Harder

by Robin York

  “You don’t understand how the system works.”

  “I do understand,” she says. “You raised me to understand. And what I’m telling you is, the system is broken on this. I don’t need Nate’s money for the rest of his life, I need for what Nate did to me to not be allowed anymore. I want that law on the books. I want a bunch of changes to the laws so that assholes can’t post photos without consent and websites can’t hide behind the Copyright Act with impunity. I want people’s attitudes to change so I don’t get called a slut just because I had sex with my boyfriend and he took some pictures. I want to help make sure nobody else goes through what I did—that Frankie and girls like Frankie won’t ever have to endure that—and what we’re doing, throwing money into a pit with this civil suit, hiding behind Jane Doe—that’s not going to change a thing. So don’t talk to me about justice unless you really want to talk to me about justice, because there are nonprofits you could give the money we’re paying the lawyer that would use it to bring about a lot more justice than this lawsuit that you seem to think I need your permission to walk away from.”

  When she’s finished, the whole house is quiet.

  The whole world feels quiet, with Caroline’s words just echoing around.

  This is what it sounds like, I think, to know exactly what you want.

  This is what it sounds like to thrive.

  I’ve heard her before like this. Every time, it wrecks me, because I’m so fucking proud of her.

  Her dad doesn’t say anything. I watch him, looking for some sign that he’s got pride in her, too.

  What he does surprises me: he sits down at the kitchen table and thinks. You can tell he’s thinking because he looks so much like Caroline, his forehead furrowed and his eyes gone far away.

  Coffee burbles and drips into the pot. Caroline picks up the dish towel and angrily dries what’s left of the dishes in the sink. At a loss, I start washing again. We finish up. Caroline puts the dishes away.

  I lean back against the sink with my arms crossed, trying to understand what this even is.

  Where I’m from, men are only good for two things. We learn how to fight, and we learn how to fuck. There isn’t anything much else for us—no jobs you can raise a family on, no other ways to live unless you go looking for them, and even then there’s no guarantee you’re going to find something better.

  I found Evan and Rita Tomlinson. They were enough to get me out of Silt, but not enough to teach me some better way of life.

  I’ve never watched anybody do what Caroline and her dad are in the middle of doing. They’re arguing, but she’s safe.

  This house where she grew up looks like a temple to me, and it’s not the money, it’s that there’s love all over the walls, and good food, and Christmas presents for people they barely know, and shortbread cookies for my sister.

  They can do all that and still argue with each other.

  They can argue without fucking up their love.

  They raised their voices, just like I did. Lost their tempers. But then her dad sat down at the table and shut the fuck up and thought about what Caroline said to him.

  He’s still considering it.

  And I think, hell, Caroline’s got to be right. She’s so fucking smart, and she brought me here and had this argument right in front of me, so she has to be showing me what she thinks I need to see.

  Showing me how to do this.

  It’s not impossible. It’s just something I have to learn.

  I’m good at learning, even if I’m complete shit at everything else.

  Out of the blue, Caroline’s dad asks me, “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “Nate.”

  “I’d like to see him get what’s coming to him. But to be honest, short of the death penalty, I’m not sure there’s anything that could happen to him that I’d think would be as bad as what he deserves. And I figure, even before the pictures, he already screwed up and lost Caroline, so he’s got a lifetime of regretting that ahead of him.”

  Caroline’s giving me an oh-please kind of look.

  “What? He does. He had you, and he lost you. Stupidest move of his life. You’ll be in the White House someday, and he’ll be telling his sad drinking buddies at the lonely bar where he wastes his time, She was mine once, but I fucked it up.” I glance at Caroline’s dad. “Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “He said fuck,” Caroline explains.

  He blinks. “Oh. That.” He waves his hand. “The White House?”

  Color climbs her cheeks. “West wasn’t supposed to say.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s—”

  I can just about hear the words that come next. Childish. Stupid. Impossible.

  Not for me.

  And right then, that’s when I get it. I really finally get it—how we box ourselves in.

  How we take something that’s hard and make it harder for no good reason.

  When I think about what kind of life I want my sister to have—who I want her to be like, what I want her to see, what I want to model for her so she’ll have a clue how to flourish, to thrive—I can’t think of any better model than the woman I love, lecturing her dad on what justice is.

  Caroline is going after what she wants.

  I’ve got to be the same way. Both of us do. It’s the only way to live that makes any sense.

  Go after deep and make it deeper.

  Accept that life is going to be hard—that everything worth having is worth fighting for—but don’t fucking make it harder than it has to be.

  Don’t put yourself in between the life you’ve got and the one you want.

  I walk straight to her, pull her close, and look down into those deep brown eyes of hers. I say, “Caro, it’s not. Whatever it is you’re thinking about saying, it’s not true. And even if it turns out to be true down the road, if you go after it but you can’t get there—let it happen when it happens. Don’t write the end over the beginning.”

  The gap between her teeth peeks out when she smiles. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “A smart woman said it to me.”

  She comes up on her toes and gives me a kiss—chaste but full of feeling.

  Her dad clears his throat.

  She stops kissing me, but she doesn’t unwind her arms from around my neck, and I don’t step away from the feel of her body pressed against mine.

