—
It was August, and Caleb was back. Caleb told me he’d gotten home from his trip the night before, but he hadn’t answered his phone the next day. He said he’d be free, though, so I figured his phone needed to be charged after returning from vacation.
I had Julian drive me over on his way out with friends. I let out a sigh of relief when I saw Caleb in his driveway, hose dragged around from the side of the house, working on his car. If he was out here, he probably hadn’t heard his phone, anyway.
Julian idled at the edge of the road, but Caleb didn’t look up. “You sure he’s expecting you?” he asked.
I wondered. Everything about Caleb recently felt disconnected. But with Julian watching, I wanted to pretend everything was still fine. So I rolled my eyes and exited the car.
He was crouched down beside his back tires, working at something with a knife.
I called, “Hey there,” when I stepped out of the car, but he hadn’t turned around. It was then I noticed he had headphones in. I tapped his shoulder, and he jumped, spinning around, the red Swiss Army knife falling from his hand.
He quickly pulled the earbuds out and stood, resting his hand on the back of his car. “Jesus, Jessa,” he said, “you almost gave me a heart attack.”
He picked up his knife, then noticed Julian still waiting and raised his hand in greeting.
His shoulders were pulled tight. The engine was grating. Everything was tension personified.
Caleb had a lot on his plate, with Sean gone, and I’d felt guilty about my time with Max while he was away. Part of me wanted to just tell him what happened—or what almost happened. But I didn’t want to drag Max into it. Whatever was happening between Caleb and me, it had nothing to do with Max.
Seeing his face, I knew it wasn’t the time.
“Car trouble?” I asked, trying to defuse the moment.
“Tire trouble,” Caleb answered, running the side of his sneaker against the ruined tread. Then he shrugged, turning away. “Whatever, it can wait.” He placed a hand on my back, gently leading me into his house. Julian didn’t pull away until we were safely inside.
Caleb still had the Swiss Army knife in his hand, his fist closed around it.
“Wow, like the Boy Scouts,” I said. I was too bright, too cheerful, trying to make up for the terrible mistake I’d almost made, which he knew nothing about.
“You know what they say,” he said, tossing me the closed knife as he took the steps up two at a time. “Always be prepared.”
I laughed, and he called, “Be right back,” and it was then that I noticed the footprints he left behind on the wood—wet, and grimy, like the dirt in his wheels. I texted back and forth with Hailey while waiting.
“Boo.” Mia jumped out from behind the kitchen wall, and I really did jump then, my heart racing.
“Mia, you scared me to death.”
Mia smiled, but she wrinkled her nose at me. “That’s not possible,” she said. “You can’t scare someone to death. You have to hurt them.”
I jerked back, her words in sharp contrast to her easy smile. “Mia,” said Caleb, coming down the steps in a new change of clothes, “stop being creepy.” He picked her up and threw her over his shoulder, flipping her upside down and back onto her feet in one smooth motion as she squealed with laughter.
Then he turned to me. “You really want to be scared to death? Listen to a child tell you about the people who come out of the walls at night.”
“Oh my God, stop,” I said, and even though he was laughing, the goosebumps rose on my arms.
He took the Swiss Army knife back, and slid it into the front pocket of his khaki shorts. “Mia,” he said, “wanna go to the park with Jessa?”
“I thought you had to paint,” she said, her face scrunched up in confusion.
“That can wait.”
“You’re painting?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Found some paint cans in the garage. Figured it was time for a change.”
“I can help,” I said, feeling there was something I could finally do.
He paused, and it looked like he was trying to think up some excuse. But then he shrugged. “If you want,” he said, wandering through the kitchen. I followed him into the garage, where he pulled a few paint cans from under the tool bench. There was one of eggshell white, unopened, and one of a deep blue. “Rustic Sea,” he said, reading the label.
“Probably too dark for the walls,” I said.
“Probably. But who said anything about the walls?”
