Fragments of the Lost Read online

  While every other guy at the dance wore plain black or dark gray, jackets optional, Caleb stood out. The suit made his eyes look bluer, his body leaner. I remember the feel of the fabric as I leaned into him, his hands on my back, the music beating in time to our movement. The whole night, a blur of laughter and color.

  The school cafeteria was transformed into a dance hall, the full moon visible through the big windows spanning the entire wall, everyone dressed up like this was a different place than the one where we spent every lunch hour, and we were different people.

  I try not to think of his jacket thrown haphazardly in the backseat of his car after. His tie that matched my strapless dress, undone. My fingers on the buttons of his white button-down shirt. His hands on my bare shoulders when he kissed me. The way he said, “Lo, Jessa Whitworth, I think I like you,” after.

  The way he said things like lo and hark now like he was tempering everything in case he needed it to be a joke.

  The next morning, at breakfast, Julian told me, “Be careful with that kid, Jessa. He’s older than you.”

  “Just a year,” I’d said. And Julian looked at me like he had missed the fact that I was no longer the kid in middle school playing dress-up and singing karaoke in my bedroom. “Besides,” I said, “he’s friends with Max.”

  I’d known Max since elementary school, in the same way I knew most of my brother’s baseball acquaintances: they were just there. Same as I was to them. And then I went to school, and an entire team of people already knew me as Julian’s sister, Jessa.

  Caleb was an exception.

  Max and Caleb were a year older than me, and Julian one year older than them. Unlike me, who ran cross-country and track all year round, since freshman year, Max only started running this year, as a way to stay in shape for baseball season. By the time I met Caleb, Julian was about to start his senior year, Max and Caleb were juniors, and I was a sophomore.

  Julian grunted. “I wouldn’t pick Max for you, either.”

  “Good thing you’re not picking, then.”

  Julian had eventually warmed, in the only way it seemed he could manage. Distantly, and with a look of surprise whenever Caleb showed up—as if this detail of my life managed to slip his mind, every time.

  —

  I zip the bag back up and place it carefully inside the box, folding it in half, covering the polos. I look away as I close the lid. My blue dress from last year still hangs in my closet, in the plastic dry-cleaning bag, untouched. I missed Homecoming this year. It was last month, on a clear and crisp Saturday night. The dress I bought for it at the end of the summer (Hailey, pulling it off the rack, holding it up to me, her eyes shining. You have to get this, Jessa. It’s perfect. It’s perfectly you.) still has the tags.

  I bought the dress because it was on sale, and because I was an optimist.

  But even then, it felt like a lie. Like I was trying to recapture something between us that was already gone.

  I’m pulling down the rest of Caleb’s clothes from the closet when I feel something bump against the back wall—a faint hum, a flat twang. I push the hangers aside, and in the middle of the space is his guitar, leaning against the wall. It’s propped up precariously between a deflated football and a spare blanket, folded up and gathering dust. I grab the neck of the guitar, and my fingers brush the strings—letting loose a tense, sharp cry in the empty room. The moment like muscle memory, as I run my fingers against the untuned strings.

  —

  It was November, and we’d just finished morning finals. Everyone was heading to the school library if they had an afternoon final, or to lunch and study groups if they didn’t. We opted for studying at Caleb’s house. “Everyone should be out,” he said. Mia was in third grade, Eve worked pretty regular hours at a real estate office, and Sean’s job alternated between days and nights, depending on the project.

  Music was playing from Caleb’s computer speakers, which seemed to be focusing him, but it had the opposite effect on me. I sat at his desk with my math notes out on my lap, swiveling back and forth in his chair. I was mostly watching his reflection in the computer screen as he was reading over the physics notes to himself on the bed, when his body suddenly stiffened. He leaned from his bed to his desk, reaching beyond me. He turned down the volume on the speakers, and frowned.

  “What?” I asked, but by then I heard it, too. Slow footsteps on the stairs. Caleb’s eyes went wide, and he took me by the shoulders, gently pushing me toward the closet.

