Harder

by Robin York

  I’m already on my way out. I’m familiar with West and unpleasantness. He has a bad habit of swinging instead of thinking. I have a bad habit of walking into his punches.

  Outside, I find a crowd bunched tight between two parallel rows of cars. I duck and weave like an eel to get a view of the action, and then I’m not sure what I’m looking at.

  West has both arms out, holding his uncle Jack apart from a man I don’t know. “No respect!” his uncle is shouting. “No excuse for this fucker!”

  The guy being yelled at has a shaved head. He’s built like a brick wall in a suit. I clue in to his identity when he flinches at the word killer.

  Bo.

  There are others shouting, too, adding to the chorus of voices. Frankie’s in the crowd behind him, white-faced, silent.

  “Calm down,” West says to his uncle.

  Jack is Joan’s son—West’s dad’s brother. He doesn’t work. I overheard his wife, Stephanie, telling West’s aunt Laura that she put the kids to bed last night and then spent two hours driving around looking for him so she could drag him home and dry him out for the funeral.

  He sounds like he’s plenty wet now, though. “I’ll fucking calm down when that fucktard is gone from my brother’s fucking funeral!”

  “He came to pay his respects.”

  “He should be in jail!”

  “That’s for the police to decide.”

  “He shot Wyatt, West! Cold fucking blood! I can’t believe you’re taking his side. Fucking staying with him, driving his truck around—it disgusts me.”

  I’m close enough now to smell the liquor fumes coming off Jack. I search for West’s mom, knowing she and Bo are the two poles of all this conflict. Two points in a triangle whose third point has been removed.

  When I find her, that’s when I know this situation is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

  I once went out after a storm with my dad and saw a downed telephone pole in the road, the severed end of a power line showering electricity into the dark night. That’s what West’s mom’s eyes are like. That much energy, loose and sparking. Lacking only a glancing touch to cause damage beyond measure.

  “You got some nerve, coming here,” Michelle says. She jerks her chin up. For one frozen instant, I see a strong resemblance to West. It’s in her jaw. In the fire in her eyes. “After what you did?”

  Her voice is rising.

  “After what you said to me, what you promised, and now you’re disrupting his funeral? His fucking funeral, Bo! You take him from me and you can’t leave me that much?”

  She’s stalking toward him now, warming up. Bo’s protests are too quiet to affect her gathering momentum. Her curses fall on him like rain. Dark and cold.

  They pelt him, and he squares his shoulders. Looks into the distance, past her. It’s not until she tries to slap him that he lays a hand on her, but one hand is all it takes.

  She tries to wrench her arm away, shouts in pain when she fails, and bloodlust ripples through the crowd, a tangible wave of ugly impulse.

  I want to keep it from getting any worse, but no one I see has a stake in stopping this. Laura is so nonconfrontational, it’s a shock her spine hasn’t dissolved. I’d hoped Stephanie could be counted on to prevent her husband from behaving like a jackass, but the excitement in her eyes says she loves this. Heather’s not someone to be counted on. The cousins are strangers to me. The funeral home director is missing.

  My gaze collides with West’s. He mouths the word Frankie.

  The least I can do.

  I look for the fastest way to get to her. It’s a straight line, so I cut through the empty space between Bo and West, ducking under West’s outstretched arms.

  “Come with me,” I say. “We have to find your grandma.”

  Her eyes are on Bo. “He shouldn’t be here.”

  “I know. Come on.”

  I pull at her arm, and she falls against my side. We zip indoors, casing the joint for Joan. Family room, bathroom, hallway, coffin room. We find her alone in an empty visitation room. When I tell her what’s going on, she just sits there, gazing at a lit cross in a niche.

  “Please,” I beg.

  She meets my eyes, and her gaze tells me she’s no stranger to this kind of thing. The people out there are her family. She made them with her body, watched them make others, weathered years’ worth of this behavior.

  Drinking problems, health problems, abuse, alienation, violence, death.

