I use the flashlight to illuminate the corners of the closet, to see if there’s anything else I’ve missed. Other than the wooden bookcase in the corner of the closet, stacked with old textbooks, spines cracked through the labels, I believe I’ve finished the closet.
I empty them out, heap them in the middle of the room, ready for a box of school supplies to donate. Caleb would like that. He was big on that.
He didn’t get why we had to buy textbooks each year; why they couldn’t be property of the school, used year after year. Instead we had to purchase them fresh, or make it down to the basement book sale where people purchased used versions from each other, for a discount.
But these are all from last year: Physics, Trig, Spanish 3. Where were the rest, from this year? They should be here, or in his school locker, but his locker was empty.
I don’t remember seeing them in his car, in his backpack, or on his desk, and something eats at me.
I don’t remember seeing them at all.
I’d gone down to the basement the first day of classes, looking for Caleb after school. But I’d only seen Max. I’d asked for Caleb, and he shrugged. He had a stack of books he was carrying and said, “I guess we can share, if he needs to. Or he can buy the new ones.”
But I worried Caleb had just forgotten and would be upset later. I’d sent him a text: Want me to get books for you? Send me a list if so.
He’d never responded, and I added it to the list of calls and texts that felt like they were disappearing into the abyss. After practice, when he was giving me a ride home, I asked him about it. “What?” he said. “Oh, I took care of it.”
All these non-answers he’d given me. How little he’d really ever told me at all.
I stand on my toes to see if there’s anything left on the top shelf of the closet, but I can’t quite see. I figure if I tip the empty bookcase, I can use it as a step stool. Which I do.
Only once I have it in position, I see what was behind it, when it was upright. There’s a door. A hidden door, lower to the floor, for storage. Dragging the bookcase completely out of the closet, I walk back into the closet and see the door comes up to my rib cage.
There’s a doorknob, but I have to crouch down to see inside.
Hailey’s house is like this on their top floor. Most of their third floor is a guest suite, but there are all these little doors, leading to unfinished rooms, attic spaces under the eaves, for storage. Her father added locks to the outside of them years ago, when Hailey’s brother used one in a game of hide-and-seek in the summer, and by the time they found him, he was dehydrated and nearly unconscious from the dry, oppressive attic heat.
I open the hidden door inside Caleb’s closet now, and instead I get a shock of cold.
The space opens up to part of the attic.
The wind sounds louder inside, unprotected by the added insulation. There’s pink foamlike material clinging to the walls at the entrance, but no light, and as I run my hand along the unfinished entrance wall, I find no switch, either.
I think about where he left that flashlight—right within arm’s reach of this door. I go out to his room, grab it from the box, then return to the closet, crouching down in front of the opening, shining the light inside. I’ve got my other hand on the door, ready to swing it closed—I’m not sure why, what exactly I expect to find. Some animal living up there, maybe.
On the floor, there are only attic beams with plywood below. I think I probably shouldn’t step directly on the plywood, unsure if it’ll support me. Either way, this space was not expected to be used. It’s unfinished, and there’s no solid floor over the beams for storage.
The wind blows against the siding, and something rattles up above. I jerk the flashlight in that direction on instinct, and suddenly I’m staring at an insulated duct with a hanger swaying from a bolt hook. It slows as the wind settles, but I’m already maneuvering farther through the doorway, balancing on the beams of wood. Once I’m through, I stand and reach for the hanger, holding it still. It looks like all the rest of the hangers in Caleb’s closet. Metal, but thicker than the wire ones that come back from the dry cleaner at my place.
I don’t understand what it’s doing here. Spinning slowly around, I shine the light in the rest of the space. The walls are covered in the pink insulation, and pinpoints of daylight filter through where the slanted angles of the roof meet the flooring. It’s dusty, and musty, and smells of wood and fiber. The beams are coated in a layer of dust, or debris.
But then my light hits a smoother surface, unmarred by a layer of dust. The wooden floor beam under the hanger. The surface is bare, and shinier than the rest, as if it’s been wiped clean from there to the entrance of Caleb’s closet. It’s a streak of dust-free wood. Maybe as if something has been dragged across the floor.
And then I hear voices. They’re coming from directly underneath my feet, unfiltered by the plaster and carpeting of a bedroom. It’s Mia, speaking to her mother. Her voice rising and falling in a familiar rhythm. I freeze, realizing that if I can hear them, they can hear me.
