Calico (26 page)

I rock against him, feeling my climax rising in me, threatening to steal my senses again. Callan cups my face with one hand, clenching his jaw. “Stay with me, bluebird. Stay with me.”

I keep my eyes open, watching him as he fucks me furiously. He is a work of art. The missing piece of me. A study in perfection. He tips his head back, his lips parting a little, and I can feel his cock growing so hard inside me. I’m almost certain that being so hard must be actually hurting him, but he shows no signs of discomfort as he slams himself into me over and over again.
 

“Tell me,” he grits out. “Tell me when you’re going to come.”

I would put that into words right now, but I can’t speak. I feel robbed of all language. I moan, nodding my head, telling him what he needs to know with my eyes as the beginnings of my orgasm ripple over me.
 

“Fuck.” Callan picks up his pace, and then the two of us are clinging onto each other, his face buried into my neck as we both come. I gouge my fingernails into his back, barely able to hold on as he hollers, riding out his climax. He pulses inside me, his cock remaining hard, the base still rubbing against my swollen clit as I fall apart.
 

Callan topples onto me, unable to keep his weight off me any longer, and the two of us lay absolutely still, panting, trying to catch our breath.
 

We’re silent for a long time. A heavy calm settles over us, pulling at us, beckoning us to sleep, but neither of us surrender. Callan strokes his hand over my hair in a soft repetitive way that brings tears to my eyes. After a long time, he pulls out of me and lies beside me, watching me as he continues to brush his hand over my head. He must see the tears in my eyes. I don’t mean to be pathetic. I don’t mean to be so emotionally crippled by what just happened, but it’s impossible to avoid. He wants to try and fix our lives now. He wants to try and come up with some plan that means we get to be like this together for the rest of our lives.
 

I need that more than my body needs oxygen to survive, but it can’t happen. Not without him knowing the whole truth. It’s almost as if Callan can read my thoughts. As a silent tear streaks down the side of my face, he threads his arm underneath my head and pulls me onto his chest. He kisses my temple and sighs. “Come on, Coralie,” he whispers into my ear. “This is make or break now, baby girl. Tell me what it is you need to tell me.”

So I do. I take a deep breath, gather every last meager scrap of courage I have, and I tell him. “I didn’t just lose the baby, Callan. My father…he found out I was pregnant. He went crazy. He…he beat me. He hurt me. He hurt me for hours, until…until our baby died. It’s all my fault, Callan. If I had said something to someone sooner, it would never have happened. I’m the reason he died, Callan.
I may as well have killed him myself
.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CORALIE
 

Calico

THEN

I should have known my father would notice how round my belly had grown. I hadn’t expected him to come at me the way he did, though, fists swinging. A month earlier, when I was just three months pregnant, still fairly flat-stomached and hiding my morning sickness well, my art teacher had cornered my father in the grocery store and told him my last assignment in her class had won me a trip to the New York Institute of Art as a potential scholarship student. He hadn’t been able to tell her he wasn’t going to let me go, since the trip was all expenses paid. Callan had just been accepted into Columbia to study photo-journalism, so we were both daydreaming about a life we might conceivably have together outside of Port Royal.

 
The time came for me to go away—I was waiting at the front of the house for the cab that was going to take me to the airport, and I hadn’t noticed Malcolm creeping up on me down the hallway. He’d screamed like a banshee, grabbing me from behind, clamping his hand over my mouth, preventing me from letting out a scream of my own.
 

‘You’re fucking disgusting, you know that?
’ he’d spat into my ear.
“A dirty, lying little slut. You can’t hide things from me, Coralie. You sure as hell weren’t going to be able to hide this.’
He’d dug his clenched fist into my belly, snarling furiously. Through the open front door, I’d seen the yellow taxi pull up along the curbside, ready to take me away, but I wasn’t going to New York anymore. I was going down into the basement, and my father was going to beat me within an inch of my life.

