The top shelf of his closet is partially lined with a tower of shoeboxes. They’re black and orange, and have miniature images of cleats, or sneakers, or boots. They’re all in his size.
During the middle of last school year, I remember Mia telling him in the kitchen, “I need a box, for a diorama.”
Caleb saying, “Go get one from the tower.”
And Mia shaking her head, her eyes wide.
Caleb grinned. “There aren’t any monsters up there.”
“But I hear them,” Mia said.
Caleb groaned but bounded up the stairs and returned a few moments later with an empty shoebox.
“You have a tower of boxes?” I asked.
“I do,” he said. “I started out keeping my shoes in them, but then I also just started keeping them for projects and storage, and now, what can I say, I’m the person who has a tower of boxes in his closet.”
“This is how it starts with cats, right?”
The first few boxes I pull down are empty, as I recalled them being. But then there’s the sound of shaking, something loose and rattling inside the one at the base. I pull it down, open the top, and see it’s full of Legos. I smile, imagining a smaller version of Caleb sitting on the floor of this room, building a town, or a spaceship. A few pieces are still stuck together, in half-towers, half-robots, shapes I can’t quite decipher.
The box, I realize, has an L on it. And others are labeled as well, as I pull them down and open them. Old figurines, collectibles, baseball cards. The boxes are labeled in marker, with a single letter—a code. L for Legos, B for Baseball, P for…People, I guess? They’re action figures, G.I. Joe, stuff like that.
I hear Eve come back in the house, and Mia speaking to her below. I can only hope she’s not telling her about finding me in her room. I hold my breath, waiting for footsteps on the stairs, but eventually the voices settle, the house settles back to silence.
Near the bottom of the boxes, there’s a D, and it’s sealed extra-closed with a rubber band, and I worry for a moment that this is it, some girl, an ex or a new one—something he didn’t want me to see. But the first thing I see inside is a photo of a very young boy beside a man. They’re holding fishing poles. They’re standing knee-deep in a river. Some instinct makes me flip it over, and I see, written in faint pencil: Delaware Water Gap?
It’s his father. It’s so easy to see, from the distance, from the shape of them. Now that Caleb’s older, you can see the resemblance between him and his father from over ten years ago. They’ve met at the center, from opposite directions. Separated by fifteen years or so now. He’s got the same build, the same hair. Which I figured, since Eve’s hair is so dark, and she’s lithe, with green eyes and pale skin, like Mia. But nothing else is in detail. Instead I imagine the man in the photo turns to face the camera head-on, and it’s the replica of an older Caleb, one I will never see, but who once existed in another lifetime.
Then I think, Maybe that’s what we were doing there, on our hike. Retracing the pattern of his father’s life, with places they had once gone together. I move the photo to see what’s below, and there are a few more pictures. They’re all of Caleb and his dad. There are none with Eve. They have years written lightly on the back, with question marks. Words like home; backyard; summer; winter. There’s one of the two of them cleaning an old black car. There’s a corner of a house behind them, and something about the angle, and the trees behind, make me wonder whether it’s the house we stopped at on the way to Max’s game. In the photo, the younger Caleb has the hose, his father has the sponge. They’re both in bathing suits. Caleb points it at his father, and his father has a hand up—but he’s laughing.
I close the lid, my fingers shaking.
I was doing the same thing Caleb did. Creating a single box remaining, to tell the story of someone I loved, that would one day be stored in my closet.
I don’t know what to do with this. If these photos once belonged to Eve, Caleb took them from her for a reason. He was trying to figure something out, something his mother wouldn’t tell him. If he asked, Where was this taken? surely she would answer. But his father was an off-limits topic. I wondered if they had divorced first. I never knew. Didn’t pry too much, into a thing I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to push Caleb back toward. All I knew: His father died in a car accident when he was five; his mom met and married Sean a few years later; Mia was born when he was nine; and they all moved here just before he started middle school. That’s all I knew of the Caleb before we met.
I let him show me what he wanted to show, and I saw the things I wanted to see.
I’ve started my own box—the box in my mind, that’s marked C for Caleb. It began with my pictures. I’ve taken the seashell. And now these pictures sing in my hand, as if they belong together. I close the shoebox back up and tuck it under the bed, and figure I’ll wait for a moment—when Eve is out, or occupied again. I listen for sounds of water running through the walls, but all I hear is the silence, and the ticking of the grandfather clock, up two flights of stairs.