Harder

by Robin York

  It’s a better approach, more logical than Rikki’s.

  It doesn’t have anything to do with how much space I want to take up in the world.

  Outside after class, I’m thinking about whether all studio art classes come with a side of psychoanalysis or if it’s just Rikki’s art-therapist thing, when I almost walk into Krishna.

  I try to go around him. He blocks me.

  I feint to the other side, spin, and head off in a different direction, annoyed because I don’t want to be this guy, but I am this guy, and I wish he’d let me alone.

  “In case you’re wondering,” he says, jogging up behind me, “I’m not giving up.”

  “I’ve got class.”

  “That was your last one. Now you’re going home to study, and then you’ve got work.”

  “What are you, stalking me?”

  “I asked Caroline.”

  He runs a few steps to catch up. There’s a lot of foot traffic on the path because class just let out, and in order for Krishna and me to walk side by side, everybody who’s coming the other way has to step off into the snowbank and get their ankles wet.

  Krishna clearly doesn’t give a fuck.

  I kind of like that about him.

  “I’m having a party,” he says. “For my birthday. I want you to come.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re supposed to ask when it is in order to make your excuse more plausible.”

  “When is it?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “Oh, tomorrow night. I can’t.”

  He tries out a signature my-shit-doesn’t-stink Krishna grin on me. The wind’s gusty, blowing his black hair around, making him look like some kind of Desi movie star. “Sure you can.”

  “Fine. I don’t want to.”

  “How come?”

  “I’m busy.”

  “You’re always busy. Think of some other excuse, because I’m never going to take that one from you.”

  “I hate parties.”

  “Yeah, but this is my birthday. You’ve got to make sacrifices for your friends on their birthdays.”

  “I don’t have to do anything.”

  “There’s a party at Minnehan at eight, so we’re going to kick ours off at ten. It’s at the house—you know where I’m living?”

  Where Caroline’s living. Of course I know.

  “I can’t make it. Sorry.”

  “Try.”

  I glance at him. He’s not smiling now. He’s got his hands shoved in his pockets, his dark eyebrows drawn in against the wind and maybe against whatever it is he’s feeling right now, which is strange because Krishna usually makes out like he doesn’t feel anything.

  “I can’t leave my sister to go to a house party.”

  “Can’t you find someone to watch her?”

  Laurie and Rikki have offered more than once. “Even if I could, what am I going to tell her, ‘Look, I know you hardly see me and you haven’t got any friends or anything, but I’m going to be at this house party tonight for some guy you’ve never met’s birthday, don’t wait up’?”

  “I’ve met your sister.”

  “When?”

  “Caroline brings her by. She’s cute.”

  Irrational jealousy grips me. Jealousy of Frankie for having seen Caroline’s place. Of Krishna for hanging out with my sister while I’m at work.

  “Look, I don’t think it’s gonna happen. But happy birthday, all right?”

  He stops. Just stops walking right in the middle of the path, and I keep going for a few steps, but it turns out I can’t leave him there like that.

  I’ve been trying to leave him since I left Putnam last spring, and every time I cut him out of my life I feel crueler, but I’m accomplishing nothing. It’s like he’s impervious.

  Except I know he’s not impervious.

  Krishna hasn’t got that many friends. Not real friends. The number of guys Krishna has ever spent a night at home with, drinking and watching basketball and doing more or less nothing—I’m pretty sure it’s just one.

  The number of guys who know what his home life is like, his asshole father who thinks if he doesn’t take over the family company in India he’s a complete failure as a human being—also one.

  I stop moving.

  “It’s not all right,” he tells me.

  “I know.”

  “I’m not sure you do. You’ve been back in town two months, and it’s not fucking all right, the way you’re acting.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why don’t you do something about it?”

  “You think I wouldn’t, if I could see some way to? You think I’m enjoying myself? I’m raising a ten-year-old, working thirty hours at the fucking window factory, taking classes, and trying to clear all my incompletes from last semester, and I can’t put things back the way they were, okay? I can’t. It’s not possible.”

