by Callie Hart
Coming back to Port Royal has been awful thus far, but this moment right here? This is one of the worst moments of my whole life. Because Callan is right. We joined our fates together so long ago, fused our lives together in such an irrevocable way, and I know there’s no way I’ll ever recover from it. I can’t allow myself to be with him, and so I know I’m destined to feel like every relationship I embark upon is a half measure. A compromise. A shadow of what it could be if I were with him. I’ll never be able to give my heart to anyone else, because Callan Cross still has it and he doesn’t seem willing to give it back any time soon.
“Just let it go, okay. You and I both know there’s very little point in rehashing this. It doesn’t get either of us anywhere,” I tell him.
“Bullshit. It would get me very far. And having a five minute conversation with me would iron out a few kinks in your life, too, I’m sure.”
“We’re beyond five minutes, Cal. We’re beyond all of this. You should never have come back to Port Royal in the first place. You hated my father just as much as I did. I never thought in a million years you’d come back for this.”
Callan’s face goes blank for a second. He straightens up, pushing off of the car, finally moving out of the way. Taking a step back, he shoves his hands into his pockets. “I needed you when my mother died, Coralie. I could have used you then. So, yeah. I guess I figured I’d be here for you, and if you needed me I’d be close by. I didn’t come here to pay my respects to your father. I came here for you.”
He removes his hand from his pocket, and he holds something out to me. “My number. I know you’re mad right now, but this place…this place does something to you, same as it does something to me. You’re going to need me at some point, when the weight of all our history presses in on you and you feel like you can’t breathe. When that happens, you should call me. Even if it is just so you can scream at me.”
I stare down at the rectangle of white card, not really seeing it all that clearly through my blurred vision. I don’t know how, but tears have crept up on me. I always planned on being here when Jo died. I always knew I’d be around for Callan, that I would hold his hand and carry as much of his pain as I could. It felt like my heart had been ripped straight out of my chest when I heard that she’d gone. I knew how badly I’d let her down. For weeks I thought about coming back here. The idea that Callan was suffering was almost too much to bear. But I was suffering, too.
I look away, clenching my jaw. Callan sighs heavily. He places the business card bearing his number under the windshield wiper of the rental. “Be careful in that thing, bluebird,” Callan whispers. “You never could drive stick.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
CALLAN
The Rule Of Thirds
THEN
“The rule of thirds is all about perspective. You can’t just slap the focus of your image right in the center. Not if you want a dynamic picture. You have to adhere to the rule of thirds. Composition is…whoa! It’s everything.” I stumble, manage to right myself, and then take a swig from the warm bottle I’m clinging to fiercely in my right hand. The beer inside the bottle is warm, too. Tastes stale and old. Next to me, Shane teeters as he tries to tightrope walk along the butt of the curb, grinning like a fucking moron.
“If you say so man.” He gives me a thumbs up.
“It’s true. If you angle the object or focal feature of the image down and slightly off to the right or the left, it gives the photograph—” I pause to burp. “Gives it…energy. Interest. Tension.”
“Oh, and you know all about tension, right? Of the sexual kind. Man, did you see how Tara McFee was giving you the come-fuck-me eyes earlier. I fucking hate you so much, you asshole. Her tits are, like, ridiculous.”
“So is her hair,” I counter. “She looks like she stuck her finger into a power outlet.”
“Who gives a fuck about her hair, Cal? You’d be too busy suffocating in those double Ds of hers to notice anything going on above her neck.”
I laugh at this, because I suppose it’s true. Tara McFee’s tits really are immense. For some reason, I didn’t care to stick around at the party and try and relieve her of her bra, though. I spent ninety percent of the night watching the door, waiting for someone else to enter. The little mouse from the library. I’m not all that surprised that she never showed, though. I’ve been aware of her existence for the past few years now, but I’ve never seen her out in social situations. She’s always sitting quietly somewhere by herself, head down, scribbling or studying. Usually both. I’ve caught a few of her drawings over her shoulder when I’ve been in the library. She’d never know it, of course. She’d never know that I think that she’s pretty talented. She likes to draw birds.
We continue walking, passing the beer back and forth between us until it’s gone, and then Shane throws the bottle down the street. He yelps when it smashes, sending shards of broken glass skittering like thousands of rough cut diamonds over the blacktop. We run—or amble drunkenly—down Main, laughing louder than is socially acceptable at three o-clock in the morning, and then we’re only four blocks from home.
Mom’s bedroom light is on.
“Fuck.” I dig my fingers into the side of my face, not knowing why it feels good, or why it seems to stem the panic I’m feeling right now. I’m about to get my ass kicked. “I’m about to get my ass kicked,” I tell Shane.
He pulls an awkward face, grimacing at me. “Damn, dude. Sorry. Sucks to be you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I hope your mom’s awake too, and she gets out the belt.”
Shane laughs, open-mouthed. Slapping me on the shoulder, he winks at me. “She’s been taking melatonin the past few months. Goes to bed at ten and doesn’t wake up ‘til morning. I could have a rock concert in the living room right now and she’d be upstairs, snoring like a log.”
“Screw you.”
“Hater.”
