There’s nothing here. Nothing left. I wonder if maybe Caleb found a new hiding spot. I can still hear the blood pulsing inside my skull. Trying to understand Max’s words. Money, taken. Money stolen. It makes no sense, because Caleb had access to money, if he needed it.
But still, the thought lingers: money that maybe Caleb had used for something else that day, something that has nothing to do with me. Somewhere else to shift the guilt. Another possibility.
And yet: It was money that Max needs. And he took this room apart, in his fury.
I’m still standing on the mattress in the middle of the mess when I hear Eve and Mia come in from the backyard.
“Try the lights up there,” Eve says.
Someone walks up the steps, and I panic.
The shelves are a mess. The floor is a mess. The room is nothing like it should be, and I give up on trying to maintain an ordered chaos.
I jump down onto the carpet and start stacking all the books on the floor into a box.
But the footsteps stop at the bottom, at Mia’s room. “They’re not working,” Mia yells.
“Jessa?” his mother calls from down below. “Are you up there?”
“Yes,” I call. “The power’s off.”
“Just a short,” she says. “Hold on.”
I get back to work, and eventually the house reboots. A door closes below, and I know Eve has been out to the garage, to reset the power. The power source under his desk glows red. The light in the corner clicks on, the gust of heat from the vent lifting the hair off my neck, like a breath.
I keep stacking, trying to put the room back in some sort of order, in case Eve comes upstairs. One of the books, a paperback purchased Used (so says the yellow sticker on the back that he never peeled off), has tears in the edges of the back cover. When I flip to the front cover, it catches me around the throat in a heartbeat, remembering the last time I saw this. I found it for him near the end of the school year. Under the seat of his car.
We were driving to one of Julian and Max’s ball games in late May, some big playoff game, and I had my phone out, directing Caleb. The windows were rolled down, and the air smelled of spring and exhaust.
“Oh, crap,” Caleb said, craning his head at the sign overhead. “Toll.”
“How much?” I asked, scrambling.
I opened the glove compartment, but only found the car manual, a mini-flashlight, his insurance and registration cards. I ran my fingers through the cup holders, the side compartments in the doors.
“Check under the seat,” he said.
I pulled out a candy wrapper, three quarters—“I knew it,” he declared when I raised them in victory—and a book, facedown, spine broken down the middle.
“Some light reading?” I asked, holding it up to him. “What, can’t possibly get enough of The Grapes of Wrath?”
He grabbed it from me with one hand, his eyes drifting from the road momentarily. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve been looking for that forever. I had to go sit at the school library for thirty minutes until I finished, because Mrs. Laverne wouldn’t let me check it out, since there was a wait list. Not that anyone actually came to check it out that week, I might add.”
“And how exactly did it end up under your seat?”
He shrugged, slipping it into the gap beside his seat. He paid the toll, took the exit. “Guess it fell out of my bag. You must’ve kicked it under the seat.” But he was smiling when he said it.
I gasped. “Me?”
“Yeah. You can never sit still.” He put a hand on my leg for emphasis. The leg that I’d just tucked under the other, unbuckling for a moment to get more comfortable.
Then we passed a small sign with a town’s name on it and his fingers tightened slightly, kind of in play, kind of not. “Hey, I want to check something out first. Okay?”
“What?”
But he didn’t answer, and he ignored the directions I gave him. “Just, hold on.”
We drove for miles, past cornfields, into a more densely wooded area, down curvier roads. Eventually, he swung the car onto an unmarked drive down an unpaved road.
“There,” he said, nodding out the front window.
He eased the car to a slow stop, but left the engine running.
“Whoa.” We had pulled up alongside what looked like an old barn, blackened in sections and caved in, with boarded-up windows. “What is this place?”
He turned off the engine and grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment. “Come on, want to check it out?”
I didn’t, really. But I didn’t want to sit in the car alone while Caleb did, either.
“Caleb, my parents will be worried if I don’t show up.” They would already be there by now, arriving with the team. And the game was set to start in ten minutes. Julian was pitching, and I should be there.
“Five minutes,” he said, brushing the comment aside.
The grass was overgrown and dry, dead around the perimeter, a scorched earth. The door was thin, and gave with the slightest shove. Inside smelled of exposed wood, singed plastic, mold. Caleb had his flashlight in his hand and shone it across the floor, because the windows were boarded up. The floorboards were angled haphazardly, and seemed to give way underneath, to a blackened hole below. I heard birds flying by from outside the boarded-up windows.
Caleb laughed at my expression. “It’s just a house, Jessa,” he said.
“It’s about to collapse,” I said. “Caleb, don’t.” But he was already heading for the stairs.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, and I held my breath, listening to his steps, the door creaking open, more steps, a pause. Eventually, he made his way back downstairs, looked around the remains of the kitchen, and returned to the front door, where I had never left.
“Satisfied?” I asked.
He pursed his lips, his eyes taking in the rooms again. “I was born here,” he said.
“Oh.” I looked around again, placing the furniture from his house into these hollowed rooms instead, trying to see it as a home.
“I don’t remember it. I just wanted to see.”
And then my body stiffened. “Is this where…your dad…” But I let the thought trail. I felt the ghosts circling, smelled the fire, heard a baby cry.
“No,” he said. He brushed the hair from my face, stepping closer. “That was a car accident. I was five. I don’t remember this place at all. I don’t know what happened to it.”
Now I turn the book over in my hands. I don’t remember what happened after, with the book. I just know I found it in his car, and then forgot about it. We left the dilapidated home. Went to Julian and Max’s game. Had dinner with the team at a diner after to celebrate, the parents all sitting in half the restaurant, Caleb and I tucked in a booth with Max and a few of his friends on the other side. I left with my parents, after. He must’ve brought the book inside when he got back home, adding it to the collection on his shelf.
It looked like there was still a bookmark inside, which there hadn’t been that day. That day, it had been folded open, stuck at the place he’d left off. I thought of him coming back up here, rereading sections of the book. Putting it down, forgetting about it. I opened the book, to see where he’d given up.
He was in the middle of a chapter, no rhyme or reason. Except it isn’t a bookmark, but an envelope folded in half. I unfold it, see the jagged top, the black script that had once been out of focus, that he didn’t want me to see. His name is written on the front. Just his name.
I pull the notebook paper from inside, read the words he wanted to keep hidden:
C—I miss you. I miss you so much. But I’m scared that if I send you this and you don’t show up, it will be even worse.
There’s nothing else. This big envelope for three sentences. Three sentences, to break my heart.
I’m holding a secret. Something I don’t understand. Someone he was talking to months before we broke up. Someone who missed him, whom he cared for enough to hide from me.
It was no secret that Kylie Vann once had a crush on Caleb. It was no secret that she asked him to help her with homework in the back room of the school library, and then kissed him when he wasn’t expecting it. He told me right away. That’s how we operated. That’s how I thought we operated.
I feel dizzy with the words. With the truth. With the memories. While I had been so frantic trying to hold together the pieces of us, had he already let us go, and just neglected to tell me?