Then I push at the door and stand in the same spot I stood with Caleb, months earlier. But now I’m someone new, and I am propelled toward the steps to the second floor.
“Jessa,” Max calls from the entrance.
“Caleb went up here,” I say. “I didn’t. But I have to see.”
The steps creak and sag under my weight, and I’m not sure whether they’ll hold me. I keep my hands planted against the walls, covered in what remains of a floral wallpaper, which is starting to give way, with the elements. But eventually I make it to the top. The dark hall with missing doors and half a wall burned straight through.
There are two rooms at the top of the stairs, one on each end. And a bathroom to share in the middle, straight ahead. There’s water damage everywhere, on top of the fire damage. The hall is dark.
In the first room, there are remnants of furniture, burned, soaked, ruined. The frame of a bed. A beat-up dresser. In the room across the hall, I can tell the walls had once been blue in sections, peeking through the charred remains. There’s the skeletal frame of a rocking horse, the skeletal frame of a child’s bed.
I imagine Caleb standing in this very same spot, looking inside. I wonder what he saw. What he understood, that I am struggling to see. I feel, suddenly, a person behind me. “Oh,” Max says. “Wow. This place has been eviscerated.”
“Mm,” I say. What was Caleb looking at? What was he looking for? I scan the room again, trying to see it through his eyes. He told me he didn’t know what happened here. He told me his father was dead. Lies and more lies.
And yet, he brought me here. It’s a tipping of scales that makes no sense. Letting me in, keeping me back.
“Did you hear that?” Max asks.
I didn’t. And then. A footstep, on the steps of the porch. Another.
I almost say it, the word already in my throat, pushing through: Caleb.
Only it’s not Caleb. I know the same way I know the tread of his step, the stride of his run, that this is not him. This is not him.
I hold my breath, and Max does the same. The footsteps disappear, and still we hold our breath. Faintly, I hear the background noise of an engine, idling at first, then driving away. And then I’m running down the steps, after the sound of the engine, as if I can catch a ghost.
I’m halfway down the drive when Max catches up with me. “Did you see?” he asks, breathing heavily.
I shake my head, staring off down the road. “Someone was here,” I whisper. “I told you, I think Eve’s been watching me.”
“I didn’t see anyone following us.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“She didn’t see us leave, Jessa. I don’t think it was her.”
But the thought lingers. I don’t understand what she’s after, with me. Why she was keeping notes, watching where I go, who I was talking to. Checking up on Hailey. And why she doesn’t need them anymore.
I remember the first day I showed up, when she asked to see my phone, to see who I’d been texting.
As if she wanted to catch me at something. Only I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what I’ve done.
—
We walk back to our car, the morning seeming eerily quiet. I’m used to living close enough to the shore that occasionally we can hear the gulls in the distance, crying. Here, there’s nothing. With the cold, there’s no insect noise, no bird noise. Just the wind moving the leaves, the branches swaying, the world faintly sighing. We wait, with the engine running, to see if anyone comes back. Eventually, Max puts the car in drive, and we leave.
But in an unspoken agreement, we stick to the back roads. I check the mirrors, constantly. There’s nothing. There’s no one.
“It could’ve been any car, really,” Max says. “Someone who took a wrong turn down a dead-end road or something. It could’ve been an animal, around the house.”
“Right,” I say. But we both believe there’s something more. It’s the unsettling, growing and gnawing.
It’s the feeling that we might not like what we find, and that maybe we’re not the only ones looking.
We go back to my place, because the distance from Caleb’s house feels safer. We have the address now. The road name. The house number. I go to the county site and look through the property records, which is a thing that Hailey taught me one day when she was sitting around wondering just how rich Craig Keegan was. Apparently her dad had taught her this trick. “Please tell me you didn’t do this to me,” I’d said to her.
She shrugged. “It’s public information.” I dropped my head to the desk.
“What? I don’t do anything with the information. I’m just curious, is all,” she’d said. She seemed more surprised that I wouldn’t think to do the same.
I find the site now and plug in the property address for the house where Caleb grew up, and I pull up the listing. It was purchased by a Carlton Evers.
“Carlton!” I shout. “His name is Carlton!”
“I’m right here, Jessa,” Max says, jumping from the sound of my voice. But I catch him grin, excited by the new piece of information as well.
From there, it’s an easy enough search. Carlton is not a common name. I know, as soon as I type it in, I should get his obituary.
Instead, I pull up an article about a sentencing hearing. My stomach sinks. Ashlyn was right. “Oh God.” I skim the details.
Caleb lied about his father; his father was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for a conviction of arson and endangering the welfare of the people inside—Caleb and Eve. Apparently the whole thing was an accident, an insurance scam gone wrong; Eve and Caleb were supposed to be out of the house. But they weren’t.
It isn’t hard to understand why Caleb would lie about that, discovering that a parent almost recklessly killed you for a money scam. But still, it stings. He never chose to tell me. Even later.
I pull out the bus ticket from the drawer where I’ve stored Caleb’s things, because I have a feeling in my gut. This town. I pull it up on the map. I search for prisons, and find one. And I know, with sudden clarity, that his father had sent him that bus ticket, in hopes that he would use it.