Shane leaves, and I take a moment to smell my own breath before I enter the house: it’s bad. Even if I had mints or gum, which I don’t, there would be no masking the smell of booze on me. Inside the house, I can hear Mom’s TV in her bedroom rumbling quietly. The back kitchen light is on, and a half-eaten microwave meal is sitting on the counter with a fork standing upright out of the hardened lasagna that remains inside the plastic tray. An empty coffee cup sits in the sink.
Mom’s shift rotation at the hospital gets her in late at the moment. She normally walks through the door at midnight and heats something up in the microwave, since she won’t have had chance to eat all day. The coffee isn’t part of her normal routine, though. She must have wanted to get some caffeine flowing through her veins so she could stay awake. This does not bode well for me. I pull the fork out of the lasagna and place it beside the cup in the sink. The microwave meal goes into the trash.
Upstairs, Mom’s door is wide open, and the woman herself is sprawled out on her bed, still wearing her blue scrubs, TV remote loosely grasped in one hand. Saturday Night Live is repeating on the screen even though it’s Thursday. She stirs when I tiptoe into the room and turn off the television, but she doesn’t wake up. Thank god. I’ll get a grilling in the morning no doubt, but for now she has no idea what time I got back, or that I’m freaking wasted.
I dab some toothpaste onto my toothbrush and head into my bedroom, trying to brush quietly—the bristles scrubbing back and forth on my teeth sound like they’re loud enough to wake the dead. I’m trying to yank the chain on my blind with my left hand, the black material lowering lop-sided and uneven, when I notice the small, curled up form of the girl sleeping on the porch roof opposite my bedroom.
The roof in question—the narrow, three-foot wide area of flat bitumen on top of the ground floor bay window next door—is barely big enough to accommodate the sleeping girl. She’s covered with a thin blanket, arms wrapped around her body, knees drawn up right underneath her chin. In the dark, with so little light from the moon, I can barely make out her features, though her lips look blue. I’m re
minded of an illustration I saw once when I was a kid. Snow White, surrounded by seven sinister-looking dwarves. I was sure, when I was seven years old, that those dwarves meant to do Snow White harm.
I put down my toothbrush on my desk, use both hands to pull up the stiff sash window, and then I lean into the night and spit out the toothpaste I’m holding in my mouth.
“Hey. Hey, Coralie.” I lean out of the window a little further, the windowsill digging into my stomach, making me feel a little sick. I’m still so full of beer. God, I’m gonna feel like death tomorrow. “Coralie Taylor!” I hiss, leaning even further out of the window. If she doesn’t wake up soon, I’m gonna end up vomiting down the side of the damn building. She remains curled into a ball, wrapped in the pale green, thin blanket, despite me calling her name.
I reel myself back in through the window and grab a couple of pencils off my desk. I’ve been playing basketball for four years now and I’m pretty fucking good at it. However, thanks to all the alcohol sloshing around my insides right now, my aim seems to be a little off when I throw the first pencil; it hits the guttering below the narrow roof and bounces off, falling to earth and disappearing into the jungle of rhododendron bushes below.
“Shit.”
I try again, and this time I hit Coralie right on the arm. She shoots upright, gasping, hands pulling at the green blanket, putting it tight around herself. I’ve never seen anyone look so panicked. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Fuck, sorry. Coralie, hey, it’s okay. It’s only me. It’s Callan.”
Across the gap between our two houses, Coralie narrows her eyes at me, squinting in the dark. “Callan? What are you doing?”
“What are you doing? You could roll off that roof in your sleep.”
“I won’t. Or at least I haven’t yet.” She looks exhausted. There are dark circles underneath her eyes, and…and her lip is split. Now that my eyes have adjusted to the night a little, I can see her features much clearer, in fact, and it looks…it looks as though there’s a deep purple bruise flowering on the right hand side of her jaw.
“What happened to you? To your face?”
Coralie covers her jaw with one hand, looking away. “Oh. Yeah. I fell off my bike.”
My brain has been cloudy up until this point, but for some strange reason I can now feel everything sharpening, coming into focus, the alcohol burning away in my system. “Your bike? I’ve never seen you riding a bike.”
She smiles. “I’m sure there’s plenty you don’t see, Callan Cross. How was your party?”
“Ridiculous,” I say, remembering Tara McFee’s tits. “And pointless, and juvenile. I stayed too late. You didn’t come.”
“I wanted to,” she whispers. I can barely hear her. Four blocks away, a single car rips down Main, the exhaust backfiring like a gunshot. I can hardly hear Coralie Taylor’s voice.
“You should get back inside. Get into bed,” I tell her.
She picks at the bitumen on the roof beneath her, not looking at me. “I have nightmares when I sleep in there.”
“Then you should come and sleep in my bed. I’ll keep my hands to myself, I swear.” I wink at her, and her eyes dart to mine, round like saucers. “Don’t worry. I’m joking,” I say.
She breathes out heavily. “Good.”
“I’m coming to get you in the morning, though, Coralie. I’m going to knock on your front door, and I’m going to walk you to school.”
“Oh, god, please…don’t. That would be very bad.” She looks frightened all of a sudden.
