He scrunched up his nose. “We can go to a movie. There’s one I wanted to see anyway.”
“What’s wrong with my place?”
“Nothing, Jessa.”
But it wasn’t nothing. I realized then how often we came here, instead of going to my house.
He looked over his shoulder, at the laughter coming from inside, from Mia. “Every time I show up, your family seems surprised to see me.”
I laughed. “It’s denial, Caleb. I’m the youngest. And Julian keeps that part of his life totally out of my parents’ eyes. Or he tries to, at least.”
He grunted. “And the questions,” he continued. “I feel like your dad is probably running some background check on me.”
“Oh my God, don’t be such a baby. He is not. Questions are, like, his way of being polite.”
“Guaranteed he knows my blood type.”
I laughed and smacked him in the arm. But when he showed up later that afternoon, he didn’t come inside. He already had tickets for that movie.
“Just, hold on,” I’d said, taking out my phone. “I told Hailey I’d be around.”
“You can let her know on the way,” he said, already walking toward his car. “We’re going to be late.”
And I remember feeling, for the first time, that there were two Calebs: the person he was with me alone, and the person he was outside of his room. Was that why I spent so much time over there, instead of at my place? Because I liked him better that way? The boy on the beach, in the bunker, when the rest of the world felt far away. I wondered if I secretly wished that was all of him. And whether he felt the same about me.
The rest of the lacrosse bag is empty, and I leave it, together with all his gear, in a corner. I know it was expensive. It can probably be resold, along with his guitar. I assume Eve will take it away, put it wherever she’s keeping the boxes.
I can almost feel Caleb slipping away—the person I thought I knew. The way I felt him slipping back then. I close my eyes, trying to hold tight to him. To remember the feel of his fingers lacing through mine, the sound of his laughter, the words he’d whisper just to me.
But I open my eyes, and I’m in an empty room, alone, with nothing but the ticking of the clock for company. I can’t hear his voice, just the steady tick, tick, tick.
And then: there he is. He’s standing on his bed, leaning toward the clock, reaching for the minute hand.
—
“Here?” he asked, dragging the minute hand around. The curtains were open beside him, and snow was starting to fall outside the window. Icicles clung to the roof overhang; it was early February.
“No, it’s before noon. You need to move the hour hand,” I said.
He leaned back, looking it over. “It looks like it’s right to me.”
“Only if you’re operating in Daylight Saving Time.”
“Isn’t it only like a month until the time changes back? At this point I might as well leave it.”
“It drives me crazy,” I said. I couldn’t stand that it was always wrong—like his room was a place that operated outside the rules of time and space.
“Jessa,” he said, tapping his hand against the clock, “this is a commemorative Giants’ Super Bowl clock. It’s meant to drive Sean crazy. Not you.”
Sean was an Eagles fan, and so Caleb took extra pleasure in these items, as if they could keep Sean from his room, just by threat of seeing them.
—
Now, looking at the clock, it seems like it tells the perfect time. The second hand ticks steadily along; nothing else moves.
I finally can’t take it any longer, the steady ticking, each beat farther and farther from a world where Caleb existed. I pull his desk chair to the wall, stand on top, and then I tear the blue and red clock from the pin in the wall—and still, it ticks in my hand. I turn it over to fumble for the battery pack, to make it stop, because it seems the only fair thing to do—
But there, tucked into the wire casing, is a rectangular ticket, like all the stubs he kept in his desk.
I slip it out, and it’s a bus ticket, from the spring—never used. Never taken. It leaves from here and goes to some town I’ve never heard of in Pennsylvania. I look at the dates—to be used within a year of purchase. I can’t figure out how this was Caleb’s. If he had any intention of using this, and why.
I open the map program on my phone, pull up a search page. I plug the name of the town in, and the map zooms in to the northern edge of the state. There’s nothing there that seems familiar. I zoom back out to see the path from Caleb’s town to there. It crosses the river, the border of the state. Something registers from the edge of my memory—the familiarity of the region.
I think of the name on the picture, of us on the hike. Delaware Water Gap. I wonder if this was some halfway meeting point.
I try to remember the dates on the pictures. I’m trying to remember why we went there. Why there. I wish I had the pictures, but they’re home. And now I’m wondering if we went there for some other reason, unbeknownst to me.
Maybe he went back; maybe it was a central meeting point that he was scoping out. I picture a girl, a hug, a smile. It seems obvious that’s who the letter was from, and this is the purpose of the bus ticket. Maybe he was supposed to go meet her there, where she lives. Maybe it’s Ashlyn Patterson, and they started up again after the ski trip. Though he has a car. He had a car. Surely he could’ve driven himself there just as easily?
Eve’s footsteps echo from the floor below, and I quietly ease the blue door shut. I unzip the lacrosse bag in the corner and wedge the stick over the handle, behind the dresser, trying not to make any noise as I do, like Caleb once did.
This other life of his gnaws at me, until I have to know. Until the voice that says What’s the point? He’s gone is silenced. Because the point is that it’s not only Caleb’s story, but mine.
