Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(104)

When I get into my car, the slamming door seals me into silence.

I’m in the metal box now, but it’s fine. I can come and go as I please. I can find a way to get comfortable with all the impossibilities in my life.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about Nate, whether the administration will back me up in a fight against him, if there’s any way I can go after him legally—a criminal trial, a civil trial. I’ve poked around a little bit online, but until this month I didn’t want to think about fighting, so I haven’t really considered what this fight is going to look like. How long it might take. What I even want from Nate, now that I’m allowing myself to want things again.

Today’s not the day I’m going to worry about it. Today there are other impossibilities to think about.

West is leaving, and I love him.

I can’t change that. I can only find a way to cope.

I have work here. I have things I need to do, power to exercise, wrongs to right.

I back out of the driveway, headed to my father’s house.

There’s a favor I need to ask, and he’s the only one who can grant it.



“I need you to get my boyfriend out of jail.”

It’s a sentence I never expected to have to say to anyone, much less to my dad, but it comes right out, fluid and easy.

All the fluster, the confusion, is on his side.

“You need me to—your what? Out of jail?”

Maybe I should have worked my way up to it.

I wish I could have picked another time, some morning when I walked into the kitchen and he actually looked happy to see me. As opposed to this morning, when I found him reading the paper with his coffee, the circles under his eyes too dark, his mouth too sad when he caught sight of me at the French doors.

There’s no other time, though. Only this time, this pain twisting in my guts as I think about how my future with my dad could be like this forever—this disappointment perpetual, our old relationship impossible to recover.

“His name is West Leavitt, and he’s being held in Putnam by the police. At least, I think he is. It would be good if you could find that out for me, actually. He was planning to confess to misdemeanor possession of marijuana.”

“You have a boyfriend. Who smokes marijuana.”

“Sort of. I mean, yes, he’s my boyfriend. And he occasionally smokes it. But mostly he just …” Sells it.

Gah. I need to pay more attention to what I’m saying, because my dad is sharp. He’s been talking to accused people for a long time. I guess he’s pretty good at hearing what they don’t say.

When it dawns on him, I can see it in his eyes. The lines deepen in his face, and his jowls look saggier.

I always used to think he was the handsomest dad. I’ve never seen him as old before, or weak, and it hurts so much to be what’s weakening him.

“This is that kid,” he says. “That kid from across the hall. Last year.”

“Yeah.”

“You promised me you’d stay away from him.”

“I did stay away. For a long time.”

Then there’s silence and snow tapping at the windows, because the weather has turned foul.

He takes a sip of his coffee.

I grip the back of a kitchen chair and wonder about my mother. If she would have taken my side, if she hadn’t died.

I think of my sister Alison in the Peace Corps. She’s got email where she is, and the Internet. I wonder if she knows yet.

I wonder about my sister Janelle, too, who does know. She wrote me this email—this long, long email that I had to close and not look at, because the first paragraph contained the words I forgive you, and I don’t want anyone’s forgiveness.

I’m not the one who has to be forgiven.

“Tell me what happened,” my dad says.

“With the drugs?”

“The whole thing.”

So I try.

I try in a way that I didn’t try the other day because I was too angry.

I try even though I feel like there’s no time for this and I wish I were with West right now, and I’m not sure how much of what I tell my dad can even reach him through the filter of his pain and disappointment.

I try because I know him, and I know that he’s fair, and I know that he loves me.

I start at the beginning. I work through to this moment, this kitchen. I tell him everything I think he really needs to know. What Nate did to me. What West has given me. Everything that’s happened, everything that’s pertinent, and more.

I use the word love. I tell him I love West. Because that, too, is pertinent.

And because, now that I’ve said it to West, I could say it to anyone.

I love West. I love him, I love him, I love him.

When I’m done, my father walks out of the room, but I don’t go after him. I take his coffee cup to the sink and rinse it out. I take the beans from the freezer and grind them and make another pot, and I collect some dishes from the countertop and the table to load the dishwasher.

I give him some time.

I think, if I were him, I would need time.

I’m his youngest daughter, his girl who lost her mother earliest, when I was still too little to remember her. He was the one who rocked me to sleep against his chest when I had bad dreams. He was the one who came to every awards ceremony, every debate tournament, every graduation.