By the time I get to Ankeny, it’s nearly eight, and the highway is clogged with people on their way to work. The traffic in Nate’s neighborhood is all headed in the opposite direction from me, so I already feel like I’m breaking rules when I park in his driveway. Even more so when his mom comes to the door.
His mom is so nice. She was always great to me. She seems not to know what to do with the fact that I’m standing on her doorstep, which I can understand. I used to be allowed to come in without knocking. I practically lived here senior year.
Now I’m dangerous—to her son, to her peace. She knows it. I can tell.
“Is Nate here?”
“He’s not up yet.”
“I’d like you to wake him up.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“I am here.”
“You ought to let the college handle this, Caroline.”
I’m tired of the word this. I’ve heard it a lot since I first heard it from my dad—a word employed as a refuge, a little piece of slippery language that can be pulled over the head and hidden behind. This situation. This trouble. This disagreement.
I’m a prosecutor. I won’t allow her to hide behind words.
“Did you see the pictures?”
She can’t look at me. “Caroline, I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Did you see them or not?”
“Yes.”
“Did you recognize Nate’s comforter in the background?”
She crosses her arms. Stares at a spot on the ground by her foot.
“It’s me in those pictures,” I say. “But it’s your son, too, whether he likes it or not, whether he wants to admit that he’s the one in them with me. And I didn’t tell a single person they existed, so the fact that the whole world knows now? That’s on him. Nate has things to answer for. I’d like you to wake him up.”
For half a minute we stand there. I think she must hope that I’ll go, change my mind, but that’s not happening.
Eventually she turns and ascends the carpeted staircase. She leaves the door open. I stand on the threshold in the gray light of morning. An unwanted gift on the doorstep.
I can hear the radio on in the kitchen. From upstairs, a murmur of voices, a verbal dance between Nate and his mother too muffled to make out the specifics of.
A complaint. A sharp reply. Then the conversation gets louder—a door has opened.
“Why are you taking her side?”
“I’m not. But if I find out you did this, don’t expect me to support you just because you’re my son. It’s despicable, what happened to her.”
“What she did is despicable.”
“What she did, she did with you. Now, get dressed and get down there.”
Footfalls. Water running in the upstairs bathroom.
Nate comes down barefoot in a red T-shirt and jeans, smelling like toothpaste.
He rubs his hand over the back of his neck. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
“Who says, the dean of students? Please.”
“I could get expelled.”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you tried to ruin my life.”
His eyes narrow. “Melodramatic much?”
“You think I’m exaggerating?”
“Nobody tried to ruin your life, Caroline. Your life is fine. It’ll always be fine.”
“What’s that even supposed to mean?”
His lips tighten. He doesn’t answer.
“You have no idea.”
It’s just dawned on me that he doesn’t. I mean, he really doesn’t.
When he said we’d always be friends, in some twisted way, he meant it.
“You think it’s … like a prank. Like the time you and the guys soaped all the windows at the high school or rolled the football coach’s car to the park and left it on top of the teeter-totter. What did you do, stay up late with a six-pack of beer, jerking off to porn, and then think, I should put Caroline up here?”
“Someone stole my phone,” he mumbles.
“Oh, bullshit. That is such a giant, steaming pile of shit, I’m not even going to—God. You did, didn’t you? You thought you could do this and it would just be funny or awesome or what I deserved. You didn’t think it was going to mess up my chance of getting into law school. Ruin my relationship with my only living parent. You didn’t know it would make it so I couldn’t sleep for months, couldn’t look at a guy without flinching, couldn’t pull on a shirt in the morning without thinking, Does this make me look like a slut? I thought about changing my name, Nate. I get phone calls from strangers telling me they want to stick a razor blade in my cunt. That’s what you unleashed. That, and a million other awful things. I want to know why.”
“I didn’t do it.”
His voice is small, compressed. This is a lie, a bald and ridiculous lie that he’s abandoned here in the space between us. Too pathetic even to back up with volume, body language, anything.
“You did it.”
He shrugs.
“You’re pathetic,” I say. Because he is. He’s so pathetic. Hiding behind his hate, looking down on me, looking down on West. “I feel sorry for you.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a bitch.”
“Why? Why am I a bitch? Is it because I broke up with you? Because I’m standing here? Because I wouldn’t let you put your penis in my butthole? I was good to you, Nate! I loved you! For three fucking years, I did every nice thing I could think of for you, and then you paid me back with this. I want to hear, from you, what you think I did to deserve it.”
“I’m not telling you shit.”
His expression is so mulish—I wish his mom could see him right now. I honestly do. He looks like a four-year-old.
He’s a boy, too stubborn to tell me the truth, too childish to comprehend the consequences of his actions.
He hates me because he can.