And because his story is also mine, because we’re woven together—his arm on my side of a photo, my hand on his—I have to know.
I slip the bus ticket into my back pocket and log onto his computer, a simple combination of four characters—his birthday month and year—I’d seen him enter a thousand times. Even Mia could’ve figured this out. His documents are all there, the English essays, saved homework assignments. His music folder, organized into playlists. On impulse, I click the playlist with my name, and the familiar melody fills the room: a scrapbook of songs, whether we liked them or not, but that told the story of us. Homecoming, the lyrics I got so wrong that Caleb couldn’t help but sing them every time he heard them; the song that played all summer, words belted out in the car on the way back from the beach.
And then abruptly I turn it off.
There’s something too close about it, that brings me right back.
Instead, I focus on this other Caleb. The one who received letters and hid them in books. Who had bus tickets to places I’ve never heard of. Who took Max’s money. Who left my race and was on his way to somewhere unknown when he was swept away.
I wonder if there was someone else, all along. I remember the way I’d find him sitting at the computer over this last summer, turning off the monitor screen when I walked in. I assumed it was college stuff, but the moments become recolored in my mind. I open the Internet program and see that he’s cleared his browser history. But I do the same. It’s a habit, from when I shared the computer with Julian and accidentally stumbled onto his last visited site—realizing the same could happen to me. I wonder if Caleb was messaging someone through the computer app, but I don’t know his password for that, and his phone is gone, swept away with the river, and him.
I do, however, know his email password. At least, I used to.
I’d been sitting at his desk, spinning in his chair, while he did homework on his bed. It was the middle of last school year, just before our ski trip. “Hey,” he’d said. “I need to print something out from my email. Do me a favor, log me in.” He barely glanced up from his notebook.
I typed his
username, but the password wasn’t saved.
His eyes were fixed on the screen beyond when I looked back. “GreenRiver36,” he said.
“Huh?”
He gestured to the screen. “My password.” Then he looked back down, as if it wasn’t a big deal.
Except it was. To me, I imagined it was like giving someone the key to your apartment. Permission to be there when they were not. To check in, if you so desired. It was a combination of his lacrosse number, our school color, and our school name.
—
He knew I knew it, so part of me wonders if he changed it after the breakup. Or maybe before. Maybe when he started getting secretive, he changed it right then.
Still, I try.
I type in his email account username, and then his password, and I’m not surprised when I get the message telling me that the Password is incorrect.
But what makes me pause, what makes me freeze, my hands hovering over the keyboard, the words blurring, is the line below:
Password last changed 49 days ago. If this is incorrect, please click here to report.
I pull up the calendar on my phone. Look at the dates. Forty-nine days. I do the math. Check again. Look over my shoulder at the lacrosse stick wedged against the door.
His password was last changed two days after he died.
“Jessa?”
His mother’s voice funnels up the steps, the second before her footsteps. I exit out of the program so she won’t think I was snooping, shut down the computer, and turn the monitor to black before racing to the door. I slide the lacrosse stick from its position, opening the door just as her hand turns the knob.
“Hi,” I say.
She tips her head to the side gently, probably noticing I’m out of breath and flushed. “I wasn’t sure if you were still up here. It’s been so quiet.”
I nod, gesturing to the boxes. “I did the drawers. The sports stuff.”
My mind is swirling, the words on the tip of my tongue: Someone changed his email password. Someone else has been through his things. Through his email. Through here.
My first thought, the first image I see, is of Caleb, hovering over a computer screen somewhere, changing his password. But I shake the thought, the painful hope, before thinking of all the other possibilities: Eve, Mia, Max; a nameless girl whom he knew just as well, who sent him letters, who he met up with—
Eve frowns. “Will you be coming directly from school tomorrow?”
It’s then I notice that the sky has gone dark, the shadows from the fan slanting across the walls.
“I think so,” I say. I grab my purse and brush by her, my body trembling.
She grabs my bag as I pass, our bodies filling up the narrow stairwell. “Leave everything.”
I flinch. “I did.”
Her fingers don’t let up, but they don’t tug harder, either. “Can I see?” she asks.
I nod, offering my purse over to her. I have this fear that she will bar me from this room, from their lives, once more, and I’ll never know what happened. I have this instinct that she doesn’t trust me up here all alone, and I’m scared she will change her mind—that just as I’m peeling away the top layer, everything that is Caleb will be gone for good.
She unzips the bag, runs her fingers along my wallet, my phone, jangling the pack of gum and ChapStick, the spare coins, the extra tampon. The pictures are in my room, safely transported the day before. The bus ticket is wedged into the back pocket of my jeans. If she sees the strip of condoms I’ve stuffed into the bottom of my purse, she doesn’t say.
“Okay?” I ask, but I’m already pulling my purse away. I want her hands out of my things—my things—but I don’t want her to keep me from coming back. It’s a tightrope, and I don’t know how to manage her. It must be the same for her: that she both wants me here, doing this for her, and doesn’t want me here, my hands in her son’s things, reminding her of the start of the chain of events—Caleb at my meet, the beginning of the end. All I know is there is not space for both of us in this room.
