The rest of the lacrosse bag is empty, and I leave it, together with all his gear, in a corner. I know it was expensive. It can probably be resold, along with his guitar. I assume Eve will take it away, put it wherever she’s keeping the boxes.
I can almost feel Caleb slipping away—the person I thought I knew. The way I felt him slipping back then. I close my eyes, trying to hold tight to him. To remember the feel of his fingers lacing through mine, the sound of his laughter, the words he’d whisper just to me.
But I open my eyes, and I’m in an empty room, alone, with nothing but the ticking of the clock for company. I can’t hear his voice, just the steady tick, tick, tick.
And then: there he is. He’s standing on his bed, leaning toward the clock, reaching for the minute hand.
“Here?” he asked, dragging the minute hand around. The curtains were open beside him, and snow was starting to fall outside the window. Icicles clung to the roof overhang; it was early February.
“No, it’s before noon. You need to move the hour hand,” I said.
He leaned back, looking it over. “It looks like it’s right to me.”
“Only if you’re operating in Daylight Saving Time.”
“Isn’t it only like a month until the time changes back? At this point I might as well leave it.”
“It drives me crazy,” I said. I couldn’t stand that it was always wrong—like his room was a place that operated outside the rules of time and space.
“Jessa,” he said, tapping his hand against the clock, “this is a commemorative Giants’ Super Bowl clock. It’s meant to drive Sean crazy. Not you.”
Sean was an Eagles fan, and so Caleb took extra pleasure in these items, as if they could keep Sean from his room, just by threat of seeing them.
Now, looking at the clock, it seems like it tells the perfect time. The second hand ticks steadily along; nothing else moves.
I finally can’t take it any longer, the steady ticking, each beat farther and farther from a world where Caleb existed. I pull his desk chair to the wall, stand on top, and then I tear the blue and red clock from the pin in the wall—and still, it ticks in my hand. I turn it over to fumble for the battery pack, to make it stop, because it seems the only fair thing to do—
But there, tucked into the wire casing, is a rectangular ticket, like all the stubs he kept in his desk.
I slip it out, and it’s a bus ticket, from the spring—never used. Never taken. It leaves from here and goes to some town I’ve never heard of in Pennsylvania. I look at the dates—to be used within a year of purchase. I can’t figure out how this was Caleb’s. If he had any intention of using this, and why.
I open the map program on my phone, pull up a search page. I plug the name of the town in, and the map zooms in to the northern edge of the state. There’s nothing there that seems familiar. I zoom back out to see the path from Caleb’s town to there. It crosses the river, the border of the state. Something registers from the edge of my memory—the familiarity of the region.
I think of the name on the picture, of us on the hike. Delaware Water Gap. I wonder if this was some halfway meeting point.
I try to remember the dates on the pictures. I’m trying to remember why we went there. Why there. I wish I had the pictures, but they’re home. And now I’m wondering if we went there for some other reason, unbeknownst to me.
Maybe he went back; maybe it was a central meeting point that he was scoping out. I picture a girl, a hug, a smile. It seems obvious that’s who the letter was from, and this is the purpose of the bus ticket. Maybe he was supposed to go meet her there, where she lives. Maybe it’s Ashlyn Patterson, and they started up again after the ski trip. Though he has a car. He had a car. Surely he could’ve driven himself there just as easily?
Eve’s footsteps echo from the floor below, and I quietly ease the blue door shut. I unzip the lacrosse bag in the corner and wedge the stick over the handle, behind the dresser, trying not to make any noise as I do, like Caleb once did.
This other life of his gnaws at me, until I have to know. Until the voice that says What’s the point? He’s gone is silenced. Because the point is that it’s not only Caleb’s story, but mine.
And because his story is also mine, because we’re woven together—his arm on my side of a photo, my hand on his—I have to know.
I slip the bus ticket into my back pocket and log onto his computer, a simple combination of four characters—his birthday month and year—I’d seen him enter a thousand times. Even Mia could’ve figured this out. His documents are all there, the English essays, saved homework assignments. His music folder, organized into playlists. On impulse, I click the playlist with my name, and the familiar melody fills the room: a scrapbook of songs, whether we liked them or not, but that told the story of us. Homecoming, the lyrics I got so wrong that Caleb couldn’t help but sing them every time he heard them; the song that played all summer, words belted out in the car on the way back from the beach.
And then abruptly I turn it off.
There’s something too close about it, that brings me right back.
Instead, I focus on this other Caleb. The one who received letters and hid them in books. Who had bus tickets to places I’ve never heard of. Who took Max’s money. Who left my race and was on his way to somewhere unknown when he was swept away.
I wonder if there was someone else, all along. I remember the way I’d find him sitting at the computer over this last summer, turning off the monitor screen when I walked in. I assumed it was college stuff, but the moments become recolored in my mind. I open the Internet program and see that he’s cleared his browser history. But I do the same. It’s a habit, from when I shared the computer with Julian and accidentally stumbled onto his last visited site—realizing the same could happen to me. I wonder if Caleb was messaging someone through the computer app, but I don’t know his password for that, and his phone is gone, swept away with the river, and him.
I do, however, know his email password. At least, I used to.
I’d been sitting at his desk, spinning in his chair, while he did homework on his bed. It was the middle of last school year, just before our ski trip. “Hey,” he’d said. “I need to print something out from my email. Do me a favor, log me in.” He barely glanced up from his notebook.
I typed his username, but the password wasn’t saved.
His eyes were fixed on the screen beyond when I looked back. “GreenRiver36,” he said.
“Huh?”
He gestured to the screen. “My password.” Then he looked back down, as if it wasn’t a big deal.
Except it was. To me, I imagined it was like giving someone the key to your apartment. Permission to be there when they were not. To check in, if you so desired. It was a combination of his lacrosse number, our school color, and our school name.
He knew I knew it, so part of me wonders if he changed it after the breakup. Or maybe before. Maybe when he started getting secretive, he changed it right then.
Still, I try.
I type in his email account username, and then his password, and I’m not surprised when I get the message telling me that the Password is incorrect.
But what makes me pause, what makes me freeze, my hands hovering over the keyboard, the words blurring, is the line below:
Password last changed 49 days ago. If this is incorrect, please click here to report.
I pull up the calendar on my phone. Look at the dates. Forty-nine days. I do the math. Check again. Look over my shoulder at the lacrosse stick wedged against the door.
His password was last changed two days after he died.