Fragments of the Lost

by Megan Miranda

  I know what I’m looking for. A navy blue, hard case, usually kept in the top drawer of his desk. But it’s not where I thought it would be. It’s not where it’s always been.

  It’s almost desperate, the way I’m ignoring everything, wasting time in search of this one item: it’s a case for these generic black glasses that he’s had forever.

  They had smudged lenses that he’d have to rub against the hem of his shirt constantly. He’d only wear them at home, even though he would sometimes complain about his contacts bothering him. Sometimes I wondered if some days he wasn’t wearing his contacts either, if that accounted for the faraway look, the things he didn’t notice about me, that he ignored. I like to think it was that, at first: that he just couldn’t see it.

  But he hated these glasses. Hated wearing them, and hated being seen in them.

  I caught him in them the first time I came up to the bunker unannounced. It was just before Christmas break, I remember, because he was working on a history paper due the last day of class, which he claimed was ruining the holiday spirit. He had his headphones on when I knocked, and he hadn’t heard me. I cracked open the door, careful to inch it open, call his name—give him time to react. But he was sitting at his computer and had a textbook out in front of him. He had a thick pair of glasses on, and they turned his expression solemn, his face more boyish. The music drifted faintly across the room.

  It took a moment for him to register my presence, and then he spun his chair toward me, swiped the glasses off his face in one quick motion, as if I’d caught him doing something embarrassing, like I had stumbled upon him writing in a diary.

  It was the moment I fell. When I knew it was more than a crush—that I was drawn by more than the charisma, the smile, the way he made me feel like I was someone worth desiring. No, it was this. This moment. I almost said it right then, was sure he could see it in my stunned expression, but his gaze had gone watery, and he said, “I’m pretending that I can see you right now, but I totally can’t.”

  “At all?” I asked.

  “I mean, I can see like the shape of you,” and he ran his hand in the air, tracing my outline. A shiver ran through me. “But I can’t tell if you’re, like, smiling or laughing or totally appalled right now.”

  I took one step closer. “How about now?”

  He scrunched up his nose. “Still nothing.”

  “Why don’t you put your hot glasses back on then?”

  He lunged off his seat for me, missed as I sidestepped, and I was laughing. He caught me around the waist, pulled my body flush with his. “Got you,” he said, and his eyes searched my face, his smile stretching wider.

  “My contacts were bothering me. Those are emergency only,” he explained.

  “So put them back on.”

  “Oh no, no no no, you do not get to see me in my glasses until you definitely, one hundred percent, have fallen in love with me.”

  I froze in his arms, and he seemed to sense something then. If only he had understood it was that moment itself. That moment, that insight, that vulnerability that did me in. I felt his breath on my face. His lips gently pressed to mine. He didn’t make me say it, and didn’t say anything back. He stepped away, put the thick-rimmed glasses back over his nose, so his eyes looked so large, so freaking blue, and went back to his work.

  It was later that night, when he told me. When he was dropping me back off at home, and the sky was dark, and the heat in the car was running, and I was bundled in my jacket with a hat pulled down over my ears. “I love you too, you know,” he said, like he’d been thinking about it. His voice was low, and his words hung in the space between us.

  “Too?” I asked.

  “Yeah, too,” he said.

  “You’re doing it all out of order,” I said, but I was smiling, my whole body thrumming.

  “Doesn’t mean it’s not true,” he said, unbuckling his seatbelt and leaning toward me.

  I whispered it to him then, like I was the first one to say it, in the moment before his lips met mine.

  “I knew it,” he said, and the memory of his smile warmed me as I walked to my front door in the cold winter night.

  —

  I shift the contents of his top drawer around, checking again—nothing. Next I check the surfaces of his dressers, the backpack in the corner, still filled with a few notebooks from the last day at school. The glasses are a part of him that only I had been allowed to see.

  And now they’re gone. Missing.

  I didn’t hear Eve coming up the steps. Didn’t feel her standing at the top of the steps. Didn’t notice until I spun around and saw her standing there, watching.