We painted the door to the bunker that day—front and back and sides.
—
Now Max is holding the same knife in his hand, and I’m trying to remember what else Caleb said that day. If he ever explained the rocks in the tires, the water on his shoes. Max said he had car trouble, and I assumed he had to get the tires replaced. He hadn’t driven me anywhere the rest of August. But he came by for my birthday dinner over Labor Day weekend, and he drove me to school the first week, and he never mentioned anything about it again.
Max turns the knife over in his hand and the side of his mouth quirks up.
“The first time I met Caleb, we were eleven, and he had this thing with him.” Max’s voice drops lower. “I knew there was a kid my age who had moved in behind us, because my mom kept talking about it. I saw him in the yard in the afternoons, so I kind of timed it so I was out at the same time once. He was using this knife to make a sign. He was carving words in a piece of wood.”
“The Bunker,” I say, and his eyes cut quickly to mine.
“How’d you know?”
“I found it.”
“No kidding.”
“It’s in a box with his personal things now.”
He holds the knife in front of his eyes. “Well, that was it. That’s how we met. The beginning of it all.”
I’m captivated by Max’s story of the knife, so different from my own.
These fragments of a lost life are not just that—they’re pieces that belong to me, to Max, to everyone who knew him. We are connected through the moments.
The knife in Max’s hand, where it had been in Caleb’s before, and mine before that. Everything connected.
“So he was here at some point,” I say, nodding to the knife. The space feels claustrophobic, and haunted.
Max frowns, opens his mouth, then shuts it because we hear the car engine rumbling in front of the house, but there’s no window from the attic space to see who it is.
“Go,” he says, his eyes wide, as I scramble past him through the entrance.
Max is out right behind me, sliding the bookcase back into position, both of us heading out the blue door toward the steps.
“Wait,” I say. I turn back and dive onto my knees, reaching for the box under the bed that I had forgotten, with the pictures of his father—the things Caleb was searching through. Max stands at the entrance waiting, but he’s mumbling Come on come on come on in an endless string, even as we’re on our way down the steps.
I frantically take the steps to the second floor, then turn to Max above and whisper, “Shut the door.”
I slow to a tiptoe on the first-floor steps, listening.
It’s Eve. I know it’s Eve because there’s a rhythm to her steps, something I can picture in my head, in time to the noise outside. Max grabs my hand and yanks me around the corner of the kitchen just as Eve slides the key into the lock. I am so grateful that Max locked the door behind us, so there’s no evidence. We go straight for the garage door—unlocking it and pulling it open just as the front door opens.
I ease the garage door slowly shut, keeping my hand on the knob, and I listen. We’re standing in the pitch dark, the roller shades pulled down over the garage windows. I hear Eve drop her keys on the entryway table, and I decide it’s now or never.
I slide Caleb’s old key into the door, and slowly, slowly slide the lock back into place. I press my ear to the door and hear her steps enter the kitchen. I stop breathing. Ma
x stops breathing.
She pulls open a drawer, and another, and another. She opens the fridge. I think maybe she’s making lunch, and I know we’re trapped. There’s no way out until she leaves.
I stand silently in the middle of the garage as my eyes slowly adjust to the dark, the only light coming from the edges of the shades and the strip under the garage door. Max sits on a rolled-up carpet, places his face in his hands, and waits. The rolled-up carpet comes into focus, the slivers of light from the corner of the window shade illuminating the maroon around the edges.
There’s a whole row of them, and I see they’re all bound with plastic wrap. I look around the cluttered area, and the rest of the scene comes into focus. Boxes. Caleb’s boxes. As if waiting for a moving truck, or a dumpster.
All these things I’ve sorted through and labeled—and for what? It sits in the dark of the garage now, shoved into corners, out of sight.