Eve says nothing, but she doesn’t object as I make my way down the staircase, my feet moving Caleb-speed, my body trembling, the air thrumming. I move quickly, terrified that she’ll notice the outline of the ticket in my pocket, that she’ll stop me, and call me back.
I burst through the front door and race to my car, and it’s not until I have the car running that I put my hands on my head and take a deep breath. I breathe slowly with my eyes closed before placing my hands on the wheel. The front porch light flicks on, and as I pull away, I see the curtains move.
—
There’s a note on the kitchen table: Took Julian to train station.
My house is too big for just me. The kitchen gives way to the living room and the dining room and the foyer, all at once. The staircase is twice as wide as the one at Caleb’s house, and the balcony overlooks the open layout of the downstairs. Our rooms are spread out upstairs beyond the balcony in the back half of the house, the windows facing the inclined backyard and the stone patio that’s rarely used once the weather turns.
Everything echoes here.
I leave on the light near the front steps and make my way to my room, keeping my door open so I can hear when my parents return.
I want to sort through the photos from Caleb’s room, which I’ve stored in my closet, on the shelf just out of reach. Now, I fan them over the blue bedspread on my full-sized mattress, adding the ticket from my pocket to the mix. There’s a canopy overtop the bed, strung from the bedposts, from when I was younger, and it’s blocking the light.
I remember Caleb running his fingers over the gauzy white material the first time he was up here, whistling between his teeth.
He fell onto his back, his hands behind his head, looking straight up. “I’m just trying to see it,” he said, “the world according to Jessa.”
My room might’ve been bigger, but his had far more privacy. He walked around mine that first day like he was in a museum gallery, his hands hovering over the decorations, the jewelry box, but never touching. Like there was something untouchable about the world I inhabited, still.
Now, the photos take his spot on the bed. The only thing out on the surface of my dresser is the broken dragonfly necklace, not put away, not replaced on a new chain, just waiting there, as if I’m not sure what to do with it. All it does now is remind me. He’s everywhere now. Even here.
I sort through the photos, pulling out the shot of us at the Delaware Water Gap.
I lean closer to the photo of us at the waterfall, Caleb staring back, his eyes locking on mine through the lens and time. I turn on my computer, to try to map it exactly, remembering where we were, the details from the sign. I check the photo to see if there are any mile markers, something that might map to our final location. I look at various images from other people’s hikes at the Delaware Water Gap, trying to find an exact match.
There’s something similar in several of the photos, but nothing that captures this exact perspective. There will never be another shot like this—the two of us on the rock, an arc of water in the background, our faces frozen in place and time, a feeling I can remember just from my expression alone.
There’s a knock on the door downstairs, and I shut my laptop and stack the photos, sliding them into my top drawer. I check my phone for messages, thinking Hailey would’ve texted first. But there’s nothing. The bell rings as I walk down the steps, and it echoes, sets my nerves on edge.
The lights are on in the foyer downstairs, and my car’s in the driveway, so I can’t pretend I’m not home. I check the front window and see a car I don’t recognize. The bell rings again. I peer through the peephole, and it’s Terrance Bilson, my brother’s ex-teammate, current alumnus, previous giver-of-questionable-look at the coach’s meeting.
My shoulders relax as I pull the door open. “He left already,” I say. “Sorry.”
But Terrance doesn’t move. He peers over my shoulder into the empty spaces, the darkened r
ooms. “I didn’t have your number, or I would’ve called first.” He angles his foot across the threshold, and I tighten my grip on the door. “I wanted to talk to you,” he says.
I don’t open the door any wider, because I don’t really know Terrance all that well, other than the fact that he played baseball with Julian and Max.
He must sense this fact, because he steps back. “Will you come out for a minute?”
It’s cold, and the neighbors are home, and his car is in the street, and anyone can see. “No, it’s okay. Come on in.”
Terrance looks around briefly, lingering near the entrance. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t really seem to know how to start.
“So, what are we talking about?” I ask. I remember the look he gave me Saturday night, and it puts me on the defensive.
He blinks, his gaze shifting back to me, as if remembering. “Caleb.”
My jaw tenses, the word echoing in the foyer with the too-high ceilings, and I know my body language must give me away.
“I saw him, in September,” Terrance continues, and then I understand. I remember.
“The college visit. Was that with you?”
He nods. “It was supposed to be. He showed up, but then he disappeared.”
“What do you mean, he disappeared?”
“Just that. He checked in, but I didn’t see him again until he was leaving. He came back Sunday afternoon for his luggage. He had a bag from the school store in his hand, and he looked like crap. He apologized, and left, and I never saw him again.” His voice trails off, because his words have an unintended finality. I wonder if everyone has their own story for the last time they saw him. A story they each tell anytime the name comes up, becoming more embellished over time.
Caleb’s phone had gone to voicemail during that trip. We had fought about it after. All I had to go on was my imagination then, and now Terrance is here, making those images even more real.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I think it’s a dick move, what they’re saying.”
Fragments of the Lost Page 10