  His face is grave. “Caroline seems to think it’s possible.”

  “Yeah.”

  He rocks up and down on the balls of his feet. “That’s all you have to say? ‘Yeah’?”

  “What do you want me to say, that I have some kind of grand plan where I’ve got me and Caroline figured out?”

  He closes the space between us and gets right up in my face, madder than I’ve ever seen him. “I want you to say you’re going to get your head out of your ass and take her back.”

  “I don’t deserve her back.”

  His gaze lowers to the ground. He kicks a chunk of snow, sending it sailing over the frozen lawn.

  When he looks up, meets my eyes, I feel the cold seep through my coat and into my bones. “I owe you something,” he says. “You took a fall for me with the cops. You didn’t have to do that, and you didn’t even hesitate. It fucked me up, and then Bridget told me, look, you’re friends. This is what friends do for each other. But then the way you cut me off, cut Caroline off, did whatever it is you did to her that she won’t tell me—that’s not how friends act. So, you know, I can’t say what you deserve. I don’t know if you’re the person I thought you were or somebody else. But fucking hell, West, cut me some slack and come to the goddamn party. Make it possible for me to fucking like you again.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I know you can’t. Bring your sister and do it anyway. Tomorrow night. For my birthday. I’ll make dinner.”

  “You cook?”

  “Bridget’s been teaching me.”

  I think I must smile at that, because he smirks, and then he reaches up and shoves off my hat, running his hand all over my hair. “You should shave it off,” he says. “Go the extra badass mile.”

  “Tattoo ‘fuck your mother’ on my forehead.”

  “That would be sweet.”

  “Maybe I’ll do that for tomorrow.”

  “I’ll live in suspense.”

  He’s grinning. It’s a sham—the banter, the smile—but a sham smile is better than nothing.

  It was never all that hard to make Krishna happy. I just had to let him hang around me. Talk to him. Throw him a bone every now and then.

  I never thought much before about whether he was doing the same thing for me.

  “Is Caroline gonna be there?” I ask.

  “She lives there.”

  He spins around and saunters away.

  I go to study, and then I go to work, heading into a whole afternoon and evening of the same shit I always do at the factory. Counting things. Measuring and marking. Loading and unloading. But I notice that the plant smells like cut wood, sawdust, and that’s what I’m thinking about—how much I like that smell.

  How I like the sound of the factory floor, this vast concrete space filled with echoes and the swirling lights on top of the forklifts, the beep of the backup alarm, the clang of metal against stone.

  I feel like I’m waking up. I’ve stopped craving cigarettes beyond the occasional random impulse, and in the space where the craving was are sounds and smells, color and numbers, Frankie, Krishna,
Caroline.

  I think about the rest of the week and how, tomorrow morning, I can tell Frankie about dinner at Caroline’s place.

  I’m looking forward to it.

  It’s been so long since I looked forward to something, I forgot what it was like. It feels good. Dangerous, but good.

  When my phone rings, I see that Caroline’s calling me, and that feels pretty fucking good, too, until I hear what it is she’s got to say.

  The school counselor’s my age.

  He’s leading me down a hall. Frankie follows, and Caroline brings up the rear. I don’t know where we’re going.

  When I got here, these three were waiting outside the office, Caroline in the middle of a conversation with the counselor that died as soon as I walked up.

  The school’s deserted. They’ve been here awhile—talking, I guess, dealing with whatever this is. Waiting on me while I told my boss I needed an emergency day off and tore across town to get to the school.

  “Here we are,” the counselor says.

  His name’s Jeff. He can’t be my age—not for real. He’s got to be old enough to have a bachelor’s. But he doesn’t look any older than me, and between the pleasant smile, the soft handshake, and his purple tie, I can’t bring myself to trust him.

