I don’t know what I’m expecting when I turn the light on. Maybe a set of chains in the corner, bolted to the wall. A dingy, stained mattress in the corner, rusty spirals of springs poking through the moth eaten fabric. Scratch marks all up the walls. That’s not the case. When I turn the light on, body tensed and prepared for the worst, I see that there’s nothing down here. Literally nothing. No workbenches. No tools. No freezer. None of the things you might find in any normal basement. The walls are bare concrete. The floor is hard packed earth, flat and even. The exposed beams that support the ceiling and the walls are raw timber, and they look like they have been treated at some point with some sort of varnish. The space looks like it’s never been used for anything at all, let alone as a prison for a seventeen-year-old girl.
I have to leave the basement and go back to my own garage to find a shovel. Jo Cross is etched into the wooden handle. Feels weird to be using my mother’s gardening equipment for this purpose, but I don’t have the patience to find something else. I head back down the basement steps next door with my heart somewhere in between my throat and the pit of my stomach, head spinning with anger, and I get to work.
Coralie never said where she buried the body.
At some point I take my shirt off, my torso slick with sweat, and I work for a long time. I have no idea how deep she would have gone. I have no idea whether she would have tried to hide the spot from Malcolm. All I know is that I’m not leaving this sinister, awful fucking place until I find the body of my baby.
It’s after midnight by the time I accomplish my goal. I’ve carefully lifted well over half of the basement floor, digging and then filling in holes as I go, until I finally come across a small dull white length of material about a foot below the surface. It’s folded and worn, so tattered and old that it almost falls apart in my hands as I lift it out of the ground.
It’s so light. Maybe this folded bundle of cloth isn’t what I’m looking for after all. Coralie was only four and a half months pregnant, though. The baby would have barely been formed. Certainly wouldn’t have weighed much. And after all of this time…
I think about opening up the cloth. That’s so fucking macabre, though. I just can’t do it. My child, whoever he or she was, has been at rest for a really long time. It would be wrong for me to disturb that rest. It would break my heart to do it. And besides, when I carefully turn the bundle over in my hands, I see something distinct that lets me know this is what I’m looking for—the faded, muddied outline of a bluebird.
I feel like someone has their hands around my throat, preventing me from drawing breath. I can’t fucking believe this is happening. It’s too surreal, too awful. Way too painful. Sinking down onto the ground, I cradle the delicate bundle of fibers to me, holding it in both arms, and I sob. I fucking sob until my throat is hoarse and I my eyes don’t work anymore.
******
CORALIE
I stay at Friday’s place. It’s weird, but knowing Callan is across the street gives me some form of comfort. I’ve spent way too much of my time here in Port Royal trying to escape him, to be as far away from him as possible, but now that I’ve told him everything, that’s changed. I want to be with him. I need to be with him. I want to be forgiven. Deep in my bones, I think it may be too late, though.
It’s black as ink out of the bedroom window when Friday bustles into her tiny guest room at the back of her house and shakes me awake.
“Child. Coralie, child. Get yourself up and outta bed this instant.”
I blink up at her, trying to place where on earth I am. “What? What time is it? Is everything okay?” Friday’s always seemed healthy as a horse but the truth is she’s well into her eighties now. And she really doesn’t like taking her diabetes medication. For a moment I panic, thinking something’s terribly wrong with her.
Her eyes are bulging, the whites showing as she frantically shakes me on the bed.
“What did I say, child? I said get up and outta bed this second. Somethin’s occurring across the street. Somethin’ bad, I’d say.”
Immediately I’m no longer worried about Friday’s diabetes, and I’m wildly worried about Callan in his mother’s old house, hurt somehow. There’s every chance he’s gotten drunk, been rampaging around inside, fallen down the stairs and broken his foolish neck. I scramble out of bed and tear down the hallway, ducking around Friday’s considerable girth as I fight to get out onto the street. I’m wearing one of her oversized nightgowns. As soon as I jerk open the front door and hurry out onto the porch, a stiff gust of warm wind catches the material, sending it billowing around me in a sea of white cotton. Behind me, Friday huffs and grunts as she lumbers down the stairs. Across the street, on the other side of the road, my old house is being eaten alive by fire.
Tall columns of smoke rise up, angry and gray against the deep night blue of the sky overhead. Red, orange, and white fingers of flame lick at the windows, the glass of which has all shattered, allowing the inferno to rise like liquid light, defying gravity as it leaps and jumps up at the stars.
“Holy shit.”