Harder (11 page)

A civil trial, she means. Since the authorities aren’t pursuing a criminal case, my uncle’s going to take justice into his own hands. “What kind of case has Jack got? He’s a deadbeat alcoholic dickbag. What’s he going to say, Dad’s death made him
more
of one?”

“Watch your mouth. That’s my son you’re talking about.”

“Sorry.”

She sighs. “These guys only make their money if they win,” she says. “The lawyer must think it’s worth his time. I’m telling you because of Frankie.”

“What about her?”

But I have a sinking feeling I know exactly what.

Frankie wakes up thrashing in the sheets, shouting. Sometimes “Daddy.” Sometimes “Bo.”

Always, “Don’t!”

I stand in the doorway of her room and say her name,
Franks, Franks, Franks
, until she stills because she’s heard me, and that’s usually when she starts to cry.

I wish I knew if I was fucking her up.

I sit in the living room after she’s asleep and think about how if Frankie ends up depressed, ends up cutting herself, ends up dead, ends up pregnant at fourteen—it’ll be because of me.

Something I did or didn’t do, some sign I missed that it was my job to see.

“They could make her testify if there’s a trial,” Joan says.

“No fucking way. Even Jack isn’t that big of an asshole. He’s got to know I’d kill him for even trying it.”

“I think that’s the idea. He’s got it in for you since the funeral.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“But if he gets at her—”

“She was at a fucking sleepover!”

Joan sucks at her cigarette so hard I can hear it. Exhales. “Day before the funeral, Frankie talked to Stephanie.”

Jack’s wife. Shit.

Shit
.

“Stephanie’s telling everybody Frankie was there at the trailer when Wyatt got shot. Frankie will get dragged into
this thing if it happens—it’s not going to do any good to pretend she won’t.”

She’s right. Fucking Leavitts—there’s a reason I stayed away from them so long, and the reason’s that it’s always like this. Drama after drama, fighting and feuding, arguing over money and sex and drugs and whatever the hell else they can think of. They feed on it. They
love
it.

Jack’s going to put Frankie right in the goddamn middle of it.

“Can’t you talk him out of this suit? Bo hasn’t got much money. Whatever went down in that trailer, I guarantee you Wyatt deserved it.”

“When have I ever been able to talk a Leavitt man out of anything?”

I laugh. Don’t mean to.

I don’t have any control over myself.

I don’t have control over anything.

Six years ago, Frankie was too young to be hurt by this kind of Leavitt bullshit, but I wasn’t. I cut ties to the Leavitts because they wouldn’t take my side, wouldn’t protect me and my sister from my father.

They won’t protect us from this, either.
I
have to.

“Thanks for the warning,” I say.

“Let me know when you decide what to do.”

I disconnect and drop the phone on the seat next to me.

The morning is cool, the sun bright over the mountains. The wind’s blowing through the cab of the truck, rattling the paper bag with my lunch in it.

I’m young and healthy, alive. Free of my father. I should feel good.

I should be able to find a way to feel good about the giant fucking palm smacking into my back, shoving me toward Iowa.

Take your sister and go
. That’s what Dr. T is trying to get me to do.

That’s what Caroline said to me, in no uncertain terms.

But all I can think, looking at the green on the hills, at the black ribbon of asphalt, at the blue sky, is this is one more fucking thing in my life I don’t get to decide about.

I see Iowa in my mind’s eye. Summertime in Putnam. Green lawns and brick buildings, marigolds and window boxes, students everywhere.

The hope spikes right into me, spikes my pulse, makes me breathe too shallow so I start to get dizzy and I have to pull over by the side of the road and slam my hand into the steering wheel and tell myself,
No way, no way, no
fucking
way
.

I think,
Take Frankie somewhere else
.

Mexico. Oklahoma.

Anywhere would do—anywhere that’s far enough away from Jack and lawyers and courtrooms to keep her safe from all the traumatic assholery heading our way.

We could live by a river in an adobe hut. I could learn to train horses. We could eat frijoles and tortillas and I’d be inside that fucking Cormac McCarthy novel I read in my first-year seminar, but it would be better than letting the hope back in.

Before she left, Caroline told me,
You have to find a way to get out from under it, knowing it’s never going away. You have to make your own life, because if you don’t, you just won’t get to have one at all, and that’s the worst fucking thing I can imagine
.

She says that to me over and over.

She says it in my head every day, and every day I say the same thing back to her.

The way I’ve lived—the life I’ve had—I can imagine worse things than you can
.

It’s not so bad to waste your life. It’s not so hard. What’s harder—what’s fucking impossible—is thinking you’ve got a future and then losing it
.

I don’t think I can survive it a second time.

In the glove box, I locate my last pack of cigarettes and light one up. I smoke it fast, sucking in deep carcinogenic lungfuls, trying to get used to the fact that it doesn’t matter if I can stand to live in Putnam or not.

I don’t have a decision to make.

We’re going to Putnam, because there’s a two-hundred-thousand-dollar education waiting for me there. A bachelor’s degree that means something. I’d be an idiot to turn it down when I can grab it and use it for Frankie.

I burned my life in Putnam to the ground. I don’t want to wade among the ashes and pitch a tent over top of what’s left of it, but I will. I haven’t got a choice.

Later, I’ll call Dr. Tomlinson.

Every year, winter takes me by surprise.

Fall comes and shears the edge off summer, mellows out the temperatures for a few golden days of gorgeous perfection, and then when I’m ready to live the rest of my life in those stolen moments,
snap
.

