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That’s what Caroline said to me, in no uncertain terms.
But all I can think, looking at the green on the hills, at the black ribbon of asphalt, at the blue sky, is this is one more fucking thing in my life I don’t get to decide about.
I see Iowa in my mind’s eye. Summertime in Putnam. Green lawns and brick buildings, marigolds and window boxes, students everywhere.
The hope spikes right into me, spikes my pulse, makes me breathe too shallow so I start to get dizzy and I have to pull over by the side of the road and slam my hand into the steering wheel and tell myself, No way, no way, no fucking way.
I think, Take Frankie somewhere else.
Mexico. Oklahoma.
Anywhere would do—anywhere that’s far enough away from Jack and lawyers and courtrooms to keep her safe from all the traumatic assholery heading our way.
We could live by a river in an adobe hut. I could learn to train horses. We could eat frijoles and tortillas and I’d be inside that fucking Cormac McCarthy novel I read in my first-year seminar, but it would be better than letting the hope back in.
Before she left, Caroline told me, You have to find a way to get out from under it, knowing it’s never going away. You have to make your own life, because if you don’t, you just won’t get to have one at all, and that’s the worst fucking thing I can imagine.
She says that to me over and over.
She says it in my head every day, and every day I say the same thing back to her.
The way I’ve lived—the life I’ve had—I can imagine worse things than you can.
It’s not so bad to waste your life. It’s not so hard. What’s harder—what’s fucking impossible—is thinking you’ve got a future and then losing it.
I don’t think I can survive it a second time.
In the glove box, I locate my last pack of cigarettes and light one up. I smoke it fast, sucking in deep carcinogenic lungfuls, trying to get used to the fact that it doesn’t matter if I can stand to live in Putnam or not.
I don’t have a decision to make.
We’re going to Putnam, because there’s a two-hundred-thousand-dollar education waiting for me there. A bachelor’s degree that means something. I’d be an idiot to turn it down when I can grab it and use it for Frankie.
I burned my life in Putnam to the ground. I don’t want to wade among the ashes and pitch a tent over top of what’s left of it, but I will. I haven’t got a choice.
Later, I’ll call Dr. Tomlinson.
Caroline
Every year, winter takes me by surprise.
Fall comes and shears the edge off summer, mellows out the temperatures for a few golden days of gorgeous perfection, and then when I’m ready to live the rest of my life in those stolen moments, snap.
It turns cold one night. Just like that.
Growing up, I’d deny what it meant. No, not yet. It’s not time yet.
I’d ignore the signs. I’d leave my jack-o’-lantern on the front porch long after Halloween, celebrating a season that had passed until black spots showed on the flesh around the pumpkin’s mouth and it started to look ancient and wizened.
Once the first frost did it in, my dad would make me take it out back and chuck it into the woods. So long, fall.
But the autumn of my
junior year at Putnam, I was ready for the days to get shorter and the temperatures to drop. I braced myself for the cold, preparing to carry on in a Putnam without West, a life without West.
It would be cold for a while. Lonely. But I’m an Iowa girl. I was used to the cold. I knew how to bundle up against it, muffle my breath behind a scarf, muffle my needs so I could endure the early nights and the long winter.
My dad finished annoying the lawyer, and my complaint against Nate got filed in mid-September. Sixty days to respond. Plaintiff identified as Jane Doe.