  He can fucking get used to it.

  “All right, kids,” he says.

  He wipes his hands down his face. I’ve seen him do that once before, when he came to talk to me at the jail in Putnam.

  It’s what he looks like, I’m guessing, when he’s giving in to Caroline’s way of doing things.

  “We’ll have to draw up an ironclad settlement agreement,” he says. “Make sure you get assigned copyright over all those pictures, nondisclosure … I guess we can let go of admission of guilt. He’ll sign if he doesn’t have to admit he did it.”

  “Everybody already knows he did it,” she says. “Everybody who counts.”

  She’s looking at me when she says it.

  I hear the front door open, Frankie chattering, footsteps heading our way. She sounds happy, and it occurs to me that I gave her that.

  I gave her this Christmas. This family. Caroline.

  As far as I’m concerned, everybody who counts is right here, exactly where I want them.

  If I have to fight to keep my sister here, I will.

  Late that night, I wake up to the sound of Frankie screaming.

  “Daddy!” she’s saying. “Bo!”

  And then, “Don’t!”

  I peel back the covers and tuck Caroline in.

  I walk to my sister’s room and stand in the open doorway. “Frankie. Frankie. Franks, it’s okay.”

  After half a minute, she stops thrashing. Then I can hear her sniffling and rummaging around for the box of tissues we keep on the floor by her bed.

  I grab her a tissu
e and sit by her waist. Hand it over. Rub my hand up and down her back.

  “You’re okay,” I tell her. “You’re safe. I’m here.”

  She quiets.

  I run my fingers through her hair.

  “Tell me what happened,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve asked.

  Maybe I didn’t really want to know.

  Maybe I was afraid of what I’d hear.

  Frankie draws a deep breath. “I was at a sleepover.”

  “At whose house?”

  “Keisha’s.”

  “Where’s Keisha live?”

  “Bandon.”

  “How’d you get home?”

  She’s quiet.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  She’s so quiet.

  I miss my chattering girl who never shut up. My Frankie from before, who ran to me when I came in a door, who hassled me for piggyback rides and never got sick of sucking up as much of my time and attention as I could spare.

  I left that girl to come here, and I never got her back.

  What I’ve got now is this new Frankie, who sasses me, hassles me, ignores me, but never tells me what’s in her heart.

  I want my sister back, and the only way I can think to get to her is to wade through all this mess between us. This story she doesn’t want to tell, these changes in her life she’s afraid to talk to me about, the reality she doesn’t want to face: that we’re not ever going back to Silt.

  We’re refugees.

  “Tell me what really happened.”

  “I was asleep,” she says.

  Just like that.

  “Dad was gone, he’d been gone a couple days, and I guess Bo knew that because he never came around, but he came around that night. It woke me up when Mom answered the door. I heard them talking. She let him in.”

  Frankie sits up suddenly. She crisscrosses her legs. Her knee overlaps my thigh.

  “They weren’t doing anything,” she says. “They were just talking. But Dad came home, and he was on something, I think.”

  “On what?”

  “I don’t know. He was almost always on something.”

  “Fuck.” The word comes out of me, not a curse but a prayer. Months too late to do any good. Don’t let him hurt her. Don’t let anything hurt her.

  “He was talking too fast, super angry, and they were all yelling. I think Dad hit Mom, because I heard her kind of yelp, and then Bo said something and they were fighting. I hid under the covers. They were crashing around until … until it was too quiet. And Mom said, ‘Wyatt, don’t.’ ”

  The hair on the back of my neck stands up at the way she delivers those words, straight out of her nightmare.

  “That’s when I went out there.”

  I’m clutching my knees. I want to keep her from seeing whatever she’s about to see, and even though I know distantly that it’s happened already, it doesn’t seem to matter.

  Don’t go out there, Franks. You’re gonna get hurt.

  “Bo was on the floor, wiping blood off his mouth. Dad had—”

  She shudders and leans into me hard. I put my arm around her. When she speaks again, her voice is high, forced. “Dad had a gun. He was pointing it at Mom, right at her head.”

  I pull her onto my lap. She twines her arms around my neck and drops her head on my shoulder, so much like the baby she used to be that I can remember viscerally the heavy, damp weight of her. Holding her, jiggling her until she was drowsy, putting her down in the middle of mom’s bed for a nap, and then peeling carefully away, chilled from the loss of her body heat. Her lips slack and open to any of a thousand kinds of harm.

  “Have you told anyone this?” I ask.

  She nods. “Aunt Stephanie. And Caroline. But I didn’t tell them all of it.”

  I hold her tight. “I’m glad you told Caroline. You can tell her anything you need to. But now I want you to tell me.”

  After a minute, she begins again. “Mom tried to send me back in. But Dad said, ‘No, stay, you should see this, you should see what happens to—’ ”

  She stops.

  “It’s okay. Tell me the parts that matter.”

  “I was so scared. I wanted to be brave, like you would’ve been if you were there, but I was so scared and I didn’t know what to do. I told him to put the gun away. He pointed it at me. Don’t talk back to me, Francine. Mom was crying, and Bo was moving, but I wasn’t paying attention with the gun on me. I was looking at Dad. And then Dad—”

  She chokes on another sob.

