Calico (7 page)

“I’ll make it happen,” I say, grinning. “You know me.”

“Yeah. I do. That’s what I’m worried about.”

I cuff him on the shoulder, pulling a face. “Fuck you, man. Come on. Give me a hug. You know you want to.”

Shane can’t stay mad at me for long. Try though he might, once we’re face-to-face, he’s never managed more than five minutes, max. He groans, opening up his arms, giving me a tired eye roll as I step in and embrace him, clapping him on the back.
 

“You smell like turps, Shane.”

“
You
smell like women’s perfume. What d’you do? Take a bath in that shit?”

“It’s not women’s perfume. It’s very expensive, manly cologne. It says
homme
on the bottle and everything.”

“You wore that shit in high school and you’d have gotten the shit beaten out of you.”

Shane tries to pull away—I’m surprised he hasn’t already—but I hold onto him tight. “Have you forgiven me yet?”

“No. Get the fuck off me, man.”

“Not until you forgive me.”

He jabs me in the side. “And here I was thinking you were a male in his late twenties, and it turns out you’re a twelve-year-old girl after all. I’m feeling pretty foolish right now, Cross. You should be, too.”

“Say it. Say it and I’ll let you go.”

“Urgh, all right! I forgive you. I shouldn’t, but I do. Tina’s gonna kick you in the balls if she sees you in town, man. I hope you can still run fast, because she’s nowhere near as lenient as me.”

I let Shane go, slapping him on the back. “I know, I know. I still have a scar from when she threw that lava lamp at me back in freshman year.” Tina and Shane have been together for approximately forever. I can’t remember a time when they weren’t a couple. She was permanently mad at me all throughout high school for leading Shane astray. On one particular occasion, he got so high he started tripping out and she had to leave her orchestra recital to come and get him before his parents drove by and saw him passed out on the verge of Main Street with his jeans around his ankles. I’d helped her carry him inside his place and gotten him up the stairs to his bed, which is where she’d grabbed hold of the offending lava lamp and tossed it at my head. Missed, thank god, but the shattering glass had rained down on me and left a few marks that I still carry to this day.
 

Shane picks up a box beside the counter and jerks his head toward the back, motioning that I should follow him. As we make our way out back, I’m hit with a succession of memories—memories of long, sweaty, hot summers working here with Shane in order to make some extra money for new lenses and disposable cameras. The smell of the place drags me back in time, to days of getting up at five am and hauling lumber, days of getting home at eight to find my mother on the floor of the bathroom, no one there to help her up.
 

And countless days of Coralie.

Summer with Coralie was always so much magic and glory, and pain and fear.
 

“Have you seen her yet?” Shane asks, dropping the box with a thud at his feet. He points to a stack of fresh cut pine, and I take off my shirt, falling easily into our routine from so many years ago. Lift, measure, saw, stack. Over and over.
 

“Seen who?” I feign ignorance. I like to think I’m not that predictable. In New York, the women I fuck undoubtedly think I’m deliciously mysterious and strange, but sadly that’s not the case back in Port Royal and with Shane. Shane knows how to read me like he knows how to read the odds at any racetrack or betting hole. He’s a goddamn professional.
 

He gives me a look that threatens violence. “You’re pathetic,” he tells me.
 

“No. No, I haven’t seen her. Not yet.”

“And?” He passes me a two by four and I take it from him.
 

“And I’m thinking about it. I don’t know yet.” Don’t know where I’ll see her. Don’t know what I’ll say. Don’t know if running away back to New York would be for the better or for the worse. “There are a lot of factors at play, here.” I buzz the plank of wood in half, holding the two together to make sure they’re even, and then I place both of them on the huge stack by the open double door leading out onto the loading dock. Shane is staring at me like I’m a space alien when I turn around. “What?”

“You’ve had over ten years to figure this shit out, Cross. You should know exactly what’s up by now. You were in love with her back then. You’re in love with her now. Simple.”

I hate that word. It makes me break out in hives and Shane knows it. “It’s not that simple. You know how she feels about me. It’s not like I can go hunt her down, give her a high five, ask her what’s up and all will be forgiven.”

