Chapter 13
TAYLOR
I picked up my keys from the sideboard and tucked my phone into an inside pocket of my jacket. ‘Will you be OK on your own if I go out for a few hours?’
‘No. I’ll pine to death from loneliness.’
I stared at Ray. He stared back at me. He caved first.
‘Of course I’ll bloody be OK,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve managed ninety-four years on this planet without you mollycoddling me, I’ll be perfectly fine to manage by myself for a few hours.’
‘You’re going to feel really stupid if you die now while I’m out.’
‘As long as I can come back and haunt you, it’ll be worth it. Anyway, you’re the one going out on that bike of yours.’
‘So?’
‘So if I had to put money on which one of us would be more likely to die today, it’d be you.’
I picked up my helmet and dusted a speck of dust off the top. ‘Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but I am an excellent and very careful rider.’
We both realized we’d strayed into dangerous territory at the same moment and exchanged a look of acknowledgment, signifying a truce and an end to that conversation.
‘Just… be careful,’ he said. ‘Your mother has been through enough.’
‘Agreed. You be careful too.’
‘I don’t plan on leaving my chair. It’s not me you need to worry about.’
It felt good to be on the bike again. I took the long way to town, around the island in the opposite direction.
It was a ride that would normally take about an hour, but with the conversation with Ray fresh in mind, I took my time.
Enjoyed the scenery. I did love living in the city, but I’d forgotten how much being surrounded by nature could do for the soul.
Blow off the cobwebs, oxygenate the blood, that sort of thing.
The road took me past the mountain lake and I stopped for ten minutes, skimmed a few rocks across the mirror surface of the water.
Remembered countless swims here when I was a kid, nights drinking around campfires as a teen.
It struck me that away from here I thought of this place as constricting and small, somewhere I couldn’t wait to get out of.
But when I was home, I was reminded of the beauty of this place.
That a small community wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I peed behind a bush and got on the road again, feeling my mood darken as I got closer to my destination.
It wasn’t nerves, but something akin to that. Apprehension.
The cemetery parking lot was empty when I got there, which I was relieved about.
I didn’t want anyone I knew seeing me there.
It would no doubt spark a conversation I didn’t want to have.
A conversation I had, in fact, actively avoided for the past fourteen years.
It wasn’t the only reason I’d left Pine Harbor, but it had been a big part of it.
It wasn’t the main cemetery in town. That honor went to Whispering Pines Cemetery down on Main Street, behind the church.
I had a few relatives buried there, great-grandparents, my grandparents on my mother’s side, a great-aunt who I’d never met.
Ray’s sister. She had died young from pneumonia, but I knew very little else about her.
Whispering Pines was a nice cemetery, as far as cemeteries go.
Well maintained, with manicured lawns and hedges and a rose garden in the center with a little water fountain in the shape of an angel.
Even the older graves, the hulking gray stones with the barely legible writing, were looked after by council staff.
There was a group of women in town, including my mother, who unofficially placed flowers onto strangers’ graves.
Flowers they had grown in their own gardens.
It was a nice gesture. The local paper had even run a front-page feature on them once.
My mother had clipped out the article and sent it to me.
But the cemetery on the top of the hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean was different.
Most of the graves were older, dating back to when settlers first arrived here and built the town and the shipbuilding yards.
There were exceptions though, the odd newer graves dotted here and there, obvious by their modern headstones.
I headed for one in the back row, closest to the top of the cliff, the spot chosen by me all those years ago.
I’d been adamant that it had to be that spot, even though my mother had been less keen.
I was glad, now, as I made my way through the older graves up to it, that I had stuck to my guns.
He’d always loved the ocean, had been a proper water baby.
Whether it was swimming, fishing, surfing or sailing, most of the time if you needed him, that’s where you’d find him.
Either in or on the water. That last summer he’d finally landed his dream job, out on one of the lobster boats.
My mother had been less than thrilled; she wanted him to go to university, find a career less dangerous, less taxing.
More profitable. But it was all he’d ever wanted to do.
Unlike me, he never planned on leaving Pine Harbor.
His dreams were simple: work his way up to owning his own boat, build himself a house on the water somewhere, marry a nice girl and have a few kids.
I found his certainty in his future unnerving, but I was also jealous.
Unlike him, I had no idea what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go.
I loved my art, and I was good at it, but I had no idea how to turn that into an actual career.
It was actually his death that had pointed me in the right direction.
A few months after he died, Adam and I got matching tattoos in his honor, and watching the man use the needle to create art on my skin had been one of those defining moments in life.
My mother had been here fairly recently.
The glass vase on his grave was stuffed with flowers – daylilies and lavender.
I could hear bees humming as they took advantage.
The day was warm and I was wearing my bike leathers, but I wasn’t uncomfortable because of that.
Most of the time I could ignore the guilt that had been a permanent part of my psyche since the moment I found out he had died.
The years had made it easier to live with.
It was just another part of me, absorbed and acclimatized.
But here in this town, and especially right here in front of his grave, it bubbled through the apathy to the surface again, making itself known, weighing me down with its unbearable weight.
‘Hey Cal,’ I said softly, my eyes tracing the white lettering of his name.
Calvin Calderwood
12/06/1993 – 12/06/2011
Loved and cherished son of Moira and John Calderwood
Adored twin brother of Taylor Calderwood
Gone but never forgotten, he rests now amongst the stars.
Because my mother had conceded to my insistence that he be buried here, in this spot, I had let her take the lead with the design of his headstone.
Nothing had seemed right anyway. No words were good enough to express how I felt at his loss.