  “What are you looking for, Jessa?” she asks, not unkindly, but not gently, either. She has no need to be gentle with me any longer.

  I tell his mother. “I can’t find his glasses.” But she doesn’t seem to get the implication. She does not understand the significance for me. Because there’s always this hope, somewhere in my mind, that this is all some huge misunderstanding. And the glasses seem to support this fact. That there’s something we are all missing, that is so obvious, that I am bound to uncover.

  She ignores my comment about the glasses. “You’ve only just started,” she says, and I nod. They could be anywhere, she’s implying. Keep working, she’s implying.

  But it’s dinnertime on Saturday, and my parents expect me home, and I tell her this.

  She considers, nods once, relieving me of my penance.

  “When should I expect you tomorrow?” she asks.

  Tomorrow, Sunday, there’s still so much to do. “In the morning,” I say. “As soon as I’m up.” And when I leave his room, she pulls the door shut behind me.

  —

  There’s a mystery, if you can call it that, at the heart of Caleb’s last day. It’s why his mother blames me. It’s why I come here, letting her blame me, in the hope that I will find out the truth. It’s why people don’t quite know what to say to me—whether to feel sympathy or something else. It’s a mystery that keeps me tethered to this room, this hope that if I keep at it, I will finally and completely understand.

  Because I don’t. And it grates at me. This is the first thing, and it’s a big thing, for which I cannot get a clear answer. And I worry that the moment will always sit incomplete. There will be no resolution that will let me move on. I can see it, even now, as if I am ten years older, looking back.

  And that is the question of where Caleb was going, and why he was at my cross-country meet to begin with.

  Part of me thinks it was just habit.

  Part of me thinks he’d forgotten he didn’t need to be there anymore.

  Part of me thinks it was Max, who he came for.

  But the fact remains that he told his mother he couldn’t watch his sister Mia because I had a race. He always used to come to my meets. I wonder if it was a slip of his tongue, a mistake, that the breakup hadn’t quite registered yet. Or if he hadn’t told his mother and didn’t want to. If he was thinking, even then, that we might mend things. If he’d come because he wanted to—and then, for some reason, decided he didn’t want to be there after all.

  Or if he just didn’t want to watch Mia. He was good with her, and Mia idolized him, but he also wouldn’t rearrange his own schedule just to accommodate his mother’s, or Sean’s. She already has two parents, I’d once heard him say to his mother as an excuse. I’d watched her flinch, turn away, and wondered if she could hear the longing for the same thing in his voice, underneath the bitterness.

  So he said he couldn’t watch Mia, and then he came to my meet. I saw him there, not quite registering the surprise of it. I asked him to hold my necklace. The gun sounded. The rain started, but it began as a steady drizzle. It wasn’t until the end of the race that it started falling fast, and hard. We kept running anyway, as we always do—the winner of the boys’ race was probably already finished by then anyway.

  The rain kept coming. By the time I crossed the finish line, mud-stre
aked and dripping wet, Caleb was gone.

  I wonder if maybe it was that—the rain picking up, and not me—that made him leave early. He came home first, we know that. From the neighbor who saw his car, to the clothes on the floor, to the timing.

  Meanwhile, we waited out the rain after the race, the coaches and spectators all dripping inside the athletic center after, the floors slick with muddy water, the lobby humid and sweaty. I remember pressing my hands to the glass doors, watching the way the rain came down in a sheet. “It’s like standing inside a waterfall,” Hailey said. Her hands pressed to the glass beside mine, her nails painted alternating green and black, our school colors.

  We stayed there, sitting cross-legged on the linoleum, playing with a stack of cards from Oliver’s bag, while others spent the time on their phones, leaning back on their gym bags. Max tapped out a rhythm on the floor with two pencils—taken from Skyler, who was doing her homework. One hour passed. Two. Before the school deemed it safe to drive, and the flash-flood warnings were over.

