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I wrap the condom in a tissue and throw it into the trash can by her desk, then sit back down next to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “Caroline?”
She shudders. “Don’t.”
“Talk to me, though.”
“I can’t. I don’t—just give me some space, okay?”
It’s not okay, because I don’t know what that means. A few feet, a few minutes?
A few miles? A few months?
She was there for me at the school with Frankie. She stuck by me after what I did in Silt, stuck close to me since I came back to Putnam even though I’ve been standoffish and inconsistent and probably fucking infuriating.
She was with me just now—wasn’t she with me?
Christ.
I stand up and dress, jeans and socks and shirt. I kneel over my knotted shoelace and spend an eternity unknotting it while Caroline cries.
Something crashes downstairs.
The sound of crashing and sobbing sends me tripping into dark channels of recrimination.
You’ve got nothing to give her, no business being here, no right to touch her, no skills to fix this.
You’re worthless, you’re toxic, you’re poison.
I sit down on the bed.
Her crying is as empty as the sound the shovel made when I sank the blade into the dirt and piled up soil and rocks to dump on my old man’s corpse. The only thing I’d done in months that felt easy, because I knew that he was gone, and I knew I could put him in the ground and be done with him. There was my past, there, six feet deep. I was going to cover it with so much dirt that it could never claw its way out of that hole.
He can never touch me again. That’s what I thought. That’s what I paid for when I paid for the funeral.
But he’s in me. He looked like me, talked like me, probably fucked like me, because I can remember being five years old and hearing my parents fucking and my mom crying after.
You don’t ever forget something like that.
And no matter how deep I buried him, there’s no way for me to pretend not to know that my father was the kind of man who’d do what I did to Caroline after the funeral.
I sure as fuck didn’t enjoy it, but I did it. I closed my eyes and closed a fist way down deep inside myself and bludgeoned my way through it, telling myself I had to because it was the only way. Telling myself I didn’t have a decision to make.
Caroline was right when she read me the riot act in Silt. Everything she said, she was absolutely right. Everything she’s said to me since.
I’m afraid.
I’m so fucking afraid of making any kind of choice, because ever since Frankie was born I’ve told myself that thinking of me, of what I want, what I need, is a luxury I don’t get to claim. It’s all about Frankie. My life is for Frankie. If I live for her, I don’t have to think about me.
I’ve been making excuses for inexcusable behavior, acting like the Fates snipped my threads so short that I just have to take whatever life shoves down my throat. I just have to breathe through my nose and swallow it and survive so Frankie wil
l never know what that’s like.
But that’s not living, is it? Survival isn’t life.
Survival is what you do when you don’t get to choose.
I’m not going to wake up in the morning in my bed over the garage and pretend to be some kind of a role model for Frankie, some kind of a parent to her, after I left Caroline naked and crying in her bed.
I survived that man. I won’t turn into him.