  I wish she’d at least had a chance to bury her no-good son with some dignity, but I want her to step in and help West even more.

  “He’s on his own out there,” I say.

  She closes her eyes. Sighs.

  Gets to her feet.

  When she walks across the threshold, I want to go with her, but I’m worried about Frankie. I can’t protect her and be with West both.

  It’s killing me not to know what’s happening to him.

  “Will you stay here?” I ask.

  She bites her lip. Shakes her head.

  “I’m supposed to keep you out of trouble, but your brother …”

  Is out there.

  Is the only thing I care about anymore.

  “You really love him, huh?” she says.

  I feel the tears coming up, but I take a deep breath and swallow them back down. “Yeah.”

  “I won’t come all the way out,” she says. “I’ll stay in the doorway, so I can see what’s going on.”

  “Good enough.”

  We hustle toward the front of the funeral parlor. I’m halfway down the hall when she takes my elbow. “Caroline?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her apology rings in my ears as I hurry away.

  Sorry. As if this is her fault.

  I hear sirens in the distance. Did the funeral director call the police? I think he must have, and it feels like overkill until I step through the door and into a disaster.

  I see a man in a suit jacket throwing a punch. A woman teetering on high-heels, bent double. I hear a high-pitched whistle, the smack of bone against bone.

  I watch a stranger head butt another stranger, the spray of blood the single most repulsive sight I’ve ever witnessed.

  This is a brawl, I think. This is what a brawl looks like.

  The chaos is random, not coordinated like in a movie, and I can’t locate West, can’t even penetrate the first layer of heaving bodies, which is hard for me to understand because there aren’t a hundred people in this parking lot. There are … twenty? Twenty-five? I should be able to get to the middle of them.

  I try, but my instinct for self-preservation is too healthy. Every time a hip or fist or elbow comes at me, I jerk back.

  Then suddenly the melee breaks open and I see West’s mom and Bo. He’s got his arms around her from behind. She’s completely wild in his grip, shouting obscenities, trying to break loose. She looks like the madwoman in the attic, her hair wild, voice rough, mascara streaking down her cheeks.

  I glance toward the entrance and locate Frankie where she said she would be. Seeing this.

  I’m sorry, too, Franks.

  Bo’s trying to get Michelle out of the middle of the tumult. West’s grandma is helping, I realize—she’s the one who cleared the path, the one whose shrill whistle keeps cutting through the noise—and West is holding the crowd off Bo’s back.

  He shoves someone. Throws a punch.

  He takes a hit to his cheek, his head snapping back, and then I’m running right for him. Sprinting toward West as the air starts to flash and bleed red.

  The screams of the sirens split the sky.

  A policeman has West facedown over the back of a patrol car with his legs spread. His forehead is mashed against metal, the seam between the shoulders of his suit jacket split open, the white of his shirt showing through.

  “Excuse me.” I grab a passing officer’s arm. “Excuse me!”

  She shakes me off, talks into her radio. I step
closer to the car and try to get the attention of the guy with West. “Is he being arrested? What about his rights? He didn’t do anything, it wasn’t his fault, he’s not a criminal—damn it, you’re not listening to me—”

  West barks, “Caro!”

  How mean he looks with that bruise blooming on his cheek. How much like the man they think he is. A roughneck brawling at a funeral.

  “Knock it off,” he says. “Let them do their jobs.”

  “But it wasn’t your fault!”

  “They’ll fucking figure that out if you give them a few seconds’ peace.”

  When a third cop takes my upper arm in a tight grip and leads me away from West, I bite my tongue. I end up against the building, beside Joan.

  “I can’t believe this,” I say. “He was trying to stop it.”

  “If he keeps ahold of his temper, he’ll be fine,” she says.

  “Nothing about this situation is fine.”

  I press the back of my head into the building’s vinyl siding and try to breathe.

  West’s mom is bundled into the back of a patrol car, where she abruptly flips from blank catatonia to screaming again in her hoarse, ravaged voice.

