Terrance agrees to see me. Not that I gave him much choice. I asked him what time would be good for me to stop by, and I must’ve caught him off guard with the question, because he says he’ll be around all evening.
Max drives again, and I direct him. We don’t speak. There’s something too fragile hanging in the balance.
By the time we arrive on campus, it’s dark. My mom calls, asking where I am. My car is home, and I am not. Also, I’m supposed to be sick.
“I was feeling better. Hailey picked me up. We’re at the library,” I tell her, and she pauses, like she can feel the lie.
“Jessa, please come home.”
I wonder if Julian called her to say he was worried. Always thinking it’s the right thing to do, that he knows what’s best for me.
“I will,” I say. “Soon. Mom. I’m just in the middle of something.” I hang up, and I turn the phone to silent.
Terrance’s dorm room is on the third floor of an old building with no elevators. The walls are made of something that looks like cinder blocks, painted over. When he opens the door, he looks too big for the room, which has two twin-sized beds crammed beside two desks, and another above-average-sized guy behind him. The other guy is eating Chinese food from a carton at his desk, and the scent is overwhelming.
I try to picture Caleb here, slide him into context, but I can’t find a place for him.
Max and Terrance do this weird guy-handshake-greeting thing, which seems to be universal, and yet. Terrance gives Max a look that seems to say, What are you doing here?
And Max’s look says, I don’t know what I’m doing here.
And Terrance gives him this warning look like, Did you think this through?
Max, beside me, has not thought this through. Neither of us has. But we’re on the same page, willing to live in the moment, seeing where it takes us.
Terrance leads us to the student lounge, where people are grouped in couches or chairs, and there’s a half-eaten pizza on one of the tables.
I fish for the stack of photos in my bag. I have two shots to show him, different versions of the same man. The photo from when Caleb was a kid, standing beside his father, washing the car. The thinner man with thicker hair, smiling. And then the mugshot, printed off my computer. Hairline receding, slicked back. A little heavier. His face morose, his eyes flat. The corners turned down, just like Caleb’s. A close-up where you can see the lines etching around his mouth and eyes. Neither are recent, but I’m hoping Terrance sees something inside them. “Is this the man who stopped by when Caleb was here?”
But Terrance shakes his head automatically. “Sorry you came all this way, Jessa, but the guy who showed up here was much younger. Like my age.”
“Oh,” I say. I had been picturing someone Sean’s age, a man who had some sort of authority over Caleb.
Terrance’s fingertips push the pictures around, sifting through the arc of Caleb—little boy, teenager, his life out of sequence.
“Okay, we should go,” Max says, but Terrance is still staring at the photos. His fingers haven’t moved from the shot of the group of us at the ball game. Sitting in the bleachers, arms around each other, Hailey laughing, Craig Keegan talking to the guy Stan beside him, the field in the background.
Terrance brings the picture closer to his face, and I’m holding my breath. He puts it back down and taps the edge. “Him,” he says.
I stare at Terrance, confused.
And then he says it again. “Yeah, this is the dude.”
“Stan?” Stan, the guy who got us the tickets for the ball game when we all skipped school. Max had gotten those tickets from him. He’d met us at Penn Station. Craig Keegan had spent half the game asking Stan about the other types of things he could get him.
“How do you know him?” I ask Max. “How does Caleb know him?”
He shakes his head. “From baseball. Little League. When we were kids. He’s a year ahead of your brother. Goes to college in the city. I went to him for last-minute tickets, had to meet up with him to get them. We’re not really friends.”
“But you have his number. Was he friends with Caleb?”
“No. They met that day. Craig Keegan was pressing him about getting a fake ID. They all got his number.” I’d missed that part of the conversation, but it made sense now why he blew off Hailey for that conversation. As if they all had plans each weekend to go to bars and pass as twenty-one. The idea was ridiculous.
“Fake IDs,” I repeat, and Max’s eyes widen. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Everything in the lead-up to Caleb going over the bridge suddenly shifts, becomes a little less certain.
“Call him,” I say, but Max already has his phone out.
In the silence, Terrance leans forward. “What’s going on?” he asks.
“We don’t know,” I say. “You said this guy left something for him?”
“Yeah, a package. Like a thick envelope. But I wouldn’t take it. Guess they made plans to meet up somewhere else.”
“Max,” I say as he’s leaving a message, “when did he take that money from you again?”
Because suddenly all the fragments are realigning, shifting into place, and they reveal a plan: Caleb taking money, calling Stan, using it for a fake ID, which was delivered to Terrance’s dorm room while he was driving up to see Ashlyn Patterson, asking to see the paperwork for his trust.
And earlier: a man sending Caleb a bus ticket, to visit him in jail, unused. A man leaving him a letter after his release, asking to see him. A hike, where we sat on opposite sides of the river. The briefest contact. The preliminary event.
The phone rings, cutting through the silence.
“Stan, this is Max,” he says. “I need to talk to you about Caleb. About something you gave him.”
