Calico (30 page)

Friday shrugs, looking off into the distance. Behind us, I can hear the gentle susurrus of the river, the same cadence and chatter it’s been whispering for as long as I can remember. Cicadas roar and quiet in turn, a bizarre and beautiful symphony. “Men are strange creatures, Coralie,” Friday tells me softly. “They recover from their injuries different to womenfolk. Who knows how long that boy’s heart will take to come back together. May not be as long as you think.”

We both sit, watching the world go on slowly around us. After a long while, Callan arrives in his beaten up Ford, pulling into his driveway on the other side of the street, and I realize for the first time that it’s his mother’s old car—the one he used to drive on errands for her back when we were kids.
 

“You gonna go talk to him, child?” Friday asks.
 

I think about this for a moment, and then I shake my head. “I’ve said everything I can say, Friday. It’s done now. It’s over.” My eyes flicker toward the house next to Callan’s—old colonial columns cracked, paint peeling, window frames choked with ivy, kudzu draped in graceful bows over the porch—and I
really
see the place for the first time since I got back. I’ve avoided looking at it, not wanting to see it, to relive any of the hurt that went on there, and now that I’m facing it, letting it in, nothing happens. I’m not scared like I thought I’d be. I remember my mother pushing me on a tire swing in the front yard when I was tiny. I remember hours at night spent talking to Callan across the seven-meter gap that stands between the properties. That’s it. Nothing else.
 

Callan climbs out of his car and stands beside it, staring at the ground for a moment. Eventually he looks up and gives us a brief wave. Two days ago, he would have been over here like a shot, trying to talk to me, to get me to hear him out. It seems as though his priorities have changed, though. He gives us a tight smile and heads inside his place. I consider bursting into tears.
 

“Let him breathe, child. Let him work through this a while. I’ve been watching you together for years now. I know it ain’t done. Believe me, the two of you have still got a long road ahead of you, and you’ll be walking it together, no doubt about it.”

Callan closes the front door behind him, swallowed by the darkness inside the house, and my heart splinters a little more. “I don’t know about that, Friday. I think our road has finally come to an end. I think this is where I go my way and he goes his. For good this time.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CALLAN

Bluebird

NOW

Seeing Coralie over at Friday’s was hard. Every molecule inside my body was drawn to her, wanted me to go over there and take her in my arms, hug her to me and never let go. For years I’ve felt that way. It’s going to take more than five minutes to break that need for her, even if I don’t want to feel that way anymore. And I can’t figure out if that’s even what I want.
 

God. Why did she have to keep secrets from me like that? On one hand, I get it. It must have been awful for her to go through that. Victims of abuse are often so mentally distressed by what’s happened to them that they never really admit it to anyone at all. I’ve read about it before. Seen it often enough in the models I shoot from time to time. I just never thought I’d be so blind to it, especially in someone I was so close to at the time, though. Makes me feel like I failed her. And she failed me. What a fucking mess.
 

Should I go over there and say goodbye to her? Should I even tell her that I’m leaving? I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m so turned around by the events of the last few days that I can’t trust myself to make the right decision. I pace the house, trying to think, but an hour later nothing is clearer. My flight back to New York is in just over twelve hours. This job with Capali should be a good distraction, but there’s a solid chance my head simply won’t be in the game. If that happens, my work will be for shit.
 

Damn it. Maybe I should just get moving. Head to the airport early, see if there are any earlier flights. I stand in the living room, assaulted by visions of what happened in here with Coralie when she was over last, and I find myself torn again. I push the feelings down though. I just have to fucking leave. I need to get the hell out of here.
 

Running upstairs, I head to my room and grab my bag. I reach over my bed, about to hit the light switch so I can leave, when I kick something heavy under the bed. A part of my brain already knows what it is, but I find myself looking anyway, crouching down and flinging back the duvet to reveal the wicker basket Mom used to keep my Legos in when I was younger. I’d dumped them out when I was thirteen, though. Started using it for my photography equipment. My hand rests on top of the woven wood, my heart aching in my chest all of a sudden. If I open this and see what’s inside, I know perfectly well what will happen.
 

One, two, three, four, five, six
…
 

I count to twenty before I make up my mind and pull the basket out. I wait another full minute with both my hands covering my mouth, breathing hard, before I unfasten the catch and lift back the lid.
 

Disposable cameras. At least thirty of them. Half of them are mine; half of them are Coralie’s. Inside those cameras are over eighteen months’ worth of memories, love, hurt, joy, suffering and pain. We agreed we would wait to develop them—they were supposed to be printed after ten years on the anniversary we started dating. They’ve sat in here two years longer than they were ever meant to. Back when I was seventeen, I was looking forward to developing these so much. I envisioned Coralie and I locking ourselves away in a dark room together and watching over each exposure, waiting with baited breath while a snapshot of our past blossomed into existence. It was supposed to be a beautiful moment. It was supposed to be special.
 

I stare down at the date-labeled cameras and I consider taking them out into the back yard, tossing them into a trashcan and setting them alight. For a moment, I think it would feel like a release, like letting go. But then I imagine the sense of loss after the plastic, cardboard and the film had been eaten away by the flames, and I feel empty inside.
 

I stand up and hurry downstairs, heading straight for the kitchen. I haven’t bought food here, there’s nothing in the fridge, but thankfully I did switch the refrigerator on when I got back. The freezer’s made just enough ice cubes in the tray for my purpose. I grab them in an old mixing bowl and then head back upstairs. I close my bedroom door, pulling my worn old dressing gown off the hook on the back, and I toss it on the floor, kicking it up against the gap to block out any ambient light. Next, I pull down the blackout blinds I convinced my mother to install for me and I switch on the red light hanging over my bed. The room is lit then by a dim crimson glow, providing enough contrast and shadow that I can see what I’m doing. All of my old developing equipment is still in the basket along with the cameras. Developer, my old stop bath, fixer, LFN—everything is exactly where I left it. I already have an unopened bottle of distilled water by my bedside from when I was hung over the other day. There’s a good chance that the fixer and the developer in my kit have chemically altered over the years they’ve been sitting gathering dust but I’m willing to risk ruining a few images to find out.
 

