Harder (Caroline and West)

by Robin York

  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.

  BLACK BORDERS

  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.

  Drink some beers. Fuck some chicks. Rock on.

  I was delusional. I can only guess, now, that my delusions were supposed to protect me, because it’s not like any part of my life had given me reason to believe awful shit gets less awful through repetition. Worrying you’re not going to be able to buy groceries – worrying your baby sister’s going to cough her lungs out from the croup – worrying you’re going to die alone and never again make love to the only woman you want – it always fucking sucks.

  It sucks and sucks and sucks and sucks, and it never stops sucking. There’s no end to it. No bottom. No black curtain that falls down and makes it so you don’t have to feel it.

  It’s like Caroline said. There are some things so terrible you shouldn’t have to go through them, but you do have to. They’re yours to feel, yours to put up with.

  Your life to live, whether you like it or not.

  I drove back to Silt and went to work.

  I fed juniper into a chipper and thought about the future for the first time in months. I thought about Caroline. What she’d said. What I’d done to her. I thought about how hard I’d tried to keep her from seeing me here, seeing me struggle to keep it together.

  I knew she would, if she came to Silt.

  I figured I couldn’t stand it if she did, and I was right. I couldn’t stand it.

  Couldn’t stand what she told me.

  Couldn’t stand that she saw right through what I did to her – the shame I felt when she didn’t cry or shout and I figured out I’d been trying to trick her into changing her mind about me because I couldn’t just tell her the truth.

  I loved her. Every day, every hour, every single fucking awful minute, I loved her.

  And even loving her, I hurt her, because I thought I had to. What else would have made her leave? A smart woman like Caroline, loyal, caring – she would’ve done anything for me, including stay. I guessed it, and then she told me, so, you know, gold star for me. Three cheers for West, figuring out what he has to do to drive the love of his life away. Eat Rita Tomlinson out against the side of Bo’s truck – that’s gonna get the job done. That’ll get it done every damn time.

  I disgusted myself.

  I hated myself.

  But Jesus, I loved Caroline. She was always braver than me. Better than me, smarter, able to see her way to the heart of things. She looked at me and saw a man worth rescuing, but I’d already made up my mind not to be rescued.

  I put her as far away from me as possible, because I was going to have to stay in Silt, and I couldn’t stand it but I had to stand it.

  I had to.

  This was my life. The script I got handed when I walked onto the set.

  Only, I looked at the script again after Caroline left, with my dad’s corpse cooling in the ground in a box I bought with weed money, and I figured out I was never the fucking sheriff.

  Nobody with any goodness in them – any sense of justice or rightness – could have done that to her.

  I’d done it.

  So who did that make me?

  I’ve got a list in my head: Shit That Has to Get Sorted.

  At the top of the list is “living situation,” so on Monday of the week after the funeral, I drive by my grandma’s house after work to talk to my mom.

  She’s on the couch wrapped in the afghan she’s adopted. The TV’s on, but she doesn’t look like she’s watching it.

  She looks like shit, actually. Her hair is limp like she hasn’t washed it, and I notice chipped polish on her toenails.

  I sit down next to her. “What’s on?”

  She hands me the remote. “Garbage. You can pick if you want.”

  I accept it. Flip through a few channels.

  I’d asked my grandma to take Frankie out for a burger so I could hash some things out with my mom, but now that I’m sitting here I sense disaster on the way. I can read Mom’s moods like the weather, and she’s not at her most stable.

  It’s not her mood that worries me, though. It’s mine. There’s a dark cloud over my head. If I thought I could put this off another week or two, I would.

  “Did your girlfriend move out to Bo’s?” she asks.

  “No. She went home.”

  “Thought she might be sticking around, the way she looks at you.”

  The way Caroline looks at me —

  I throw a wall up there.

  The way she touched me, the way she tried to comfort me, the way she took off her shoes and dug that grave with me —

  I build the wall taller.

  My voice is dry when I ask, “What’s there to stick around for?”

  The pillow next to me on the couch has a deer on it. A naturalistic forest scene I remember thinking was real cool when I was a kid.

  Tacky. That’s how this place looks to me now. My whole life here, shabby and low-class and tacky.

