The wind blows against the siding, and something rattles up above. I jerk the flashlight in that direction on instinct, and suddenly I’m staring at an insulated duct with a hanger swaying from a bolt hook. It slows as the wind settles, but I’m already maneuvering farther through the doorway, balancing on the beams of wood. Once I’m through, I stand and reach for the hanger, holding it still. It looks like all the rest of the hangers in Caleb’s closet. Metal, but thicker than the wire ones that come back from the dry cleaner at my place.
I don’t understand what it’s doing here. Spinning slowly around, I shine the light in the rest of the space. The walls are covered in the pink insulation, and pinpoints of daylight filter through where the slanted angles of the roof meet the flooring. It’s dusty, and musty, and smells of wood and fiber. The beams are coated in a layer of dust, or debris.
But then my light hits a smoother surface, unmarred by a layer of dust. The wooden floor beam under the hanger. The surface is bare, and shinier than the rest, as if it’s been wiped clean from there to the entrance of Caleb’s closet. It’s a streak of dust-free wood. Maybe as if something has been dragged across the floor.
And then I hear voices. They’re coming from directly underneath my feet, unfiltered by the plaster and carpeting of a bedroom. It’s Mia, speaking to her mother. Her voice rising and falling in a familiar rhythm. I freeze, realizing that if I can hear them, they can hear me.
“We can’t just leave—” Mia says.
But Eve cuts her off. “I told you, honey. He left. He’s not coming back. We can’t afford to stay here.”
I realize they’re talking about Sean. First, her father left, taking a good chunk of their income along with him. Then her brother died. Eve told Sean he had to leave in the summer, and he did—taking his car, and not much else. Caleb and Sean had been fighting more, pushing up against each other, and I thought the tension would dissipate after Sean finally left. But it didn’t. It still lingered, unplaceable. I wondered then whether Eve secretly blamed Caleb. If Eve held it against him that she was forced to take a side, driving a wedge further between their fracturing family. Knowing her the way I do now, I wonder if she even bothered to keep her blame a secret.
“It’s not fair,” Mia wails, in the way that only a child can get away with.
“Of course it’s not,” Eve says. “But this is life. And now you have to decide. This is your bag. Fill it with what you want to keep. The rest we’ll have to sell.”
I crouch lower as the words become more muffled—they must be moving across the room now. I’m trying to hear better, when something catches my eye. There’s something shiny that has fallen between the beams, stuck in the insulation.
My fingers carefully push the material aside to keep from getting splinters from the fiberglass insulation, and the hairs on my arms rise in a chill. But I pull out the item. It’s a house key. And it’s attached to the keychain I know so well—the one I bought him, that he opened on Christmas, signed and personalized. My hand shakes. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why this key is here, in this room, under a hanger.
I don’t understand how it got here. Why it wasn’t with Caleb when he disappeared.
I’m crouched down in this attic room, running through the day in my mind again—He tosses his clothes on the floor. He changes. He leaves—so I don’t hear the footsteps coming up the stairs until it’s too late.
And all I can do is stay put. I pull the attic door shut, and huddle into the corner of the space.
His bedroom door creaks open. Someone moves around the bedroom. They don’t speak. My purse is still there, at the foot of the bed. I silently curse myself. Then the steps move with purpose, into the closet, straight toward me, and the door swings open and it’s Mia, poking her head inside, her eyes watering, her mouth hanging open.
I turn the flashlight on, and her face falls. She sits back on her heels. Her face looks ashen. “It’s you,” she says.
And I wonder, for the flicker of a moment, who she expected to see instead.
She’s holding his glasses, I see. Like she intended to give them back to him.
I crawl back toward her so we’re both out of the unfinished space. “Who did you think I was, Mia?”
She shakes her head, catches her breath on a hiccup, like she’s trying not to cry. “I heard his footsteps,” she says.