  “It was so loud, West. And red, bright bright red, everywhere, and I didn’t understand what was happening until Bo started apologizing. I didn’t even know Bo had a gun. He shot Dad. It was my fault, because if I hadn’t come out Dad wouldn’t have pointed his gun at me, and Bo wouldn’t have killed him, and Mom—”

  Now she’s crying. It’s awful, fucking awful to hear it. My baby. My Frankie.

  “The gun went off, and she went right to Dad. She crawled on top of him like she could put him back together with her hands. I don’t—”

  “Frankie.”

  I can’t listen anymore. I’m rocking back and forth, pressing her head into my chest, willing her to shut up with everything I’ve got, because there’s knowing something bad happened and then there’s knowing.

  There’s knowing your dad, high, pointed a gun to your sister’s head and might have killed her.

  There’s knowing your mom didn’t try to save her and didn’t go to her afterward.

  There’s knowing that, and there’s pain so huge from knowing it that the pain doesn’t have anyplace to go. It just ricochets around inside you, howling.

  “I did the wrong thing,” she sobs.

  “No.”

  “I should’ve called the police. I didn’t think. I tried to think what you would say to do, but I couldn’t, and you weren’t there, West.”

  I wasn’t there. I can’t change it. I tried, I fucking tried to be there for her, but I couldn’t.

  “You did great,” I say. “You did everything perfect.”

  It’s stupid, unhelpful, but Jesus, what’s helpful? I can’t make it right.

  I rock her, wipe her face dry, murmur nonsense until she starts to calm.

  We sit in her dark room. The snow’s falling outside. In the hush, the quiet, I remember all the worst times.

  The time my dad hit my new kitten with his car, studied the limp body by my side, and booted it underneath the trailer next door.

  The time I stood up to him and he knocked me down with a lazy fist and kicked me in the stomach so hard, I shit blood for days.

  The night I got arrested out of the bakery after I found out my mom had taken him back.

  The day I left Caroline at the airport in Des Moines.

  The dead zone of time after the funeral when I tried to burn my life down around me so I wouldn’t have to feel anything anymore, because I’d had enough. I was fucking done.

  Frankie’s worst time is worse than any of mine, and I can’t fix it.

  All I can do is this.

  “It’s not your fault.” I whisper it into her hair, behind her ear. Her head is smooth and sleek under my hand, her body small, a curve against my stomach that reminds me of that kitten on my lap, soft and warm and innocent for those few hours I had it. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s them, Franks. It’s them.”

  She presses her nose into my chest, clutching my shirt. “I don’t want to live at Bo’s.”

  “You don’t have to. You can stay with me.”

  “Mom says you want to be alone with Caroline.”

  “I want you with me. You’re my girl. Okay?”

  She’s quiet.

  “I love you, Franks. I’ve loved you all your life, and I’m always gonna love you. And the fact that I love Caroline, too, doesn’t take anything away from you. It just means I want her with me and you with me, both. It’ll always be like that. You understand?”

  I can feel her nod against my chest.

 
“I’ve been thinking since Christmas that you wanted to go back to Silt and I was gonna have to talk you out of it. I don’t want to fight Mom for you, but if she tries to make you go back, then I’ll fucking fight for you, because it’s better here. It’s not perfect, I know, but I think we can get it close if we work at it. If you’re miserable, though, you have to tell me so I can try to fix it. You have to tell me everything. I can’t read minds.”

  “Sometimes it seems like you can.”

  “That’s because we Leavitts are fucking sharp as tacks.”

  She turns her head to rest her temple against my shoulder. “It’s different here,” she says.

  “What is?”

  “Everything.”

  “Bad different or good different?”

  “Some of both.”

  “Yeah.” Her hair smells like fruit. Cherries. “It’s that way for me, too. You think you could ever get used to it?”

  “Probably.”

  We’re quiet for a minute. Her body is loose in my arms. Relaxed.

  “I love you, West,” she says.

  And Christ, it feels good.

  It feels solid. Strong enough that we can build on it. Sweeter than I expected, because she hasn’t said it in months.

  I hold my baby sister for a long time.

  “You ever think about what I asked you? If you could do anything, be anybody, what you would want?”

  “Not really.”

  I kiss the top of her cherry-scented head.

  Say, “Start.”

  The package from my grandma shows up a few days into January. At first I think it was delayed by bad weather, but the postmark shows she didn’t mail it until December 29.

  Inside, there’s a backgammon set wrapped up for Frankie, a new afghan big enough to cover the back of the couch, and a lumpy envelope with my name on it.

  I slip the envelope into my pocket. Later, when Frankie’s gone dancing back to her room and Caroline’s talking to Paul on her headset, I put my boots on and take the letter out on the landing at the top of the stairs.

  I read it holding my breath.

  Dear West,

  Michelle showed me the book you sent her with your pictures in it. It looks like you and your sister are doing good.

  I’m sending you my 5 yr. chip from AA. I’m going to get my 10 yr. next month. I don’t know what you’d want with it, but it’s something I’m proud of, like you are.