“God, Max, you’re like a beached whale,” I called.
I turned to see Caleb staring at the side of my face. “Going in?” he asked, switching his expression to a coy grin.
I tipped my head at Max’s shoes in the sand. “Someone has to guard the sneakers,” I said.
He laughed. “You’re so full of crap.” Then he picked me up over his shoulder and started running for the shoreline.
“No, no, no, no!” I yelled. “Wait.” I pounded his back. “At least let me take off my shoes. They’re expensive.”
He placed me on the sand, and I stepped back as I bent over to peel them off.
“Take yours off, too,” I said, but he only watched me, grinning.
Then I turned and sprinted down the beach, but Caleb was ready for me, and he caught me in three quick strides. I squealed while he tossed me over his shoulder and ran straight into the surf.
He dropped me into the water, and the cold felt so good, so shocking, but I panicked for a moment, until I got my feet back under me, felt the sand giving way under my weight. We were deeper than I thought, and I automatically scrambled back toward shore.
“Ugh, I hate you!” I said, but he was laughing, holding me up.
He carried me on his back as he walked back out, as he had the month before at the river. “I told you, Jessa. I’m not gonna let you drown.”
On the beach, he took off his sneakers, caked with wet sand and salt water. He tipped them over, and the ocean streamed out. “I told you, Caleb. Take off your shoes.”
Max was lying on the sand, drying in the sun. There were other runners on the beach now. “Please tell me you brought water,” he said. “Please. I’m unprepared. I think I’m dying.” A girl stared at him lying there shirtless as she ran down the beach, and he raised his hand at her, smirking.
I reached a hand down. “Drinks are in the car, hot stuff.”
At the car, Caleb opened the trunk, and they each grabbed a Gatorade from my cooler. “You guys should do this with me. Cross-country, I mean. You’re fast, Caleb. And you’ll both stay in shape.”
“I notice you did not say that I was fast,” Max said.
“I said you’d stay in shape.” I smiled wide. “Come on, it’s fun.”
“That wasn’t fun,” Max said.
“You’ll feel awesome later.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“You both just did five miles from nothing. That’s harder than most of our practices. Come on, Max, I see you in the weight room, trying to keep in shape until baseball season. I’ve seen you on the treadmill.”
He focused on me then, took a long sip, brushed the wet hair from his eyes. I held my breath, waiting. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Okay, I’ll do it.”
We both turned to Caleb, who was looking Max over. He turned to me, took a deep breath. “Sorry, Jessa. Not my thing.”
Then he looked at Max again, and there was this awkward silence, where I wasn’t sure what we were doing here, standing in a circle, a feeling I couldn’t put my finger on. Then Caleb finally said, “Come on, Max. We’re all waiting here.”
Max handed him the bottle of Gatorade and climbed up on the hood of Caleb’s car. He walked onto the roof, stretched his arms out to the sides, and belted the lyrics, “O say can you see—”
—
The sneakers are beach-worn, waterlogged, completely spent. I hate that I have to throw these out, but they’re ruined. I warned him, I think. I told him. But Caleb was like that. He didn’t like to be told what to do, even by me.
The top shelf of his closet is partially lined with a tower of shoeboxes. They’re black and orange, and have miniature images of cleats, or sneakers, or boots. They’re all in his size.
During the middle of last school year, I remember Mia telling him in the kitchen, “I need a box, for a diorama.”
Caleb saying, “Go get one from the tower.”
And Mia shaking her head, her eyes wide.
Caleb grinned. “There aren’t any monsters up there.”
“But I hear them,” Mia said.
Caleb groaned but bounded up the stairs and returned a few moments later with an empty shoebox.
“You have a tower of boxes?” I asked.
“I do,” he said. “I started out keeping my shoes in them, but then I also just started keeping them for projects and storage, and now, what can I say, I’m the person who has a tower of boxes in his closet.”
“This is how it starts with cats, right?”