“It was just me,” I say. We’re sitting in the floor of his cleared-out closet now, and she’s letting me hold her. It’s the closest she’s let me get in months, and I take it. I’m scared to make a sudden move, to move at all.
“No,” she says. “Before.”
I feel a chill rise on my arms, the back of my neck. The ghost of someone else here beside me. “I’ve been working in the closet,” I say, for her and for myself. She must’ve heard my footsteps there.
She looks at me then, like I don’t understand. “When he was here, sometimes I would hear footsteps at night. I thought it was a monster. But Caleb said it was just him. His closet is just over my room. I didn’t know about that.” She points to the open doorway, the cold coming in with the dark.
I stroke her hair, just letting her speak. Letting her remember.
“But I also heard him there, after the police came,” she whispers.
My hand stills. The air stills. I wonder if someone was going through his things. Maybe that’s why the desk is in such disarray. Where nothing is as it should be here.
“It could’ve been the police. Or your mom.”
But the key. The hanger. I’m holding my breath. That painful hope that doesn’t settle right with what I know is true.
“He was here, Jessa. A few days later. I heard him at night, after my mom went to bed.”
“Did you see him?” I ask. I realize this is a ghost story, and I’m letting her tell it. I’m feeding it myself, giving her pieces, letting her weave them into a tale, wanting to believe.
She ignores the question, as if she knows that by answering truthfully, the story will shatter, and Caleb will vanish again. “I thought he was looking for his glasses. He’ll come back for them. He has to.”
“Did you tell your mom?”
She nods, then drops her voice. “She said not to tell you, though. She said not to talk to you.”
I smooth back her hair, and she curls herself onto my lap, and I feel, for a moment, like Caleb. I wonder if she feels it, too. Like I am filling a gap that keeps growing, and we’re both here desperately pushing back against it.
“Mia,” I say, speaking gently into her ear. “When, exactly, did you hear someone up here?”
She thinks it was two days after the night the police came, but she’s not sure. That’s what Mia kept saying. But she believed it enough to come straight up here, to the closet, expecting to find someone else.
There was a hanger. A bare piece of wood. His house key.
Mia’s words become a life raft. They become something tangible, with weight. Even if they are a lie, they are something to cling to.
She heard footsteps in the attic two nights after Caleb was swept out to sea. When the police were still searching the river. When the shock waves were still rippling through school, and the rumors were laced with my name. When the looks were not apathetic, but cutting.
But. His key is there. His key.
Maybe she didn’t hear anything. Maybe she wanted to. Or maybe she did, and it was someone else. But Caleb had been in there at some point, because his house key had fallen.
I imagine him taking something from the hanger. Dragging something across the floor. Dropping his key, and not realizing it.
There are too many unknowns: the money he supposedly took from Max, that we cannot find; the unused bus ticket; the story Terrance Bilson told me about his college visit, and the man who showed up looking for him. As if Caleb had this whole other life, hidden underneath.
And I’m back where I started, the very first day I began, as if I’ve been running in place all along: Where we
re you going, Caleb? Why?
—
By the time I leave—grabbing my purse from the foot of the bed, escorting Mia to her room, descending the rest of the steps on my own—my feelings shift until I’m angry. Angry at Caleb, and angry at myself.
This is all so Caleb, honestly. Every bit of it. Everything that keeps me tethered to that room, even now.
It was the secrets that hooked me from the very start, the things that he doled out to me, in pieces. Letting me believe I was always getting closer, seeing more of him. But now I’m realizing how much of it was only granted to me because his hand had been forced. Three months before he said a word about his father, and only then because I didn’t understand his family’s money situation; a chance encounter with an ex-girlfriend before I even knew she existed.
I’d believed myself worthy not only of his affection, but of his trust. Except I’d misread the signs. Everything had been situational, a reaction, an answer to a question I had to first ask.
There was always something just under the surface, that I was trying to reach. He kept things just hidden enough to keep me hooked on the intrigue. Doling out the secrets—I don’t like my best friend’s girlfriend—to mask the ones he kept.
