Harder (Caroline and West)

by Robin York

  Then I return to his room, dig out that note I wrote him, and put it on the table. At the bottom of the page, I write a new message.

  If you eat enough tobacco, it’s poisonous. Hell of a lot quicker than smoking them.

  I put a fork next to the pile I’ve made, sweep all the empty papers and filters and cellophane wrappers into the garbage can that I find beneath the sink, and then look at the little scene I’ve created.

  I’m losing it.

  But I feel curiously detached from having to care about what’s normal and what isn’t. Curiously entitled to my behavior, my stalking, whatever displays of emotion I feel like directing at him.

  I don’t know if what he did to me is what entitles me, or if it’s that folder in his bedroom. My name on Frankie’s school form. Every sweet moment that ever passed between us.

  Either way.

  I gather up my books, find the porch light, and flip it off before I let myself out.

  I sit on the top step beside the front door and look at the sky.

  There’s a wilderness of stars up there. I lay back and let myself wander through them until I’m lost – even more lost than I already was.

  I trace the shapes of those lights with my fingertip, looking for patterns, and I think about the first time West kissed me on the roof of the house where I grew up. How we went up there to look at the stars. How we were stoned, and I loved him so much, his mouth on mine, his body and his heat and his beautiful face.

  The tears that fall down my temples and soak into my hair are hot, but I don’t brush them away. It feels good to cry.

  It feels good to be here, waiting for West in this forest of stars.

  When I hear his truck in the driveway I’ll get up and go, seal myself inside my own car before I have to talk to him, because tonight’s not the night. Tonight, I made him something to find, and that’s as far as I’m going to push it. For now.

  Until he drives up, I’ll be here, waiting for guidance.

  Waiting for a light to follow, for peace to help me find my way.

  On Monday morning, a few days after I killed West’s cigarettes, I walk to my seminar with Bridget.

  When we pass the art building, he’s there, of course. Standing by himself. Smoking.

  Bridget is talking, telling me about a movie she went to see with Krishna over the weekend, but I’m veering away from her. I’m walking right up to West, plucking the cigarette from his fingers, and grinding it out in the bare dirt at his feet.

  His eyes look green next to the pale green glass of the art building, the white of his teeth when he smiles.

  “There’s more where that came from,” he says.

  His voice is so soft, I can feel it moving over my skin like the pads of his fingers, trailing over my nipples. “I figured.”

  I feel soft. My face, my eyes, my mouth. I want to press against him. Let his hard edges sink into me. Reshape me. Change me.

  I’ll bounce back after he’s gone. I always do.

  He shakes his head. Pulls out his pack of cigarettes and extracts another one. Taps it against the cellophane wrapper and lights it up.

  He blows smoke over the top of my head and says, “Expensive habit to break.”

  “Me or the cigarettes?”

  He squints as he inhales. “You should stop it with Frankie.”

  “Maybe we should get together sometime,” I suggest. “Have a meal. Talk things over.”

  “You should stop it with that, too.”

  “With what?”

  He points at me. Points at his chest.

  I guess I’m supposed to be discouraged.

  This time, I take the cigarette from his lips.

  I put my mouth where his mouth was, and I inhale carefully, letting the taste of him move through me. Pulling West into my body, through the chambers of my heart.

  He watches me exhale.

  I drop this cigarette, too, and grind it out.

  Bridget touches my wrist and says we’re going to be late, we’re already late, but I don’t stop watching West until we turn a corner and he disappears from sight.

  Hands in his back pockets. Elbows out to the sides.

  His smile fading as he watches me go.

  I start to notice music. Not like I’m hearing music in my head, but like I’m just now tuning in to the music that’s already everywhere, all the time.

  The last week of classes before fall break – the week after I destroyed West’s cigarettes, the week I pick Frankie up from school three times, the week I ace two midterms and set the curve on my Latin exam – I hear sad ballads at the coffee shop.

  I hear pop songs on the radio.

  I hear a low drone of sound that floats down the hall to my room from Krishna’s.

  It draws me to his doorway, where I find Bridget sitting crossways on his bed, feet propped up on the backs of his thighs, book in her lap. Krishna lying on his stomach, a book open by his head, a chunky calculator resting by his left hand, his pencil scrawling over a notebook page making notations I can’t understand.

  He’s tuned in to those numbers and symbols, but it’s the music that catches me.

  Krishna plays this album a lot. I never noticed before that all the songs are love songs.

  I go out for a run with Bridget, long sleeves and long tights on a cold morning as we jog in a rectangle around Putnam’s campus, turning left, left, always to the left. She runs slow for me, because I’m not as good a runner as she is, and because my pace falters every time I hear some new lyric, a fresh tilt to a tune I’ve never paid attention to.

  I find myself waving her ahead, Go on, I’ll see you at home, because I need to listen hard, cupping my hands over my earbuds. I’ve just discovered – yes. This one, too. Another love song.

  Angry love songs. Plaintive ones. Complaining ones, ecstatic ones, sexy moaning ones, cute ones, smug ones, turbulent bleeding aching disastrous ones.

  Everywhere I go.

