapel, places people aren’t supposed to enjoy themselves.

  Suspended places.

  The door into the viewing room stands open, but there’s no one in there. No one in the hall, no one in the family lounge area.

  I walk out into the parking lot. The sun has dropped beyond the horizon line, and although there’s still enough light to see, dusk is gathering.

  I’m tired. I want a hot shower and a warm bed, and I’m going to make West take me to Bo’s tonight. Even if he won’t touch me, I’m sick of sleeping on carpet squares in an attic that makes me sneeze. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning with crusty, red-rimmed eyes.

  Joan’s Chevy sedan is gone. She must have taken Frankie back to her place.

  I walk to the truck and check the door. Unlocked. Once I’m settled into the passenger seat, I text him—Where are you?—then glance at my email.

  Tired and lonely, I text my dad.

  Just wanted to check in. I’m fine.

  I think how lucky I am, how extraordinarily lucky. Being with West’s family, seeing the way they are, helps me remember that my life has basically been amazing in every way that matters. Sure, I lost my mom, but I wasn’t old enough when she died to remember having her. Who I remember is my dad, and he’s always been there for me and my sisters. Crabby and controlling, yes, but I’ve never doubted that he wants the best for me. Not for a second. And whatever minor differences I have with him, they’re always going to be just that: minor.

  I send another text. I’m glad you’re my dad. I love you.

  I wait a minute, but he doesn’t write back. Neither does West.

  I lay my head down on the seat and close my eyes, hoping West will turn up before it gets too chilly. Even in the summer, it’s cold here at night. Something to do with the mountains.

  West would know why, if I asked him.

  I fish my earbuds out of my purse and put a song I like on repeat at low volume.

  Sleep comes down on me slowly, stealing into the song, rocking me to safety.

  The next thing I know, I come awake to a thump. My hand clutches closed around my phone; when I sit up and look out the windows, I don’t see anything. It’s completely dark now, the parking lot just a gravel patch with no streetlights to illuminate it.

  I hear a woman’s laugh, low and intimate.

  There’s another thump—a body making contact with the side panel of the truck.

  A quiet squeak against glass, and now I crane my head farther around to see something moving against the narrow window of the back part of the cab. A shadow, fuzzed at the edges. I realize it’s a woman’s hair when she says, “No one can see us out here.”

  A cloud of black hair, and the back of a dress that would be purple if it were light enough to tell color from shadow. The woman who hugged him too long beside the coffin. Mrs. Tomlinson.

  West’s voice replies, “You’ll have to be quiet.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “You need something to shove in your mouth?”

  She laughs.

  “Turn around,” he says.

  A clack against the window. Her wedding ring.

  It’s the ring that makes it real. The white streak of her teeth. I’m dizzy. So disoriented, I close my eyes.

  That makes it worse.

  For a long moment, I’m falling, stuck inside a pocket of time, drenched in violent revulsion as though it’s been dropped on me from above. A bucketload of antipathy, a full-body no.

  No, this can’t be happening.

  Her ring taps against the glass again. “Yeah. Yeah, I missed that mouth.”

  I don’t hear what West says. I can’t see him.

  I can’t see him because he’s down on his knees with his face between her legs.

  I turn away from them, blinking into darkness.

  When I was three, I fell into a lake in the winter. We went to a dock where you could throw bread crusts to ducks and geese—me and my two older sisters with my dad—and I think Dad must have taken his eyes off me for a second too long.

  I remember fear when I backed away from something that scared me.

  I remember surprise when I fell.

  I don’t remember being afraid in the water. Only sinking into a cold so absolute, a descent so inevitable, that I accepted it.

  That’s what this is like. I know it’s happening. I know I’m angry. I know my hands are shaking, and I’m nauseated. But all of that is as unimportant as the frantic shouting of my sisters muffled by the water.

  I’m cold.

  Encased.

  Sinking.

  I drift without moving as the sounds she makes become more frantic.

  We could compare notes.

  Is he doing that thing with his tongue, Mrs. Tomlinson?

  Oh, he must have just scissored his fingers. That gets me, too.

  How many times have you done this? Did it start when he was your caddy?

  How old was he then? How many different ways did you use him?

  He’s using you now.

  They aren’t my thoughts.

  It’s not my own ironic detachment, it’s just a random defense. A mouthy guard at the door. The real me is awash in rage and shame and sorrow so deep I’m not even allowed access to it.

  I have to sink away. Let the water take me.

  I’m annoyed when my phone vibrates in my hand. I glance at the screen and see that I have new texts from my dad and West.

  In funeral home office, West’s first text says.