It turns cold one night. Just like that.

Growing up, I’d deny what it meant.
No, not yet. It’s not time yet
.

I’d ignore the signs. I’d leave my jack-o’-lantern on the front porch long after Halloween, celebrating a season that had passed until black spots showed on the flesh around the pumpkin’s mouth and it started to look ancient and wizened.

Once the first frost did it in, my dad would make me take it out back and chuck it into the woods.
So long, fall
.

But the autumn of my junior year at Putnam, I was ready for the days to get shorter and the temperatures to drop. I braced myself for the cold, preparing to carry on in a Putnam without West, a life without West.

It would be cold for a while. Lonely. But I’m an Iowa girl. I was used to the cold. I knew how to bundle up against it, muffle my breath behind a scarf, muffle my needs so I could endure the early nights and the long winter.

My dad finished annoying the lawyer, and my complaint against Nate got filed in mid-September. Sixty days to respond. Plaintiff identified as Jane Doe.

The trial date was set for the end of next year. I braced myself for four seasons of waiting and strategizing, subpoenas and scrutiny, depositions and petitions to compel.

I thought I had it under control.

Then I got a text from a number I didn’t know. It was West, telling me he was coming back to school.

Another to say he was bringing Frankie.

A third to let me know I shouldn’t worry, because he’d keep his distance.

I think what I was supposed to do when I got those texts was freeze.
Snap
. Go cold, just like that.

It would have been easier if I could have locked myself off. Safer to tend my rose garden of ice crystals, pretending to love the cold.

But I was through with pretending.

I got those texts, and I felt joy–pure and deep, as real as anything I’d ever had with him. I felt vindicated, because this would be another chance. The future he’d killed off, now brought back to life.

And maybe our future was an ugly, shambling thing. Maybe it was half-dead, scarred and foul–but it was ours, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t want it. I couldn’t even pretend not to be elated, burbling through the days after I got the news, wondering when and where I’d see him again, how it would be, how it would feel.

That sounds stupid. Naive.

I know how it sounds.

And I know, too, that a jack-o’-lantern on the front porch is only a jack-o’-lantern until midnight on October 31. One minute after midnight, it becomes a rotting pumpkin. My father used to explain it to me every November.

But it’s the same pumpkin, right? It’s the pumpkin you bought, carried home, planned over, cut carefully into. It’s the pumpkin you gutted and scraped at, lit up, placed proudly on display.

It’s the same fucking pumpkin the day after Halloween that it was the day before, and the fall when West came back to Putnam, I was through with people trying to tell me how to feel and what to love.

When there are pictures of your cunt on the Internet and strangers emailing to tell you they want to jizz in your face—when that’s happened to you and there is a way in which it will never stop happening—you have to get really comfortable with the notion that the only person who’s allowed to define how you feel about anything is
you
.

I shared an off-campus house with seven friends and friends of friends, including my best friend, Bridget, and West’s former roommate, Krishna. Bridget and Krishna nagged at me.
What happened, what happened? You can talk to us. You should tell us. We need to know
.

Everyone wanted to talk to me about West that September. What happened in Silt. How I felt about it. What I was going to do when he came back to Iowa. Even my friend Quinn, who was studying in Florence that semester, pestered me over email.
I heard you went out to see West. I need details
.

Everyone wanted to talk about it, but really they wanted to tell me how to feel.

It ticked me off that there was so obviously a right and a
wrong way to respond to what West had done, and that everyone seemed to think I was doing it wrong—in denial, confused, lost, deflecting.

Fuck that. I felt how I felt. I wanted what I wanted.

Outside, the weather turned cold, then colder.

I saw West everywhere, and I burned.

I’m driving back to campus when I spot him getting out of his truck at the Kum and Go.

I check that the oncoming lane is clear, jerk the wheel to the left in a U-turn, and pull up to the curb across the street.

My hands tremble in my lap as I watch him walk into the store. He’s wearing short sleeves over long sleeves. His shoulders stretch the fabric. I drink him in—that back, that ass, those long legs in boots.

I get wet just from looking. Greedy. Full of an anxious, amped-up craving for contact.

I want to talk to him, push into him, hit him, fuck him. Crash into him and find out what happens next. Something. Anything.

The plate-glass front of the shop is crowded with brightly colored posters and signs, but I can see the top of West’s head at the counter. I lean closer to the windshield. My throat is hot, my breasts full.

I left Silt six weeks ago. West’s been back in Putnam fifteen days.

Every time I see him, it gets a little stronger.

The first time I saw West after he came back, he was outside the art building, and I was walking with Bridget to my seminar. A clutch of smokers gathered by the door, West off to the side by himself, blowing a white cloud into the air.

He didn’t greet me.

I knew to expect it. He’d done it to Krishna already. He’s doing it to everyone.

West works and goes to class and stands off by himself, because that’s how he wants it.

I spot him out windows, passing by the giant phallic sculpture at the center of our campus.

I see him in the library at the circulation desk, waiting to be helped.

I go out for groceries and discover the shape of his head, the curve of his shoulder, as he holds a package of cold ground beef in his hands by the butcher’s counter and studies the label instead of turning around to say hi to me.

When I close my eyes, there’s his defiant, arrogant face as he opens the door of the truck after he finished eating Mrs. Tomlinson’s pussy. He wipes his mouth, even though he never did that. He tilts up his chin and says,
How about that, Caroline? Am I good enough for you now? Still want to rescue me? Still think you can love me? Huh?