Calico (3 page)

Callan was always into cars. Fifteen years ago, he would have loved driving this thing. Jeez, I mean he probably actually has one of his own now. Every once in a while, someone will say his name. They’ll read an article about him and see that we’re from the same tiny town in South Carolina, and they’ll comment on what a strange coincidence it is. Do I know him? Did we hang out when we were kids? Sometimes I’ll tell them the truth. Sometimes I’ll admit to knowing him, maybe even say, ‘yes, we were actually next door neighbors, if you can believe that.’ Most of the time, I shake my head and tell them, no. I have no idea who he is. It’s easier that way. It’s better.
 

******

“Coralie Taylor? Is…is that you, child? Well blow me down. You’d better not be plannin’ on walkin’ past my house and not comin’ in to say hello. I know you was raised with manners, girl.”
 

Friday Beauchamp was my sometimes nanny when I was a kid. She was the only other woman my father would let inside the house; he wasn’t stupid enough to ever go up against Friday. She was big even back then, the size of a doublewide trailer, my dad would say, and now she’s even bigger. Her temper was the stuff of legends. She tanned my backside raw so many times that I almost forewent sitting down altogether for an entire year.
 

Friday may have been tough on me, but she was also generous and kind when I needed it. When I was so tired I could barely stand. When my body hurt so badly I just wanted to die. She would clean up my cuts and patch me back together time and time again, and she would beg me to stay with her in her modest little house, and I would cry and tell her that I wished I could, and then I would go home anyway.
 

She knows I would never come back here to this place and not come to see her. She knows I was raised with manners, because
she
instilled them in me. I let her fold me into her embrace, and the smell of rosewater and hair pomade floods my senses, bringing back a swathe of memories, painful and sweet, wonderful and terrible all at the same time. It’s enough to bring tears to my eyes. She pats the back of my head, making cooing noises.
 

“If you were anyone else, child, I’d say I was sorry for your loss,” she tells me. “I know better, though.”

“Yeah. It’s hard, I guess.” I say bland things like this all the time when I tell people my father died. It seems like it’s expected of me, and I hate disappointing people.
 

“Bullshit.” Friday leans away from me, holding me at arm’s length so she can get a good look at me. “This ain’t even close to hard. This is the easiest thing in the world. Your daddy died. He was a spiteful old bastard and he deserved every last moment of pain he lived through before he passed. It’s okay to be relieved, Coralie.”

I just nod and
mmhm
and hope she stops talking about him soon. Friday knows my avoidance tactics well enough to read me. She pulls me up the steps that lead to her porch, where a pitcher of sweat tea is already sweating in the shade. Two tall glasses are set out side by side, and a part of me finds this amusing. I’m so used to California now; in Los Angeles you’d never find such an open sign of hospitality. Friday put two glasses out, not because she knew I would be stopping by at some point, but because she knew
someone
would, they always do, and she wanted to be ready to receive her guest.
 

“Sit yourself down, baby girl. I need to hear all about that Hollywood lifestyle of yours.” Friday, despite being such a huge woman, moves with grace as she crosses the porch and sits herself down in one of her white-painted Adirondack chairs. “I know what goes on out there. All those loose morals flying around. All those pretty boys with they bleached white teeth. It’s a wonder a woman can get any work done. You taking commissions from all them A-lister celebrity types, huh?” She says all of this in one breath, before I’ve even had chance to sit myself down.
 

Once I’m confortable, I take a deep breath and start at the beginning. “I don’t live in Hollywood. I live south of the city, right on the ocean. I do take commissions, but I haven’t painted anything for anyone famous yet. And I never go into Hollywood. Even if I did, I wouldn’t be looking at pretty boys with bleached teeth. I have a boyfriend, remember? Ben? I told you about him last time I emailed.”

“
Email
? Baby girl, you know I ain’t reading no email. I can’t work that crazy machine. What’s wrong with a regular letter? The postal service is still running, ain’t it?”

“Yes. Though not very well,” I concede. “Are you still taking your insulin?” Friday’s been diabetic for the past few years. Whenever I find the time to call her and see how she’s doing, she skirts around the topic of her medication. Sitting right in front of her, looking her right in the eye, makes it harder for her to lie or dodge the question.
 