No trite poem or pithy epitaph could ever convey how much I’d loved him.
As far as I was concerned, it both didn’t matter what she chose to have engraved, as much as it mattered immensely.
It could never be enough, but I desperately needed it to be.
I needed anyone who stood in front of his grave to know how much my brother, my twin brother, had meant to me.
How much I’d loved the irritating bones of him.
How he’d been a part of me since always, for as long as I could remember, and even before that.
I needed them to understand that a part of me lay buried here with him.
That when he’d died, a piece of me had died too.
But there wasn’t a headstone big enough to fit everything I needed to say, and not enough adjectives in the world to say it. There was just this, and because anything would be inadequate, this would have to do.
I saw down beside the headstone, and ran my fingers over the ceramic photo of him.
They came away salty from the sea spray that made its way even up here to the top of the cliff.
I loved this photo of him. Felt that it summed him up pretty effectively in one image.
It was taken only a few weeks before he died, out on the lobster boat, by one of his crewmates.
He’d emailed it to me after Cal died, and when I clicked on the attachment and this photo had opened, my brother’s face filling the screen, it had completely stolen the breath from me.
He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and a pair of shorts, sunglasses high on his head keeping his sandy blond mop out of his piercing blue eyes.
His skin tanned and freckled, his teeth white and his smile beaming as he held out a large lobster for the cameraman to see.
He was beautifully, achingly perfect. Animated and so, so alive.
I still couldn’t understand how all that could just stop in an instant.
I couldn’t wrap my brain around or reconcile the Cal in this photo with the Cal lying six feet underneath me in a box in the ground.
How could someone so young and vivid and alive just…
cease to exist any more? It didn’t seem possible, and it sure as hell wasn’t fair.
‘I know it’s been awhile,’ I told him. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t bring you any flowers. Kind of hard to carry on the bike.’
I jumped as a gull screeched loudly as it flew overhead.
It headed out to sea as I watched, its gray-and-white wings stretched wide, tail feathers spread.
They looked majestic in flight. Nothing like they did on shore, noisy and begging for food.
The number of times I’d fallen for one standing with a leg tucked out of sight to garner sympathy.
They’d conned quite a few fries out of me over the years.
‘I’m guessing Mom told you what happened with Adam,’ I said. ‘It’s probably karma.’
There was no sound apart from the rustling of the breeze in the trees surrounding the cemetery and the sound of the waves breaking onto rocks at the bottom of the cliff.
I unzipped my jacket and took it off, laying it on the grass beside Cal’s grave.
Underneath I was wearing a black tank top.
The sun was deliciously warm on my skin, and I realized it had been a long time since I’d sat like this, skin exposed, and soaked up some vitamin D.
‘Do you remember how we used to live in our bathing suits all summer long?’ I said, leaning my back against the side of Cal’s headstone.
‘We’d put them on in the morning instead of clothes.
Eat breakfast then head for the beach.’ I shook my head sadly at the memory.
‘God, I miss those days. When summer seemed to last forever and the only thing we had to worry about was sneaking in past Mom before she could see how much sand we were tracking into the house. Everything was so… trivial then. So easy. I wish I had enjoyed it more before it was over, you know? If I’d known our childhood, and my time with you was limited, I would have… ’ I trailed off.
I would have what? Enjoyed it more? No. I would have done things differently.
But regret was a road that led to madness.
I knew that. At the very least it led to impulsive decisions and borderline alcoholism.
I couldn’t understand people who said they had no regrets.
Surely there had to be something about their past they would change if they could?
Some teeny tiny thing, maybe harsh words spoken or a small action taken that rippled with far-reaching consequences.
The kind of ripples that change lives, send them coursing in another direction.
Sometimes nothing more than a look, a missed appointment, a kiss.
There was another screech of a gull. I turned my face skywards to search for it, but the sky was empty.
The sound came again, this time louder. Intrigued, I got to my feet and took a few steps.
It sounded in pain, and not in the sky as I’d first thought.
Somewhere lower. I scanned the tree line, the grass at the top of the cliff, but there was no sign of an injured bird anywhere.
Then I heard it again, and this time I recognized it for what it was.
‘Help!’
My stomach dropped when I realized that it was coming from over the edge of the cliff.
‘Hello?’ I shouted, gingerly making my way over to the edge carefully.
I lay on my stomach and wriggled as far as I could, peering down.
There was a woman sprawled on her back on the rocks below.
Her leg was at a weird angle, and she had blood on her face.
When she saw me, she started sobbing with relief.
‘Oh, thank God,’ she called out between sobs. ‘I didn’t think anyone was going to come along. Please help me.’
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ she wailed. ‘I was just walking along the trail, enjoying the view and then the next thing I knew I was down here. I think maybe I stood on some loose rock or something. I fell and now my ankle is broken. There was a snapping sound, and now there’s a piece of bone poking…
’ Her voice broke and she started sobbing.
‘There’s so much blood. I don’t know what to do. I’m so scared.’
‘It’s OK,’ I called back to her. ‘Just…’ I’d been about to say wait there, but where was she going to go? ‘I’m going to get you some help,’ I promised, starting to wriggle back away from the edge.
‘Don’t leave me,’ she shouted. ‘I think the tide is coming in.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I reassured her. ‘I just need to get my phone from my jacket so I can get you some help, OK? Then I’ll be right back.’
‘You promise?’
‘I promise. What’s your name?’
She sobbed. ‘Casey.’
‘I’m not leaving you, Casey. I’m going to get you some help, and you’re going to be just fine.’
‘I’m so scared.’
‘I know.’