  “His funeral!” she’s yelling. “His fucking funeral!”

  Bo gets taken to the station in another car. West’s uncle Jack goes to the hospital with a broken nose, and the rest of the aunts and uncles and cousins disperse. I don’t know if they’re heading to the hospital, the police station, or if they’re just done with the whole scene.

  West is allowed to stand, and he gives his statement in the parking lot out of my earshot.

  An officer comes over to talk to me. I tell him what I know. It takes longer than I thought it would, and by the time I’m finished West is nowhere in sight.

  The lot is nearly empty.

  The funeral director appears at my elbow. “If you’ll come inside, miss.”

  I can’t think of any reason not to follow him. My feet operate on their own set of instructions. My face feels stiff. I think I might be a little shocky.

  He shows me into the viewing room, where a small group stands in front of the coffin—West, Joan, Frankie, the Tomlinsons. All that’s left of the mourners, I guess, because as soon as he deposits me next to West, he takes a place at a lectern beside the coffin.

  “What’s going on?” I ask West.

  “Funeral.”

  “Now?”

  He finds my hand, squeezes it once hard, and lets go.

  It soon becomes clear that whatever program was planned has been tossed out the window. We’re treated to a short, generic speech, and then we’re all asked to step out into the other side of the room behind a fabric-covered panel while they close the coffin.

  The Tomlinsons hold an angry-whisper conference in the corner. If I had to guess, I’d say Dr. T wants to leave and his wife is refusing.

  I can’t imagine why she would want to stay.

  Frankie is folded in a chair, her arms wrapped around her knees. West sits beside her. He’s missing from his face, all the anger wiped away and replaced with the impassive blank nothingness I remember from when he was at Putnam and we were both denying how we felt about each other.

  I don’t want anything from anyone that expression says.

  It makes me want to give him the world on a plate. Give him absolutely everything he could ever desire.

  It makes me want to apologize for his lot in life and for the differences between his world and mine, because West is amazing, and his life sucks.

  His life is always going to suck if he stays here, in his mother’s orbit, and assigns himself the job of keeping order.

  There isn’t anything I can do about it.

  After a while, the panels roll open. The coffin is wheeled outside on a sort of pallet. We watch them load it into the hearse to drive it uphill to the cemetery, which is just behind the funeral home.

  At the graveside, West remains impassive until we’re invited to throw flowers or earth on the coffin. Then he steps out of the circle of mourners to where a shovel leans against a nearby utility truck, grabs it, and digs into the pile of dirt at the head of the grave. Tossing in one shovelful after another until the earth stops sliding off the domed lid and starts to accumulate.

  This is not, obviously, what the funeral director had in mind, but no one seems inclined to put a stop to it. Joan leads Frankie back inside. Mrs. Tomlinson follows. Dr. Tomlinson didn’t show up at the grave at all.

  West and I remain, along with the funeral director, who’s giving me a pleading look.

  I shrug.

  West shovels. His eyes are fevered, his cheeks pink.

  The funeral director returns to the building.

  I start to wonder how long it takes to fill a grave. I can’t imagine leaving him here alone.

  Spotting a second shovel in the back of the truck, I retrieve it and carry it to the dirt pile. West’s gaze locks with mine.

  We stare at each other.

  There’s no tenderness in it. It’s a clash of wills.

  It’s him saying, Stay the fuck out of this, and me saying, Make me.

  It’s him snapping, I don’t want you here. You don’t belong in Silt. I don’t need you.

  It’s me shouting, You don’t fucking know what you need. Stop being so stubborn. Take what I’m trying to give you. Take it.

  What I want to do is drop the shovel and walk over to where he is. To slip my arms around him, press myself against him, flatten my breasts into his chest, kiss him until he has no choice but to kiss me back—to kiss me the way he used to, sparks striking into a burn so fast and hot that sometimes we couldn’t get our clothes off quick enough, couldn’t manage to do more than unzip jeans and shove underwear out of the way just far enough to join our bodies together.

