Chapter 34
CHAPTER 34
CALLIOPE
“Calli!” Arlow calls, rushing to catch up with me. He captures my wrist. “Are you sure you want to do this? You’re upset right now.”
My steps slow, but I continue to the metal dumpster that sits flush with the side of the hotel. “I’m sure. He died here. His ashes are in some mass grave. Why should she get a pretty final resting place? I want to be done with it. I need to let them both go.”
“Okay.” He lays his hand on my back.
“Just keep an eye out because I doubt this is legal.” The garbage truck must’ve recently been by since the dumpster is empty, but it still reeks of old trash.
“There’s nobody around.”
There are no words that I need to say. She’s long gone, I know that, and they would’ve been wasted on her anyway. Nothing I said ever mattered. I loosen the top of the cardboard urn that was lightly glued on, pull it off, and dump it unceremoniously into the dumpster.
A loud clang rings out and Arlow’s gaze leaps to mine. “What was that?”
“I don’t know. Bone, maybe?”
“It sounded like metal.”
“Maybe she had pins from a broken bone or something. Do they leave those in cremated remains?” I step up on a nearby crate to look inside. Arlow leans over to pluck something from the inside wall of the dumpster. “What is that?”
He holds it out where I can see it. “It’s a GPS tracker. A magnetic one meant for cars. It stuck to the side when you dumped the ashes.”
Both of us stare at each other for a long moment as the pieces fall together. “That son of a bitch,” I exclaim. “That’s how Carl found me. He put a fucking tracker in my dead mother’s ashes to be mailed to me.”
The whoop of a siren is accompanied by red lights that chase each other down the side of the building. The police aren’t interested in us, only the fight that’s going on near the lobby. Still, we need to go.
“Throw it back in there,” I order and drop the empty cardboard container, stomping it flat before tossing it into the dumpster as well. “Let’s get out of here.”
Arlow nods, and I hear the tracker ding against the metal again. We return to the car and head for our hotel.
“Are you alright?” Arlow asks, squeezing my knee.
“Yeah.” I shake my head, scoffing. “I worried about him finding out my new name and where I was, so I had the ashes sent to a PO Box. At the time, I thought I was being too paranoid. I guess not.”
“Jesus, Calli. He was crazy.”
“He was. I’m surprised he thought of it, to be honest. He wasn’t that smart.” A realization hits me. “If I’d dumped the damn thing in Cincinnati before I moved like I should have, I could’ve spared both of us all this trouble. Or if I would’ve ignored the stupid email in the first place and not accepted the urn.” Arlow wouldn’t have killed a man for me. If only I hadn’t toted around the ashes as some kind of reassuring trinket.
Arlow’s response is instant. “No, you don’t get to blame yourself for anything to do with this insanity. You didn’t do anything wrong. This isn’t on you.”
Arlow carries in the box of my dad’s things when we get back to our hotel. As eager as I am to see what pictures are inside, I’m also nervous. It’s all I have left of him. All I’ll ever have.
The box waits in the middle of the spare bed, and after I spend a couple of minutes staring at it, Arlow sits beside me, sliding his arm around my middle. “Whenever you’re ready. There’s no hurry. We’ve got all night.”
Nodding, I swallow the knot in my throat as a memory comes back to me. “Did you see the elevators when we came in?”
His head tilts, and he blinks before answering. “Yes, I saw them.”
I’m sure it’s a strange question to hear out of the blue. “They’re made of glass, so you can look down on the lobby when you ride them.” A smile grows on my face. “When I was a kid, I thought that was the best thing in the world. My brother did too. There was this big fancy hotel downtown with a huge lobby that felt like a palace, and it had glass elevators. A lot of places have them now, but back then they were the first I’d seen. Dad never had money and always found free stuff to keep us entertained on his visitation days. One of our favorite things was to walk downtown and ride the glass elevators up and down.”
Arlow smiles at me and kisses the top of my head as I continue. “I can’t remember when we stopped doing that, but it was something I never forgot. Like that day he carried me home in the snowstorm. I dream about it sometimes. Just standing with my hands on the glass, looking down as the people grew smaller or larger.”
