The door is closed, like yesterday, but I know Eve has been in here, because she has moved the boxes I finished. Most of what I packed was inside drawers, so the room doesn’t look much different, other than the walls.
Except it’s darker in here. The window curtain has been pulled shut, shadows dancing along the wall. The switch on the surge protector under his desk glows an eerie red, which you only notice when the lights are off and the shades pulled closed.
It’s not really a window shade but a shower curtain that hangs in front of his window. It’s white, with black birds. But, like, Alfred Hitchcock–level birds. Horror-movie-level birds. You don’t realize they’re birds at first: at first, it just looks like a bunch of thick black lines intersecting on a white background. A pattern you can’t quite figure out. You have to step back, see it from the entrance, look closer. Find one bird, the rest come alive.
Caleb put it up for Halloween last year to get into the spirit, he said—but he never took it down. When the light hits in the morning, they cast shadows across his bed, the walls, the floor. Us.
“And my soul from out that shadow…,” he said, my head resting on his chest. The words vibrated through his ribs, into my skull. We were lying across his bed. He ran his fingers through my hair, absently.
“Wow, so romantic,” I said.
The clock ticked above us. Just minutes after nine a.m.; I had woken him up. Or, I was still waking him. I’d walked right in the front door, up the steps, and let myself in his room. It was the first day of summer break, after we’d spent the whole school year together, and he was supposed to be babysitting Mia, who was watching television downstairs by herself when I arrived.
“You’re coming to the party this weekend, right?” I asked.
“Hmm?”
“Julian’s graduation party? It’s this Saturday.”
Caleb’s arm tensed under my head. “I don’t think he’d want me there. I don’t think I’m his favorite person.”
It was true. Julian had never quite fully warmed up to him, maybe because Caleb was my first serious boyfriend, maybe because our circles were overlapping in a way he wasn’t comfortable with. Either way, I knew Caleb could sense the discomfort, just as I could. “I want you there.”
“Maybe call me after, Jessa. I’m supposed to help my mom with something.”
“Right,” I said, pushing myself onto my elbows. Lately it felt like our days revolved around his schedule, his plans, his family.
“Wait, don’t get up,” he said, his fingers circling my arm.
“Your sister needs breakfast,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, and suddenly he was up, out of bed, searching his floor for a pair of pants to slip over his boxers. He looked over his shoulder, catching me watching. “But that’s not your job.”
He shut the door behind him, but said, before it latched, “Don’t move, I’ll be right back.”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a guy who cares for his much younger sibling somehow has an unprecedented appeal. Listen, it’s just biology. Many other things are forgiven in its place. Like: the way I’d sometimes catch him staring out the window when I was talking; these vague excuses he’d started giving me more and more often; how college was a topic that had recently become off-limits, as if I was a distraction from the decision.
I pushed myself to sitting when I heard his steps on the stairs again, saw the envelope on top of his desk. The top slit open, rough and ragged. He opened the door just as I reached for it.
“Don’t,” he said.
But I did. Of course I did.
He reached for it too, grabbing it out of my hands before the handwritten words could slip into focus. I felt the sting of a paper cut on my index finger. “What the hell?” I said.
“Just leave it, Jessa,” he said, dropping it into the bottom desk drawer, leaning back against it. Creating secrets, instead of giving them away—the opposite end of the bell curve.
Just say it, just say it, just say it—
The sound of Mia’s scream cut through the moment, cut through the tension. Caleb’s eyes went wide, and he launched himself down the stairs, with me scrambling to keep up. Mia stood beside the kitchen table, staring at the overturned cereal bowl, the shattered glass beside it, the juice seeping across the floor. Her toe was bleeding from where she’d stepped in glass.
“Oh,” he said, scooping her up. “It’s okay, Mia.”
Her green eyes were wide and overflowing with tears. “I just wanted more juice,” she said, and she let out another wail.
I cleaned the floor, carefully picking up the pieces of glass, while Caleb tended to Mia’s foot. Everything that had just happened upstairs, forgotten. Until my paper cut made contact with the orange juice, and I sucked in a quick gulp of air, from the sting.
My hands shook as I finished cleaning, and all the while I heard Caleb’s low, soothing voice across the room, in words that were too far away to hear clearly.
Caleb took the plastic trash bag with the pieces of glass out to the garbage around back, and Mia looked up from the chair across the room. “He’s supposed to be watching me,” she said, the corners of her mouth tipping down, a shadow of Eve. An echo of a grown-up, those same words probably spoken in this very room.
It wasn’t my fault. The excuse on the tip of my tongue. He was sleeping when I arrived.
“I have to go,” I told Caleb when he came back inside. “Feel better, Mia.”
I hear her words again, standing in the entrance of his room now, watching the shadows of the birds lighten and darken on the walls, the bedspread, the desk, from a cloud moving across the sun.
He was supposed to be watching me.
The course of events would be different had he done what his mother asked of him. I wonder if Mia still feels those words, understands that there is an alternate outcome, if only he had done what he was supposed to do. Caleb in this house, instead of driving through the rain. It’s not my fault, I want to tell her. Pointless words now. I barely believe them myself. I stride across the room, my steps angry.
The curtain comes down first. I have to stand on the desk chair, which swivels, to reach the curtain rod. The metal bar tilts when I lift it off its bracket, and the birds slide off in a heap to the floor. The light is too bright, and my eyelids slam shut on instinct. The room is bathed in light, and I think: There will never again be the shadow of a bird on the wall. On the bed. On us.
The curtain feels much lighter and ethereal in my arms, as I fold it over, fabric billowing up again as I push it down, deeper into the box.
The surface of his desk is now bare, other than the computer screen. I haven’t touched the desk drawers yet.
I picture him leaning against it, hiding the envelope, the words that wouldn’t slip into focus.
Next, I drag the box over to the desk. I drop to my knees. I need his secrets to be mine again, hear him whisper them into my ear as he sits beside me on the beach. As if I could save us, even now.