  It’s unbelievable how badly I want that back. How urgently I wish we could get lost in each other, find joy again.

  I understand, though, that it’s not what he wants from me.

  I take off my heels, sink the blade into the soil, move it through the air until it hovers over the gleaming black surface of the box West’s father will rot in.

  The thump of earth landing on steel gives me a cheap satisfaction.

  I’m awkward with the shovel, losing more dirt than I get in, dropping some of it on my feet, where it gets between my toes, moist and muddy. Within a few minutes, my back starts to hurt. Then my hands.

  West moves fluidly, his body graceful in action. The blade of his shovel sings.

  Still, it takes a long time. I get blisters.

  I don’t stop.

  The sun drops toward the horizon.

  When we finish, he takes my shovel and returns them both to the truck. He stands beside the grave, hands loose and empty.

  He looks like a boy—so much like a boy that I understand viscerally that he was as young as Frankie once. He was a kid who wanted a father and got nothing but disappointment. A boy who got punched, kicked, abandoned, and then told to stop holding on to the past. To let it go.

  His mother, his grandmother, this whole family—they all asked him, again and again, to give his father one more chance. Maybe this time Wyatt would be different. Maybe this time life would be fair and kind, and happiness would be possible.

  It never was, though. Not for West.

  I don’t know how he can survive here.

  I don’t know how he’s not crushed, because it crushes me just to watch him. This whole place—it’s beautiful, that winding road from the airport, the trees in the mountains, the buttes and the ocean. It’s not fair that it’s beautiful, because it’s so outrageously cruel to the man I love.

  If West stays here, this place will kill him.

  I step closer, skirt around the grave until I can feel the heat coming off his arm.

  I touch him, my hand on the curve of his shoulder. “West.”

  It’s not fair to ask him for anything right now, but I don’t want to take from him. I only want him to lean
on me. I want to give him rest, oblivion, escape. Something.

  I’ve been trying to give him space, trying not to dig up feelings he can’t handle when he’s already got so much to deal with, but I can’t take it anymore. I can’t believe that this is better—that somehow it’s better for West not to have whatever comfort I can give him, it’s better for me to be three feet away from him and telling myself I can’t get closer, not now, not tomorrow, maybe not ever.

  How the fuck is this better? For who? Not for me. Not for West.

  Surely not for West.

  I move around to his front and insinuate my hands into the space between his arms and his sides. I rest my cheek against his heaving chest.

  “If you want me,” I say. “No strings. No anything—just, if you want to forget for an hour. Whatever you want.”

  I tighten my arms around him. He’s so much harder than he used to be. All this armor between him and the world. I want him to know that I see it there. I know what it is, and if he wants to take it off with me, he can.

  I love him.

  I love him so fucking much, and this is all I’ve got to offer that he can possibly take. So I squeeze him as tight as I can until he yields.

  His weight bows into me. Not all, but a fraction of it. A crack in the blank concrete wall of his self-denial.

  His hand comes to the back of my head, the nape of my neck, pressing my face into the ragged sound of his breathing.

  “Caro,” he says into my hair.

  It’s the first time he’s said my name like he used to. Like it’s precious.

  Like I’m precious.

  “I can come out to Bo’s,” I whisper. “Or we could find a motel. Whatever you need.”

  When I lift my chin, his eyes are closed, so I kiss him.

  I kiss his mouth. The margin of it. The swell of the bruise on his cheekbone.

  His soft lips, his lowered eyelashes. This boy I love.

  I kiss beneath his jaw, my tongue flicking out to taste his sweat, his skin, and then his hands are on me, lifting my chin, and he’s kissing me back.

  It’s no tender reunion—it’s a swan dive right into the middle of where we used to be, a plunge into blind lust and tension and sex. His tongue, his frustration, his taste, his heat, his lips on mine, his hands guiding me, giving me all of that, all of it, and I get carried away.