Max isn’t at school. I’ve checked the parking lot, and I’ve waited by his locker, and he’s not here. The warning bell rings, and it’s time to make a decision.
I’ve called him. Twice. Once last night, after we left in separate cars from the pizza place—he didn’t pick up, and I didn’t blame him. I figured he didn’t want to hear it again, the ghost story I let Mia feed me, that I wanted so desperately to hold on to.
But I tried again this morning, and nothing. So I send him a text: I’m worried.
Because it’s not a cool thing to do, to not answer. Not for us. Not for people who know where it might lead.
He responds right away: I’m fine. Not feeling well.
I know I’ve done this to him. So I make a decision. The second bell rings, and I’m officially late, and Screw it, I think. For the second time in my high school career, I skip a day of school.
I drive by his house, but nobody appears to be home. His car is gone, but I ring the bell anyway. I wait one minute, two, and when the silence stretches on, I send him a text: I’m standing outside your front door. Where are you?
He writes back immediately: Just thinking. Go back to school.
Which means he’s not driving around. I can think of two places off the top of my head where he’d go to think, if he was thinking about Caleb. There was just one place if he was thinking of the things I whispered to him last night.
I drive slowly, expecting things to look different on the approach. But it’s all the same, perfectly normal: the strip of stores lining the road, a restaurant, then thicker trees, and a sign: BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE ROAD.
Max’s car is tucked onto the shoulder of the road just before the bend. I ease my own car next to it, rocks and unpaved dirt crunching under my tires. I’m surprised by the change in incline, the way the car leans too far, and I’m suddenly caught in a tangle of fear—that there’s a tipping point, and I have to be careful not to breach it. But the car remains steady. I remain steady.
It’s chilly outside, but the sunlight hits the road, and the glare burns my eyes as I step across the divide from pavement to bridge.
I find Max in the center point of the bridge, sitting on the spot where the guardrail has been replaced. It’s a little brighter, a little smoother, and it draws the eye, standing out. Max is staring deep into the water, and he doesn’t notice me approaching.
“Max,” I say. He swivels his head, but nothing more.
I cannot stop the way my heart melts at the look. The way I can’t help moving closer.
“You shouldn’t be out here, Jessa.”
I don’t know if he means because it’s a school day, or because of the bridge, or because of him.
“Neither should you,” I say.
“The cameras saw his car pass the bridge, and never come back. They found pieces of his car in the river.” He chokes on the word pieces, forcing it out.
“I know,” I say.
“And it happened before, years ago, with the Coats guy. With the ocean currents, they didn’t find him for another four months.”
“I know that, too,” I say. It’s why the police are still checking, still waiting, but they aren’t holding their breath in the meantime. If the river wasn’t moving as fast; if the weather formation and the Gulf Stream weren’t crossing that exact same time of year…
But my mind still clings to this terrible hope, picturing him kicking out the window, swimming for the shore, pulling himself up onto the mud, coughing up water, catching his breath. Did he walk back up the slope, to the road? Did he make it?
But there’s one piece that doesn’t fit. That makes the whole puzzle fall apart: he didn’t come back.
Max must be thinking the same thing. He’s staring off down the meandering river, the current a deceptive calm, a still blue. “I don’t know anything about him. I don’t know why he took that money. I didn’t understand what was happening.”
“Because he didn’t tell us,” I say.
I stand beside him, on the safety of the road, and he pivots his head. “What kind of best friend was I, then? That he wouldn’t tell me? That I wouldn’t notice?”
I know what he’s thinking, because I’m thinking it, too. We had been preoccupied. We thought we were getting away with something. We thought we were the ones with the secret. And we tiptoed around him, grateful when the conversation slid to anything mundane.
We did not want to hear, I need to talk to you about something.
We did not say, What’s the matter, Caleb? Because we were scared what that might force into the light instead.
“Remember the day you jumped?” Max asks, looking straight down, where his feet dangle against the concrete below the guardrail. I want to reach out and grab his shirt, keep him from falling.
“I didn’t jump,” I tell him. “I wouldn’t have jumped on my own.”
He shakes his head. “We thought we were invincible. That nothing could really touch us.” He looks at me. “I lied to you. You could’ve drowned. Or hit your head. Or broken your leg.”
And it’s then I know what I must do. It feels inevitable. I cannot stop the momentum. I take off my sneakers, placing my socks inside. I strip off my sweater, but leave the rest. I’m standing in the November chill in a tank top typically worn underneath a sweater, and the black pants of my school outfit. I start to shake; I have to move.
I stand on the edge, just out of Max’s reach. “Jessa,” he warns, and then I leap. The cold air beats against my face, and it feels like it might carry me for a moment—and then I fall, and fall fast, the relentless pull of gravity drawing me toward the harsh and bitter shock of water.
