Calico (15 page)

“Mmm, just a couple of beers…with the guys after work.”

He never goes drinking with the guys from work. He’s told me repeatedly that they’re all drunken morons, and why the hell would he want to hang out with them after office hours? Suspicion itches at the back of my mind, but I choose to ignore it.
 

“Great. Maybe you should get yourself to bed, then. You know how bad your hangovers are if you don’t sleep.” My own hangover is bound to be epic, but I don’t have anything to do tomorrow, besides hand in those papers at the morgue.
 

“Yeah, you’re right. G’night, Cora. Love you.”

“Mmm. You too.” I hang up the phone, and for the millionth time I hear Ben’s voice saying, ‘
Did it again, Cora. You didn’t tell me you love me. What’s up with that?’
 

I’ve told him a grand total of three times that I love him, and each time was a lie.
 

I’ve never gotten over Callan. Not even close. At dinner, when he said I would never get married, he was right. I might trick myself into thinking it’s what I need to move forward in my life, but I’d know. I’d
know
it was the wrong thing to do, because try as I might, I’ve never been able to stop loving Callan. There’s been no room in my heart for anyone else, because that bastard has owned me since day one. Without even trying, and with an entire country separating us, Callan has exerted a powerful and terrifying hold over me that I haven’t been able to shake. Worse still, I haven’t even tried to shake it. I’ve let it rule and ruin me for so long. It’s been self indulgent of me to believe that there’s nothing I could do about it, when in actual fact there’s plenty I could have done.
 

I could have gone to see him. Gotten some closure. I could have talked about my relationship with him in therapy, instead of refusing point blank every time the subject of him came up. I could have
tried
to love someone else. Or tried harder at least.
 

There are other reasons I haven’t been able to let him go, of course. Dark, awful, agonizing reasons that even he doesn’t know about. I kept them from even him, and while he’s sat on the east coast for all these years, stewing on that stupid photograph, I’ve sat on the west coast, stewing on something far worse. I couldn’t tell him back then, though, and there’s sure as hell no way I’ll ever tell him now. What would that accomplish? Absolutely nothing, that’s what.
 

I plan on drinking the second bottle of wine and going to sleep. Halfway through the second bottle of wine, I plan on putting the rest in the mini fridge and calling Callan so I can scream at him. Despite how badly I wanted to burn it, I did keep that fancy business card he put under the windshield wiper of the Porsche, so I have his number. I could do it. I have so many things I could yell at him for. The rest of the wine never makes it into the fridge. I polish off the bottle, blearily wondering if I have still have a drinking problem. Back home in LA, I may have a few glasses with dinner, but that’s hardly every night. Maybe once or twice a week, if that. No, I don’t think have a problem with alcohol. I have a problem with Port Royal, and I have a problem with Callan, and with my dead father, and with the ghosts and the memories and the pain waiting for me at every single turn. The alcohol is a temporary coping mechanism, just like making myself throw up on the way to the airport.
 

Even as I wash the smudged mascara from my face, I know I can’t rely on alcohol or a resurgence in my eating disorder to handle this situation, though. It has to stop. It would be all too easy to lean on those crutches a little too hard, and then where will I be? In rehab? Ben staging an intervention for me, because I can’t eat a single solid meal without forcing myself to throw it back up again? He would hate that. So would I. No. Fuck that. I’ve wrestled through years of therapy. I’ve been in crisis twice already. I don’t ever want to revisit that dark place again. I’m past all of it. I just have to be.
 

If only Callan had stayed in New York. Dealing with Dad’s arrangements would have been hard, but I think I could have managed it. I probably would have been able to get through the farce of a funeral and the service without breaking down and destroying everything in sight.
Maybe
. But with him here, it just makes everything ten times harder. I find myself growing angrier and angrier by the second as I realize that him showing up here really was the most selfish, underhanded, cruel thing he could ever have done to me.
 