—
The first few boxes I pull down are empty, as I recalled them being. But then there’s the sound of shaking, something loose and rattling inside the one at the base. I pull it down, open the top, and see it’s full of Legos. I smile, imagining a smaller version of Caleb sitting on the floor of this room, building a town, or a spaceship. A few pieces are still stuck together, in half-towers, half-robots, shapes I can’t quite decipher.
The box, I realize, has an L on it. And others are labeled as well, as I pull them down and open them. Old figurines, collectibles, baseball cards. The boxes are labeled in marker, with a single letter—a code. L for Legos, B for Baseball, P for…People, I guess? They’re action figures, G.I. Joe, stuff like that.
I hear Eve come back in the house, and Mia speaking to her below. I can only hope she’s not telling her about finding me in her room. I hold my breath, waiting for footsteps on the stairs, but eventually the voices settle, the house settles back to silence.
Near the bottom of the boxes, there’s a D, and it’s sealed extra-closed with a rubber band, and I worry for a moment that this is it, some girl, an ex or a new one—something he didn’t want me to see. But the first thing I see inside is a photo of a very young boy beside a man. They’re holding fishing poles. They’re standing knee-deep in a river. Some instinct makes me flip it over, and I see, written in faint pencil: Delaware Water Gap?
It’s his father. It’s so easy to see, from the distance, from the shape of them. Now that Caleb’s older, you can see the resemblance between him and his father from over ten years ago. They’ve met at the center, from opposite directions. Separated by fifteen years or so now. He’s got the same build, the same hair. Which I figured, since Eve’s hair is so dark, and she’s lithe, with green eyes and pale skin, like Mia. But nothing else is in detail. Instead I imagine the man in the photo turns to face the camera head-on, and it’s the replica of an older Caleb, one I will never see, but who once existed in another lifetime.
Then I think, Maybe that’s what we were doing there, on our hike. Retracing the pattern of his father’s life, with places they had once gone together. I move the photo to see what’s below, and there are a few more pictures. They’re all of Caleb and his dad. There are none with Eve. They have years written lightly on the back, with question marks. Words like home; backyard; summer; winter. There’s one of the two of them cleaning an old black car. There’s a corner of a house behind them, and something about the angle, and the trees behind, make me wonder whether it’s the house we stopped at on the way to Max’s game. In the photo, the younger Caleb has the hose, his father has the sponge. They’re both in bathing suits. Caleb points it at his father, and his father has a hand up—but he’s laughing.
I close the lid, my fingers shaking.
I was doing the same thing Caleb did. Creating a single box remaining, to tell the story of someone I loved, that would one day be stored in my closet.
I don’t know what to do with this. If these photos once belonged to Eve, Caleb took them from her for a reason. He was trying to figure something out, something his mother wouldn’t tell him. If he asked, Where was this taken? surely she would answer. But his father was an off-limits topic. I wondered if they had divorced first. I never knew. Didn’t pry too much, into a thing I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to push Caleb back toward. All I knew: His father died in a car accident when he was five; his mom met and married Sean a few years later; Mia was born when he was nine; and they a
ll moved here just before he started middle school. That’s all I knew of the Caleb before we met.
I let him show me what he wanted to show, and I saw the things I wanted to see.
I’ve started my own box—the box in my mind, that’s marked C for Caleb. It began with my pictures. I’ve taken the seashell. And now these pictures sing in my hand, as if they belong together. I close the shoebox back up and tuck it under the bed, and figure I’ll wait for a moment—when Eve is out, or occupied again. I listen for sounds of water running through the walls, but all I hear is the silence, and the ticking of the grandfather clock, up two flights of stairs.
I stand up and reach my hands to the top shelf, feeling for anything left behind. There’s an assortment of ties, and what look like shin guards, maybe from soccer, though I don’t recall him playing soccer.
My hands brush something larger that rolls when I bump against it, and I strain my fingers, then close them around a rubber edge.