With a sigh, I open the box. On top are a few items of clothing. Threadbare tee shirts and ragged jeans. A bus pass, a business card for a free clinic, a couple of paperbacks bearing submarines on the front. The sight of them makes me chuckle. “Some things never changed. He was a big Tom Clancy fan. If there wasn’t a submarine in the story, he wasn’t interested.”
Arlow runs his hand up and down my back. “He had good taste. The Hunt for Red October was one of my favorites when I was in high school.”
The small stack of pictures is stored in a baggie in the bottom of the box. The one on top shows dad and my brother when he was around fifteen. They sit on a porch I vaguely remember, with a beer in both their hands. “Him and my brother. I’ll send this with the letter,” I mumble, setting it aside.
The next shows a group of people I don’t recognize. Dad isn’t in it, and there’s no description or date on the back. It’s just a few men and a couple of women sitting around in lawn chairs. Probably at a cookout judging by the grill in the background. “I don’t know any of them. Some old friends, I guess.”
The next picture shows a smiling blond. “I remember her. They dated when I was ten or so. Damn, I can’t remember her name. I don’t think it lasted long.”
“She must’ve meant something to him to have kept the picture,” Arlow says.
“Yeah, maybe she was the one who got away.”
The last picture chokes me up. We stand against a red brick wall, Dad smiling down at me. Arlow silently pulls me into his arms as the picture blurs through my tears. It takes me a minute to compose myself enough to look again. “I remember the day this was taken. I was about eight years old. We’re standing outside my elementary school. He was a janitor there for a while. He used to leave me little notes in my desk to say hi until they transferred him to another school. A teacher had brought her camera to school, and she took the picture. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.”
I lean against Arlow’s shoulder with a sigh. “I’m glad I came. Just for this.”
“You might not know if he remembered that day in the snow, but he remembered this. He loved you.”
“Yeah.” I swipe at the tears that drip down my cheeks. “I’ve never really doubted that. He wasn’t a good person, I know that. He didn’t take care of us. He was neglectful and probably put our lives in danger more than once. Mom wasn’t wrong about that. She was the one who provided, and she resented us because that didn’t matter to us.”
Arlow nods, his arm around my shoulders. “Kids don’t care who buys their food or pays the electric bill. They care about who is kind to them.”
“I think I would’ve respected her position more, understood more once I grew up, if she wasn’t so cruel. In her mind, if you feed a dog, it’s yours to kick. Our last name—Dad’s last name—became an insult to use whenever we pissed her off. We were a piece of shit like the rest of the Raines.”
With a sigh, I lean against him, so grateful to have him by my side. “I wish I could tell him I was never ashamed to be a Raines.”
“I’m sure he knew that, sweetheart.”
“I hate that drugs took priority over us, but a part of me understands. He was born dirt poor and never found a way out. He had a terrible life. Drugs are what he had. They were the only escape or peace he found. Yet, it never made him hateful. He was good to us when he was there. I think it was as simple as that.”
Arlow holds me for a long time before I finally pack Dad’s things back into the box. The rest of the evening is subdued, and I’m tempted to head back home. It’s late, but we could be home by dawn. Before I can suggest it, Arlow sets my shoes in front of me.
“Come on, Peach.”
“What? Where are we going?”
His smile is sweet as he holds out a hand to me. “To ride the glass elevators.”
The trip to Indianapolis did me good. I feel lighter, like I’ve finally let the past go. In the month since we’ve returned, Arlow has spent almost every night in his barn, drawing. I love the new project he’s been working on, an outstretched hand covered by crawling bees.
About an hour after he disappears into the barn, I’m surprised to see him coming through the front door of my cabin with a canvas in his hand. He holds it facing his body where I can’t see.
“I have something for you,” he announces. There’s no smile on his face. He seems a little nervous, hesitant. As if I won’t love anything that this incredibly talented man created for me. I get up from my seat as he rubs a hand over his collarbone. “I thought this would be the next best thing to having a picture.”
He turns the canvas around where I can see it. Like all his drawings, the subjects look lifelike enough to be a photograph, but unlike all his other drawings, this one makes me burst into tears.
My dad smiles from the canvas while the little girl version of me clings to his back. Snow swirls around us, coating our hats, coats, and gloves. My arms are wrapped around his neck and his are tucked beneath my legs as he gives me a piggyback ride through the storm. A row of houses peeks out through the curtain of snow in the background.