  I stand by the side of the road on a cold morning, frost on the stalks in the ditch beside me, a crow on the telephone pole, a cloudless sky, listening to a woman pleading over a line of throbbing drums, Take me back, take me back, take me back, baby, take me back.

  At home, Krishna’s music pulls me down the hall another time.

  No Bridget today. They argued about something after dinner, and I haven’t seen her since.

  “You okay?” he asks me.

  I’m not sure what to tell him.

  I’m in love.

  Sometimes it feels like a terminal condition. Killing stupidity. Dangerous to my well-being. It makes me do dumb shit like fly to Oregon on a moment’s notice, and shred a hundred cigarettes to nothing.

  Krish and Bridget are in love. It makes them do dumb shit like lie to each other about how they feel, pretend not to feel it, fuck and touch and kiss and then run, run, run.

  Am I okay?

  Is love like this okay?

  It doesn’t feel okay. It feels necessary.

  In the daytime I hear music, and I start to think that whatever is wrong with me might actually be what’s wrong with everybody.

  I start to think it might be normal, because if it’s not, then what does it mean that all the songs are love songs?

  What does it mean that I hear them now, everywhere I go?

  Fall break is the last full week of October before Halloween. I spend a few days of it at home with my dad.

  Home is like a thrift store shoe – I love the way it looks, but when I put it on, it feels stiff, creased in weird places. I can pretend it fits if I need it bad enough, but when I’m honest with myself I know it never will.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  Everybody asks. The other morning I caught sight of myself in the mirror coming out of the shower. I’m too thin, and I look like I haven’t slept through the night in about a year.

  I haven’t.

  “Sure.”

  I’m fine. It’s just that I feel some days like I’m moving through liqui
d, and I have trouble sleeping. When I do sleep, I dream about burning alive. I dream about alien pregnancies. I dream about losing all my teeth, losing a baby I didn’t know I had and searching all over campus for it, in every classroom, in the post office, under every table at the library.

  I sit in class and think about West’s arms, West’s hands, West’s smile.

  West.

  “You seem kind of down,” my dad says. “Are you worried about the case?”

  Nate’s attorney responded to our petition with across-the-board denial and a request for summary judgment. This was what we expected, and in the two days I’ve been home, Dad’s told me no less than four times that there’s no way the judge will go for it. We have a strong enough claim that the case will keep moving forward toward trial, gliding along on well-greased wheels, until the money runs out or something dramatic happens to stop it.

  I’m not worried about the case.

  I think he’d be surprised to learn how little I actually think about it, except when he brings it up.

  I haven’t told him that Nate is living in a house two hundred feet from the one I’m renting, or that I pass him on my way to class sometimes and we both look down and away, like strangers.

  “I’m okay,” I tell him.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I picked up bananas and ice cream for dessert. Want to do the honors?”

  “Sure.”

  I build banana splits: a scoop of each stripe of Neapolitan ice cream, a banana cut neatly in half, hot fudge, caramel, whipped cream, and nuts. An old ritual with my dad and me. As I’m swirling whipped cream on top, he comes up beside me.

  “Hey, Dad?” I ask.

  “Mmm-hmm?”

  “Are we not going on vacation at Christmas because of the lawsuit?”

  He sighs. “We already talked about this.”

  Money, he means. We talked about how I was supposed to handle my side and he was supposed to handle the money side, and I didn’t need to worry about it. But why shouldn’t I know what my revenge costs?

  “You talked about it. I still don’t understand why it has to be a secret. And if we can’t afford it, then maybe it isn’t worth it.”

  “We’ve put so much into this already. We have to see it through.”

  “But as much as it’s already cost, it’s just going to get bigger, and I start thinking, you know, what are we doing this for? Because what Nate took from me – I already can’t get it back.”

  “Caroline, we talked about this.”

  We’ve talked about all of it, every possible facet, every conceivable approach. We’ve more than made up for all the talking we didn’t do in the months after Nate first posted the pictures. We’ve talked until my jaw hurt.

  “But don’t you ever wonder if we’re making a mistake?” I ask.

  “No.”

  Which, actually, yeah, I knew that already. My dad’s idea of a life philosophy is that you figure out what you want, and then you go after it. He believes in ambition and its relentless pursuit.

  No giving up. No compromising.

  He plucks a cherry from the jar on the counter. “Don’t give up on this,” he says. “It’s going to be hard work, but it’ll be worth it.”

  Maybe it is going to be worth it, but if the goal is to make Nate pay, my will might be starting to flag. I pass him on the sidewalk, and he seems untouchable.

  I pass him on the sidewalk, and I don’t really care.

  I have other things on my mind.

  Frankie texts me on Wednesday afternoon of fall break week. I drive back to Putnam to pick her up from school. After she falls asleep that night, I sit out on the steps and wait for West.

  I hear him before I see him. The drone of an engine coming up the road, changing pitch and volume as he slows to make the turn.

  The rocks under his truck’s wheels. Light cutting across the garage.

  I hear his boots on the steps, but I can’t see his face. It’s dark by the door, and his headlights messed with my night vision.