I pull down a flashlight, in black and red, with a switch at the base. I run my fingers over it, push it on, and shine it into the corners. I feel him behind me then, hear his whisper in my ear as this flashlight was in my hand, surrounded by the cold night air, and the dark.
Turn it off, he says.
It was sometime in the middle of March and we were not supposed to be out. Caleb had gotten into some fight with Sean, and Sean had grounded him. But Caleb maintained that Sean didn’t have the right to ground him, daring him to say otherwise.
“You’re not my father,” he’d said. We had come home from school, dropped the keys on the entrance table, and had made it halfway to the steps when Sean rounded the corner from the kitchen. Caleb had not expected for Sean to be here. Apparently he hadn’t expected us either.
“I thought you were supposed to be studying at the library,” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“I thought you were supposed to be at work,” Caleb answered.
“Of course you did,” Sean said. “Is this what you do instead? You tell us you’re busy so Mia has to go to the sitter’s, and then you bring your girlfriend here? You lie to us, and Mia, so you can screw around with her?”
I jerked back. “Hey,” I said. The tone of his voice made me stiffen my backbone, plant my feet.
But Caleb stepped forward. “We came for my books, Sean.”
“Sure you did.”
He brushed by him, pushing his shoulder into his. Sean grabbed Caleb’s car keys from the table.
“Why aren’t you at work, Sean?” Caleb asked, not backing down.
“Leave,” Sean said to me, over Caleb’s shoulder. But I had nowhere to go. Caleb was my ride. I thought, briefly, of heading to Max’s place. Thought about knocking and saying, Caleb’s stepfather kicked me out. Thought about calling Julian, or my parents.
There was something off in the dynamic—I wasn’t sure whether he had caught Caleb, or Caleb had caught Sean, but neither was backing down.
And then, before anyone could make a decision, the lights flickered once and went dead. The washing machine wound down—I hadn’t realized it was on until that moment, when I heard it stopping. Sean frowned, flipping the wall switch a few times.
“Seriously?” Caleb’s eyes bored into Sean’s, and I remembered that night from November, when the lights turned off, because they hadn’t paid the bill.
“It’s just a surge,” Sean said, his words on the offense, instead of the defense as I had expected.
Caleb rolled his eyes. “This house is falling apart.” Then he grabbed the flashlight from the kitchen drawer and opened the door to the garage. I followed him into the darkness. Then he called back into the house, “What do you do with the money, Sean? Really?”
The door slammed shut behind me, the lock turning. I felt the gust of air from the swinging door, pushing me inside.
“Watch your step,” he said. There were two wooden steps down until I hit the concrete floor.
They didn’t put cars in here—it was mostly for storage. It smelled of paint stripper and gasoline and wood shavings. He flipped the flashlight on and made his way to the circuit board, where he flipped the switches back and forth in one smooth motion, like he’d done it a hundred times, and the house rebooted.
Then, staring at the door back into the house, he hit the garage door opener instead. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
We both went to Max’s house, and stayed there until after dinner. His mom ordered pizza for us. Max didn’t ask what we were doing there, and Caleb didn’t offer up the information. My parents had called twice—once to wonder if I’d be having dinner with them (no), the second to ask if I was still at the library. I hated lying to my parents. I was terrible at lying to my parents.
“I’ll tell Julian to pick me up here,” I mumbled. I’d owe him one, I’d have to put up with the questions in his silence, but I knew he’d at least keep it between us.
“No,” Caleb said. “I’ll drive you.” But I thought of Sean with his keys, in that house. Still, he didn’t seem to want to talk about it in front of Max, so I agreed.
He handed me the flashlight and we walked through Max’s backyard, shining it in our path.
“Turn it off,” Caleb whispered as we approached his gate. We walked in the dark through his backyard, the frost-covered grass from the remains of an early spring snow crunching under our steps.
