She’s nine years old.
She needs somebody who will set limits, send her to bed, tell her to get off the phone and wash her face.
She needs me to make her do her homework and to manage Mom, who can only pass as a decent parent if there’s somebody around to make her work at it.
She needs me.
Resentment spikes in me, dark and poisonous.
I wish I knew some way to give her back. If I knew how to stop caring—to become as faithless as my father—then I could go to Putnam and stay there. Send Frankie a card on her birthday.
I could make myself over into Caroline’s West, with wide horizons and endless options.
“I’ll miss you,” my sister says.
Fists clenched, I have to close my eyes.
I would leave you behind if I could.
I wish I could. I want to.
But I open my eyes, open my mouth, and tell her, “I’ll miss you, too. I’ll be home in a few months. Then I’ll take you somewhere cool. Portland, maybe.”
“Really? What about San Francisco? Keisha says they have sea lions there, and there’s this store that’s all kinds of chocolate. That’s where we should go.”
“Yeah, I guess we could go to San Francisco. Maybe go camping on the way. See the redwoods.”
“Camping? No way. Camping sucks.”
“When have you ever been camping?”
“I know about it! You sleep in a tent and don’t shower, and spiders fall on your head. No thanks.”
I’ve never been camping, either. But who’s going to take her if not me?
“We could have a fire. Make s’mores. We’ll find a place to stay with a shower.”
“A fire would be good,” she says. “As long as there’s a shower. And you would have to kill all the spiders.”
“I can handle that.”
Whatever has to be handled—spiders, nightmares, homework, fathers—I can handle it.
What choice have I got?
I stand. “Hug me goodbye.”
She gets up and wraps her arms around me.
I kiss the top of her head. Her hair is soft. It smells like pink chemicals, and all the resentment in me is gone, washed away as if it had never been.
We walk down the driveway together. She chatters about San Francisco.
She watches me from the road. Waves whenever I turn around.
She belongs to me. I can’t do anything about it.
It’s five miles into town, but I get lucky and hitch a ride with one of Bo’s neighbors.
I look out the passenger window at the landscape, white and wheat, beige and brown, the sky wide open and relentlessly blue.
It doesn’t look like Iowa. It looks like me. Those colors the colors I’m made of, the dirt of this place in my bones, silted up around my heart.
I can’t keep being two people. The clock’s running down, my time almost up, and I won’t let myself string Caroline along, let her think I’m some other guy, some Iowa version of myself, when I’m not. I don’t get to be.
I’m Frankie’s.
I can’t be Frankie’s and keep Caroline. I wish I could, but there’s no point in wishing.
Every time I kissed Caroline, I pulled her deeper in. Deep and then deeper, until I couldn’t come home again without bringing her along.
“Here’s my girl,” I told my mother. “The pretty one.”
I sat on Bo’s couch in the dark and told Caroline, “I want inside you. I want you here.”
But I was pretending. There’s no world that has Frankie and my mom and Caroline in it, all of them belonging to me.
I’ve made a mess of things. That’s what it all boils down to. A heinous fucking mess.
Caroline is in me, and now I’ve got to cut her out.
JANUARY
Caroline
Winter break was endless. I slept in late and padded around the house in my slippers. The rest of the world was working, productive, but I had nothing to do.
I played six million games of Minesweeper, which—yeah, I don’t even know. Obviously there are better games. I couldn’t bring myself to commit to anything that involved more than one level or any sort of complex strategy.
It was draining, being home. Christmas in the Caribbean wore me out. Having to smile so much. Having to talk about my classes, my friends, my interests, and never mention West or the bakery, Nate or the pictures, any of it.
Keeping secrets is exhausting. When your whole life turns into a secret, what then?
I told my dad about rugby. He didn’t like the idea of me playing a tackle sport.
“You should play golf,” he said.
“Dad, I hate golf.”
“What’s wrong with golf?”
Golf made me think of West. How he caddies, so he must know when to hand somebody a nine iron or a sand wedge. How he must have opinions about drivers and wear some kind of a uniform—a crisp polo shirt, khaki shorts. He must look so different.
I pored over Google maps, searching for golf courses in Oregon, trying to guess which was his.
My grades came. Two A’s, two A-minuses. Dad put them on the fridge.
He asked if I was going to see Nate, and when I reminded him we broke up, he said, “You were friends before you were going out. Maybe it’s better not to burn that bridge.”
Obviously, I didn’t call Nate. I took a four-hour nap instead.
For New Year’s, Dad took me out to dinner and made a big thing out of letting me drink a glass of champagne. The next morning he gave me his credit card to buy myself “something nice.” Because I got good grades. Because he was so proud of me.
When I showed him the cashmere sweater I’d bought at the mall—the exact shade of West’s eyes—he kissed my temple, rubbed my shoulder, left me alone to watch bad movies in the den.
At night, long after Dad was asleep, I lay in the glow of the TV and waited for West to call.
I dozed off sometimes. I was so tired.
But when the phone rang, I woke up. I laughed. I craved. I yearned.
I flushed hot, dug my teeth into the flesh of my thumb, whispered words I never thought I’d own.
“Want you.” “Need you.” “Inside me.” “God, West.”
He would tell me things he wanted me to say. Dirty things that somehow weren’t dirty with him, they were just true. They were real. He would tell me, and I would say them. Anything he wanted.
There were words I didn’t say, though.
I miss you.
I love you.
I must have thought there would be time for that later. After break, when I saw him again, we’d be different. We’d be close—as close as we were on the phone. We’d be real.
I hadn’t learned yet that when your whole life is a sham, real isn’t something that happens to you.
When you surround yourself with lies, all the real things start to break.
I’m back in Putnam for all of an hour before I head over to West’s apartment.
I can’t help it. I need to see him.
I wanted to pick him up at the airport last night, but he’d left his car in Des Moines, and he was getting in late. So I tracked his flight and saw when he landed, a quick twenty-minute drive from me in Ankeny. I imagined him driving to Putnam alone in the dark.
This morning, I’d promised my dad I would hang around for lunch after my sister and I went to the bridal shop to pick up my dress. Janelle grilled me relentlessly about boys, wanting to know if I was over Nate yet. “You should start thinking about meeting a new guy,” she said at least six times. “It’s not good to focus just on school.”