I can hear Stan on the other side, something about, yeah, being down at the college for some football game, delivering something for Caleb. But not willing to say anything about any fake ID, one way or the other. “Not on the phone,” he mumbles.
“Caleb’s dead,” Max says, and the silence that follows is excruciating. “We’re trying to figure out what happened to him.”
Then Stan starts talking, and Max turns up the volume on his phone as I lean my ear closer, to hear. “The police better not end up coming to me with this, Max. If that ID has anything to do with it, I could be charged with something.”
I want to punch Stan through the phone. “Tell him we’ll find the ID,” I say.
“We’ll get it,” Max says.
“Well, listen, it won’t be one from New Jersey or anything. You always want to get an out-of-state one, so it’s not looked at as closely.”
“What state?” I say, my voice scratching. “What’s the name on the ID? What’s the state?”
Max goes to repeat the question, but Stan must’ve heard. “The name is whatever we can get, I don’t remember. The state I do remember, because he requested it. Most people don’t care. I mean, it’s just to purchase liquor.” I’m holding my breath. The room is silent as we wait. “He asked for Pennsylvania.”
We sit in the parking lot, with the car running, staring straight ahead, into the night sky. We don’t move. We don’t drive.
I think he’s alive.
I think he lied.
I think he was planning this.
I don’t know why.
Max smacks his hand once against the steering wheel, lets a string of expletives fly. “Who does that?” he says. And then louder. “Who does that to people?” Except by people he means him. I don’t know what the last few months have been like for Max, but I imagine a cloud of grief and guilt, like my own. I reach out and take his hand, slide my cold fingers between his own. We sit there, with his head hanging low, until the phone buzzes in my pocket with another text from my mother.
“I need to get home,” I say.
Max stares out the window, presumably trying to fit his own memories together in a way that makes sense.
My mind keeps circling, doing the same. Sean hit him. I don’t know what happened after that. I don’t know for sure that Sean is dead, and not gone.
But his mother kept the pocket watch. His mother has kept all of Caleb’s things. And she’s been watching me. Telling Mia not to talk to me. But keeping me close all the same.
My mother isn’t having it, the excuses.
She catches me coming in. “That’s not Hailey,” she says.
“No, it’s Max,” I say.
She tilts her head.
“As in, played-baseball-with-Julian Max.”
“As in, Caleb’s best friend?”
“Yes, they’re one and the same, Mom. Which you know.”
She rubs her temple, closes her eyes. “It’s not the person, Jessa. It’s the lies. We’ve given you time, and space, and I can only imagine what it’s like….” She trails off. Then regroups, says what she’s been meaning to say. “But I won’t stand for the lying. I won’t stand for the sneaking around.”
“Mom, please,” I say, because I can’t even focus. My whole body is thrumming.
“I’ve let you do whatever you’ve needed—a week home from school; quitting the team; ignoring us all—” She shakes her head before continuing. “But I can’t say nothing when you stay home from school and then disappear. I’m worried. And I’m angry. I know I’m not supposed to say that, with everything you’re going through. But there it is. You were gone, and Caleb’s mother came by today and—”
I stand straight. Shocked silent. “Caleb’s mom was here? Eve was here?”
“Yes, Jessa. She was looking for you.”
“The room is finished,” I say. “What did she want?”
“Well, I wasn’t about to twenty-question the poor woman. I told her you were at the library with Hailey, but that’s obviously not where you were, now, was it?” She eyes me, like she isn’t sure what to do with me. I can’t remember Julian ever being grounded. But I can’t remember Julian ever being caught in a lie, either. Maybe he was just better at it than I am. “She asked if she could wait for you, but I had to pick up dinner.”
Eve, asking to come into this house. What does she want with me? She has my number. She could’ve just called….
“Mom,” I say, dropping my voice, “something happened. Something’s wrong, about what they say happened to Caleb.”
She shuts her eyes, takes a deep breath. “Don’t do this, sweetheart.”
“Something’s wrong in that house. Something’s wrong with that woman.” I’m shaking my head, the confession making it all become real, out in the air. But she puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Jessa, please.” She tries to pull me toward her, in an embrace, as if to calm the illogical from me.
I feel like I’m so close, that I just need a little more time. And a little more space, from this, and from Eve. I don’t feel safe in my own house, not after Eve has been here. I can’t be here, not with that pocket watch, with his mother dropping by. I can’t go to the police, not without dragging Caleb back to whatever he was running from.
But a plan forms, even as the anger rises.
“I want to go visit Julian,” I say.
Her breath releases. Yes, this is something she can manage, that she can count on.
“Of course,” she says. “It would be good to get away. I’ll call him now, to make sure he’s free this weekend.”
“I do know how to call my brother,” I say.
“Right, I just, I want to talk to him anyway.” She’s backing away already, and I set my jaw. My teeth press together until the pain radiates to my jawbone. Of course she wants to talk to him first. Discuss the point that I am unwell, make sure he looks after me. Responsible, predictable Julian. His sister stuck in a stage of grief: denial.