It’s exactly how I described it to him.
“How?” I whisper, barely managing the word and trying not to let tears fall on the artwork. There’s no way he completed this in a month.
“Do you remember the night you told me about that memory? The night you asked me to come and catch the cave cricket?” He continues at my tearful nod. “I took a picture of the photo of your dad you kept on the mantel. I thought I’d draw him in the snow for you. I had most of him finished but once you got the photo from the hotel that he carried of you…I thought this was better.”
It's hard to look away from the drawing as I keep noting so many small details. The way tiny snowflakes are caught in both our eyelashes, the gap in my teeth that I had until I was ten, the way Dad’s glasses sit crooked on his face.
When I finally set it aside, it’s to throw myself into his arms. “It’s everything. It’s exactly how I remember that day. This is the best gift anyone has ever given me. Thank you.”
He holds me tight and brushes his hand through my hair with a chuckle. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
I pull him over to sit beside me on the couch where I can continue to admire the drawing. “You started drawing this right after the cave cricket night? But we weren’t even…that was a few days after I kissed you and you weren’t interested in me then. Was there something about the picture of him that made you want to draw it? Did it shine like your storm drain?” It doesn’t make sense that he’d want to do this when he’d just rejected me.
“You shine, Calliope. You light up everything around you and make it stand out. You made it important. I was afraid when you first kissed me, but there was never a time I wasn’t interested in you. I loved you from the first moment I saw you eating a peach with your feet in the creek.”
“If you want me to stop crying, you’re going to have to stop saying such sweet things.” He grins at me, tucking me under his arm, and I interlace my fingers with his. “Do you know what my first thought was when I saw you in the forest?”
“Run, he’s probably got a cooler full of body parts?”
“The first word in my head when I looked up and saw you standing over me was gorgeous . You startled me and scared me, coming out of nowhere, but you were so striking.” I reach up to scratch at the white patch in his scruff. “So handsome, but there was something else about you I couldn’t put my finger on. I still can’t. Some special quality I can’t describe.”
His adorable flustered smile is firmly in place. “And then you threw peaches at me and ran like hell.”
Giggles spill out of me. “You were still a stranger in the woods. Then I learned you were also kind and funny and caring. You calmed me and made me feel safe even with all the chaos we’ve dealt with since I moved here. I stole that first kiss, and I stole your peaches, but you stole my heart from the very beginning. I never had a chance.” Now it’s his turn to be emotional as he hugs me, tucking his face into my neck. “You also fuck like a god but that goes without saying.”
He stands up with me in his arms and carries me toward the bedroom. “I’m going to need to make you say it again.”
We spend the rest of the night in my bed where he proves my statement was true. Sex with him is sometimes tender and sweet, sometimes rough and wild, but always passionate and mind-blowing.
The drawing is hung in the living room of my cabin where I can admire it and be reminded of the two men in my life who have loved me.
A few days later, I wake to Arlow standing over me, biting back a grin, his arms crossed over his chest. “What?” I ask, recognizing that expression. “What did I do?”
“What did you do, Calliope?” He waves a sheet of paper in front of me that looks like a delivery invoice. “Would you like to tell me why a truck just delivered two massive boxes onto our lawn?”
“Um…surprise?” Damn it. They weren’t supposed to be here until tomorrow.
He dives onto me, pinning my hands to the mattress and looks me in the eye. “You got me new hives?”
“Three of them are for you. One is for me. So, you can teach me. I also have the bees and queens already reserved for when they send them out in the spring.” He hasn’t made any attempt to replace his hives or even mentioned it. I don’t want him to give up on something he clearly loved because of what Carl did.
“You are the best girlfriend ever.” He punctuates his last three words with firm kisses. “Let me tell you what’s going to happen tonight. I’m going to build a giant bonfire, spread a nice thick blanket beside it, then fuck you so good I’ll have to carry you back.”
“You might want to bring an extra blanket to put around my shoulders so I don’t get a chill when I’m riding you.”
He lets out a groan as he rolls me over and swats me on the ass. “Come on. Get up. Let’s go unbox the hives.”
Seeing Arlow happy and excited is my favorite way to start my day.