  “Why don’t you three take a few minutes in here to talk privately?” he asks. “And Mr. Leavitt, when you’re ready, I’d like to have a brief word before you leave.”

  The door closes, and then it’s just the three of us standing around a table in a room the size of a walk-in closet. It smells like janitorial supplies—sweet and woodsy, laced with chemicals.

  Caroline pulls out a chair for Frankie and takes the seat next to her. Frankie reaches out for her hand.

  “Want to tell me what happened?” I ask.

  My sister shakes her head no.

  “Great. That’s just fucking perfect.”

  What I know from Caroline’s phone call is that Frankie launched herself over a desk in an apparently unprovoked attack, sat on some kid named Clint, and hit him repeatedly in the face until the teacher and an aide pulled her off.

  Frankie’s never done anything like that. Not once in her whole life.

  “Caroline?” I ask.

  “It’s better if she tells you.”

  Frankie’s staring at her feet like someone nailed them to the floor.

  I pace back and forth behind the chairs. Every time I walk behind my sister, her shoulders draw tighter until they’re up by her ears. She looks like she’s afraid I’m going to hurt her, but I’m the one who holds her when she wakes up from nightmares. She’s got no fucking reason to be scared of me, not one.

  “Start talking,” I bark.

  Frankie scoots her chair away from where I’m standing, burying her face in Caroline’s armpit.

  “West,” Caroline says.

  “What?”

  “Calm down.”

  “How?”

  It’s an honest fucking question. I wish she’d tell me where the handbook is for this. I’d memorize the whole thing if I thought it might help me out here.

  I squat down next to Frankie. Pitch my voice as low as I can, as calm as I can manage. “In a few minutes, that counselor’s coming back in here. He’s going to ask me what happened, and I’m supposed to tell him you’re catatonic? You think that’s going to go over well?”

  “I don’t know what that means,” she mumbles.

  “It means you’re practically in a coma.”

  “I’m not catatonic. I just don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Well, who do you want to talk to, huh? The social workers who show up at the apartment when they decide I’m not fit to take care of my sister who’s beating kids up at school? Unless I missed something, we’re on the same team, Franks.”

  She doesn’t say anything. My eyes rise to Caroline’s, and there’s softness there. Faith in me that eases some of the sharpness off my temper.

  I put a hand on Frankie’s leg and try again. Try to keep my voice level, try to keep from sounding like my dad, from being like him.

  “We have to stick together,” I say. “I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me. What’s going on right now—this is actually dangerous. I could lose you.”

  Frankie’s trembling.

  “You’re scaring her,” Caroline says.

  “I’m sorry, but this is a scary situation. Scarier than you understand, I think.”

  Frankie starts to cry.

  My fists keep closing, clenching tight, my forearms pumped up with blood and violence that won’t do any good here. Not in a school, not in Putnam. I can’t fight my way out of this. Can’t yell my way to a solution.

  “You have any suggestions?” I ask Caroline.

  She ducks her head and whispers a question to Frankie. Frankie whispers something back. They go on like that for a few seconds, and then Caroline says, “She wants me to tell you for her. Would that be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s do it over there.” She leads me to the opposite side of the closet-room, as far from Frankie as we can get, and refuses to start talking until I sit. I straddle a chair, fold my arms across the back, wondering why she’s going to so much trouble to get me ready for this.

  Then she tells me, and it’s worse than anything I could have guessed.

  I thought Frankie missed her friends back home, and that maybe she was embarrassed of her boobs, uncomfortable with her body—but what Caroline tells me is there’s a kid, this slimy little Clint fucker, who’s been giving Frankie a hard time on the bus every morning and every afternoon. He’s been saying perverted shit about how she looks, her body, sexual stuff that no ten-year-old should be thinking about.

  On Halloween, the teacher moved the kids’ desks into a new arrangement with groups of four desks clumped together, and now Clint’s is right next to Frankie’s, so she’s been hearing his shit all day long, day in and day out.

