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.