  “Shh,” he said as the darkness engulfed me, his shirts closing in around me, his face a pale sliver in the gap of light before he slid the door shut entirely.

  I tried to slow my breathing, to mask the sound of my existence.

  “Caleb?” The door to his room creaked open and someone stepped into the room. “I thought I heard someone up here.” Sean’s voice, low and gravelly. I imagined a lifetime of smoking cigarettes, though I never smelled any smoke in the house.

  “Yep. It’s just me.”

  “Thought you were supposed to be at school.” An accusatory edge.

  “It’s finals week. I’m studying,” Caleb said. His voice had risen to the same level, matching Sean’s. “What are you doing home?”

  I heard something move—an object picked up and placed back down. “We finished up early. Physics, huh?” Sean said. He must’ve picked up Caleb’s textbook. I heard a slight jangle as he stepped closer, the chain of his pocket watch, always connected from his pocket to a belt loop whenever I saw him. “You sticking around? I could use your help carting some junk from the garage to the recycling center.”

  The silence lingered, the tension radiating all around the room. I held my breath, so sure he could sense me, in the silence. The way you can feel the presence of another, without seeing them. I was a rustling in the walls, a shadow in the closet. I wondered if Sean was staring at the gap under the closet door right now.

  Finally, Caleb spoke. “On second thought, think I’ll head to the library.”

  Sean made a noise that could’ve been a laugh. Hard to tell, behind the door, without perspective, with no body language or facial expression to accompany the moment.

  Something pressed against my back, and I jumped, thinking it was an arm, or a hand, until I reached behind me to grab it. The strings brushed against my fingers, but my hand held them silent and still, the shape of the neck gaining context in the dark. I had no idea Caleb could play an instrument.

  I stayed where I was, holding the guitar, listening to Sean’s steps descend. Caleb didn’t move until he heard a door close somewhere below us. Then he opened the closet door, and I pushed him with my free arm, annoyed. He laughed, fake-rubbing the shoulder I’d just shoved.

  “I didn’t know I needed to be hidden,” I said.

  “Trust me, it was the quickest way to deal with him.”

  I rolled my eyes. “So many secrets, Caleb. You play the guitar?”

  He saw what I had in my hand and laughed. “Hardly. It was a gift from my grandparents when I was younger. I don’t know how to play.”

  “At all?”

  “Nope.”

  The guitar, I then saw, had a fine layer of dust covering the sides. Remnants of a spider web clung to one of the tuning keys at the top. I brushed away the dust and debris, swung it in front of my body, looping the strap onto my shoulder. I placed my fingers in the position of the single chord I knew the best, which my father had taught me years earlier.

  “Wait, you can play the guitar?” His face contorted, stuck somewhere between confusion and delight.

  “I wouldn’t say I can play exactly, but apparently I can play better than you.” I strummed another chord, smiled, tried to remember the few basic bars from the handful of lessons I took back in middle school. The guitar was out of tune, but the notes still sounded familiar.

  “What else don’t I know about you, Jessa Whitworth?” he whispered, leaning closer. We were at that stage where we thought we already knew all the impor
tant things, but then something like this would come along, and we’d realize how much more there was still left to discover.

  “Well, for one,” I said, placing my hand over the strings, to still them. The room fell silent. “I don’t like being hidden in closets.”

  He tipped his head back, laughed—laughed louder than he expected. He cut himself off, cut his eyes to the stairway. “Point taken,” he said. “But we should go before Sean comes back inside, unless you want to end up back in there.”

  I slid the guitar strap off my shoulder, handed it to him, and watched as he restored it to its original position, in the back of the closet.

  “Who owns a guitar and doesn’t know how to play?” I mumbled.

  “I’ll let you teach me if you want,” he said. He threw me a look over his shoulder, then motioned for me to follow him silently. We snuck down the steps, peering around corners, until we were down the front porch steps, in the open air, then in his car, driving to a place I can no longer remember.