Behind the boxes are a few suitcases, but they don’t look familiar. Maybe they’re Mia’s, or Eve’s. I gently tug on the zipper of the nearest one, and see men’s clothes inside. But they don’t look like Caleb’s. I wonder if they once belonged to Sean, if he neglected to take everything, if Eve was tasked with sorting through the fragments of the life he left behind as well.
Behind Max, there are items sitting on a toolbox that must’ve once belonged to either Caleb or Sean—forgotten, abandoned, along with the people they left behind. Some are familiar: the letter opener, an assorted collection of electronics. Things taken from the boxes I’ve packed. They’ve been sorted through, reordered, mostly Caleb’s personal items.
Some items, though, I don’t recognize, and I assume they must belong to Sean. That this is the assortment of things of value, to be resold. There’s a phone, with the back removed, wires exposed. A man’s wedding band. Maybe left behind when they split, a ring on the bedside table, a last goodbye. Or thrown at her feet in a rage, when she kicked him out.
And there, underneath, is one more item. I can’t see it well in the dark, but my hands move over the surface, feeling the circular item, the chain attached, until it makes a small sound.
I stand straight, jerk back.
Max has stood, as if sensing something lingering in the air, in this room. I feel him approach as my hand releases the item.
He picks it up and holds it to the light, and I see a broken pocket watch that looks vaguely familiar. It belongs to a man, but it’s not Caleb’s. I’ve seen this before, heard the sound of this chain moving whenever he entered a room. The broken chain slides through Max’s fingers, and it sounds faintly like music, and I know exactly who this belongs to.
This silver pocket watch with the broken chain belongs to Sean. There are certain things I know about Sean’s pocket watch. I know I’ve never seen him without it. I know it makes the faintest sound, like a tag on a cat’s collar, announcing his entrance before his booming voice.
Listen to your mother, Caleb—
Take some responsibility in the family—
I’d roll my eyes while Caleb’s shoulders would tighten, and I could feel him bristling. Imagined the words he had said to Sean: What do you do with the money, Sean? You’re not my father. There was something weighty and solid between their interactions, and I couldn’t quite crack it. The truth was, I hadn’t really tried. I let him say nothing about it: Just leave it, Jessa. I never pushed.
Sean had a tendency to open and close the pocket watch in his hand, when debating what to say. He did it a lot, whenever Caleb would talk. As if weighing his choices: Say something; let it go; cut deep; swipe shallow.
And I know it probably broke in a fight with Caleb.
I know because it all matches up now—the broken chain, and Caleb’s face, and what came after.
—
He was supposed to meet me and some friends from the cross-country team out for dinner, a Friday night in late July. He didn’t show up; he didn’t answer his phone. But we were less than a mile from his house, so while the rest of them went out for ice cream after, I walked over to Caleb’s.
I showed up at his house. All the cars were still there. And then I saw him, coming down the front steps with a garbage bag in his hand, his expression unfocused.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps, turned his face to the side, but it was too late. I saw the mark near his jawline. A raw cut in a straight line, the skin red and swollen around it.
“What happened?” I asked. It would’ve been easy to ignore it; it could’ve been anything: playing a pickup game of football in the road, Mia accidentally knocking her head into his. But it was in the way he hid it that pulled my focus.
“What are you doing here, Jessa?”
“You were supposed to meet me for dinner,” I said.
His face went pale as I reached for the mark, and he jerked back. “Got in a fight,” he said, his voice so much smaller than I was used to. He looked over his shoulder, into the house, the door slightly ajar. There was a shadow-shaped person in the darkness where anyone could’ve been looking out.
I lowered my voice, my eyes gone wide. “With Sean?” I asked. I peered at the entrance of the house again, but the shadow was gone.
He blew out a slow breath, took my arm, and pulled me to the side of the house. “I said some things.”
“And he hit you?” He didn’t say anything, just set his jaw firmer. “Does your mom know?”
He looked at the front door again. I heard the faint sound of Mia crying.
“She kicked him out,” he said.