“I know how she felt about you twelve years ago,” Shane says. “And yeah, she was mad at you. But she still
loved
you. You can’t just turn that shit off. You should never have let her leave.”

I stop milling the piece of wood in my hands, grinding my teeth together. I don’t get mad about many things, but the situation with Coralie…That’s one of the only things that will make my blood boil. Shane’s a friend, a fantastic, awesome, kick ass friend who’s put up with my shit far longer than he ever should have had to, but he has no idea what he’s talking about right now. I want to chew him out and give him hell, but like I said: he’s already put up with an unreasonable amount of shit from me. I need to bite my tongue. Behind me, he sighs.
 

“Okay. I’m going to assume from your complete and utter silence that you wanna tear me a new asshole right now, but haven’t you thought about it, Cal? Haven’t you thought about what your life would be like right now if you hadn’t let her leave that night?”

“Of course I have.”

“And? Wouldn’t it have been worth the extra fight?”

I stay silent, thinking about how
much
fight it would have taken to get her to stay. It would have been awful. It would have been brutal. I would have had to crawl on hand and knee, apologize until I ran out of breath, I would have needed to swallow my pride and begged. Eventually she would have changed her mind. She would have stayed. Shane doesn’t know anything about what happened that night, though. And he has no idea what it would have been like for the both of us if Coralie had remained behind in Port Royal. It wouldn’t have been sweet smelling roses and happily ever after, that’s for sure.
 

I take a deep breath, throwing aside more wood. “There was nothing to be done, man. It went how it was supposed to go. I fucked up, and she got out. The end.”

He says nothing, but I’m sure he disagrees with me. We continue to work in silence, and after a couple of minutes Shane begins to hum. This is a peace offering from him, an apology in a way. The song is Journey, Don’t Stop Believing—the song we would blast out of our car speakers, belt out at the top of our lungs whenever we were driving anywhere. He gets through the first verse and the chorus before I give in and join him.
 

Eventually our humming turns to lyrics, and then we’re belting out the song together, screaming our way through the final chorus and playing air guitar for absolutely no reason. Once we reach the end of the song, Shane tosses my shirt at me, laughing.

“Get dressed, you asshole. I’m sick of staring at your washboard abs. How the fuck does a photographer even look like that anyway?”

“It’s called working out, my friend. You should try it sometime.”

“I haul wood and build shit all day. I should be ripped if that’s your argument.”

I grunt, conceding. “Maybe you should stop eating double cheeseburgers every single meal then. And subbing out some of the six pack you drink every night with water would undoubtedly be a wise move, as well.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “I’m a married man now. Isn’t that punishment enough in my life?”

I nod, laughing, as I slide my t-shirt back on. “Yeah, well I guess you’re gonna have to put up with the keg you’re carrying around, then, friend. Let me know if you wanna come for a run sometimes. I’ll go slow for you.”
 

Shane growls at the back of his throat, shaking his head. “Whatever, man. How about this? I’ll come for a run with you when you figure out your shit with Coralie.” He winks at me, making a gun out of his hand and pointing it at my head. “I won’t rush out and buy myself some new sneakers, I guess, huh?”

CHAPTER SIX

CORALIE
 

Red Tape

NOW

Ben’s left three messages on my cell phone since I arrived in Port Royal. I keep staring at the blinking icon in the top right hand corner of my phone’s screen, feeling sick with each passing second. For the past couple of years, Ben’s been there for me. Kind of. He’s encouraged me as best he can, but he’s a real guy’s guy. He doesn’t know how to talk about emotions or how he’s feeling. I met him just after I’d recovered from my eating disorder, and my therapist had said he needed to know how delicate I was. Ben hadn’t been all that great at listening when I’d stumbled over the words, trying to explain some of what had happened to me in my father’s house. I hadn’t told him everything, not even close, but I told him enough. He was awkward, angry and quiet, and then he was just…nothing. He pretended like I’d never really said anything about it at all. At the time, I was kind of glad. If Ben pretended like it never had happened, then I could pretend it had never happened, too.

