I think maybe when your last baby, your motherless daughter with her hair in pigtails, grows up and leaves, you console yourself with the knowledge that she’s smart, and she’ll be safe, and she knows how to make good choices.
It must be so difficult for him now, to deal with the fallout of the choices I’ve made.
I’m not a white dress. My future is not a thing I can dirty, tear holes in, or ruin. Not in any way that’s real. But for him, I guess that dress … it’s a dress that he laundered, a hope that he cherished, and he’s got to find a way to adjust to what I’ve done to it.
His daughter is naked on the Internet.
His baby girl is in love with a drug dealer.
I give him time.
It only takes him ten minutes to come back to the kitchen.
He accepts the cup of coffee I offer him. He stares down into the black brew. He meets my eyes and says, “I’ll make a few calls.”
“Thank you.”
He sighs.
He puts the coffee mug down.
“Don’t thank me yet. There’s probably not a lot I can do. And I have to tell you, Caroline, I’m not certain I’d do even this much if this boy—”
“West.”
“If this … West didn’t have one foot out the door.”
“Okay. Thank you.” It’s a big concession on his part. If he’s going to make some calls, it means he’s putting his own reputation on the line for West—and that means he does trust me. At least a little.
I put my arms around him. His neck smells like aftershave. Like my dad.
“I love you,” I tell him. Because I do. I always have. He’s the world I was born into, and he gave me so much. Safety and strength, intelligence and courage, the knowledge I arm myself with.
He’s a great dad, and I love him.
When I squeeze, his arms come up, and he squeezes back.
“After this, can we be done for a while with the bombshells?” he asks. “You’re going to give me a heart attack.”
“I hope so. Although maybe now is when I should tell you I’m not going to be around for break. Once you get West out, I’m staying with him until he flies home.”
Another sigh.
A long minute, with the snow hitting the glass, and my dad not letting go, and me not letting go, either. His shirt collar is stiff, his body warm, the size of him surprisingly wrong since I’ve spent so much time snuggled up to West.
My dad isn’t very tall. I’ve always thought of him as taller than me, but he’s not, after all.
He’s just ordinary.
We’re both doing the best we can.
“I talked to Dick,” he says. “We have some strategies to consider.”
“Okay. Why don’t you set up a meeting for the three of us, and I’ll take anything he has to share under consideration.”
My dad backs up a step and looks down at me with his eyebrows steepled. “You’ll take it under consideration?”
“Right.” I touch his arm. “This is my fight, Dad. I’ll take your help, if it’s help I think I need. But don’t get confused about who’s in charge.”
And it’s funny—he laughs. Not a big laugh. Kind of a snort with half a smile attached to it, and a slight shake of his head. “You always were a ballbuster,” he says.
But he says it like he’s proud.
SPRING BREAK
West
I wish I had a picture of what she looked like that day.
I’d told her not to come, not to get involved, but I didn’t really expect her to listen. It’s like she said to me—we’re a team, and she’s the leader.
There are guys who’d have a problem with that, her asshole ex among them. And, sure, even I threw out a token protest when she said it, but that was mostly to make her smile.
Caroline’s being the leader—it doesn’t mean I’m her flunky. It doesn’t diminish me. It’s just who she is.
I always liked that about her. How she could walk into a classroom with her books, her binder, her pens, and you could see by the way she raised her hand, the questions she asked, the straight column of her spine: She’s the leader.
It’s what makes her so awesome.
So I wish I had a picture of Caroline on the steps of the police station, and it’s not because I’ve forgotten.
Her perfect posture. The way her hair bumped over the collar of her jacket, shiny and smooth.
The look on her face, serious one second and radiant the next.
The light that came into those big brown eyes of hers when she saw me walk through the station door.
I won’t forget. I could never forget what Caroline looked like the first time I saw her after she told me she loved me.
She’s the only person who ever said that to me, other than my mom or Frankie. The only girl to give me her heart, and I hate that she handed it to me right when I was leaving. When I fucked up everything—school, my home situation, the weed, my job. I got fired from the bakery. I missed my midterm, nearly got her arrested, and that’s when she decided it was time to say the words.
I didn’t know what to say back to her. I still don’t.
I love you, too.
She knows it, I think. If she doesn’t, I was doing something wrong all those weeks we had together.
She knows it, but it wouldn’t do either of us any good to have it out in the open. If I’d said it, it would’ve been just another loss for us to carry around.
I thought about saying, You shouldn’t, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that, either.
She shouldn’t. She does. I’m glad.
More than glad, I’m greedy over it. I can’t find any piece of me—a finger bone, a molecule, a single atom—that wants her to feel different.
She’s in love with me.
Thank fucking Christ.
So I wanted that picture. Caroline, standing in the sun with our friends gathered around her. Bridget and Quinn on the steps, listening as she told them something. I’d asked Bridge to take care of her, but seeing Caroline there, I realized she doesn’t need to be taken care of anymore, if she ever did. She had those two arrayed around her and her dad in a car by the curb, awaiting her commands.
