Calico (29 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CALLAN

No Surprises

NOW

I spoke to Malcolm Taylor only once. During the whole time Coralie and I were sneaking around, taking photographs, holding onto each other fiercely in my bed, running as wild as we possibly could with the old bastard controlling her so doggedly, I only had occasion to face him and actually speak once. That seems strange to me now, but at the time I’d been relieved. Coralie had told me he was a hard ass, over protective, and I’d been willing to take her at her word and avoid him at all costs.

“You never suspected that he was hurting her, though. That night she left town was the first time she ever said anything about it. I remember, man. I remember being shocked when you told me, too. She always hid it well.” Shane gives me a third beer. I’d sat around at home and tried to think things through after Coralie left, but I’d started to go a little crazy. I stopped by Willoughby’s, looking for an old friend to talk to, and we’d ended up going to Chase’s—the only dive bar in town that seems to have escaped the community’s ‘regeneration.’ Shane and I used to come here and get fucked up after my mom died. I can’t even recall how many times I’ve puked in the men’s toilets. At the speed we’re going, I’ll probably end up revisiting that tradition tonight, if only for old time’s sake.
 

“Yeah. I had no fucking idea. Still. Part of me feels like I should have somehow.”

“Fuck, man. I still can’t believe you were going to be a dad. I can’t believe you were going to be a dad and you didn’t fucking tell me.”

“Sorry. Seems like we were all full of secrets back then.” I pull at my beer, thankful that it’s ice cold so I can’t taste how cheap and shitty it is. “Not like we were shouting it from the rooftops at the time, y’know?”

“Hmm,” Shane grunts. “Are you mad at her? Do you blame her for what happened?”

I pause with my beer bottle pressed to my lips, staring at the buzz of yellow and red light reflected in the bar mirror from the juke box behind us. My mind seems to have ground to a jarring halt. “I don’t know,” I tell him, because it’s the god’s honest truth. I don’t know what the hell I should be thinking anymore. I know I love her. That won’t ever change? But do I hold her responsible for the death of our child? It would be easy to be angry and place blame where it fits easiest. Malcolm’s dead already, so hating him even more isn’t going to make me feel better. Hating Coralie might make me feel self righteous and free at last, able to head back to New York without feeling like I failed in achieving something with her here, but it would be forced. She didn’t lie to deceive me. She lied to save me from further hurt. I shake my head, raising the beer bottle in my hand and pouring half its contents down my neck. “I just don’t know what I think or feel anymore. I thought all of this stuff was a side note in my relationship with Coralie, but now it feels like it’s the only thing in my head. I can’t fucking think about anything else.” I shake my head. “Jesus, we would have made terrible parents.”
 

“No you wouldn’t, man. You guys would have been great. Every parent thinks they’re going to be a massive failure at raising a kid, believe me. I know. Tina’s crying every five minutes because she thinks she’s gonna accidentally let our newborn drown in the bathtub or something. But when it comes down to it, you step up to the plate. You figure that shit out. You and Coralie would have figured it out, too. You woulda had a better chance than anyone else I know, anyway.”

“How d’you figure that out?”

“Because you guys loved each other so much. Every kid in school used to watch you guys together and flip out, because you were both so invested. There was no Callan or Coralie. Only Callan
and
Coralie.”

“Pffffttttt.” I blow out a long sigh between my lips. It feels so sentimental thinking back to those days. I’ve tried so fucking hard in the past to stop thinking about Coralie altogether, but that was always a futile exercise. “We didn’t know we were special at the time,” I say, but this is an out and out fallacy. Both of us absolutely knew. There was no hiding from it.
 

“Look, man, I know she’s all you’ve wanted for the past decade, but trust me. Ending up with your high school sweetheart is not all it’s cracked up to be. You know them inside out, front to back. You know what they’re thinking at all times. You can pretty much guess what they’re gonna be wearing each day based on how they said good morning to you when you got out of bed. You can anticipate each other, know exactly what’s going to come out of their mouths when they’re pissed off, when they’re happy, when they’re sad...”

“And these are all bad things, because…?”