The way his eyes turned slightly downward at the edges, pulling me closer, so I could decipher him. The physical differences from his mother, a window to the father he must’ve once known, but whose picture I’d never seen.
The history of the marks on his body: lower stomach, appendectomy; outside of the knee, skiing accident; between the thumb and forefinger, a kitchen knife.
But he’d never let me all the way in. Kept that box of photos for him and him alone, now hidden underneath his bed.
Meanwhile, I gave him everything. What it was like living with Julian (like a shadow), exactly what I had done, and not done, with my last boyfriend (it wasn’t much), a trail of names, an open book. What I wanted to be (a pediatrician), where I wanted to be (somewhere warm all year round), what I wanted to do (Doctors Without Borders, see the world).
He answered by telling me what he wanted to be (happy), where he wanted to be (here, with me), what he wanted to do (not answering, instead giving me a smile that cracked my heart wide open).
I thought because he told me where he was born, brought me to see that old house, told me about his father and the trust fund, that he was letting me further in. That he was giving me everything.
But all I’m left with are these pieces of our lives, sharp-edged fragments that don’t fit the picture of the Caleb I thought I knew.
—
I’m shaking by the time I make it home, everything on autopilot. Running through the last day again in my mind: Caleb showing up at my race; seeing him while I stood at the starting line, and handing him my necklace. Please hold this for me. Please be careful.
What had he come back for? Where was he heading?
I see glimpses: The rain. Caleb launching himself down the steps. The bridge. The phone call. The police. Driving around with Max. The moment we heard.
Pieces of his car. Pieces of his life.
My phone dings in the cup holder, and I jump, too accustomed to the silence, to being alone. The message is from Hailey. It’s a time and location: The pizza place on South Ave. Six p.m. Be there!
It feels a little like neutral ground, like a baby step before we hang out at one of our homes again. Like we’re starting over. The clock in the car ticks forward. I can make it if I leave now. And I have nowhere else to be, no one else to talk to, just my own memories—and even those begin to feel like lies.
I can talk to Hailey, work it all through. She will calmly tell me that I’m not being myself, that I need to get out of that room, that it’s getting to my head.
—
But when I get there, I realize that’s not what this is at all. The pizza place is busy, full of people I know.
It’s a cross-country team get-together. Hailey waves me over. The coach places a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. There’s no animosity. I wonder if I’ve manufactured it. Or if it’s just time, dulling the sting for them.
Life goes on, and these things are the same: Hailey will make the decisions, and others will follow; Oliver will take out a pack of playing cards at some point; Vivian will sit beside Brandon, in a well-timed maneuver; Brandon will pretend not to notice, but he does, everybody does; and nobody can put away as much pizza as a cross-country team.
I am the only element not the same, who seems to have forgotten her role, and her lines.
Max is there. Sitting in a booth across from Brandon and Vivian. He freezes for a moment when he sees me, then raises his hand and gives me a small smile. I’m a mirror image, doing the same, confused as to why I’m here at all.
Hailey makes room for me in the booth across the aisle, and I slide in beside her. She doesn’t even break conversation as she sets a paper plate in front of me. “Well, whatever, Brandon’s way hotter.”
“I’m sitting right here, Hailey,” Brandon said.
“I know,” she says. And she smiles while she takes a bite, leaning around me to look him in the eye. Only Hailey can make eating pizza look good. “I’m explaining why we have the better team. Obviously. I mean, so what if you can’t beat him in a race. Ever.”
He throws a balled-up napkin at her, but he’s laughing.
“Next year, fellas,” she says.
“Too bad I won’t be here to help you out,” Max says, and the table laughs. Max never got much faster than that day on the beach. He’s not slow by any means, but he’s a solid middle-of-the-pack cross-country runner, same as me. He picks up points for the team, but he doesn’t win. He’s essentially the male counterpart of my role.