At the back door, we could hear his parents arguing, muffled through the walls.
“Probably about me,” Caleb whispered. “Don’t move,” he said. He took the light and shone it into a window on the second floor. Then he turned it off and did it again. Eventually, Mia’s face came into frame. Caleb mimed opening the window.
“Mia,” he said. “I need you to get the spare keys. They’re in Mom’s purse.”
We waited in the darkness until Mia reappeared. She held out her small hand and dropped the keys into Caleb’s below.
He shone the light in his face, so you could see his smile, now eerie from the angle. He mouthed Thank you, grabbed my arm, and we left.
—
I wonder now if he snuck back upstairs after dropping me off. If he kept the flashlight because he didn’t want to make any noise.
I asked him the next day, what happened, and he said, Nothing, Jessa. Nothing happened.
I use the flashlight to illuminate the corners of the closet, to see if there’s anything else I’ve missed. Other than the wooden bookcase in the corner of the closet, stacked with old textbooks, spines cracked through the labels, I believe I’ve finished the closet.
I empty them out, heap them in the middle of the room, ready for a box of school supplies to donate. Caleb would like that. He was big on that.
He didn’t get why we had to buy textbooks each year; why they couldn’t be property of the school, used year after year. Instead we had to purchase them fresh, or make it down to the basement book sale where people purchased used versions from each other, for a discount.
But these are all from last year: Physics, Trig, Spanish 3. Where were the rest, from this year? They should be here, or in his school locker, but his locker was empty.
I don’t remember seeing them in his car, in his backpack, or on his desk, and something eats at me.
I don’t remember seeing them at all.
—
I’d gone down to the basement the first day of classes, looking for Caleb after school. But I’d only seen Max. I’d asked for Caleb, and he shrugged. He had a stack of books he was carrying and said, “I guess we can share, if he needs to. Or he can buy the new ones.”
But I worried Caleb had just forgotten and would be upset later. I’d sent him a text: Want me to get books for you? Send me a list if so.
He’d never responded, and I added it to the list of calls and texts that felt like they were disappearing into the abyss. After practice, when he was giving me a ride home, I asked him about it. “What?” he said. “Oh, I took care of it.”
All these non-answers he’d g
iven me. How little he’d really ever told me at all.
—
I stand on my toes to see if there’s anything left on the top shelf of the closet, but I can’t quite see. I figure if I tip the empty bookcase, I can use it as a step stool. Which I do.
Only once I have it in position, I see what was behind it, when it was upright. There’s a door. A hidden door, lower to the floor, for storage. Dragging the bookcase completely out of the closet, I walk back into the closet and see the door comes up to my rib cage.
There’s a doorknob, but I have to crouch down to see inside.
Hailey’s house is like this on their top floor. Most of their third floor is a guest suite, but there are all these little doors, leading to unfinished rooms, attic spaces under the eaves, for storage. Her father added locks to the outside of them years ago, when Hailey’s brother used one in a game of hide-and-seek in the summer, and by the time they found him, he was dehydrated and nearly unconscious from the dry, oppressive attic heat.
I open the hidden door inside Caleb’s closet now, and instead I get a shock of cold.
The space opens up to part of the attic.
The wind sounds louder inside, unprotected by the added insulation. There’s pink foamlike material clinging to the walls at the entrance, but no light, and as I run my hand along the unfinished entrance wall, I find no switch, either.
I think about where he left that flashlight—right within arm’s reach of this door. I go out to his room, grab it from the box, then return to the closet, crouching down in front of the opening, shining the light inside. I’ve got my other hand on the door, ready to swing it closed—I’m not sure why, what exactly I expect to find. Some animal living up there, maybe.
On the floor, there are only attic beams with plywood below. I think I probably shouldn’t step directly on the plywood, unsure if it’ll support me. Either way, this space was not expected to be used. It’s unfinished, and there’s no solid floor over the beams for storage.
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