 
Now, it’s dark. I don’t know if that’s because I’m still in the basement, or if it’s because my eyes have swollen shut. Malcolm was pacing for hours earlier, back and forth, back and forth, while I lay out on the bare dirt, barely conscious. Eventually, thankfully, I did pass out. Now that I’ve woken up and I can’t see anything, I can’t tell whether he’s still there or not, just sitting silently, biding his time. I ache everywhere.
 

Less than fifty feet away, Callan’s probably helping his mother cook dinner. Or he’s up in his room, his thick black curtains drawn at the window, a towel stuffed up against the door while he develops some of his pictures. He’s probably thinking about when I get back from my trip, when we’re planning on telling Jo about the baby.

Overhead a floorboard creaks, and I almost jump out of my skin. The low hum of the television crackles to life, and relief takes hold of me. He’s not down here with me. He’s upstairs in the family room, no doubt sitting himself down with a beer in his chair like nothing took place earlier. I strain to open my eyes. They are swollen, almost to the point where I can’t crack them at all, but I manage to part my eyelids wide enough to make out the shape of my father’s workbench in the near pitch darkness. It takes me a while to get myself upright, and then even longer to get to my feet. Sharp, shooting pains fire across my belly, making me double over every time a new cramp arrives. The agony is breathtaking. I count the steps I take before I finally reach the bottom of the stairs up toward the ground floor of the house. There’s a light switch there, which I find easily enough. I’m panicked for a second, assuming my father would have simply removed the light bulb from the fixture in order to punish me further, but when the small room floods with light I’m relieved instead.
 

That is, until I look down at myself and see all of the blood.
 

It’s everywhere, almost black, soaking through my jeans between my legs. On the ground a few feet away, presumably where I was lying a moment ago, a dark crimson patch of it has pooled in the dirt, half dried, half wet still….there’s so much of it. I go to hold my hands up to my face, to cover my mouth so I don’t cry out in horror, but my hands are covered in blood too, my skin mottled bright red and sticky, and that is the final straw. I collapse to the ground, folding over and pressing my forehead against the cool ground as I sob, ropes of saliva and snot running down my face. I clasp my arms around my stomach, knowing now why I’m in so much pain.
 

The baby. The baby is gone.
 

I don’t know how long I lay there. After a while, the pain in my stomach becomes so great that I think it will kill me. I’m happy about it; I want to die more than anything else in the world. I fall asleep. When I wake up, god knows how much later, the pain has gotten even worse but my body has started to feel numb, like my nerve endings are exhausted, unable to register the vast depths and widths of the hurt I’m experiencing.
 

I take off my jeans and my underwear, gripped by the sudden and undeniable need to push. I cry out. I scream and I shout. I beg for my father to call for a doctor.
 
Above me the house is silent. I fall asleep again, exhausted.

The next time I wake, one of Dad’s dinner trays has been placed on the ground next to me, and on it is half a glass of water and a cheese sandwich. Nothing else. No pain medication. No clean clothes. No nothing. I throw the glass of water at the wall, sobbing as the water spills and the glass shatters. I feel too nauseous to eat the sandwich so that gets thrown, too. I somehow manage to drag myself up onto my feet but by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs, I have no energy to walk up them. I crawl.
 

At the top, I find the door is locked and no matter how hard I rattle it or scream underneath the narrow gap beneath it, no one comes to open it.
 

I think about Callan next door, going about his daily life. It must be days now since I was meant to leave for the Institute of Fine Arts. He must be wondering why I haven’t called him yet. He won’t be worried, though. He’ll be thinking that I’m just enjoying myself, learning, focusing all of my attention on the opportunity before me, just like he told me to. I cry for hours because I know no one is coming to get me.
 

The pain seems to abate for a while, but then it returns with a vengeance a few hours later. I’m overcome with the need to push again, so I do, crying, feeling like my soul is being ripped out of my body as I give birth to my baby.
 

At first I can’t look. It hurts too much. When I do pluck up the courage, my heart breaks at the tiny, half formed being that should have been allowed to grow inside me. For a while I don’t know what to do. I feel much better, weirdly, though incredibly weak. I find some of my old paintings stacked one on top of another in a dark corner of the room. I pick the most beautiful painting—a bluebird, full of vibrant color and life—and I tear the calico from the frame. I use the material to make a tiny shroud and then I bury my baby in the dirt where I lost him. I have no way of knowing that he was a boy, but for some reason I’m filled with the certainty that this is true. I lie on top of the spot where I buried him and I sob until I fall asleep.
 