  That’s one part of going to a rich-kid school in Middle America that I never knew to expect. You spend two years in classrooms with six-inch-wide heartwood pine molding stained deep, academic brown, and when you go
back to where you came from it all looks a hundred times worse than you remembered.

  Your default settings have shifted. Hondas and Toyotas instead of American cars. Handcrafted instead of machine made. Local and organic and artisanal whatever-the-fuck, and you can mock it when you’re there, but that doesn’t keep Hamburger Helper from tasting like warm piss and chemicals the next time you try to eat it.

  “I don’t like you staying out there with him,” my mom says.

  “Bo’s all right.”

  “You don’t know. You weren’t at the trailer that night.”

  “How could I have been?”

  “You’re never here. Even when you’re home, you’re thinking about how much you’d rather be somewhere else. With Caroline.”

  Mom trills Caroline’s name as though only snobs are named Caroline, and I’m instantly pissed.

  I breathe deep, try to shake it off. She’s right that I shouldn’t have left. I lost track of my place in the world, went to Putnam, let myself believe there might be more for me, and look what happened. If I’d stayed here, Mom would probably still be with Bo. My dad never would’ve come around, couldn’t have moved into the trailer because that’s where I’d have been living.

  None of this mess would’ve happened if I’d stayed.

  “I’m here now,” I say.

  But Caroline’s whispering in my head.

  She’s saying, They’re never going to stop taking things from you, not ever.

  I should’ve told her I don’t expect them to.

  That’s the part Caroline doesn’t get, because she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and she grew up thinking she could be anybody she wants to, do anything she sets her mind to. The world belongs to Caroline, but it doesn’t belong to me.

  I’m from Silt. I was born to take care of my sister and watch out for my mom. I belong to this place and this family, and that means they take from me, and what I’m here to do is give them what they need.

  I can’t leave.

  I can’t dream big dreams.

  I can’t have college, or Caroline, or anything outside the borders of this place, because if I leave here I leave Frankie vulnerable to Mom’s careless mistakes and whatever narrow vision of the future she can form when she can’t see past the mountains to guess at what might be possible for her.

  If I work hard, keep my head down, and take care of business, I can give Frankie the world. That’s the best I can hope for.

  “I want to get a place in Coos,” I tell my mom. “Someplace big enough for the three of us.”

  “Coos?”

  “Franks can go to middle school there if we have an address in the district. They’ve got better teachers.”

  “Frankie’s not smart enough for it to matter.”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  My mom sighs. We’ve had this argument before. “You have enough money for rent and a security deposit?”

  “Yeah, but if we want someplace nice you’re going to have to be working, too.”

  “I quit the prison,” she says. “I can’t work at the same place Bo’s at.”

  This isn’t true. She was fired.

  Bo told me he argued with the human resources people for an hour, trying to get them to keep her on. He’s been there fifteen years and thought he might have enough pull. In the end, though, Mom wasn’t worth their waiting on her to come back.

  One more lie. One more disappointment.

  Shrug it off.

  “You still have Dad’s car?” I ask.

  “Yeah, but I told Jack he could have it.”

  “Why the fuck would you do that?”

  “He always liked that car, and he wanted to have something of Wyatt’s.”

  “I can’t keep driving Bo’s truck if I’m not paying him rent money and you’re treating him like you are. Where’s that leave us? One job and no fucking car – how are we supposed to get by?”

  “I don’t know, West! I can’t cope with all this with your dad gone!”

  “When could you cope with it?” I snap. “When? When could you ever cope?”

  “Don’t take that tone with me!”

  “I’ll take it if you deserve it! All you’ve done since he got shot is cry and feel sorry for yourself and then cause a fight you could’ve stopped at the funeral. It’s over, Mom. We’ve got to move on, because there’s shit to figure out – where we’re going to live, how we’ll get new school clothes for Frankie, a physical. Is she still on the state health plan?”

  “Your dad took her off it.”

  “Jesus fuck. So we’ve got to get her back on and sign up for the Oregon Trail card again. The funeral about cleaned me out, but I’ve got enough money left for a cheap car. If you can get a job nights, I’ll stay on days at the landscaper, and I’ll find an apartment on the bus route so Franks can get to school. I think —”

  “West.”

  “What?”