I hear Max hit the river a moment after me, the sound echoing under the water, and when I break the surface, he’s calling my name in the shadows of the trees.
“I’m right here,” I say, after I manage a breath. The cold was shocking, and it stole my breath, seized my lungs. I tread water in the middle of the river, slowly making my way closer to shore. But Max swims arm over arm, his face focused in concentration.
He’s angry when he reaches me, when his arms snake around me, so he’s sure he has me.
Max is struggling to swim, weighed down by his jeans and his thick sweatshirt. “You were supposed to take off your sweatshirt first. You’re going to be freezing,” I say. And suddenly I’m the one helping hold him up instead.
He’s coughing. I can’t tell whether he’s laughing when we make it to shore. I pull myself out, and Max stands beside me. My body is covered in goosebumps. I’m shaking anyway.
He steps away, looks me over quickly. “He would hate me right now.”
“He would be too cold to hate you,” I say, wrapping my arms around myself, fighting for some extra heat.
“Fine, then your brother would hate me.” His teeth chatter as he speaks, the whole effect vaguely unsettling, like the words don’t quite count right now. “Remember the party your parents had for the baseball team at the end of the year when I was a freshman? Before you were at school with us?”
But I don’t, not really. Not until he starts telling me the story, and I see the memory playing out, through his eyes. “You were in the kitchen and you poured me a soda and I don’t even remember what we were talking about,” he says, “but I guess I was laughing, because when you left the room your brother stood like three inches from me and just said, No.” He smiles now, thinking about it. “Just that. No. I’ll be honest, it was pretty effective. I was terrified of your brother.”
I reach for his hand, cold and clammy at his side. And when he doesn’t object, I rest my forehead on his shoulder, breathing him in. But all I get is river.
His body is close, shivering, he’s wound tight. I feel his heartbeat against my ribs, but he’s looking beyond me. His other hand rests against the back of my head, and I feel his fingers move gently through my hair.
I press my lips to the side of his jawbone, and he softens. He lowers his head. “Jessa, I’m not him,” he says.
I run my hand up the side of his face, feel the contours that make Max Max.
He’s not, it’s true. He’s the one who got me to jump. The one who drove me home after the breakup. The one who picked me up when Caleb went missing. The one who came back for me when I was lost in the crowd.
“I know,” I say.
I hold my breath. I wait. The trees are hiding us, and the cold is inside us, and I was a girl who just jumped on her own. For a moment, we are not ourselves. Separate from all the events leading up to this, and the ones that will soon come after. The words we say here don’t count. The things we do, only half-real.
Only maybe they’re not. Because as he finally lowers his lips to my own, I think I have never felt something so real.
Max’s house feels warm and welcoming, even as I’m shivering in someone else’s clothes. I’ve followed him back here, after we separated. After he pulled back and said, his forehead still resting against mine, You’re going to get hypothermia, seriously, and we walked back to our cars together, like nothing at all had happened.
The front door leads to the kitchen and the living room together, the only parts of the house I’ve seen before. There are family photos on the beige walls; Max is an only child, so it’s all him, except for a photo from his parents’ wedding.
My living room is like this too, covered with images of me and Julian, and in that one moment I realize what’s missing from Caleb’s. There are no pictures of him when he’s younger on the walls of his house. There are pictures of Mia, and Caleb with Mia, both not until he’s older.
“Eve doesn’t have pictures of Caleb growing up,” I say. “Downstairs.”
But Max frowns, turning back to the fridge to scrounge for food, and I realize my mistake. I know what he’s thinking: everything I say, everything I see, is in comparison to Caleb.
Max: taller, leaner. His kisses more tentative, unsure. My first thought down on the riverbank, when he finally lowered his lips to mine, was frustration that he was pulling away and stepping back, until something tipped and he pulled me closer, our clothes cold and clinging to our skin, my body trembling against his. Everything natural and easy from there, where Caleb was all anticipation and surprise; it was as if I’d known Max forever, and this was the way it was meant to be.
I wonder if it was just the moment, two people missing the same thing, seeking comfort in each other. If now that we’re back in his kitchen and reality, he will say something like Listen, Jessa—
Things that felt possible an hour earlier seem suddenly overexposed in the reality of our lives. He looks like he wants to say something, like he’s on the cusp, but instead he looks me over again. “You’re still shaking,” he says.
Our clothes are in the dryer, and Max has changed into something warmer. Meanwhile, I’m wrapped in Max’s sweatshirt, and a pair of his mom’s pajama pants. Still, the chill lingers.
“I’m freezing. It seemed like a better idea an hour ago.”
