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I watch a stranger head butt another stranger, the spray of blood the single most repulsive sight I’ve ever witnessed.
This is a brawl, I think. This is what a brawl looks like.
The chaos is random, not coordinated like in a movie, and I can’t locate West, can’t even penetrate the first layer of heaving bodies, which is hard for me to understand because there aren’t a hundred people in this parking lot. There are … twenty? Twenty-five? I should be able to get to the middle of them.
I try, but my instinct for self-preservation is too healthy. Every time a hip or fist or elbow comes at me, I jerk back.
Then suddenly the melee breaks open and I see West’s mom and Bo. He’s got his arms around her from behind. She’s completely wild in his grip, shouting obscenities, trying to break loose. She looks like the madwoman in the attic, her hair wild, voice rough, mascara streaking down her cheeks.
I glance toward the entrance and locate Frankie where she said she would be. Seeing this.
I’m sorry, too, Franks.
Bo’s trying to get Michelle out of the middle of the tumult. West’s grandma is helping, I realize—she’s the one who cleared the path, the one whose shrill whistle keeps cutting through the noise—and West is holding the crowd off Bo’s back.
He shoves someone. Throws a punch.
He takes a hit to his cheek, his head snapping back, and then I’m running right for him. Sprinting toward West as the air starts to flash and bleed red.
The screams of the sirens split the sky.
A policeman has West facedown over the back of a patrol car with his legs spread. His forehead is mashed against metal, the seam between the shoulders of his suit jacket split open, the white of his shirt showing through.
“Excuse me.” I grab a passing officer’s arm. “Excuse me!”
She shakes me off, talks into her radio. I step
closer to the car and try to get the attention of the guy with West. “Is he being arrested? What about his rights? He didn’t do anything, it wasn’t his fault, he’s not a criminal—damn it, you’re not listening to me—”
West barks, “Caro!”
How mean he looks with that bruise blooming on his cheek. How much like the man they think he is. A roughneck brawling at a funeral.
“Knock it off,” he says. “Let them do their jobs.”
“But it wasn’t your fault!”
“They’ll fucking figure that out if you give them a few seconds’ peace.”
When a third cop takes my upper arm in a tight grip and leads me away from West, I bite my tongue. I end up against the building, beside Joan.
“I can’t believe this,” I say. “He was trying to stop it.”
“If he keeps ahold of his temper, he’ll be fine,” she says.
“Nothing about this situation is fine.”
I press the back of my head into the building’s vinyl siding and try to breathe.
West’s mom is bundled into the back of a patrol car, where she abruptly flips from blank catatonia to screaming again in her hoarse, ravaged voice.
“His funeral!” she’s yelling. “His fucking funeral!”
Bo gets taken to the station in another car. West’s uncle Jack goes to the hospital with a broken nose, and the rest of the aunts and uncles and cousins disperse. I don’t know if they’re heading to the hospital, the police station, or if they’re just done with the whole scene.
West is allowed to stand, and he gives his statement in the parking lot out of my earshot.
An officer comes over to talk to me. I tell him what I know. It takes longer than I thought it would, and by the time I’m finished West is nowhere in sight.
