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Chapter Eight: Checking Out - Part Two
Calla
Leo: Hold on to the things you love fiercely, but love fiercely enough to let things go.
Stupid horoscope and its fatalistic, fortune-cookie crap.
She didn’t know why she read them every day. She really should stop. It wasn’t as if she put much stock in astrology or psychictry. You couldn’t read the future in the palms of people’s hands or in the trajectory of a star. If you could, life would be so much simpler and much more boring.
No, Calla didn’t believe that horoscopes foretold the future. They were just old adages and Aesop fables’ morals attributed to star alignment or some such nonsense. Just age-old pearls of wisdom passed off as New Age prophecy.
She knew that.
It’s just that she also figured good advice was good advice and she wasn’t about to discount it just because it came from someone who thought they were psychic.
Calla’s eyes turned from the paper she was holding to the TV and the bright and shining colors of the Saturday morning cartoons playing across her screen late at night. It seemed that—in entertainment, at least—the hotel could be very obliging.
Calla watched the caped crusaders trounce the evil villains, wishing that life could be as easy and as just as that. She wished that she could put on a mask and make everything right.
Unfortunately, her alter ego was her only one and, it seemed, injustice was safe from her.
She’d failed. She promised to help Mei. To save her. But she’d failed.
Some hero she turned out to be.
Calla sighed and leaned over her bed to dig beneath the cover’s overhang and grab the goods she kept there. Well, if she’d learned anything, it’s that, when Fate lets you down, there’s always chocolate.
She popped up again at a knock on her door.
She glanced at the clock and wondered who could be knocking at her door so late at night. Reaching for the remote, she paused the DVD before getting up to answer the knock. “Olive?” Calla did a double-take when she opened the door. “What are you doing up?”
The small girl bit her lip, clutching her doll tight to her chest. “I fell asleep outside Mei’s room, I think. She wouldn’t let me stay with her.” The girl pouted. “But I wanted to be there, when she left, to…” Her face pinched as she paused.
To talk her out of it, Calla knew. To somehow convince her to stay. To stave off the inevitable and pull off the impossible. She shook her head. “You should be in bed, little miss.”
“I was,” she said. “I woke up in my room, in my bed. I don’t know how I got there and I didn’t want to stay there alone.” She looked up at Calla with sorry sadness in her eyes. “I went to Uncle Lark’s, but he wasn’t in his room.” She shifted her weight a bit, shuffling her feet. “I’d go to Mei’s, but...” The little girl’s voice trailed off, her lips wavering and her eyes beginning to tear.
Calla smiled sympathetically and nodded. “Come on.” She held out her hand to the girl, leading her into the room. Patting the mattress, she urged the girl to join her on the bed.
The girl jumped up on the bed, bouncing with the effort.
Calla knew she ought to talk to the girl, ask her if she was all right. But what was there to say? The girl wasn’t all right and Calla, despite all her efforts, couldn’t make her so.
So, following her own advice, Calla reached under her bed and pulled out an opened package of Tim Tams. The chocolate-covered biscuits didn’t solve anything but, if anything could keep it all at bay for a bit, it was cartoons and cookies.
So curling up with her on the bed, giving her a pillow and a share of the blankets to cuddle with, Calla started up the DVD again, letting the fantasy fill what fate couldn’t fix.
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