I’m clearly not in my right mind as I pick up the phone and call down to the front desk for a cab. Calling Callan and giving him hell isn’t enough. I need to see him face to face so he can see the look in my eye when I call him every name under the sun. I need to be able to look straight at him when I plead with him to go back home to New York.
 

The concierge tells me they’ll call when my taxi arrives, but I’m too agitated to wait in my room. I throw on my jacket, even though it’s probably hotter than hell outside, and I stalk down to the main lobby to wait for my ride. A blue and white cab rolls up outside the main entrance fifteen minutes later, and I climb in without bothering to check and see if it’s even mine. I give the driver the address and then I sit on the backseat, gaze fixed out of the window, unseeing. I think the driver asks me something but when I don’t respond he makes the remainder of the journey across town in silence.
 

Outside Callan’s house, I pay him with a twenty and tell him to keep the change. I feel revolting inside as I hurry down the pathway towards the front door, trying my level best not to cast my eyes at the building on my right. My old home might as well be the Amityville Horror house. I can’t look at it without panicking and wanting to run far and fast from it; even being in such close proximity to it is making me break out in a cold, terrified sweat.
 

There are no lights on inside Callan’s place. I hammer on the front door, using the flat of my palm for maximum impact, and the sound of the hollow booming rings outs around the sleeping neighborhood. At this rate I’ll be waking Friday up as well as everyone else on the street, but I don’t care. So long as Callan wakes the fuck and let’s me the fuck in, I couldn’t care less who else I wake up.
 

Lights go on in an upstairs bedroom three doors down, but the lights remain stubbornly switched off on the second floor of the house in front of me. “Fuck you, Cross,” I hiss, slapping the door even harder.
 

No lights. No answer. No stirring from within whatsoever. I take a step back and glare up at the place, fuming. Fine. He doesn’t want to answer the fucking door? That’s really not a problem. I’ll let myself in one way or another, and then he’ll have no choice but to deal with me.
 

Storming around the side of the house, I keep my head down and to the left, still refusing to make eye contact with the place next door. I go on the hunt for a rock in the patch of earth beside Callan’s place—a bare patch of earth that used to be overflowing with flowers and beautiful evergreen shrubs that Jo took such pride in once upon a time. There, sure enough, right where it always was, sits a large, black rock with a metallic blue sheen to it—volcanic, and totally out of place in a flower bed in South Carolina. I pick up the rock, fully prepared to launch the thing through a downstairs window if I need to, but when I squint in the, dark low and behold, there is the same bunch of keys Callan always used to keep there for me. They’re rusted now, the metal loop the keys are attached to completely covered in dirt, but they’re exactly the same.
 

The sight of them makes me panic. Oh, fuck. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe I shouldn’t be running around in the middle of the damn night, breaking into houses that don’t belong to me. Can I get arrested for this? There’s every chance Callan is going to want to press charges by the time I turf him out of his bed and start threatening him with physical violence.

I consider the prospect of sitting in a communal jail cell at Sheriff Mason’s station for a second, and then I figure fuck it, it will be worth it if Callan gets the picture and leaves. I use the keys, jamming the slimmest into the lock on the front door hard enough that the metal protests and the door swings open, creaking in the exact same way it used to when I was a kid. Strange, the things that remain the same, when so much else changes.
 

“CALLAN!” My voice rings out into darkness. I enter the house without stopping to think, to prepare myself for the assault to my senses, and the smell of the place hits me like a punch to the gut. Not old or damp or musty, or even like the old house used to smell long ago. It just smells like Callan. At the far end of the hallway, the old Grandfather clock Jo loved so much has been covered with a white sheet. Upon a timid investigation of the ground floor, I see that every piece of furniture in the place has been covered with dustsheets, too. And Callan’s nowhere to be seen.
 

I jog up the staircase to the second floor, a little hesitant now that I know he’s been here. And recently. The door to Jo’s old room is closed. The bathroom door is ajar, though. Moonlight pours in through the tiny porthole window, casting long silvery fingers of light over the cabinet and the sink, where a single blue toothbrush lays on its side next to a travel-sized tube of toothpaste.
 

