Calico

by Callie Hart

  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.

  I’m suddenly so exhausted. My bones feel heavy inside my body, pulling me down into the mattress, refusing to let me move. Lying down is the worst idea I’ve had in a long time, but I can’t seem to muster up the energy to care. Callan’s out flirting with a girl in a bar or he’s sitting on a bench talking to his black-rimmed glasses wearing, blogger girlfriend on his cellphone, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Nor is there anything I should want to do about it.

  Fuck him. Fuck him for coming back here. Fuck him for hurting and loving me, and looking so damn perfect, and for making me feel things I don’t want to feel.

  And fuck me for what I did, too.

  ******

  CALLAN

  My brain feels like it’s been pickled in alcohol. Friday was not impressed by my behavior at dinner, but then again I don’t think she was impressed with any of us. She cursed under her breath as she got up and ladled gumbo into plastic Tupperware containers following Coralie’s exit from the house.

  “Here. Take this. For the road,” she told me, shoving a container into my hands, and then a larger one into Shane’s. “Y’all can’t even have a civil conversation in my household, then you can leave until you’ve mastered the art of social etiquette.” She then unceremoniously booted myself, Shane and Tina out on the sidewalk, hmmphing at us as she slammed her front door, and that was the last we saw of her. Five hours have passed since then. And those five hours have been filled with Tina screaming at me for being an asshole, Shane bundling Tina into their car and telling her to go home, and then Shane and me drinking our faces off at some new, fancy bar full of kids that wasn’t here when I left town last.

  “Are you sure you want to go home now?” I ask, prodding Shane in the gut with my container of cold gumbo. We’re standing at the end of the driveway to my house, swaying like limp stalks of corn. “You’re wasted. Tina’s gonna kill you.”

  “Tina won’t kill me. She’ll—” He hiccups. “She’ll kill you when she sees you next. She’s well aware that I know no better. Can’t be trusted, she says.”

  “Hmm. Well, you’ll forgive me if—I don’t rush to hang out with your wife between now and the moment I leave this Podunk town then.”

  “I get it.” Shane belches, thumping his chest with a clenched fist. “If I were you, I wouldn’t either. So. What are you going to do about…?” Angling his head toward next door, he waggles his eyebrows. “Y’know. Coralie Taylor, and the whole, don’t ever speak to me again thing?”

  “She didn’t say I couldn’t ever speak to her again.”

  “She didn’t need to. It was pretty damn obvious, Cal. She’d rather stick hot pokers into her eyes than have another chit chat with you, from the looks on her face when she was running the hell away from you.”

  He’s right, and I hate it. God, my eyes are stinging like crazy. I’m so drunk and so tired, and the enormity of the day keeps threatening to take me out at the knees. If I let it, I’ll be smashing every single stick of furniture inside the house as soon as I walk through the door, and I don’t want that. I don’t want to get angry and violent, just because seeing Coralie for the first time in so long didn’t go as I’d hoped. It went precisely as I expected, and that, well…

  She gets to be mad at me. She gets to be furious. Publishing that photo was a real dick move on my part. “You’d better get back to that pregnant wife of yours before she sends out a search party, baying for my blood,” I say, clapping Shane on the arm. He tugs me into a hug, jabs the knuckle of his index finger into my ribs, and then he walks off down the street, laughing quietly under his breath.

  When I get to the front door, I find it open an inch.

  The hell? After living in New York for so long, I don’t make the mistake of leaving the front door open. I just don’t. I’m practically OCD about it at my loft space, which makes the fact that this door is unlocked highly irregular. And worrying. When I was a kid, I used to play baseball, just for fun. I used to take one of Mom’s hessian shopping bags down to the bottom of the garden and collect all of the bitter cooking apples that had fallen from the trees there, and then Dad and I used to stand on the narrow boat dock at the end of our yard. He would lob the apples up into the air, and I would hit them, barking out snatches of laughter as the softened fruit exploded every time the cedar wood of my bat connected with them. The river that runs through Port Royal, snaking its way around the back of the houses on our street, would be littered with chunks of apple, and Dad would have this look on his face, like he figured he was the greatest father on the face of the fucking planet. The air would be full of sugar and sunlight, and I’d think maybe that he wouldn’t leave after all.