  I’m going to be a few minutes still.

  Wrapping things up w/ director.

  If we were inside the funeral home, I’d have to feel something right now. That’s what they’re for, these places we create to receive grief, to allow it and mute it at the same time.

  But in the cab of this truck, drifting down into the cold with the scent of tobacco in my veins, I’m protected from having to feel. Suspended, for now.

  I read the texts from my dad while West brings Mrs. Tomlinson to orgasm.

  I love you too, C.

  What’s the word there—any idea when you’ll be home?

  A third one arrives.

  Let me know when, I’ll pick you up.

  She’s noi
sy when she comes. I didn’t know people were that noisy outside of movies.

  This scene is a parody, a terrible movie I can’t turn off.

  Gravel clatters. West getting to his feet. He must see the interior of the truck illuminated by the screen of my phone. Her, too, now that her eyes are open.

  The sounds they’re making probably mean something.

  I’m supposed to care.

  I’m supposed to say something when West opens the truck door and looks at me with nothing in his expression like surprise.

  Looks at me with a blazing sort of pride, an arrogant tilt to his eyebrows that tells me he knew.

  He knew exactly what he was doing.

  I don’t say anything. Not even when he calls me by name. “Caroline,” he says—my whole name, which he hardly ever uses.

  I refuse to speak even when he takes me by the shoulder and shakes me, “Fucking say something,” and Mrs. Tomlinson’s making soothing noises, “West, West.”

  I’m sinking, and I don’t have to talk to him.

  I don’t have to do anything.

  He drives me to the airport in the morning.

  Up the mountain. Down the mountain. Wordless.

  It’s not until I see a sign that says we’re twenty miles from Eugene that I start thinking how this is it.

  I mean, this is really it.

  When West left Putnam last year, I took him to the airport, and I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again. It was horrible, but not as horrible as this silent car ride, because what I didn’t understand last year is that everything about that departure was outlined in hope.

  I didn’t know if I’d see West again, but I hoped I would.

  He didn’t know if he’d ever get back to Putnam, but I know he hoped, too.

  We hoped we could be friends. We hoped we could be more.

  And the slow death of hope—the suffocation of a future—that’s hard to live through. It’s no wonder he couldn’t take it.

  It’s no wonder he told me he’d met someone, just to give himself a reason to stop calling. To give me a reason to stop waiting for the phone to ring.

  All of that was hard.

  It’s not as hard as this.

  This is the wasteland after a volcanic eruption—everything hot and black, covered in sulfur, the sky the color of ash. There’s nothing for hope to feed on in this car. He took it all.

  He killed it on purpose.

  “I know what you did,” I say into the silence.

  His hands tighten on the wheel. “Say what you need to say, Caro.”

  “You’re hoping I’ll yell. I bet it would be easier if you could remember me that way. You could think about how it ended, and then you wouldn’t have to remember the rest of it.”

  He’s quiet.

  I’m not.

  I’ve never been a quiet person, and everything that’s happened to me in the last year has driven whatever quietness remained right out of me.

  I wish I had a microphone for this. A sound system and a crowd of a thousand.

  I wish everyone in the world could hear.

  “I love you.”

  That’s the first thing I have to say to West Leavitt, and I hear his surprise in the sharp sound of his inhale.

  “I came here because I love you, and I helped you the best I could because I love you. I need you to know that there isn’t anything I wouldn’t have done to make this work between us. I didn’t know it when I got here, but I sure as fuck know it now. If you’d asked me to take time off school, move out here, help you get your sister on the right path, I would’ve done it. For you. If you’d said to me you wanted to raise her, you and me together, take her from your mom and set up a house somewhere, I’d have said sure, yeah, let’s do it, even though it’s scary. For you I’d do it. All I’ve ever said to you is yes, and I was going to keep saying yes, because you were worth it. The way you made me feel. Your mind and your heart and you. Everything about being with you was worth it.”

  His eyes are on the road, so I look at it, too, but there’s nothing there.

  “Look at me,” I say.

  He won’t.

  “You look at me,” I repeat. “I deserve that much from you.”

  The truck slows. He signals, then pulls onto the side. Cuts the engine.

  He turns toward me, and it’s harder.

  But it’s already so hard, there’s no point in flinching away from it now.

  “You have to leave Silt,” I tell him. “Take your sister, because God knows you won’t leave her, but you cannot stay. You’ll never be happy here. You don’t know how.”

  His eyes cut away from me. Out the window, toward the mountains.