  She took it and took it until she couldn’t take it anymore. Then she attacked.

  I run sweaty palms down my thighs. “I’m going to kill him,” I say.

  Caroline’s hands are on my shoulders. She’s right behind me, talking soft. “No, you’re not.”

  Frankie’s huddled into a ball on the seat of her chair.

  I can’t breathe right. It’s not Clint I want to kill. I did this to her. Me.

  The whole time she was a baby, I was afraid. If she slept longer than usual, I worried she’d died in her sleep. I wouldn’t be able to make myself look in on her because I was so sure it would come true.

  I worried she wasn’t eating enough, wasn’t eating right, wasn’t growing the way she should be.

  I worried she wouldn’t have anything to wear to school, and when she had a fever I worried that her brain would fry and it would make her stupid. I worried when I found out about all that recalled Tylenol that I’d given her too much and she was going to get asthma or seizures or whatever.

  When I was in middle school, Frankie was a toddler. Mom would leave her at the neighbor’s, Mrs. Dieks, and I would come off the bus and straight to Mrs. Dieks’s place to pick her up. Most of the time I’d find Frankie in nothing but a diaper, slapping her fat little palms on the coffee table, wreathed in smoke and babbling at the TV.

  She’s a terror, Mrs. Dieks would tell me, and I knew even when I was twelve years old that Frankie wasn’t. She was normal. Curious. It was Mrs. Dieks who was too old to be watching her.

  I could tell from the way she looked at me—like I might be carrying a disease—that Mrs. Dieks didn’t like me. I could guess from the bruises on the softest parts of Frankie’s thighs that Mrs. Dieks didn’t like my sister, either.

  But there was nothing I could do about it but tell my mom, who blew it off. She falls down, my mom said. I’m sure they’re from accidents.

  I remember being so upset, I threw up. Wiped my eyes, rinsed out my mouth from the bathroom tap, and swore it was the last time I’d count on my mom for anyt
hing.

  You’re going to have to fix this, I told myself. You’re going to have to make it better for her.

  But what could I do? I was a kid, barely older than Frankie is now. I carried my sister home the second I got off the bus, changed her diaper, rubbed the diaper rash cream in as gently as I could.

  Once she was in school during the day, we both got off the bus at the same time. Mom was working. Frankie was mine to worry about.

  When I got my driver’s license, I could drive her around. I had money of my own to buy some of what she needed—clothes and food and treats. Even when I left her behind to come to Putnam, Frankie was my first priority, my principal worry, my sister, mine.

  But now she is mine, legally my responsibility, and I’ve failed her. I brought her here where she’s vulnerable. I left her alone too much. I knew something was going on, but I didn’t want to hear it.

  “It’s my fault,” I say. “All of this is my fault.”

  “You’re wrong,” Caroline replies.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I do understand, and you’re wrong. But we can talk about that later. Right now, you need to focus on constructive solutions to this problem.”

  “What’ll be constructive is if I bash that little fucker’s face in.”

  I don’t mean it. I just haven’t got anything constructive to offer.

  “It won’t help if you get yourself arrested,” she says. She braces an arm on the chair in front of me and leans close to my back to say, “Everything’s going to be fine, West. Trust me. I know this feels huge, but I was already talking to the counselor, and it’s really going to be okay.”

  I grab her arm, wrap it across my chest, forcing her to drop into a seat behind me on the chair, pressed up against my back. When she puts her other arm around me, I cross mine to cover her hands and squeeze tight.

  “Breathe,” she says.

  I breathe in. Breathe out. Drop my head back until it rests against her neck, her shoulder.

  I focus on Caroline. How right she feels against me.

  I pitch my voice low and tell her, “It’s abuse. What he’s been saying to Frankie.”

  “I know.”

  “That kind of shit messes you up. I can’t fix it.”

  “I know. But West, we’ll help her through it. I promise.”