He never did.
I don’t blame him. His father put his life in danger, for an insurance scam. It’s reprehensible. It’s unforgivable.
At the bottom of the article, there’s a mugshot, and my heart drops. He looks so different from the photos Caleb kept in his room, blurred and smiling in the distance. Here, the camera is zoomed in on his face, so close you can see the lines of rebellion or contempt.
I push the chair back. My breath catches. I’ve seen his face before. I’ve seen this man. “I know him,” I say. “Max, I’ve seen this man before.”
And so has Caleb.
I look closer, to be sure, but the face remains the same, lining up in my memory. I have seen this man before, with the eyes a little softer, some added weight with time, and the hair slicked back, as he brushed it out of his face, water dripping from the ends.
—
That day at the waterfall. The man in the river, who was swimming nearby. He waded through the water, offered to take our picture.
I flip through those photos now, until I find the right one. Caleb’s face is frozen in the image, as if he’s staring right through it, to something beyond, and he is. He was.
He’s looking right back at the camera with a haunted expression, looking right through the lens.
I think of the letter again, the one I found in his room. Begging him to show up. Three lines, to break my heart.
And eventually, when his father got out of prison, he did. But he didn’t want to go alone. He brought me, as a buffer, the first time he saw him. They didn’t interact at all that day. But it must’ve been the start.
Now I’m thinking of all the times he blew me off, when he wasn’t where I thought he would be. All the excuses he gave. Going to Jessa’s. Have to help set up for her brother’s party. If that date on his to-do list was for the second tim
e they were meeting, and that was why he told me he couldn’t come at first.
Just as I think he’s left me behind, I’m realizing that all along, he’s been leading me closer, leaving a trail of clues. But now I’m worried what he’s brought me into.
Max stares at the side of my face. I stare at the computer screen. All these pieces, tying us together.
“I need to talk to Terrance Bilson,” I say. “A man came to see him, when Caleb was visiting him at college. I need to know if it was him.”
Max isn’t moving. He’s sitting at my computer, staring at the screen, at this part of Caleb we both never knew.
“Max,” I say, and he jerks back.
“I don’t know his number,” Max says.
“Okay. It’s okay. I know who will.”
I print out the mugshot image and throw everything in my purse, and already I’m making a plan. I hold tight to the items in my purse, these things he left behind. Fragments of lost memories. Now clues left behind, for me to follow. To find him.
—
I decide to ask Julian for Terrance’s number. I text him the question, assuming he’s in class. My phone rings a minute later. He’s rightly suspicious. “Why do you need Terrance’s number, Jessa?”
“Do you have it or not?” I ask.
He sighs, a drawn-out pause, in which I imagine the internal argument he has with himself. Then he starts rattling off a number—so maybe the pause was just him looking up his contact info.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Jessa? Is everything okay?”
Julian is one state away. One train ride. One car ride. It is both close and infinitely far away. “Yes,” I say.
“I can come home this weekend,” he says. He doesn’t even know what he’s offering, but part of me knew he would do it, that I could count on him.
“Julian,” I say. “You can’t help with this.” Julian is all rational, contained energy. He wants to believe the best of people. He believes that people want to tell him the truth. That he can fix things. But this is an emotional, gut response. You have to be willing to be wrong, and I don’t know if Julian has ever risked his own image in his life. If he’s willing to be the one out on the limb, who falls, who makes a scene. To lean forward and let someone else decide whether to drop you or not. To jump when you can’t see under the surface, when you don’t know what might be hidden underneath.
Terrance agrees to see me. Not that I gave him much choice. I asked him what time would be good for me to stop by, and I must’ve caught him off guard with the question, because he says he’ll be around all evening.
Max drives again, and I direct him. We don’t speak. There’s something too fragile hanging in the balance.
By the time we arrive on campus, it’s dark. My mom calls, asking where I am. My car is home, and I am not. Also, I’m supposed to be sick.
“I was feeling better. Hailey picked me up. We’re at the library,” I tell her, and she pauses, like she can feel the lie.
“Jessa, please come home.”
I wonder if Julian called her to say he was worried. Always thinking it’s the right thing to do, that he knows what’s best for me.
“I will,” I say. “Soon. Mom. I’m just in the middle of something.” I hang up, and I turn the phone to silent.
Terrance’s dorm room is on the third floor of an old building with no elevators. The walls are made of something that looks like cinder blocks, painted over. When he opens the door, he looks too big for the room, which has two twin-sized beds crammed beside two desks, and another above-average-sized guy behind him. The other guy is eating Chinese food from a carton at his desk, and the scent is overwhelming.
I try to picture Caleb here, slide him into context, but I can’t find a place for him.
Max and Terrance do this weird guy-handshake-greeting thing, which seems to be universal, and yet. Terrance gives Max a look that seems to say, What are you doing here?
And Max’s look says, I don’t know what I’m doing here.
And Terrance gives him this warning look like, Did you think this through?
Max, beside me, has not thought this through. Neither of us has. But we’re on the same page, willing to live in the moment, seeing where it takes us.