Shane hunkers down next to me, casting a wary eye at the barmaid like she’s a Soviet spy. “There are no surprises left, Callan.
None
. It’s
awful
.”

I laugh for the first time since Coralie left my house. “You wouldn’t be saying that if you didn’t have it, asshole. Trust me.”

“I don’t think I can trust a guy who’d rather sleep with one woman the rest of his life instead of hitting all of that New York pussy.”

Shane is so full of shit. I know him. I’ve known him his whole life. He’s not a one-and-done kind of guy. He wouldn’t know how to have casual sex even if there was a naked woman laid out on a bed in front of him, telling him she wanted to get fucked and never see him again. He’s been with Tina forever. I’m pretty sure she’s the only woman he’s ever slept with—the only woman he ever wants to sleep with. He’s just trying to make me feel better, and it isn’t fucking working.
 

“Just stop talking,” I tell him.

Shane pulls a face at me and then gestures for the barmaid to bring us another round of beers. She gives him a scandalized look, throwing her polishing cloth down on the bar. “You’re not even halfway through that one, Shane Willoughby,” she says.

“I’m aware. But the rate you move, Carolyn Anderson, I’ll have finished and drank his.” He tries to take my beer from me, but I shoot him a glare that tells him quite plainly what will happen to him if he tries to touch the damn bottle again.
 

I’m about to tell Carolyn the barmaid not to bother fetching me another drink anyway, but my cell phone starts vibrating in my pocket. When I pull it out, I see Angela Ricker’s number flashing on the screen. Lord knows what she wants. I haven’t heard from her in a while. In fact, I haven’t done any work for Rise and Fall Magazine in well over a year. I answer the call, making an apologetic face at Shane. “What’s up, Angela?”

“Callan Cross. You’re a hard man to reach. I’ve been calling you for days.” She probably has, and I wouldn’t have a clue. I’ve been far too preoccupied with Coralie and her father. “I even swung by your place last night but the doorman said you were out of town. South Carolina? I told him he must have been mistaken. Big city boys never go back to their small town roots once they’ve escaped.”

“Ha! And yet here I am.” There’s a long pause on the other end of the line. Angela seems to be waiting for me to tell her what the hell I’m doing back here. She’s going to have to come out and ask me if she wants to know, though, and even then I probably won’t be telling her the truth.
 

“Right, well,” she says. “I have a job you won’t be able to turn down. You’ve been dodging R and F assignments for far too long, Cal. There’s no way you’ll turn down this shoot, though. No way in hell.”

“I don’t want it, Angela.”

“You don’t even know what it is yet.” She’s one of those women who pouts unnecessarily. I can picture her doing it right now as her forehead creases in frustration. “It’s a chance of a lifetime. And the pay is phenomenal. I’m not going to stop bugging you about it until you’ve at least let me explain.”

“Fine. Tell me what it is so I can tell you no again and hang up.”

Angela grumbles in the receiver, making displeased noises. She’s not used to having to pitch jobs to photographers. Normally photographers are clawing each other’s eyes out to get a foot in the door with them. “We want you to take some political shots. Alberto Capali is being sworn in as the new mayor of New York, and we want you to go to his house and take shots of his family, his home, him fucking walking his fucking dog if you like. But we want candid shots. No propaganda. If you see something that looks strange, shoot it. If he argues with his wife or his kid, shoot it. If you think Capali standing out in the freezing cold in his boxer shorts would make an amazing photograph, then you take the damn photograph. He’s agreed to be an open book.”

“I don’t do political work, Angela. You know this.”

“Bullshit. Every single picture you take is political. And the magazine has a budget of thirty grand for the piece.” She pauses. When I don’t make any comment, she says, “ Did you hear me, Cross? That’s thirty grand for a couple of days’ work. Normally you’d have to slave away for two months to get a paycheck like that.”

Thirty grand is a lot of money. And she’s right: it does take me a couple of months to get paid out like that. “All right. Since it’s a New York job, I’ll consider it. Send through the information. When I get back, I’ll take a proper look at it.”

