Harder (Caroline & West #2)(12)

Banging my head against a brick wall.

Only I don’t think West is a brick wall, as much as he looks like one. The bricks he surrounds himself with are no more real than the wood-grain surface of the tabletop.

“I can’t talk right now,” I tell my dad.

“When can you talk?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ll call you.”

“You’ll have to do better than that. I set up a meeting for Tuesday, because I have some questions about the complaint. I need you to weigh in on a few things before then. Will you be back? Or …”

I can’t listen. Outside, the heavy thump of bass draws closer. Lights cut across the window and pan over the wall, illuminating a dark decoration against the wallpaper.

A spatter pattern.

Blood.

I disconnect the phone.

Joan comes out with a handful of jewelry and Frankie’s Skip-Bo cards. “Let’s get out of here,” she says.

I want to move. Escape. But I stand another minute in the beating heart of West’s nightmares, because for so many years, escape was impossible for him.

We ride back to Joan’s house with the windows down. I turn my phone over and over in my hand, thinking about my dad.

West’s dad is dead. I saw his blood.

Joan must have seen it, too. Her son’s life, spilled across the walls. Wasted.

I came here to help, but there’s so little that’s in my power to do. All I can do is stay. Love him. Hope.

I carry the bags up the stairs so Frankie will see them when she wakes up.

My fourth day in Silt is the funeral.


West stands by the coffin with his mother.

I try not to stare, but I can’t stop. His thighs strain the trousers of his suit. The jacket is so tight across the shoulders, he looks like a thug in a gangster movie. When he bends down to hug one of his little cousins, I notice how shiny the pants are across the backside, and I worry he’s going to split them.

Maybe he borrowed it, but the ache in my body says no. This is his best suit. This is his suit from before, maybe the suit he graduated high school in, wore to prom, I don’t know.

It doesn’t fit him, and I want to cry.

He looks so angry.

He didn’t want to come. His mom couldn’t talk him into it. His grandma knew better than to try.

Frankie wanted him here.

She’s all the way on the other side of the room with her aunt Heather, who has three kids with different fathers and lives on disability in western Idaho. Heather is rubbing her lower back like it hurts. All this standing around talking to people makes my back hurt, and I didn’t get hit by a falling pallet at a warehouse ten years ago.

We’ve been here for six hours. It’s hot and too dry, we’re tired, and there’s nothing to drink or eat.

Every few minutes, Frankie looks around until she finds West. Her shoulders ease.

He’s trying so hard to make this work out for her. As though, if he does that, he won’t have to deal with it himself.

I suspect he thinks that he is dealing with it, but when he drops his guard his face tells me the truth. When he looks off in the distance and lets that angry mask fall for a second, half a second, an instant, I see.

I saw him watching Frankie talk to an older teenage cousin, everything raw in West exposed in his face—protectiveness, aggression, fear, love.

God, I miss his face.

I miss the mornings when I’d wake up before him and look and look until I could close my eyes and see him there, the tangle of his eyelashes, the shape of his mouth, the scar in his eyebrow.

I miss the nights when I’d sit on the couch and he’d be on the floor below me, book open on his lap, one arm thrown over the cushion behind him, and his fingers heavy on my thigh. How he’d read something interesting and turn to tell me, his smile cockeyed and bright, my world full of him all the way out to the edges.

When he looks in my direction, I catch his gaze and hold it, and it’s my yearning that propels me across the floor toward him. It’s the click of our connection, as powerful as ever, magnetic even from across a room. It’s my hope that maybe I can say something, maybe— But a couple gets there ahead of me, the woman touching West’s elbow and sharing condolences. A beautiful woman with black hair, older than me by a decade, perfectly made up. I envy her poise and her boobs and her fuchsia wrap dress, but mostly I envy that she’s touching West and I’m not.

I look away.

Right into the open coffin.

I don’t know whose idea that was. I’d assumed it would be closed, because hello, gunshot wound? But I guess they just pack the holes full of whatever and slap a suit on the body, because there’s West’s dad, laid out like …

He looks so much like West.

It’s creepy how much he looks like West.

Like West, dead.

I’m not tricked, I’m not stupid, but my heart is, apparently, and my body’s in a galloping panic, sweating and hot, tears in my eyes.

Look away.

The woman is hugging West. Up on her toes, pressing her breasts into his chest. It’s a little too much hug, you know? With hips in it, and hips aren’t supposed to touch when you hug at a funeral.

Look away.

Separated from them by a few feet, there’s a man talking to West’s mom. Older, distinguished gray hair, great suit. Michelle is crying again, although it’s dignified funeral crying. He’s offering her a hankie, and the hug is still going on to his right. His mouth looks like mine must—tugged down at the corners, as if he’s wishing the hug would die a painful death.