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? Why 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.
Here and now, back in Port Royal, I can’t seem to process the image of Coralie finally asleep on my bed. I take a step toward her and it hits me how marvelously, ridiculously drunk I am. Fuck. I want to wake her up. Talk to her. Figure out what’s brought her here. Something really shitty must have happened for her to make her way inside this house, so close to her father’s place next door. I can’t rouse her when I’m in this state, though. It would only make her mad. I take the corner of the duvet on my bed and fold it over, covering her, and then I back out of the room, pulling the door closed behind me.
I need coffee. I need a giant vat of it, and I need it mainlined into my body right now. I can’t fuck this up. I can’t. If she wakes up, gets angry with me and bails, it’ll be the last time it ever happens. I know it.
******
I dream that I’m drowning. When I wake up, I’m gasping for air, clawing at heavy blankets that lie over me, and Callan is sitting in his mother’s old rocking chair next to the bed, watching me. There’s a stern look on his face and a baseball bat resting over his lap. He rolls it back and forth, up and down his thighs.