  She’s rubbing her hands over her face. She looks pale, smells ripe. “I can’t do any of that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t… I can’t think. I can’t sleep. I want Wyatt. It’s hard for me to even see you, you look so much like him, and —”

  “Just don’t look. Don’t think. I’m not asking you to think. All I’m asking you to do is help me get Frankie sorted, get this paperwork rolling. I’ll put you on my accounts at the bank. We’ll do the lease in both our names, and that way —”

  “West,” she interrupts again, her voice a whisper.

  “Fucking what?”

  She’s crying again. Always crying.

  I remember how my dad used to complain. You’re always fucking crying, Michelle, and when you’re not crying you’re nagging me. Useless cunt.

  It should make me feel poisoned, that echo, but instead it makes me hate her.

  I’ve spent half my life trying to be her helper, her partner, her boss. It’s not a job I’d wish on my worst enemy.

  “I can’t,” she pleads, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “I just can’t.”

  “What do you want me to do? Everything? While you sit here on Joan’s couch and cry?”

  “Joan will let me stay.”

  “Joan’s his mom, not yours. He didn’t marry you. He didn’t stand by you, he didn’t treat you good, he didn’t respect you or love you or even stop himself from kicking your ass whenever he felt like it. Why are you doing this? Why cling to this sick fucking memory when Frankie needs you?”

  She blows her nose and lowers the tissue. Her mouth is hanging open a bit. She looks wrecked.

  My hands mash the pillow. I want to do violence to something, but it’s not her. Her body is the first soft thing I remember, her smile the one I’d work for when I was a kid. Her radiance was the treat I’d earn if I made the right jokes and read her mood correctly.

  I’m a dick to keep pushing at her when I know she’s not exaggerating – she really can’t do this.

  “Frankie doesn’t need me,” she says. “She’s got you.”

  She says it so matter-of-fact, it sounds like the clang of a cell-block gate swinging shut.

  Frankie’s got me.

  I had Caroline.

  Not anymore.

  I stand up. Pace back and forth in front of her. Jam my hands into my pockets, take them out, cross my arms, rake my fingers through the stubble of my hair.

  I know where this conversation is headed, and I’m not ready for it.

  “You want me to take care of her,” I say. “Until when?”

  “Until I’m feeling up to it.”

  “When’s that gonna be?”

  She shrugs and looks at her lap. “Until I can work. Get a car, save some money up for a place.”

  I bite back a laugh.

  Never. That’s when she means. She’s never going to feel up to it.

  I turn and look at her, wishing I could feel more tenderness – some of the friendship we used to have, if not actually love.

  I do love her.

  I j
ust don’t like her or respect her or trust her anymore.

  And I can’t carry her. If she’s giving me my sister to carry, I’ll take that weight on, but I can’t handle my mother, too. Not if she won’t help me.

  “Fine,” I say. “But if we’re gonna do that, we’ll make it official. You give me power of attorney for Frankie. I need to be able to make decisions.”

  Her eyes are huge. “I’m still her mother.”

  “I’m not trying to steal her from you. Power of attorney isn’t the same as custody. It just means you’re giving me permission to do shit like enroll her in school, sign her up for health insurance, that kind of thing.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve looked it up.” A dozen times since I was twelve.

  “Will we need a lawyer?”

  “No, it’s pretty simple if both adults are willing.”

  “Both?”

  “You and me.”

  “Oh.” A shadow crosses her face. “You’re only twenty.”

  “I turned twenty-one a couple weeks ago.”

  “I missed your birthday.”

  “Yeah.”

  And for whatever reason, that’s the thing that crumples up her face, sets her off crying for real.

  I sit down again, letting out a slow exhale and holding my arms open so she’s got something to fall against. She sobs and tells me how much I look like him.

  Just like him, just like him.

  It’s breaking her heart.

  Three weeks later, Dr. T shows up at my work right when I’m climbing into the truck to get Frankie from school.

  Bo told me to keep it. Said he doesn’t need it and implied he knows I do.

  Nothing quite like charity to make you feel like a worthless sack of shit.

  I pull the door closed and throw Dr. T a wave. The idea is to pretend he’s here to check out the water features in the showroom or buy a new garden gnome.

  Hands on the wheel. Eyes on the rearview. Put the truck in gear.

  It doesn’t work. His arms are waving in my peripheral vision. He’s jogging over, and then he’s right beside my door making that gesture that means Roll down the window, so I have to.