Because he’s been allowed to.
Because he’s male, he’s well off, he’s privileged, and the world lets him get away with it.
Not anymore. The life those pictures ruin? It’s not going to be mine.
“Enjoy your break,” I tell him. “Enjoy the rest of your semester. It’ll be your last one.”
And I can see it in his eyes—the fear.
For the first time. Nate is afraid of me.
I like it.
When I get into my car, the slamming door seals me into silence.
I’m in the metal box now, but it’s fine. I can come and go as I please. I can find a way to get comfortable with all the impossibilities in my life.
I don’t know what I’m going to do about Nate, whether the administration will back me up in a fight against him, if there’s any way I can go after him legally—a criminal trial, a civil trial. I’ve poked around a little bit online, but until this month I didn’t want to think about fighting, so I haven’t really considered what this fight is going to look like. How long it might take. What I even want from Nate, now that I’m allowing myself to want things again.
Today’s not the day I’m going to worry about it. Today there are other impossibilities to think about.
West is leaving, and I love him.
I can’t change that. I can only find a way to cope.
I have work here. I have things I need to do, power to exercise, wrongs to right.
I back out of the driveway, headed to my father’s house.
There’s a favor I need to ask, and he’s the only one who can grant it.
“I need you to get my boyfriend out of jail.”
It’s a sentence I never expected to have to say to anyone, much less to my dad, but it comes right out, fluid and easy.
All the fluster, the confusion, is on his side.
“You need me to—your what? Out of jail?”
Maybe I should have worked my way up to it.
I wish I could have picked another time, some morning when I walked into the kitchen and he actually looked happy to see me. As opposed to this morning, when I found him reading the paper with his coffee, the circles under his eyes too dark, his mouth too sad when he caught sight of me at the French doors.
There’s no other time, though. Only this time, this pain twisting in my guts as I think about how my future with my dad could be like this forever—this disappointment perpetual, our old relationship impossible to recover.
“His name is West Leavitt, and he’s being held in Putnam by the police. At least, I think he is. It would be good if you could find that out for me, actually. He was planning to confess to misdemeanor possession of marijuana.”
“You have a boyfriend. Who smokes marijuana.”
“Sort of. I mean, yes, he’s my boyfriend. And he occasionally smokes it. But mostly he just …” Sells it.
Gah. I need to pay more attention to what I’m saying, because my dad is sharp. He’s been talking to accused people for a long time. I guess he’s pretty good at hearing what they don’t say.
When it dawns on him, I can see it in his eyes. The lines deepen in his face, and his jowls look saggier.
I always used to think he was the handsomest dad. I’ve never seen him as old before, or weak, and it hurts so much to be what’s weakening him.
“This is that kid,” he says. “That kid from across the hall. Last year.”
“Yeah.”
“You promised me you’d stay away from him.”
“I did stay away. For a long time.”
Then there’s silence and snow tapping at the windows, because the weather has turned foul.
He takes a sip of his coffee.
I grip the back of a kitchen chair and wonder about my mother. If she would have taken my side, if she hadn’t died.
I think of my sister Alison in the Peace Corps. She’s got email where she is, and the Internet. I wonder if she knows yet.
I wonder about my sister Janelle, too, who does know. She wrote me this email—this long, long email that I had to close and not look at, because the first paragraph contained the words I forgive you, and I don’t want anyone’s forgiveness.
I’m not the one who has to be forgiven.
“Tell me what happened,” my dad says.
“With the drugs?”
“The whole thing.”
So I try.
I try in a way that I didn’t try the other day because I was too angry.
I try even though I feel like there’s no time for this and I wish I were with West right now, and I’m not sure how much of what I tell my dad can even reach him through the filter of his pain and disappointment.
I try because I know him, and I know that he’s fair, and I know that he loves me.
I start at the beginning. I work through to this moment, this kitchen. I tell him everything I think he really needs to know. What Nate did to me. What West has given me. Everything that’s happened, everything that’s pertinent, and more.
I use the word love. I tell him I love West. Because that, too, is pertinent.
And because, now that I’ve said it to West, I could say it to anyone.
I love West. I love him, I love him, I love him.
When I’m done, my father walks out of the room, but I don’t go after him. I take his coffee cup to the sink and rinse it out. I take the beans from the freezer and grind them and make another pot, and I collect some dishes from the countertop and the table to load the dishwasher.
I give him some time.
I think, if I were him, I would need time.
I’m his youngest daughter, his girl who lost her mother earliest, when I was still too little to remember her. He was the one who rocked me to sleep against his chest when I had bad dreams. He was the one who came to every awards ceremony, every debate tournament, every graduation.
He has a picture of me in his chambers with a gap-toothed smile, my hair in pigtails.