  “You told me once when I needed to hear it that I hadn’t done anything wrong, so now I’m going to tell you. You did do something wrong. That performance last night? It was a performance. I’m not going to pretend it was anything you wanted, that you got carried away with lust or some bullshit, because that was fucking calculated. It was mean, and it was wrong. But I know what you did, West. I know why you did it. And the same way I needed to hear that I hadn’t done anything wrong with Nate, that I wasn’t wrong even when a hundred strange assholes on the Internet were talking in my head at me day in and day out—”

  His eyes cut to me.

  “I never told you that?” I ask. “Yeah. Voices in my head, insomnia, misery. The whole thing. And you were the one who pulled me out of that. You were.”

  “You did it yourself.”

  “Everyone does everything themselves, West. By themselves, to themselves. Everyone. But sometimes they do it because they have a reason, and you were my reason. You told me I was fine, I wasn’t broken, I wasn’t wrong, and I believed you. You made a difference.”

  I knot my hands in my lap. Not sure now that I should be saying any of this.

  Never sure, actually, that I could make any kind of difference for him the way he did for me.

  “I’m not the person you need to hear it from, I guess.”

  There’s a plane low in the sky. Landing at the airport. I look at his face again. “But I might be the only person who’s going to tell you. Your dad sucked. Your family … well, nobody wants to hear anything bad about their family, but West, they’re never going to stop taking things from you. Not ever. There’s never going to be a day when you look around at your mom and your sister and your grandma and say, Okay, they’re fine. I can go live my life the way I want now. It’s not going to happen, any more than I’m ever going to get my sex pictures off the Internet. You can’t wait for it to happen. What you have to do is find a way to get out from under it, knowing it’s never going away. You have to make your own life, because if you don’t, you just won’t get to have one at all, and that’s the worst fucking thing I can imagine.”

  He makes a sound in his throat. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know how he feels, but this is the only chance I’ll get. I’m going to lay it all down in front of him, because he taught me how to cut through the bullshit, and it’s one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned.

  “You know, that’s the thing that made me cry the hardest last night, even after what you did to me? Even with how mad I am, how fucking gross I feel every time I even look at your mouth or think about hearing what I heard—thinking about how you made me hear it—it’s even worse to think I’m going to leave and you’re going to drive back to Silt and die there. Die there every day.”

  I swipe at my face. Mascara all over my hand. What a disaster.

  “It’s sick, you know that?” I say. “This heart of mine, limping along?”

  “I don’t get it,” he says. “I don’t get why you’re being …”

  “Because I love you. I don’t want to, okay? I think there are some things that are so hard, you shouldn’t have to do them, only no one can take them from you. There are feelings so sick, so obviously unhealthy, you shouldn’t have to feel them. But there they are. I still love you, and I’m not ever going to see
you again, not ever. You did that to us. Not your dad or your family, just you. So I could hit you. I could rage at you right now, and call you every ugly name I know, and I know a lot. I could tell you how much I’m hurting, or I could get out of the car, slam the door, hitchhike to the airport because fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, West, how could you do this to me? How?”

  He wipes his palms up the back of his head. Drops his forehead onto the steering wheel and covers his face with his forearms.

  “What I can’t do is pretend I don’t know what you did,” I say. “Or pretend I don’t still care about you.”

  I look one more time at him. All of him. His lowered head and his shoulders, his torso wrapped in a blue T-shirt, those long legs sticking out of his shorts.

  We’re so far from where we were when we met.

  Lost in the wilderness, and there isn’t any way back.

  “Don’t waste your whole life,” I tell him. “You’re not going to get another one.”

  Collapsed over the wheel, he turns the ignition.

  I can hear him breathing. Thick, deep breaths.

  It’s five full minutes before he’s got it under control.

  I’m calm now. Emptied out.

  When he lifts his head, he flips open the glove compartment, careful not to touch my knee, and extracts his cigarettes. The lighter is out of reach.

  I pluck it out and give it to him.

  I find his bracelet in my purse and leave it in the glove box while he watches. It looks like a child’s token.

  “Give up the fucking cancer sticks, too,” I say.

  When he exhales smoke out the window, I watch it disappear into the sky.

  I remind myself that this place we’re in now—every green thing I see—all of this came after the fire and ash.

  There’s hope in the world.

  I just have to find it.

  West

  Fade to black.

  That was my plan.

  Some fucking plan.

  Caroline left the morning after my dad’s funeral. I spent the next four weeks in Silt, and the screen of my personal Wild West movie was supposed to darken from the edges to the middle until there was nothing left but a quarter-size hole, a nickel, a dime, nothing.

  Show’s over. Welcome to the rest of your life. Enjoy your time in this paradise of emotional numbness.