I was a solidly above-average runner, but I wouldn’t be recruited for it. I had to work twice as hard as Hailey, just to be half as good. I didn’t even want my parents to come to my races most times, because it made me feel like they could only see the things I lacked—in comparison to their other child, one of the best pitchers in the state; a skill that had come so naturally for him.
If my coach has missed me, it’s only in that I’m a body that picks up the number five spot. But my replacement isn’t much slower. My presence isn’t critical to anyone but myself. If I were to quit (as I sort of did), not much would change.
The soda feels too carbonated, and the pizza too hot, and I’m all jittery energy until Hailey places a hand gently on my arm. “You okay?” she asks, when no one else is paying attention.
Everything in the now feels so far away, as if filtered through a thick layer of plastic. Hailey dulls. Her voice fades. The scenes from earlier today sharpen into focus instead, and I keep replaying moments: Mia in Caleb’s room, Mia’s words, her memories. She’s nine. Still, that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.
“Caleb’s mom has me cleaning out his room,” I say, as a way to explain my current demeanor.
But she frowns, and cuts her eyes to the rest of the table. “Stop doing that,” she says, nearly whispering. “It’s not healthy, Jessa.”
I think back to what Hailey said, about his mother cleaning out his locker at school. “When did his mom clean his locker?”
“What? I told you. That first week.”
“No, when? Which day?”
She shakes her head quickly, like this is both pointless and also an impossible memory to recover. “I don’t know…it was the same day as the school-wide meeting. Someone came to get Max after that. So, the Friday, I guess? Does it really matter?”
The meet was Tuesday, the day Caleb drove over the bridge. Two days later was Thursday, when Mia said she heard Caleb upstairs, and told their mom. Eve was at the school the very next day. Could it be coincidence? Did his mother wonder what Caleb was up to, as well?
Hailey sees me thinking, and places a hand gently on my wrist.
“Listen, a bunch of the girls are coming over to my place after this. Why don’t you come? It will be good for you. Get you out of that place.�
�
I feel sick. Like I either ate too much or not enough, and I’m not sure if there’s room inside me for anything other than my own thoughts. “Next time?” I ask. I give her a smile so she knows I’m grateful. Because I am. But I also need to get answers, and I can’t do that with five other girls in Hailey’s basement, streaming HBO Go.
“Do you need a ride tomorrow?” I ask, because Hailey doesn’t turn seventeen until later in the year, though she already has a car waiting for her, for when she does.
She wrinkles her nose. “Craig Keegan is picking me up.”
“Craig?” I ask, as she tips her head back and laughs.
“I know, I know. Attempt number two went much better than the first date.” That first date, Craig had gotten lost in a side conversation with Stan from the city, asking what other tickets he could hook us up with, effectively ignoring Hailey. She was not one to be ignored.
Hailey slides out of her seat, and the stream of girls trails after her, calling their goodbyes back to me. Vivian pauses beside my seat, says, “We’ve missed you, Jessa,” before heading out.
Hailey silently mouths Bye while waving her fingers, and I feel like I’m making my way back to my old life, just slightly out of sync. But I can almost touch it as I watch it go—my shadow beside Hailey as she piles into a car at the curb with our friends.
—
When everyone’s leaving, I catch Max in the hall leading to the bathrooms, or Max catches me. Either way, we’re standing in the hall, inches apart, the rest of the sound dulled and far away.
“I need to talk to you,” I say.
Max leans against the opposite wall. The light’s too bright, and it makes us look sick, blue-tinted.
“I talked to Mia, and…” I let the thought trail. Then I close my eyes, forcing the words out. “She heard something. Two nights after.” I don’t need to specify after what. We’ve set our calendars to the same weighted moments.
Max is holding his breath. “Heard something where?”
“There’s this hidden attic space, the door was behind a bookcase in his closet. I was up there, and I found something. His house key was there.”
Fragments of the Lost Page 17