“Come on, Cross. You should know better than that. This has to happen this weekend. I’ll have to put you on a flight first thing in the morning, and you’ll have to go straight from the airport to Capali’s place. That’s the only catch.”

“Right.” So this will be it. I’ll only have tonight left in Port Royal if I take this job. Shane can obviously hear what’s been said on the phone. He quirks an eyebrow at me, waiting to hear what my response will be. I sigh, then take a swig from my beer.
 

“Okay. Fine. Send me the ticket. I’ll come back to New York in the morning.”

I hang up, and Shane thumps me on the arm. “Man, I didn’t think you were gonna agree to that.”

“What do you mean? You were telling me five seconds ago that I should be excited to go back home.”

He frowns. “Yeah, well. I don’t know. I didn’t really think you’d listen to me. I thought you’d stick it out here, figure this shit out with
her
. You’re a stubborn motherfucker, Callan. When you have your heart set on something, you don’t normally give in all that easy.”

“Mmm.” I finish my beer, moving onto the next. “I guess. But you know what they say about the definitely of insanity. Repeating the same acts over and over again, expecting a different outcome. I’m done chasing this down, Shane. She was right all along. Too much pain has passed between us. Too much suffering. I don’t know that anyone would ever be able to overcome what we’ve been through. I have to be smart. I have to know when to call it a day. And right now, I think that time has come.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CORALIE

End of the Road

NOW

The past is like a foreign country. It seems as though I visited long ago, but I have no idea how to get back there. And even if I could get back there, I don’t know that I’d ever want to take such a perilous, awful journey. Sometimes, I don’t get a choice, though. There are occasions when I’m dragged back there by my boot heels and I can’t stop the process no matter how hard I kick and scream and cry.
 

I travel back to that first night in the basement all the time. For a while, making myself throw up was the only way to stop the violent memories hitting me over and over again. Throwing up was the only way to break the cycle.
 

I thought once I’d left Port Royal, everything would get better. It didn’t, though. For years I was sick, distraught over what had happened. And losing Jo. Not being able to say goodbye to her. Mostly, I was torn to pieces over losing Callan. In my head, I had to cling onto the idea that I was mad at him. That I
did
hate him for selling that photograph of me to the world. It made it easier that he was gone. That I’d walked away.
 

Now it seems like he’s walking away, and I don’t blame him. I can’t. I mean, I’ve had well over a decade to come to terms with what happened and I still haven’t managed it. How can I expect him to get his head around it and accept it in less than twenty-four hours? And how can I expect him to forgive me for keeping it a secret? My father should have gone to jail for what he did, both to me and to our baby, and I let him get away with it. I couldn’t have faced reporting the crime. It took me years to even confess it to a therapist, and I had a major panic attack when I did get the words out. That’s when my eating disorder was at it’s worst. When my drinking was beyond out of control. I’ve never been as close to spiraling down that rabbit hole again as I have been the past few weeks. I’m not frightened about losing control anymore, though. I was afraid because I knew I was going to have to tell Callan, and now that I have, despite how terrible and hard it was, I feel a little lighter. I don’t want to pour a bottle of vodka down my throat. I don’t want to puke hard enough to tear my esophagus.
 

It’s a relief.
 

“You’re a foolish child,” Friday tells me, handing me a glass of sweet tea. “You shoulda done tol’ me ‘bout all this nonsense back when it happened. I get it, though. I do. Sometimes the only thing that can fix things is time, and you gotta just get there on yo’ own. Ain’t a journey that other people can take for you. Or even ride along on.”

I don’t have anything to say to that. I don’t talk about my emotions easily. There’s always been this block inside me, this insurmountable wall that I can never overcome. Climbing the wall or trying to knock it down has always been a futile task. Now that I seem to have managed it, I’m content to take things slowly, one step at a time.
 

“You and him were never meant to stay here, Coralie. You was both meant to leave and see what was what out in the world. The circumstances for you both leaving were the worst kind, but it was your fate. And now fate has brought you both back here again to heal your wounds.”

“Callan’s wounds are too fresh. They’re going to take a long time to heal.”