He cracks a grin, and a laugh slips through. Then he bites it back, as if remembering why we are here. “About earlier,” he starts, and I lean forward. Earlier, as in when I kissed him, and he kissed me back? Earlier, as in when I threw myself into the river and he followed? Earlier, as in when I told him that Caleb might not be dead and he started to believe me?
But before he can continue, there’s a sharp noise from the back of his house, like a waiter dropping a tray of dishes.
I jump, on edge, while Max walks to the living room windows, peering through the blinds. “My neighbor,” he says. “Dumping the trash. It’s garbage day tomorrow. We keep the containers in the alleys behind our houses until garbage day, when we drag them around to the front.”
I stand beside Max. The neighbor doesn’t see us. She heaves another bag into the bin beside it. The bottles crash against one another as she drops her recycling inside.
My gaze shifts to the house over the fence, and I know Max is doing the same.
Just like that, we know what we have to do. I see him staring out the back window, to the high wooden fence.
“They’re gone,” he says.
“How can you tell?”
He points to the window of the garage, the shades pulled closed. “The garage light is always on when they’re home now.” There’s only darkness behind the shades now.
“Always?”
He shrugs. “Seems that way to me.”
“That sounds like a really inexact science.”
He turns to face me. “I want you to show me, Jessa. Show me the room. The hidden attic space behind his closet. The things that made you think he’s alive.”
And of course I must, we must. You can’t put a thing like that out into the world and expect it to dissipate in the air. It has substance now. I’ve sucked him in, and now I have to prove my theory: that there were parts to Caleb that neither of us saw. Something neither of us knew. Secrets lingering just underneath the surface, hidden in plain sight.
I have a key now, I realize. The one that somehow ended up in the attic space. I can get in his house on my own. Undetected.
But I don’t fully trust Max’s surveillance techniques, which is why we end up waiting for the dryer to finish, and then check the house on foot first, walking around the block, looking for Eve’s car.
“I told you,” he says. But I am not one who can accept what I am told without question any longer.
Max watches the street as I slide the key into the lock, and I imagine Caleb standing in my place. The lock turns, and the feeling reverberates through the metal, into my bones.
“Hello?” I call as I push the door open, but Max grabs my arm suddenly, and I fall silent.
“Just listen,” he whispers. So I do: the grandfather clock, counting the seconds; the hum of the refrigerator; our steps that seem to echo louder on the hardwood floor in the entrance. The house feels so different without the area rugs under the furniture, and the artwork off the walls. All that remains are the hard surfaces of the floors and walls, with a smattering of furniture.
“I can’t believe they’re really doing this,” Max whispers.
They’re moving. They’re leaving. And they’re taking the truth with them. I feel an urgent pull upstairs, as if it all might slip through my fingers at any moment. As if everything I told Max hinges on a certain moment in time. Max locks the front door behind him, and the noise resounds.
I take the stairs first, two at a time, like Caleb would do. My hands plant against the walls on the way to the third floor, and I hear Max breathing on the steps behind me. The door is closed—dark blue, in the darkened hall.
I push the door open with a creak, and Caleb’s room is too bright now, without the window cover, in the noonday sun. The glare hits the bare surfaces of his desk and the bedside table. Specks of dust hover in the streams of light, and I know it’s me who has set them loose, who has shaken them out, disturbing the balance of this room.
The boxes are gone.
I don’t look at the bed beside the window, the backpack in the corner. It’s practically all that’s left.
I open the closet door, nervous that the bookcase in front of the door will be moved, or that my memory will have betrayed me, but it’s there: a small door, hidden behind the shelves.
Max stands behind me, unmoving, unspeaking. I open the door, and have to duck through the opening. I stand once I’m through, and Max follows. He pulls out his phone from the back pocket of his jeans to use as a flashlight.
I step once, and the beam creaks under my feet. “Mia’s room is right below here. I could hear her and Eve talking when I was inside. Mia says she heard footsteps up here two days after Caleb’s car went over the bridge.”
Somewhere, I’ve stopped saying died. I say his car went over the bridge, which, I’m realizing, is the only thing we’re truly sure of. The police declared him dead because he went missing under peril. Because there was once a man who disappeared in much the same way, decades earlier, who didn’t wash up to shore for months later, and there was no point dragging it out that long, and no guarantee Caleb’s body would ever be found, either.
“Max?” I ask. “You know Caleb inherited that money from his dad, right?”
He nods, looking around the space.
“What happens to it now?”
He raises his eyes to mine, the wheels processing alongside my own. He doesn’t answer. I thought it must go to his mother, or to Mia, but I heard Eve say they had to leave—that they couldn’t afford this place anymore. I almost say as much, but then his eyes narrow, distracted. Max is taller than me, and he sees something I do not. His hand reaches for a higher beam, and he pulls down a folded red rectangle.