  I see the cherry-red tip of his cigarette as he flicks it to the ground and grinds it out, then leans down to pick up the butt.

  When he’s two steps below me, he stops. “Is Frankie okay?”

  “She’s asleep.” I stand up, a few feet separating us, dozens of cubic inches of darkness. “I wanted to ask you, did she tell you she’s having trouble on the bus?”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The kind of trouble girls have.”

  I’m not sure how else to put it or how much to tell him. I don’t know a lot myself – just that Frankie is increasingly reluctant to ride the bus home, and it seems pretty likely that the boy who’s harassing her has stepped it up a notch or two.

  I can’t decide if it’s for me or for Frankie to tell him that. I’m wary of stepping between West and his sister. “You should find out from her.”

  He exhales – a soft whoosh of breath. “I don’t want you babysitting Frankie.”

  “I’m not babysitting,” I tell him. “We’re friends.”

  “You can’t be friends with a ten-year-old.”

  “I can if you’ll let me.”

  “What if I won’t?”

  “Why wouldn’t you? Your sister deserves a friend, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe a friend her age.”

  “What if she made one at school? She couldn’t bring her friend over here. She couldn’t go to the friend’s house for a playdate, not with your work schedule the way it is. She’s stuck hanging out alone for hours every day.”

  “Laurie keeps her company sometimes.”

  “He’s got to be fifty, though. Are you honestly saying it’s better for her to be with him than to do stuff with me?”

  Begrudgingly, he says, “No.”

  “Good. Because I’m good for your sister, and I think you know it.”

  West turns his head away to look out over the drive. My vision is better now, sharp enough to pick out the shape of his profile against the sky. His Adam’s apple.

  I can feel how tired he is. His tiredness is tangible, a statement his body makes to mine, and my arms want to reach out and touch him. My heavy head wants to find his shoulder.

  He used to feel this way after a Wednesday-night shift at the bakery – dead on his feet by the time we stumbled through the door to his apartment. He’d flop back on the bed still kicking his boots off, pull me against his side, nudge his face into my hair, and fall asleep in his clothes.

  There was something so trusting in it, so precious about being that close to him at his most vulnerable.

  He taps the toe of his boot against the step. “I don’t get what you’re doing here.”

  “I think I’m helping.”

  “I don’t see why you’d want to.”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “I told you I’d keep away from you,” he says. “I meant it.”

  “Is that really what you want?”

  I hear him swallow. I wonder if his throat is as sticky as mine. If his heart is beating as fast.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  He doesn’t answer for so long, I think he won’t. But when he does, I wish he hadn’t, because all he says is, “What I did to you…”

  Like fingers snapping – those words ignite my anger in an instant. “I already told you what I thought about what you did.”

  “Right,” he says. “And it’s because of what you said that I knew to keep away from you when I came back here.”

  “I never imagined you would come back here.”

  “It doesn’t change anything.”

  “For fuck’s sake, West, it changes everything!”

  “It doesn’t have to, though.”

  “What if I want it to?”

  “Caro…” He leans closer. I think he’s going to touch me. All he has to do is reach out his hand – find my waist or my shoulder – but he doesn’t. He sighs. Descends a step. “It’s better th
is way.”

  “I don’t believe that. For me, nothing is better.”

  He crosses his arms. “It’ll get better.”

  “You’re so full of shit.”

  Then he’s quiet for a long time.

  He looks at me hard and long, so I look right back at him. I wonder if my face is any easier to read in the dark than his.

  I wonder if he misses me in his bed at night the way I miss him in mine.

  I don’t understand what’s in his head anymore. What he thinks he’s doing and why he thinks he’s doing it. He pushed me away as hard as he could, but now he’s come back to Putnam, so why doesn’t he come back to me?

  What I did to you…

  That memory, so raw for me. I avoid thinking about it.

  It must be the same for him.

  But if it’s just that memory that keeps him from me – if it’s his sense of honor, as if I’m a princess in a tower and he’s soiled my gown so that’s the end of it – fuck that.

  Fuck that with a tire iron, is my feeling. If he’s going to deny himself what he wants, deny me what I want, there’s nothing honorable in that. It’s just pigheaded stubborn idiocy, and I won’t stand for it.

  Which is the sort of thing it’s easy enough to think. But what do you do?

  West and I, we look at each other.

  It’s heartbreaking. His pretty cheekbones, the scar in his eyebrow, his nose slightly off center, his ears too small, his mouth so wide and expressive and perfect.

  It’s heartbreaking, knowing there was a time when I could’ve taken him inside and put him to bed, given him some ease, given him something. But that time came and went, and this is the time we’re in now.

  The waste of it makes my throat tight.

  “I feel guilty,” he says. “Like I’m taking advantage of you when you’re watching Frankie, only I can’t stop taking advantage because I never fucking asked you to watch her, and when I tell you to quit, you don’t.”

  “That must be tough for you.”

  He laughs. “Fuck you, Caro.”

  “Wish you would.”

  “Christ Jesus.” His hand comes up to brush over his hair and hang up at the back of his neck. He exhales, rough, and I love it. Love getting under his skin.