“When I need it, child. I don’t see the need to be pumping that nonsense into my body every five seconds of the day.”

“You’ll get sick if you don’t take it like you’re meant to,” I chide. “You could go blind. Lose your legs. Do you want that?”

“What kind of a backward, hair-brained question is that? And there I was thinking you was smart. Of course I don’t wanna lose my damn legs.”

Friday always grows hostile when you point out the truth. I don’t take offense. “Then start doing what you’re meant to. Your insulin intake wasn’t a suggestion. It was doctor’s orders.”

Friday makes a disgruntled sound, refusing to look at me. She pours out some sweet tea and thrusts the glass at me. “I saw that one yonder coming home earlier.” She points across the street, toward the house I’ve been avoiding looking at. Both houses, in fact. To the left, the Cross household, where Callan grew up, and next to it, the three story building where I existed in the shadows for seventeen years.
 

“He grew again, if that makes any sense to you. The boy never stops growing.”

I blink slowly at the house across the way, trying to understand what Friday is telling me. “Callan?
Callan
came home?”

Friday sighs heavily, shifting in her chair. “Ain’t that what I just said? He rolled up this morning in a terrible piece ‘o’ shit car. Pretty sure there was smoke pouring out from underneath the hood.”

“Callan shouldn’t be here. Callan is in New York.” I know this because I somehow always know where he is. I never mean to notice him so much, but the guy does have social media accounts, and, well, I sometimes look him up.
 

Friday stretches, rolling her shoulders back so that her considerable bust protrudes even further. “Then Callan has a twin brother with a surly gait that I never done knew about when you kids was growing up, because a tall, dark-haired guy walked into that there building five hours ago that looked just like him.”

After the stern telling off I gave myself on the plane about not making myself throw up anymore, it’s funny how badly I want to stick my fingers down my throat all of a sudden. The Klonopin Margo gave me has been nicely dulling the sharp edges off the day thus far, but now it feels as if all the world is in glaring Technicolor and my head is about to split open.
 

“
How
? How did he even know to come back? I don’t understand.” Telling him about my father never even crossed my mind. Callan hated him almost as much as I did. There’s no way he would ever want to come back here and pay his respects. Given our history and every single heartbreaking thing that happened here, him showing up unannounced was the very last thing I was expecting. Jesus Christ, how the hell am I going to deal with this?

Next to me, Friday clears her throat. “I called him after I heard, child, same as I called you. You was thick as thieves growing up. He was your first love. Ain’t no way I wasn’t gonna give him the chance to get his ass down here and support you.”

“Oh my god, Friday, I can’t believe—” I stop myself there. I’m dangerously close to losing my temper and chewing out the old woman, and I’m sure she only thought she was helping. Damn it, though. Callan being here is the last thing I need. I need calm, and quiet, and peace, and the only thing Callan Cross can provide right now is confusion. I take a deep breath and then start over. “Callan and I aren’t friends anymore, Friday. We haven’t been for a very long time. And now he’s come back here, thinking I need him or something, and it’s going to be so awkward. I can’t…I can’t even
look
at him.”

Friday listens to me speak, but I can tell she has something to say from the look on her face. Her lips are pressing tighter and tighter together, turning them white, and her eyebrows are practically fused in the middle. “Just ‘cause you can’t look at him, doesn’t mean he can’t look at you. You know what he did when I told him your daddy was dead?”

“Laughed?”

“No, he did
not
laugh. What’s wrong with you? Lord have mercy.” I stare down at my sweet tea, not saying anything, but Friday prods me with the toe of her slipper. “That boy done broke down in tears, young lady. He may have denied it, but I could hear it in his voice sure as eggs is eggs. Now.” She points her finger at me, shaking it in my face. “When you see him, you make sure you don’t claw his eyes out too quickly, you hear? He might have something he’d like to say to you first.”

I shake my head slowly, feeling a strange, hollow kind of numbness working its way through my insides. “It’s been twelve years, Friday. If either of us had anything to say to one another, it was said a long time ago.”