She was the leader.
Her dad pulled a few strings, got me out on probation with permission to leave the state as long as I complete some kind of drug program back home. There’s still hoops to jump through, but the public defender said the misdemeanor’s going to drop off my record once I’ve hopped on through them. The PD said I was getting a sweet deal—maybe sweeter than I deserved.
Her dad said he’d be glad to see the back of me.
I get where they’re both coming from. If I were them, I’d feel the same.
Sweeter than I deserved—that was Caroline. Head to toe, beginning to end, every day I had her.
I ought to be sorry I slept with her, sorry we got to be friends, sorry I ever walked out to where she was sitting by the curb in the dark and pulled her into my life.
There’s things I am sorry for. That I left Frankie. That I thought I might have a place in the world somewhere other than home, thought I could put down the responsibility I picked up ten years ago and trust somebody else to carry it.
I’m sorry I ever came here, because if I’d stayed in Oregon, maybe I could have kept this from happening. Kept Mom away from my dad. Kept her together with Bo, and kept Frankie tucked away safe with stuffed animals in her bed and glitter on her fingernails. I should have been there, telling her bedtime stories. Telling her she can be anyone, anything she wants to be.
That’s what’s in my power—to give Frankie that. Not to take it for myself.
I’m sorry I tried.
But I’m not sorry about Caroline. Not even a little.
I wish I had that picture, though.
Her smile.
Her eyes in the first instant when she looked up and saw me walking out, a free man.
I wish I had it, just to have something of Caroline to keep.
APRIL
Caroline
I had him for one more week while they got some legal stuff sorted out.
Seven days.
He tried to pull away from me, but no way was I letting that happen. I slept in his bed. I kissed him and licked him, bit him and scratched him, put my tongue on every single spot on his body it wanted to be.
He was mine. Mine, and I knew I had to give him back, but I didn’t have to do it yet. I refused to cry over losing him when he wasn’t gone.
I helped him pack. I helped him sell his car to Quinn.
I took him to bed.
I walked him to Student Affairs and forced him to formally withdraw. Not because I thought he might come back, but because that was the right way to leave. With deliberation. With care.
I deliberately, carefully, slowly drew his cock into my mouth and sucked it until he stopped saying my name and started bucking off the mattress, his heels catching the fitted sheet so it rucked up underneath him and he came with his hands tangled in my hair, his fingertips gentle behind my ears.
I held him.
I touched him.
That last night, I stroked his back and his shoulders, his hips and his ass, his arms, his neck, his face.
For as long as he was still mine to love, I loved him.
Then I let him go.
At the airport, I don’t know what to say.
We hold hands on the walk from the parking lot to the check-in counter.
We hold hands on the walk from the check-in counter to the security line.
We hold hands until the moment is finally here when he has to go and I have to stay and we can’t hold hands anymore.
He drops his backpack on the ground and pulls me into his arms.
I can’t think of words to tell him that mean anything. It’s easy, with my body, to press up against him. To rub my damp eyelashes against his shirt, feel his lips on the crown of my head, his arms so tight around me.
I won’t tell him I wish he didn’t have to go. There’s a little girl on the other side of the country who needs him. There’s a place he fits into, a life that’s not this life, and I can’t question the claim it has on him. I don’t have the right.
I can wish things were different. I’ve wished it a thousand times. But as long as they’re not different, this is the way it is, and I won’t tell him I wish he would stay.
“Hey,” he says.
I look up at his face. I push my hands up his neck, cover his ears where they stick out because he’s wearing his black baseball cap. He’ll get on a plane next to some lady who thinks he’s an anonymous college dude, nobody important. She won’t know that he’s everything.
“I’ll miss your ears,” I tell him.
“I’ll miss that gap in your teeth.”
“I never did show you how I could spit through it.”
“That’s all right. We found some other stuff to do with our time.”
That makes me smile, which makes him smile, and we just look at each other. I study how his eyes crinkle at the corners, how deep the lines sink in around his lips, how nice his teeth are. His slightly crooked nose. The smile fades away, leaves his mouth so serious, as serious as his eyes.
I pet his ears. Pinch his earlobes.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I tell him.
“There isn’t a way. We just do it.”
I reach for the brim of his cap, pivot it all the way around on his head, and go up on my tiptoes to kiss him.
Goodbye. I’m kissing West goodbye.
His hand clamps down on the back of my neck. His tongue moves into my mouth and the kiss goes deep, deeper, until we reach the place where there’s no boundary between us. The place where I’ve given him a piece of my heart, my soul, a prayer flag with soft, fraying edges that flaps in the wind, claims him as my own, forever.
I tell him, with this kiss, that I want him to be well. That I want him to thrive. I want him to use his mind and his hands, his curious restless energy, his creativity—to put them in service of something that feeds his soul.