“We can’t just leave—” Mia says.
But Eve cuts her off. “I told you, honey. He left. He’s not coming back. We can’t afford to stay here.”
I realize they’re talking about Sean. First, her father left, taking a good chunk of their income along with him. Then her brother died. Eve told Sean he had to leave in the summer, and he did—taking his car, and not much else. Caleb and Sean had been fighting more, pushing up against each other, and I thought the tension would dissipate after Sean finally left. But it didn’t. It still lingered, unplaceable. I wondered then whether Eve secretly blamed Caleb. If Eve held it against him that she was forced to take a side, driving a wedge further between their fracturing family. Knowing her the way I do now, I wonder if she even bothered to keep her blame a secret.
“It’s not fair,” Mia wails, in the way that only a child can get away with.
“Of course it’s not,” Eve says. “But this is life. And now you have to decide. This is your bag. Fill it with what you want to keep. The rest we’ll have to sell.”
I crouch lower as the words become more muffled—they must be moving across the room now. I’m trying to hear better, when something catches my eye. There’s something shiny that has fallen between the beams, stuck in the insulation.
My fingers carefully push the material aside to keep from getting splinters from the fiberglass insulation, and the hairs on my arms rise in a chill. But I pull out the item. It’s a house key. And it’s attached to the keychain I know so well—the one I bought him, that he opened on Christmas, signed and personalized. My hand shakes. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why this key is here, in this room, under a hanger.
I don’t understand how it got here. Why it wasn’t with Caleb when he disappeared.
I’m crouched down in this attic room, running through the day in my mind again—He tosses his clothes on the floor. He changes. He leaves—so I don’t hear the footsteps coming up the stairs until it’s too late.
And all I can do is stay put. I pull the attic door shut, and huddle into the corner of the space.
His bedroom door creaks open. Someone moves around the bedroom. They don’t speak. My purse is still there, at the foot of the bed. I silently curse myself. Then the steps move with purpose, into the closet, straight toward me, and the door swings open and it’s Mia, poking her head inside, her eyes watering, her mouth hanging open.
I turn the flashlight on, and her face falls. She sits back on her heels. Her face looks ashen. “It’s you,” she says.
And I wonder, for the flicker of a moment, who she expected to see instead.
She’s holding his glasses, I see. Like she intended to give them back to him.
I crawl back toward her so we’re both out of the unfinished space. “Who did you think I was, Mia?”
She shakes her head, catches her breath on a hiccup, like she’s trying not to cry. “I heard his footsteps,” she says.
“It was just me,” I say. We’re sitting in the floor of his cleared-out closet now, and she’s letting me hold her. It’s the closest she’s let me get in months, and I take it. I’m scared to make a sudden move, to move at all.
“No,” she says. “Before.”
I feel a chill rise on my arms, the back of my neck. The ghost of someone else here beside me. “I’ve been working in the closet,” I say, for her and for myself. She must’ve heard my footsteps there.
She looks at me then, like I don’t understand. “When he was here, sometimes I would hear footsteps at night. I thought it was a monster. But Caleb said it was just him. His closet is just over my room. I didn’t know about that.” She points to the open doorway, the cold coming in with the dark.
I stroke her hair, just letting her speak. Letting her remember.
“But I also heard him there, after the police came,” she whispers.
My hand stills. The air stills. I wonder if someone was going through his things. Maybe that’s why the desk is in such disarray. Where nothing is as it should be here.
“It could’ve been the police. Or your mom.”
But the key. The hanger. I’m holding my breath. That painful hope that doesn’t settle right with what I know is true.
“He was here, Jessa. A few days later. I heard him at night, after my mom went to bed.”
“Did you see him?” I ask. I realize this is a ghost story, and I’m letting her tell it. I’m feeding it myself, giving her pieces, letting her weave them into a tale, wanting to believe.
She ignores the question, as if she knows that by answering truthfully, the story will shatter, and Caleb will vanish again. “I thought he was looking for his glasses. He’ll come back for them. He has to.”
“Did you tell your mom?”
She nods, then drops her voice. “She said not to tell you, though. She said not to talk to you.”
I smooth back her hair, and she curls herself onto my lap, and I feel, for a moment, like Caleb. I wonder if she feels it, too. Like I am filling a gap that keeps growing, and we’re both here desperately pushing back against it.
“Mia,” I say, speaking gently into her ear. “When, exactly, did you hear someone up here?”