I work quickly as I set up the rest of the equipment I need on my old desk: measuring cups, my reels, cassette opener, changing bag, thermometer and timer. I’m so well versed in dark room practices now that I don’t need to use a thermometer and timer anymore. I have developing down to a fine art. Still, I set everything up the way I used to when I was younger, following the exact process I did back then. It was almost a religious ritual for me, something I took such huge fucking pride in.
 

The developer’s too warm to be any good right now. I pour out a cup and place it into my makeshift ice bath, and then I wait. Selecting a camera to use in this experiment is tough. There’s a good chance this won’t work and I’ll end up destroying the roll, so I have to be okay with losing whatever I open up. It’s so hard to remember what was happening and when during the time we spent jumping out on each other and taking pictures. March? What the fuck was happening in March? Spring was launching into full effect early that year. It was abnormally hot. I remember Coralie covered in flowers, the two of us lying on our backs on the riverbank, the sky so blue overhead. I remember Coralie sneaking into my house for the first time, after me trying to talk her into it for weeks. Knowing what I know now, she’d been so brave to do it at all. I would never have tried to convince her to do it if I’d known how crazy her father was. What it would have meant for her if she’d been caught.

I put March back in the basket. June next. I was teaching her to drive during our free periods. Her father wouldn’t let her get a car, wouldn’t even pay for her to have lessons. He told her that she wasn’t competent enough to drive, and that giving her the means to drive a car would only get her hurt. I’m willing to bet that he didn’t want to give her the necessary skills to escape him, though.
 

October. October was the month before Coralie had sprung the news on me that she was pregnant. It was the only time we’d ever fought. She’d seemed highly-strung and nervous all the time. We argued constantly for three days and then we hadn’t spoken for a whole week. It had sucked. There won’t be a better month to choose than this one if I need to find images I don’t mind losing. The whole film is probably full of shots of Callan Cross voodoo dolls with pins sticking out of their eyeballs.
 

I crack the cassette and prep the film. The developer’s ready so I mix up the solution and go to work. I pace up and down while I wait for the first of the images to develop. I can only soak five sheets at a time, so I have to do them in stages. Eventually the shots start to emerge onto the paper.
 

The first image is a picture of Coralie and I together, two idiots grinning into the camera lens. We look so young. So happy.
 
So ridiculously in love. It’s amazing how little she’s changed since then. I look a little older, I guess. Harder, somehow, like there’s a barrier between me and the outside world now.
 

The second is a picture of Friday and her crazy little dog. Coralie composed the image to make it look like some sort of Victorian family portrait, Friday glancing austerely down the lens out of her eye as she petted Algie. The third image is of me—a profile shot. The background is bright and overblown, so much so that I’m almost completely in silhouette. I can still make out the deep frown on my face, though. The look of intense concentration in my eyes. I have no idea what I’m doing or why I look so focused. After a while, Coralie grew clever about the way she took her photos. She would find the right moment when I was well and truly distracted or involved in some task and that’s when she would get me, like a goddamn sniper.
 

I move onto image number four and disappointment wells up deep inside me. Seems I am going to lose a few of the photographs after all. The paper remains white. I give it an extra minute to make sure nothing will develop on it, but it remains blank. Or at least I think it does until I’m taking it out of the developer, letting the fluid run off it, and I notice the small dark smudge in the bottom left hand corner. I squint at it, trying to figure out if it’s an accidental shot Coralie took or if it’s something else. The small dark patch is too small to be sure either way, so I slide it into the fixer and let it sit while I move onto the next image. It’s the same deal. A bigger dark patch this time, a scribble of black against a white background. It’s definitely something. Perhaps writing? Something she wrote out for me?

I move quickly, shifting over the paper and setting five new images in the developer. Each of these comes out the same way, with random dark shapes and lines on them. I rotate them into the fixer and shift the other images out to hang dry on the line overhead. It doesn’t take long to finish up the whole roll of film. There are more pictures of me in there, plenty of Coralie smiling happily, but there are nine of the white shots with the black markings on them.
 

Once the paper has dried a little, I take down the photos and place them in a grid on the floor, three wide and three high, and I stare down at them, waiting for them to make sense. It takes some rearranging, but I eventually figure out where the lines and smudges connect.
 

It’s not writing after all. It’s a painting. A painting of a bird. It would have been huge. It’s on a canvas—must have been painted onto the material I bought for her, since her father refused to buy her supplies. It’s beautiful. Now that I’m looking closer I can see that there isn’t just one bird as I’d first thought, but actually three, one inside the other, the smallest just a tiny little silhouette made with three twists of a brush. It’s such a simple painting, definitely not the most complicated thing Coralie has ever painted, but it’s beautiful because I know what it represents. It’s me and her. And our baby.
 

This is how she was going to tell me. She came over to the house one day when we were fighting and she wanted me to develop her camera. I’d been a stubborn asshole and refused. So
this
is what she’d wanted to show me. I crouch down, looking down on the photographs, my heart stumbling all over the place. I’m not used to feeling like this, so torn, being tugged and pulled in so many directions all at once.
 

I’m angry with her. She messed up. But then
I
messed up, too. We both did. If it hadn’t been then, perhaps we would have done something later on, hurt each other, done something stupid to send us hurtling away from one another on different flight paths. I was so sure of us back then that I never thought it would happen, but who knows.