  —

  Now I hold the guitar to my hip. He never asked me to teach him. I never did. It sat in the same spot, apparently for nearly a year, unmoved, untouched. The strings remain intact—I strum them once, then place my hand over the top, to stifle the sound.

  I lean the guitar gently against the wall at the door—it won’t fit in a box. Still, it has value, if his mom decides to sell it. I figure that’s the point of all this packing: an ordering of what needs keeping and what can be donated or sold.

  —

  I’ve filled boxes, labeled them Shirts, Pants, Shorts, Socks. They tower along the wall, but the room is still full. He’s still everywhere. It’s Saturday afternoon, and there are six boxes of Caleb on the staircase, and I’m wondering how much longer it will take before the room becomes something else. Before I stop seeing him in every corner, every heartbeat, every tick of the godforsaken clock. Before I can breathe deeply without this suffocating feeling.

  It’s the pictures, I decide. His eyes. They’re everywhere.

  I think of the last time I walked up these steps, peering into this room, when he was still here. The way he stood in the entrance, his arm outstretched, bracing himself against the doorjamb. His body said everything: You are not welcome.

  And now here I am, precisely where he let me know that I am not welcome, and I feel him watching me. Watching as I go through his things, tossing pieces of his life aside.

  His words from that day, his expression flat as he said, “What are you doing here, Jessa?”

  I hear the words again. Coming from the walls. Coming from everywhere.

  I lunge for the window and push it open. The cold air rushes in, seizes my lungs midbreath. The room flutters all around me, coming to life. Pictures flap against the wall in a wave; a paper on his desk turns over, as if Caleb himself were circling the room. I hang my body out the window, resting my waist on the ledge, and I know I must look like I’m trying to escape, that there’s a fire, or thick smoke, when really there is only me.

  There used to be a screen here. I’m not sure what happened to it.

  I listen to the birds, to the wind through the tree branches, to a car engine turning over down the street. I close the window, and the cold lingers. It will take a moment for the heat to rise again.

  The pictures come down next. One by one. Because I can’t stand him looking at me. I can’t stand me looking at me. The way we used to be, taunting me.

  I’m somewhat surprised to find the pictures are still up. Maybe he was keeping up appearances; maybe he hadn’t had the time or the energy to eradicate me completely from his life yet. Maybe he had grown so accustomed to the images, like background music, that he didn’t really notice them anymore. Or maybe—and this is more painful—he was an optimist underneath everything, too.

  As I take them down, I notice he’s written on the backs of them, in pencil, and something in my chest squeezes closed. Who prints pictures anymore? It’s sweet. This is too much.

  There’s one from when we were still just friends, sitting at the beach. I have my cover-up on, my hair is wild, my nose is sunburnt, I can feel the sand gritty beneath my toes. August, that first summer, which the date on the back confirms. Caleb held the camera away from us and leaned in close, telling me to smile, but in the photo I’m mostly squinting against the glare.

  I knew that day, he’d said, pointing to this picture on his wall.

  I smiled to myself.

  I knew before. The first day he sat beside me and took my soda, the flip of my stomach, the way he made me feel like I was someone worth knowing.

  Next there’s the shot my mom took before the Homecoming dance, the first picture of us as a couple. We were practically glowing, smiles so wide I could still remember the feeling—how I couldn’t wait to get out of the house, how I was just about bursting, something fighting its way to the surface.

  Caleb is—was—a collector. Which was basically about half a step from a scrapbooker. He kept everything. Ticket stubs from our dates, old graded assignments, notes passed back and forth. So it shouldn’t surprise me to find the months and years written on the backs of the pictures. Still, there’s something almost desperate about it as the dates progress, the way they’re faint, written in the corners, as if he knew he would one day look through them as memories. As if he could feel, even back then, the gradual unraveling of us. Trying to hold on to the moment, even as he could feel it slipping. A date scribbled on the back, a piece of sticky tack, Caleb pushing the photo onto the gray wall, standing back to look it over.