Finally, I thought. His car was still there, though.
“You can’t be here, Jessa. Not today.”
“He’s leaving?”
“Yeah, he’s leaving.”
“Come with me,” I begged him. And I thought he considered it, for a moment, before he closed his eyes and backed away.
“I can’t. I need to be here.”
“We can call the police,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Please, Jessa. Don’t call the police. Don’t make it a thing. It’s over. It’s done.”
“But what if he comes back? What if he does something else—”
“We don’t all have perfect lives with perfect families,” he barked, and I jerked back. Like he saw me as a character from a storybook. My house, a set. My family, an act.
And then he took a slow, steady breath. “Please. Just leave it, Jessa,” he said. And I did, walking back alone. Seeing Hailey through the glass windows, everyone smiling, everyone laughing—but I couldn’t go inside. All of us, storybook characters to him. Like he couldn’t be bothered to see beneath the surface.
I called Julian, asking for him to come pick me up. And I sent Hailey a text, saying I was staying at Caleb’s. Keeping his secret; becoming part of it.
I called him later, to make sure he was okay. He responded late at night with a text, telling me Sean was gone, but they were going to take Mia away for a trip to the Poconos, to make it easier—and he’d let me know when he was back home.
—
“This is Sean’s,” I whisper to Max in the dark garage. I take the watch from him and hold it closer to my face. There’s something brown and rusted stuck between the link to the chain. Blood, I think. I wonder if it’s Caleb’s blood. Dried and caked in, the only thing left of him. It’s sitting in the garage, next to items I have packed up, as if maybe his mother intends to sell this, too.
I see things again, in the dark, behind closed window shades and a locked door:
Sean’s clothes are still here, in suitcases. His pocket watch, his wedding band. Boxes of Caleb’s things, left behind.
The rugs are gone, bound up in the garage, ready to be taken to the dump; the watch has blood. They’re stripping the house down, piece by piece—and suddenly the scene replays, from a different angle.
She kicked him out. He’s leaving.
It’s over. It’s done.
But what if that wasn’t what happened at all?
Don’t cal
l the police. Don’t make it a thing.
My breath catches, and I can’t focus. All these things I’ve been sorting through. Digging deeper, looking for the Caleb I thought I knew better than anyone. Only to discover something worse, something I don’t want to imagine at all.
Caleb, I think, what have you done?
—
Inside, Eve answers a ringing phone. “Thanks for returning my call. Yes, I have some large items I’d like to sell,” she says, and I can hear her scribbling down some notes.
I need to get out of this garage. I pull back the window shades as quietly as I can, but the windows are just for decoration—they don’t open. I suppose I could break them, throw something through, and make a run for it, but not without drawing attention to myself.
I remember where the circuit breaker is, feel Caleb beside me as I go to it. I do the same maneuver, using the side of my hand to take the entire house offline. I flick it all back on, then open the garage door, and hope she will think it’s an unexpected, unexplained part of the power surge.
Max takes my hand, pulling me around the corner of the garage, in hopes we won’t be seen. He has the box of photos tucked under his other arm, from upstairs. I hear the door from the house to the garage swing open, but we don’t look back.
It’s not until we’re around the corner, tucked out of sight, catching our breath with our hands on our knees, that I realize, in the clenched fist of my other hand, I still have Sean’s pocket watch.
We are sitting in Max’s car, but the engine is off. The only sound is of us both trying to catch our breath. The pocket watch is on my knees, and the blood looks more like rust in the light of day. Max keeps looking over my shoulder, out the window, as if expecting Eve to come along at any moment, but nothing happens.
“Did she see us?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I was running.” His throat moves as he swallows, and his eyes drift to the pocket watch in my lap. “What’s going on, Jessa?”
My fingers tighten on the watch. “I don’t know. But I think…I think something happened to Sean. I don’t think he left.”
“And you think…Caleb?”
Fragments of the Lost Page 19