  And while we sat there—deliberating over our hand of playing cards; counting out a frantic beat; trying to remember how to find the inverse tangent; taking a nap—what were you doing, Caleb? Where were you going?

  No one is sure. But the last thing you said to your mom was about me. The last place you said you’d be, with me. Had something else driven you to this sequence of events? To convince you to go home, and to leave again?

  It’s a mystery that has me complicit, in this room. Because I want to know. And I have this painful hope that I will pull open that drawer, or find a note in your handwriting hidden under that book, or see something on a calendar I didn’t know existed, and everything will become clear. The mystery solved. And I will be absolved.

  Caleb, please, I need to know.

  It’s impossible not to notice that Julian’s home. My father is making chicken potpie, his favorite. My mother has the laundry basket on the coffee table, and there’s a pile of Julian’s folded shirts on the couch while she watches television.

  Even if they hadn’t given me fair warning (a verbal countdown, each morning), it would be obvious. So much of our family life revolved around Julian’s ball games and his schedule these last few years, it’s like we don’t know what to do with each other now that he’s gone. So my parents take it upon themselves to make his return visits as welcoming as possible, to entice him to want to return.

  They do his laundry. They cook his favorite meals. They leave him be. There’s a calm in the house when he’s home, like I know my place again in our family unit. Without him here, I feel my parents’ focus too strongly, like they’re surprised by the person I have become.

  “Where’ve you been?” my mother says, her substitution for a greeting because I’m supposed to be engaging in family time, now that Julian’s home.

  “Helping Eve with the packing,” I say.

  “Oh,” my mother says, and her voice falls, her face falls. She moves around the couch, places her hand on the side of my head, and I look away, too aware of her gaze. “How is she? I can’t believe they’re really doing it. Really moving.”

  I don’t answer any of it, because really, what is there to say? Sean’s gone and Caleb’s gone and soon they’ll be gone, too. Nothing more to remind us.

  “I need to go back tomorrow.”

  I feel the tension through her arm before she trails her fingers through my hair, and she shifts her focus. “But you’re going to miss seeing your brother. He leaves tomorrow evening.”

  “I’m seeing him now,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “He’s going out after dinner. Some baseball thing. Oh, you should go.” Then, she calls louder, “Julian! Do you think you could bring Jessa with you?”

  “Ugh, Mom, stop.” The last thing I want is to be dragged around as an appendage to Julian. It’ll be a bunch of people I’ve known for what feels like my whole life, mixed with my classmates who know me with Caleb. A blending of worlds, and I won’t know which person to be.

  “It’s fine,” he says, stepping out of the kitchen, where he was undoubtedly helping my father, because Julian can also cook, of course. “I’m going back to talk to the team at the coach’s place.”

  It’s fine, he says, like I am the chore.

  “God, don’t do me any favors, Julian. What if I don’t want to go?”

  My mother mumbles at the television, picking up another shirt to fold. Julian grins and tilts his head. “Would you rather…,” he says, letting the thought trail off. He raises his hands in a balance of scales, as if to say: Pick, Jessa. A night home with your parents asking you questions, trapped in this house? Or an escape.

  “Ugh, fine,” I say. I roll my eyes at him, and he laughs. I hate that I like my brother as much as I do.

  —

  I’ve sort of inherited Julian’s car, in that the car is here, and Julian’s usually gone. But when he’s home, I’m reminded that it belonged to him first. He takes the keys from their familiar spot hanging in the kitchen. He sits in the driver’s seat. I stew silently, wondering if he’s noticed the keychain with my name (well, it’s really a Jesse, the e turned into an a with red permanent marker, the closest name Caleb could ever find on the store display; I was always searching for my name, everywhere), or the seat that’s been adjusted to my height, the mirrors angled to my field of vision.

  He adjusts things smoothly as I make a show of sliding into the passenger side, but he leaves the radio on my station at least.

  The coach’s house isn’t far from campus—an older colonial that makes me suddenly wonder how much history teachers–slash–high school baseball coaches are paid.

  Julian, as if reading my thoughts, says, “Mrs. Peters works in banking.”

