The day my father left, I was fourteen years old. As I walk into my old house, the first memory I’m hit with is my mother on her hands and knees in the hallway, sobbing uncontrollably with a pair of scissors in her right hand. Her left hand was bleeding all over the freshly buffed floorboards, and her mascara was running down her face in black rivers. I didn’t need to ask her what had happened; they’d been arguing for weeks. Even two stories up, I could hear my father screaming that he didn’t love her anymore. Didn’t want to be with her anymore. Didn’t want me anymore. He never hurt her. Not with his fists. His words did enough damage all by themselves.
As I walk through the other rooms of the house, more memories fly at me, casting me back in time. My mother teaching me how to play chess at the kitchen table. My father swearing when he burned himself trying to ignite the pilot light on the water heater. Me, prizing up the floorboards by the fireplace in the lounge, hiding money and canisters of undeveloped film there. My father, angry over something and nothing, throwing the first photographs I ever developed by myself into the trashcan. Shoving them right down to the bottom, and then telling me he’d take a belt to my behind if I even thought about pulling them out again.
The memories of Coralie don’t start until I get to the second floor of the house and I’m standing outside my mother’s old room. My mother was bedridden the last time I saw Coralie. I was standing outside her room. Mom was sleeping, and Coralie was standing in the hallway, right where I’m standing now, staring at me. I had never nor have I seen since such pain in a person’s eyes.
I’d wanted to get up, to go to her, take her in my arms, tell her how sorry I was, but it was too late for that. Coralie had a bag in her hand, and I knew she was leaving. She shook her head at me and that was it. I knew The End Of Callan Cross’s Life: Part One was beginning. It took two years for Part Two to come along and crush me once and for all.
Every single stick of furniture inside the house is covered with dustsheets, making oddly shaped poltergeists out of sofas, tables, bookcases and the grandfather clock downstairs. I don’t remove any of them. I won’t be staying long enough to warrant stripping the furniture, after all. The only room I do bother unveiling is my old bedroom. Band posters still hang everywhere. Mom let me glue cork to one of the walls, which is still plastered with ticket stubs from trips to the movies, concerts, art shows, museums…anything I ever went to or saw. My bed is neatly made, sporting the same sheet set I had when I was a teenager—dark blue and simple, though a little faded now. My old football and basketball trophies still clutter up the space on top of my chest of drawers. I’m betting all of my old clothes are still inside there, now probably a little tattered from where the silver fish have gotten in and feasted.
I don’t see any of these details, though. Not really. I’m too distracted by the photographs. They are everywhere. Photographs that came from the same Leica I’ve brought back with me to Port Royal. Photographs of everything I ever saw that made me think something or question something, or feel something. Mostly, the photographs are of Coralie, because for the longest time she was all I saw, thought, questioned or felt.
She looks so young goddamn young. Beautiful. Innocent.
I turn and storm out of my room. My phone starts ringing in my pocket. I pull it out as I head straight for the room Mom always used as a walk-in closet at the end of the hallway. Her clothes are all still here, wrapped in garment bags and hanging anonymously in rows from the railings inside. Angela Rickers: R&F flashes up on my cellphone screen I pick up one of the many shoeboxes stacked beneath the garment bags and I rip open the lid, dumping the black high heels inside onto the floor. I then storm back into my bedroom with the shoebox in my hand, ignoring the ringtone that’s still blaring out of my cellphone speakers. Angela is one of the editors for Rise & Fall Magazine—she probably wants me to take on a job and I’m not in any fucking frame of mind to be talking to her about that right now.
My heart feels like it’s beating outrageously fast as I tear down the photos of Coralie and pile them one on top of another inside the shoebox. I can’t look at them. I can’t see them. I can’t see her.
Coming back here was a terrible fucking idea. I should have known better. I could be licking Rae’s uncomplicated pussy, covered in her sweet sweat right now, and instead I’m back here in this hellhole, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I was wrong before. The house doesn’t just smell like mothballs.
It smells like death, too.
CHAPTER FOUR
CORALIE
Point Of View
THEN
When people say they hate high school, I always wanna roll my eyes. Going to school is pretty much the best part of my day. It means I’m not at home. It means I’m relatively safe. If I were smart enough, I would be enrolled as an AP tutor and I’d be staying back for hours every night, helping people bump their grades. Sadly, I’m not smart enough. I’m an average student. I’m not the brightest shining star in the sky, but neither am I the dullest. I get by. That means I have to hide out in the library and do my work before I go home, otherwise my father will be on my back and I won’t get a second to myself. I’d live in the library if I could.