“Why not?
“Because my father…he doesn’t like people coming to the house. Especially boys.”
“I’m your neighbor, though.”
“Still. He hates strangers over here. He’s protective.”
“Of you?”
She gives me a strange, strange look. “Of everything. Me. The house. Everything inside it. I’m not allowed to have people over here.”
“Not ever?”
“No. Not ever.”
“All right. I won’t knock. But I’ll be waiting outside my place for you at eight. You gonna walk with me?”
She thinks about this for a second. Eventually, she nods. “Just don’t come to the house.”
“I won’t, I promise.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to leave my window open. If you want to come and sleep in my bed after all, just call me. I don’t mind crashing out on the floor.”
Coralie blinks at me some more. I can’t tell if she’s considering accepting this offer, or if she’s wondering how I can be so sleazy and persistent. “I’m sure I’ll be fine right here,” she says slowly, her voice wavering.
“Well. Like I said. If you change your mind…”
I lean back in, and I stand there, watching her for a second. She seems so breakable, sitting there all huddled up like that. I don’t like it. For the past few years, I’ve hung around with girls at school, driven by this powerful desire to have them stick their hands down my pants. The desire that drives me now isn’t that, though. I’m caught off guard by how badly I want to take care of this pale, interesting girl, perched on the rooftop opposite my bedroom.
She’s like the rarest of birds, endangered and at risk of expiration, and I want to fold my body around hers in order to protect it, not to glean some sort of sexual gratification from it. It’s not as though she isn’t pretty; she has this strange, ethereal quality to her that makes me feel a little dizzy. If I’m honest, that could actually be the beer, but whatever. I’d like to kiss her. I’d like to make sure she’s safe even more, though.
I drag my Nirvana t-shirt off over my head and discard it on the floor, and then the jeans come off, too. I collapse onto my bed, on top of the sheets, wondering if I’ll find a bruised, fragile butterfly curled up into a ball next to me when I wake.
I don’t.
CHAPTER NINE
CORALIE
Gumbo
NOW
Sheriff Mason is a woman, which, for some reason, surprises me. I was expecting an old, pot-bellied guy with a grand, waxed moustache and a cowboy hat. Instead, Amanda Mason is a thirty something blonde, thin as a rail, with a strangely shaped birthmark on her face, below her right cheek bone—it kind of looks like a tiny postage stamp.
“We’re ruling suicide, yes. We were planning on waiting until after the funeral, though. Doubt Sam’ll dig him up or anything. Doesn’t seem like he’d have the stomach for it.”
I very much doubt Sam has the stomach for it, either. I smile at Mason, tapping my fingers against the paperwork I need to give to the county morgue in order for them to release my father’s body. “Thank you, Sheriff. I know it’s a little underhanded, but I appreciate it. I’m sure my father does, too.”
She gives me a saccharine sweet smile, pursing her lips. “Frankly, Coralie, I didn’t care all that much for your father. He made a pretty good show of church-going and helping in the community, but I know a bad soul when I see one. Call it southern intuition. And people talk, of course. Talk about how he treated you and your momma. A man that hits a woman loses the right to call himself so, if you ask me. Still. I don’t want any headaches. And people should be buried where they wanna be buried, regardless of how they end up dead. It ain’t up to us to judge people in this life. That’ll happen on the other side, no doubt, when we meet our maker.”
It’s strange to hear someone so young talking about God. I guess I’ve been away for so long now that I forget it’s more common than not for people to be believers around these parts. Seems so…unfashionable.
I leave the station, still feeling brutalized by my run-in with Callan. The county morgue is already closed for the day. I can’t take the paperwork over there without being able to hand it to someone in person apparently, and I don’t really feel like going back to my hotel, so I drive the Porsche over to Friday’s place. It feels dangerous. Callan’s place is right across the street, as is my old home; being within a mile vicinity of either house feels like I’m inviting tro
uble and pain into my life, but I need to see her. She’s the only person capable of helping me get a grip on my life. It feels as though everything is spinning hectically out of control, and if I don’t right my trajectory now, then I’ll be a wreck by the end of the week.
When she opens her front door, Friday is wearing a huge tent-like housecoat and a pair of old slippers, hair in huge curlers, and she’s brandishing a spatula in her hand. She holds it out to me. “Perfect. You stir while I finish off the bread, child.”
She had no idea I was coming, of course, but once again this is the Port Royal way—someone will always show up for dinner if you make enough food. In the kitchen, the small, rectangle dining table I used to eat at as a child is already set for five people. “Expecting a big party tonight, Friday?” I ask. She steers me toward a huge pot of gumbo, which smells incredible.
“Sure I am. You one of them.”
I don’t really feel like sticking around if other people will be showing up, but then again some company might be just what I need. It’s taking everything I’ve got to not go drink myself into a stupor back in my sterile king sized bed right now.
“Can you still make that like I taught you, baby girl?” Friday asks.
I make a mmming sound, inhaling the warm, spicy, delicious smells coming off the large vat of stew on the hot plate. “I sure can. Not as often as I’d like, though. My boyfriend, Ben, he doesn’t like spicy food. Gives him indigestion.”