  He did, though. He left. I never hit apples out onto the river again, though I kept the baseball bat. As the man of the house, I knew I had to protect my mother; I kept the bat stashed in the narrow gap between the front door frame and the bookcase in the hallway, which is where it still lives, gathering dust.

  I reach for it now, curling my fingers around the age worn wood, scanning the inky blackness with unfocused eyes. I can’t see shit. I’m fairly fucking drunk, and try as I might I cant seem to get my vision to adjust to the dark. Turning on a light could be a fatal decision, though. If someone’s lurking out there, waiting for me to stumble past them so they can smash a lamp over my head, the last thing I want to do is help them out by showing them exactly where I am.

  God. Why did I have to get broken into tonight of all nights? I’m going to be raging mad and hung over in the morning. I’ll probably be up for a fight then. Now, I feel like I’m about to pass out at the foot of the stairs. I manage to plant one foot in front of the other as I crash around the lower level of the house, searching for intruders. Whoever has broken in is either seriously nimble and silent as a ninja, or they’re not down here. Each room is emptier than the next.

  Second floor it is, then. I try not to make any noise as I tiptoe up the stairs, but the old wood creaks with each and every step. The bathroom window is still tightly sealed closed. I’m beginning to suspect that the wind somehow blew the front door open (highly unlikely), but then I see my toothbrush in the toilet bowl and I know someone’s been in here. Someone with a perverse sense of humor.

  Fuckers.

  I lift the bat high over my head, ready to go to town on whoever I find in my bedroom, but when I kick open the door, I immediately recognize the small, balled up human being in the middle of my bed. I’ve found her this way so many times before, back when we were teenagers.

  The toothbrush makes sense now.

  I made enough noise to wake the dead when I belted the door open just now, and yet Coralie sleeps on, unaware that I’ve been stalking around the house like a madman for the past ten minutes. I lower the bat, feeling the tension fizzing in my veins a second ago, melt away to be replaced by a strange, hollow feeling.

  Coralie is lying on my bed. Why? Wh
y the fuck is she lying on my bed? She screamed at me at dinner, ran out of the house like I was the devil incarnate and she couldn’t wait to get away from me. And now, she’s let herself into my place and she’s climbed up onto my bed and fallen asleep, like it’s the most normal thing in the world? There have been times back in New York, or Cambodia, or Iceland, or wherever I seem to find myself in the world, where I’ve returned back to my bed and wished I’d opened the door and found her like this. I was shooting pictures in Zimbabwe for a Time Magazine piece once; I’d had the worst fucking day, held up at gunpoint while Carl, the journalist’s car was ransacked and then firebombed. Carl and I were forced to stand on the side of the dirt road and watch as our only means of transportation went up in flames. We’d kept our mouths shut. I hadn’t made a peep when our attackers had ripped the camera from around my neck and passed it around their group, holding the viewfinder up to their faces cautiously, as though they expected to see awful, magical things through the glass. In some countries the camera would have been smashed on the ground, but not in Africa. Everything’s worth something in Africa. I knew I’d be able to buy the Canon back at the local market in a couple of days’ time if I held my tongue, so I did. Carl and I had to trek eighteen miles back to our basecamp in the blistering heat. By the time we got back to the run down hotel we were quartered at, I was too exhausted and miserable to even walk through the door into my room.

  I knew she wasn’t going to be there. I knew she wasn’t, and yet a part of me hoped somehow, impossibly, she would be. I didn’t want to walk through the door and realize that I was alone, still without her, and so I’d stood in the hallway for three hours with my forehead pressed against the peeling paintwork, and I’d tried to breathe through the pain.