I pray that I don’t wake up. When I do, I find that I’m in clean pajamas in my bed, and sunlight is pouring through my bedroom window. My father sits in my reading chair on the other side of the room, reading a book. When he sees that I’m awake, he stands up and walks over to the bed. Sitting on the edge of the mattress beside me, he holds the back of his hand up to my forehead. I notice that his knuckles are red and scabbed over.

“You had a fever,” he tells me. “You slept for three days. You seem to be getting better now, though.”

I want to recoil away from his touch, but my body feels like a lead weight in the bed. “What day is it?” I croak.

“Friday.” My father’s voice is strangely warm. “Don’t worry. You have another week before you’re meant to be back from New York. Your bruises will have faded by then. You’ll be feeling much better.” He beams at me, like everything is working out just perfectly and he couldn’t be happier. “Of course, there’ll probably be a couple of dark shadows on your face. You’ll have to cover it with makeup. You can do that for me, can’t you, Coralie?”

I nod dumbly. I don’t want to do anything to make this crazy mood of his slip. My skin is crawling, though, my insides seething at his close proximity.

“You must be very hungry,” he says, scratching at his stubble. “You lost a lot of blood. And you didn’t eat the food I brought for you, silly girl. I’m gonna have to watch over you, make sure you’re keeping your strength up.”

And he will, too. The next week is going to be pure hell. He’s not going to let me out of his sight. Even if I were capable of getting up out of this bed and heading next door—which I most definitely am not—he will be hovering over me like a hawk. I’m stuck here until he deems it necessary or appropriate that I leave.
 

“Now, I know you’re probably still not feeling all that great, child, but you and I need to have a little talk, don’t you think?” He says this ruefully, smiling, like he just busted me kissing a boy for the first time and he’s planning on telling me about the birds and the bees. I flinch at the prospect of what’s about to come. “You lied to me, Coralie. You told me you wanted to wait until you were married before you got intimate with a boy, but clearly that wasn’t the case. You’ve been sneaking around behind my back. Do you have any idea how much that hurts me?”

I have to be so careful. If I don’t handle this situation in the right way, he’s going to lose his fucking mind. It won’t matter that I’m already laid up in bed, unable to even sit up. He’ll lay into me again, and this time I won’t be losing my baby. I’ll be losing my own life, for all that it’s worth.
 

“I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Well you have, Coralie. You’ve broken my damn heart. I can see it within myself to forgive you, though. It’s important for us to strengthen our relationship and move forward, don’t you think?”

“Of course. That’s really important.”

“Good. Then let’s make it happen. You tell me who it was that did this to you, and we’ll move on.”

“What?” I barely choke the word out. He wants to know, so he can go and murder them in their beds, no doubt.

“Neither of us can move on until the person who mislead you can be punished, Coralie. I won’t be able to forgive you until you’ve confessed every single sin you’ve committed. I need to know what he did to you, where he touched you,
how
he touched you. Every last detail. You have to tell me, and then I’ll make everything all right.” He sounds incredulous, like this should be obvious to me. Like it makes perfect sense that he would need me to go through this with him.

“I don’t think I can, Daddy,” I say softly.
 

“Why not?” Anger creeps into the edges of his tone. He narrows his eyes at me, leaning forward so I can see that he has a burst bloody capillary in his right eye. Must have been from when he was screaming at me so hard.
 

I have to tread lightly. God, I have to measure and weigh every single word that comes out of my mouth. I scramble, trying to think of some way to make this situation okay. I’m not telling him about Callan. No way. For close to two years now, we’ve been so careful. I haven’t mentioned his name. I haven’t looked sideways at him. I’ve done nothing to draw attention to him, to even give my father the impression that I know he exists. I’m not going to volunteer the information freely now, that’s for sure. I’d rather take another beating myself.