  Next to come down is the photo from Halloween, where Hailey and I kept up our yearly tradition of dressing as a famous set of twins, even though we looked nothing alike (per the school rules, we had to remain in dress code, so we had to get creative). We had gone as the twins from The Shining, since Hailey was in the midst of a Stephen King kick. Never mind that Hailey was at least four inches taller than me, or that her eyes were brown to my blue, or that she took after her father’s side of the family, from Puerto Rico, her skin a deeper shade of olive, while I was incapable of tanning. Hailey curled her long dark hair to make it look shorter, and I tucked my blond hair into a brown wig, and we’d both slipped a barrette into the side. We’d found the matching dresses at a thrift shop and tied a bow around each. In the photo, Caleb stands between us in a cape, his button-down shirt open up top to reveal the letter S, the blue of his Superman uniform. (There was nothing in the dress code about capes, he claimed.)

  Then the one at a Christmas party, our eyes sparkling like the lights around us. Next, the ones of us sitting in this room, when I started to spend more time here than at my own house. There’s one including Max. One with Caleb’s little sister, Mia, on my lap. I freeze, thinking I should leave this for her instead, but no. I keep going. Keep moving. They all go facedown on the carpeted floor, the dates a timeline that I could order, piecing together our relationship, like a bell curve.

  I watch as my hair grows longer, my smile more comfortable, how we slide together, our arms entwined, a second nature. I pull them all off the wall, one by one, flip them facedown in a pile. These don’t need to be boxed up, but I can’t bring myself to throw them out, either.

  His mother wants his personal items in a separate box. But this isn’t something I’d want her to sort through on her own. These, I decide, are mine.

  This room is full of me. She said it herself. I can’t cut these down the middle, an arm on my side, a hand on his. There’s no easy way to untangle the images.

  The pictures stop long before the end. We go to a baseball game, we take a picture in this room, sitting on this bed, with him kissing my cheek, holding the camera, me scrunching up my nose while laughing. We go on a hike. And then they stop. I wonder if there was a moment up here where he knew. Just like the beginning. Whether he knew first. Whether I did. If it was a moment for him, where he could see it clearly. Or whether, like for me, it was a feeling I didn’t recognize at first, sitting in the pit of
my stomach, waking me up at night—gently gnawing, a slight unease. Not a bang, not a fight, but a slow and inevitable slide.

  I flip over the last picture, the one from the hike, and there’s the date again. June of this year. Five months ago. My name below. Jessa Whitworth, Delaware Water Gap. As if this were merely a file already, a piece for a museum archive. As if he knew someday, somewhere, these would belong to someone else.

  Once they’re all down, I flip over the stack as I go to slide them into my bag, and there we are again—at the beach.

  Now I want to ask him, What did you know, Caleb? That a year later, you’d be gone and I’d be peeling all evidence of you and me off the wall? That your mother would hate me, and Max wouldn’t look me in the eye, and your baby sister wouldn’t say a word to me, no matter how many times I said hello?

  Salt water helps you float, you said that first day we met at the beach, when I told you I couldn’t swim well. That I didn’t like the feeling of the current in the ocean. That I had this irrational fear of being swept out to sea, and that nobody would ever find me.

  You laughed.

  Caleb, you laughed.

  After the pictures come down, the walls are bare, except for a few pieces of sticky tack, and the ticking clock above his desk, which was more a piece of football memorabilia than a functioning clock, since you couldn’t really make out the numbers. The room looks like it did that first day, when I came up here and he told me it was the bunker. It feels like forever ago. It feels like a moment ago. One year together, a bell curve in photos.

  There’s a version of me and Caleb that fell apart. There’s a version of him that braced his arm against the doorjamb, banning me from his life from then on. There’s a version of me who walked away. There’s a version of him who changed, grabbed his keys, left this room for the last time—

  But right now I want this part of him. I want to find him here, see him at the moment when everything was right.