CHAPTER THREE
 

CALLAN

Ghosts

NOW

The house smells like mothballs. I haven’t been here in over ten years, not since my mother passed, and while I’ve had a cleaner come in once a month to dust and make sure nothing is deteriorating too badly, you can tell as soon as you walk through the door that no one lives here. It’s a shell. A ghost-filled mausoleum. I wanted to sell a while back, but it only sat on the market for three weeks before I freaked out and had the real estate agent pull it from their listings. It felt like…like a betrayal somehow. I knew that as long as Malcolm Taylor was alive, Coralie was never going to come home, but I don’t know. My head would play out these scenes where she came back one day and knocked on the door, finally wanting to see me, and she was faced with a stranger. That wasn’t something I could tolerate. Even from within the vast embrace of a city like New York, it played on my mind that she was out there somewhere, and she may need to use the spare key again to run away and hide in my old bedroom, the same way she did for years when we were teenagers.

There’s a cold, snake-like thing that lives inside me now. It never used to be there. Not back then, when I was with her. No, the frigid, cold, empty thing that lives inside me showed up the day after my mother died. It told me it was pointless to care about people. It told me it was useless to consider what they think or feel or desire out of life. It insisted that other people’s feelings were nothing more than an inconvenience that would hinder my own happiness. It told me to forget all about Coralie. I railed against it for the longest time, but slowly, gradually, I resigned myself to the fact that it was right. Right about everything. I stopped caring about other people’s feelings. I shut myself off from the world and gave them the persona of the great Callan Cross instead. I did everything it wanted me to. Everything bar the last thing. I could never forget about Coralie, the girl next door, no matter how hard I tried. Moreover, I didn’t want to. She is still the one part of my past that I haven’t jettisoned from my life. She’s either a shard of glass under my skin or the only thing that’s keeping me from losing my shit altogether, depending on the day and the time and the place.
 

Right now, she’s the glass.

The day my father left, I was fourteen years old. As I walk into my old house, the first memory I’m hit with is my mother on her hands and knees in the hallway, sobbing uncontrollably with a pair of scissors in her right hand. Her left hand was bleeding all over the freshly buffed floorboards, and her mascara was running down her face in black rivers. I didn’t need to ask her what had happened; they’d been arguing for weeks. Even two stories up, I could hear my father screaming that he didn’t love her anymore. Didn’t want to be with her anymore. Didn’t want
me
anymore. He never hurt her. Not with his fists. His words did enough damage all by themselves.
 

As I walk through the other rooms of the house, more memories fly at me, casting me back in time. My mother teaching me how to play chess at the kitchen table. My father swearing when he burned himself trying to ignite the pilot light on the water heater. Me, prizing up the floorboards by the fireplace in the lounge, hiding money and canisters of undeveloped film there. My father, angry over something and nothing, throwing the first photographs I ever developed by myself into the trashcan. Shoving them right down to the bottom, and then telling me he’d take a belt to my behind if I even
thought
about pulling them out again.

The memories of Coralie don’t start until I get to the second floor of the house and I’m standing outside my mother’s old room. My mother was bedridden the last time I saw Coralie. I was standing outside her room. Mom was sleeping, and Coralie was standing in the hallway, right where I’m standing now, staring at me. I had never nor have I seen since such pain in a person’s eyes.
 

I’d wanted to get up, to go to her, take her in my arms, tell her how sorry I was, but it was too late for that. Coralie had a bag in her hand, and I knew she was leaving. She shook her head at me and that was it. I knew
The End Of Callan Cross’s Life: Part One
was beginning. It took two years for Part Two to come along and crush me once and for all.

Every single stick of furniture inside the house is covered with dustsheets, making oddly shaped poltergeists out of sofas, tables, bookcases and the grandfather clock downstairs. I don’t remove any of them. I won’t be staying long enough to warrant stripping the furniture, after all. The only room I do bother unveiling is my old bedroom. Band posters still hang everywhere. Mom let me glue cork to one of the walls, which is still plastered with ticket stubs from trips to the movies, concerts, art shows, museums…anything I ever went to or saw. My bed is neatly made, sporting the same sheet set I had when I was a teenager—dark blue and simple, though a little faded now. My old football and basketball trophies still clutter up the space on top of my chest of drawers. I’m betting all of my old clothes are still inside there, now probably a little tattered from where the silver fish have gotten in and feasted.