I find myself standing there, staring at it. Somewhere in the city of New York, Callan’s other belongings are neatly folded away into cupboards and drawers. His books are stacked in an orderly fashion on shelves. His records are filed alphabetically, just as they always were, next to his ancient record player. His shoes are probably in disarray underneath his bed, just like
they
always were, too. My heart suddenly feels weighty, too heavy to carry inside me any longer. There was a reality once upon a time when my toothbrush was meant to belong next to his. My shoes would have been in a jumble along with his under
our
bed. We talked about it. Daydreamed, really. In our heads, we created this exceptional far away life together and it was amazing. There would have been fights and disagreements, of course. There would have been plenty, but the sweet moments where we loved each other and made each other’s lives better, simply for the joy of making the other person happy—those were the moments we would have lived for.
 

As I stand there, still staring at his stupid toothbrush, remembering everything we said once, I realize that I feel robbed. That life was taken from me, and the life I live now is so far removed from my dreams that I don’t even recognize it as something I ever really wanted for myself. I walk into the bathroom, pick up Callan’s toothbrush, and I drop it into the toilet. It refuses to vanish like a good little toothbrush when I flush, so I just leave it there, not caring that he’ll find it at some point and know how petty I’ve been.
 

I steel myself before I open the door to Callan’s bedroom. Seeing him fully clothed and arguing with him at a dinner table is one thing, but seeing him half naked and sleeping, vulnerable…that is something else entirely. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to deal with the dichotomy of emotions such a vision will produce. As it turns out, rallying myself was a pointless task anyway. When I step into the room, holding my breath, trying not to breathe him in, I immediately see that his bed is made and he’s not even there. He’s not at home in his bed? It’s two-thirty in the morning, and it’s a weeknight. He hasn’t lived here for a very long time, as far as I can tell, so where the hell is he? Out drinking in some late night bar with a girl?
 

I hate that this is the first place my mind travels to. Callan is a highly sexual person. He always was, and there’s no doubt that he still is now. It’s remarkable that I haven’t even contemplated the fact that he might have a girlfriend back in New York until now. His marriage speech earlier was definitely a good indicator that he’s not involved in anything serious at the moment, but regardless, there could well be some cute little hipster girl with black-rimmed glasses waiting for him back in Tribeca, or Brooklyn Heights, or whatever up-and-coming neighborhood he’s transplanted himself into.
 

She’s probably a writer or something. She probably
blogs
.
 

My throat feels like I’ve swallowed ground up glass. I try to choke down the feeling as I enter Callan’s domain and pace the floorboards, allowing things to come back to me piece by piece: the
Nevermind
poster on the wall that I tacked up after Callan accidentally knocked a hole in the plasterboard; the cork wall full of movie stubs and concert tickets. God. So many we went to see together. Fight Club. Lord of the Rings. 10 Things I Hate About You. The Green Mile. We weren’t even old enough to see most of them at the time, but Shane used to work at the Village 8 Theater and would sneak us in after a little bribery.
 

I can’t believe he kept the same bed sheets. Faded and washed out now, they’re more gray than blue, but they’re still the same. I feel like I just dropped acid, and I am Alice, tumbling down a long lost rabbit hole that used to be so familiar to me but now seems strange and alien. By rights, I should be trying to climb my way back out of the damned hole, but I’m not. I’m freefalling, not even caring, losing myself in the smoke and mirrors of dusty memories that come rushing at me.

I sit myself down on the edge of Callan’s bed, overcome with all of the love and the pain that existed between us in this room once. Some of the most formative moments of my teen years happened right here. Others took place next door in my own bedroom. One took place in my father’s basement.

I’ve been fighting valiantly to persuade myself that being here in Port Royal is no more than an inconvenience to my life now, but the truth is that I’m so scared and traumatized by finding myself back here that I can barely breathe. I’m not even aware of what I’m doing as I lie back onto the mattress and kick my shoes off, curling myself up into the fetal position, hugging my knees to my chest.