He didn’t even bring up how going back home was affecting my mental state, though, and that seems like a question a normal person would have asked. Ever since I drove through the town limits of Port Royal I haven’t been able to think about him without feeling like there’s a pressing weight sitting on my chest, though. I didn’t feel like this back in LA. I’ve been aware of that fact since the sensation arrived, this inability to breathe properly, and I’ve been wracking my brain ever since, trying to figure out what I
was
feeling. It took me a while to figure out that I wasn’t feeling anything at all, and that only made my chest tighter. So I haven’t listened to Ben’s messages.
 

I’m sure he’s getting a little worried by now. I said I would speak to him when I arrived at my hotel, but instead I drank the mini bar dry and fell asleep in a bathtub full of cold water. I woke up shivering and almost blue at one in the morning, and then spent the next hour trying to get warm.
 

I’m pretty fucked up. I’ve always known this, of course, but being fucked up never really seemed like an option when I was at home with Ben. It seemed incredibly antisocial to be drinking excessively, watching porn, and making myself throw up at random intervals during the week. I’ve been on my best behavior the past few years, and I didn’t even realize I was trying so hard.
 

Now that I’m on my own, it doesn’t seem so unreasonable to be a complete mess. It seems like my natural state, and every part of me wants to revert to it.
 

I sit up straighter, tugging on the hem of my tight pencil skirt, trying to yank it down my legs, make it longer somehow, as I wait for Ezra Mendel. If it had been up to me, I would have gone to see John Bickerdale first, the funeral director dealing with my father’s burial, but there wasn’t much point. Until I’ve spoken with my father’s lawyer, how am I supposed to know if he had a financial plan in place for when he died? Stupid for me to be forking out thousands of dollars for a coffin and for the funeral director’s fees if he had some sort of policy in place. So here I am. Sweating. Hung over. Feeling like the sun is about to come crashing down into the earth, and I have no means of escaping my fate.
 

Ezra finally enters the cramped office I’ve been sitting in for the last fifteen minutes, paper coffee cup in one hand and a copy of the New York Times in the other. Occasionally Ezra would come to the house to see my father—I guess, if it’s at all possible for anyone to have been friends with my father, then that’s what Ezra was—and he would bring strange baked goods his wife had made. My father would toss them in the trash the second the man had left the building. He’s aged a lot since I saw him last, though he’s still wearing the same tiny spectacles with the wire frames, and he still has far too much wiry, wild hair, though most of it has turned white now instead of the steel gray I remember.
 

“Coralie. So lovely to see you. Obviously, it would have been far nicer under less sorry circumstances, but…”

I wave off his sentimentality. “It’s okay. We don’t need to do that.” He, along with everyone else in Port Royal, must know exactly what I thought of my father. That there was no love lost between us. He can’t possibly think for a second that I’m in mourning for the old man. Ezra gives me a perfunctory nod, pouting a little.
 

“Of course. Well, be that as it may, it’s still a pleasure to lay eyes on you again. You’ve grown into a beautiful young woman.”

I say nothing. It’s not a pleasure to see him. Back when my father would lay a belt buckle against my back, breaking the skin, back when I was covered in bruises and barely able to walk, Ezra would
lay eyes
on my injuries and he never said a word.
 

“I can see you’ve developed your father’s stoicism, Coralie,” Ezra muses. “I don’t think I’ll ever meet another person capable of hiding their feelings so well. He was a bit of a closed book, your old man.”

“He hated everybody,” I say evenly. “He just never wanted them to know. He was constantly trying to mask his disdain.”

Ezra gives me that look. The one that means he’s trying to figure out if I’m being rude. If I mean that my father hated
him
. My father never said either way, but judging from his black mood whenever the man in front of me paid a visit, I’m willing to bet he did.

Ezra blinks, and then looks away. “All right. Well, I’m sure you have a lot on your mind at the moment, Ms. Taylor. You must have an awful lot to organize in advance for your father’s memorial. How about we make this short and sweet?”

“That would be perfect.”