  There are cars already filling the driveway, a few parked along the curb. “So,” I say, “you’re giving, like, an insight-to-college talk or something?”

  He shrugs. “They do this yearly alumni-family gathering thing. Like a chance for the kids to ask questions about applying, or scouts, or whatever.” He fidgets with the controls on the car, turning the lights off. “We don’t have to stay long. Maybe we can catch a movie on the way home. Or get some ice cream. Or whatever.”

  He stares out the front window as he says this, and I groan. “Oh my God, did Mom put you up to this?”

  “No, I just thought—”

  “I’m fine, Julian.”

  “I know, I know, it’s just—”

  “We broke up,” I say, and he sits straighter. “Caleb and I had broken up.” I did not lose my boyfriend. That, at least, was a role I could figure out how to fill. The tragic figure left behind. A future full of never-haves and what-might-have-beens.

  “Yeah, I heard that. Still…” Still. You missed a week of school. You stopped showing up to cross-country. You don’t see your friends. You go to school and back, stuck in a lifeless cycle, like a ghost.

  “Still, what?” I’m going to make him say it, sharing in the discomfort of the moment.

  But before he can answer, someone knocks on the window; another alumnus, a year older than Julian. Terrance Bilson. He smiles widely, and Julian launches himself out of the car, laughing, embracing his old teammate. I trail behind as they walk together toward the house, and then Julian gestures toward me, saying, “You remember my sister, Jessa?”

  Terrance’s smile fractures for the slightest moment. If the outside porch light hadn’t been trained directly on him, I wouldn’t have noticed. But I did. I do. Then the smile is back, and he says, “Right, hi, Jessa. Nice to see you.”

  Inside, there’s a spread of finger food on the long dining room table. There are kids I recognize from school who nod their hellos after they fawn over Julian. Sometimes there’s a benefit to being Julian’s sister, to fading into the background, to being generally ignored. I let the conversation hum around me. I check out.

  I sit on a hard-backed chair with a plastic cup of soda in my hand, and I take out my phone, pretending to look
busy. Pretending like anyone has texted me in the last month.

  Someone’s knee nudges mine, and I ignore it at first, assuming it’s an accident. I shift my legs farther to the side. But then they’re bumped again, and I look up, catching Max’s eye briefly before I look back at my phone. “Oh, hi,” I say. “My brother’s in the kitchen. Though I see you’ve picked your seating strategically.”

  But he ignores me. His leg is bouncing beside mine. “How long were you over there today? I left for work, and your car was still there.”

  “Yeah, till dinnertime.” And then, in the silence, I tell him. Hoping it will mean something to him as well. That he will sit a little straighter, lean a little nearer, drop his voice in surprise. “I can’t find his glasses,” I say.

  His leg stops bouncing. “You mean the ones from middle school? Thick rimmed, black?”

  I nod.

  “I haven’t seen those in years. He still had them?”

  “Yes, he still wore them.”

  He laughs, and the sound makes me mournful. It was a piece shared only with me, then.

  “Maybe he finally tossed them,” he says.

  Nothing. No spark. No meaning.

  “I’ll check again tomorrow,” I say.

  I feel him looking at the side of my face. “You’re going back?”

  Of course I’m going back. It’s all that’s left of him, whether his mother is punishing me or not. It’s the first time I’ve been invited back into the house since before that day. It’s my last chance for answers, for some sort of absolution, to see if I can uncover what he was doing, where he was going. The cause and effect that led us all here. “It’ll probably take me at least a week,” I say.

  “You don’t have to do that. I’ll do it. Don’t show up, and I’ll just do it, okay?”

  “Max,” I say, and I am so serious, so deadly serious I grasp onto his arm so he will understand how serious I am. “Do not touch that room.”

  It’s mine. My grief, my guilt, all of it—it belongs to me, and it’s mine to go through. I had no idea how possessive I felt over Caleb, even now. Even though Max probably has more claim to that room, if he wants to make the argument. But he doesn’t.