Terrance leads us to the student lounge, where people are grouped in couches or chairs, and there’s a half-eaten pizza on one of the tables.
I fish for the stack of photos in my bag. I have two shots to show him, different versions of the same man. The photo from when Caleb was a kid, standing beside his father, washing the car. The thinner man with thicker hair, smiling. And then the mugshot, printed off my computer. Hairline receding, slicked back. A little heavier. His face morose, his eyes flat. The corners turned down, just like Caleb’s. A close-up where you can see the lines etching around his mouth and eyes. Neither are recent, but I’m hoping Terrance sees something inside them. “Is this the man who stopped by when Caleb was here?”
But Terrance shakes his head automatically. “Sorry you came all this way, Jessa, but the guy who showed up here was much younger. Like my age.”
“Oh,” I say. I had been picturing someone Sean’s age, a man who had some sort of authority over Caleb.
Terrance’s fingertips push the pictures around, sifting through the arc of Caleb—little boy, teenager, his life out of sequence.
“Okay, we should go,” Max says, but Terrance is still staring at the photos. His fingers haven’t moved from the shot of the group of us at the ball game. Sitting in the bleachers, arms around each other, Hailey laughing, Craig Keegan talking to the guy Stan beside him, the field in the background.
Terrance brings the picture closer to his face, and I’m holding my breath. He puts it back down and taps the edge. “Him,” he says.
I stare at Terrance, confused.
And then he says it again. “Yeah, this is the dude.”
“Stan?” Stan, the guy who got us the tickets for the ball game when we all skipped school. Max had gotten those tickets from him. He’d met us at Penn Station. Craig Keegan had spent half the game asking Stan about the other types of things he could get him.
“How do you know him?” I ask Max. “How does Caleb know him?”
He shakes his head. “From baseball. Little League. When we were kids. He’s a year ahead of your brother. Goes to college in the city. I went to him for last-minute tickets, had to meet up with him to get them. We’re not really friends.”
“But you have his number. Was he friends with Caleb?”
“No. They met that day. Craig Keegan was pressing him about getting a fake ID. They all got his number.” I’d missed that part of the conversation, but it made sense now why he blew off Hailey for that conversation. As if they all had plans each weekend to go to bars and pass as twenty-one. The idea was ridiculous.
“Fake IDs,” I repeat, and Max’s eyes widen. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Everything in the lead-up to Caleb going over the bridge suddenly shifts, becomes a little less certain.
“Call him,” I say, but Max already has his phone out.
In the silence, Terrance leans forward. “What’s going on?” he asks.
“We don’t know,” I say. “You said this guy left something for him?”
“Yeah, a package. Like a thick envelope. But I wouldn’t take it. Guess they made plans to meet up somewhere else.”
“Max,” I say as he’s leaving a message, “when did he take that money from you again?”
Because suddenly all the fragments are realigning, shifting into place, and they reveal a plan: Caleb taking money, calling Stan, using it for a fake ID, which was delivered to Terrance’s dorm room while he was driving up to see Ashlyn Patterson, asking to see the paperwork for his trust.
And earlier: a man sending Caleb a bus ticket, to visit him in jail, unused. A man leaving him a letter after his release, asking to see him. A hike, where we sat on opposite sides of the river. The briefest contact. The preliminary event
.
The phone rings, cutting through the silence.
“Stan, this is Max,” he says. “I need to talk to you about Caleb. About something you gave him.”
I can hear Stan on the other side, something about, yeah, being down at the college for some football game, delivering something for Caleb. But not willing to say anything about any fake ID, one way or the other. “Not on the phone,” he mumbles.
“Caleb’s dead,” Max says, and the silence that follows is excruciating. “We’re trying to figure out what happened to him.”
Then Stan starts talking, and Max turns up the volume on his phone as I lean my ear closer, to hear. “The police better not end up coming to me with this, Max. If that ID has anything to do with it, I could be charged with something.”
I want to punch Stan through the phone. “Tell him we’ll find the ID,” I say.
“We’ll get it,” Max says.
“Well, listen, it won’t be one from New Jersey or anything. You always want to get an out-of-state one, so it’s not looked at as closely.”
“What state?” I say, my voice scratching. “What’s the name on the ID? What’s the state?”
Max goes to repeat the question, but Stan must’ve heard. “The name is whatever we can get, I don’t remember. The state I do remember, because he requested it. Most people don’t care. I mean, it’s just to purchase liquor.” I’m holding my breath. The room is silent as we wait. “He asked for Pennsylvania.”
—
We sit in the parking lot, with the car running, staring straight ahead, into the night sky. We don’t move. We don’t drive.
I think he’s alive.
I think he lied.
I think he was planning this.
I don’t know why.
Max smacks his hand once against the steering wheel, lets a string of expletives fly. “Who does that?” he says. And then louder. “Who does that to people?” Except by people he means him. I don’t know what the last few months have been like for Max, but I imagine a cloud of grief and guilt, like my own. I reach out and take his hand, slide my cold fingers between his own. We sit there, with his head hanging low, until the phone buzzes in my pocket with another text from my mother.
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