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.
I am captured by this version of Caleb, the one who cannot exist. Wondering where he would’ve gone to school, what he would’ve done. What schools were scouting for him, sending him letters, asking him to come visit?
By the start of Julian’s senior year, things were already firmly in motion. The letters arrived during junior year, and I remember my parents spreading them out on the kitchen table, Julian sitting between them, making a plan.
I go for the bottom drawer first. It’s deeper, and used less. Inside are the things he doesn’t reach for often: computer wires, an old speaker, a tangle of cords, a spare mouse. I dump them all into a box, label them Electronics.
The letter isn’t here. None of them are.
I try the middle drawer, and here’s where the college letters are. He played lacrosse, but he wasn’t going to be recruited for it. That’s what he told me, anyway, explaining why he was so diligent about his grades.
It was something I understood all too well, being related to Julian, who had been naturally gifted at something so definitive from a young age. Meanwhile, I was an above-average runner, but I had to really work for it. Nobody was going to come looking for me.
Still, Caleb had offers to come visit schools. To stay with other students, see how things work. He was a good student. A decent athlete. His test scores were high. He would’ve gotten into a good school.
The college pamphlets are from state schools. There are letters, folded up in envelopes with his name and address typed on the front, all touting their schools’ benefits and inviting him to consider applying. There are thick packets with applications inside, still untouched.
I don’t see the hand-printed envelope that gave me the paper cut. He probably threw it out. I don’t see anything in these papers that would make him want to hide it from me. These are all for in-state schools. What was there for me to be so worried about?
But in some ways, it was the beginning of the end.
He made it a thing, by hiding it. Manifested the worry out of thin air. So at any mention of college, my stomach would knot, and my shoulders would tighten, and I’d picture a different Caleb, in a different place, with a different girl, while I stayed here, finishing out my last year of high school.
He went on his first school visit in early September of this year, not even thirty miles away. I won’t be far, he’d said, not looking at me as he packed.
His duffel bag was in the middle of his bed. I was standing near the entrance, watching his back. “Jessa,” he said, “you’re making me nervous, just standing there.”
What I wanted to tell him was that he was making me nervous. There was something off in his energy, in the way he was moving, like he wasn’t focused on any one thing.
I couldn’t watch anymore. Couldn’t put words to the feeling growing between us. “I have to go,” I said, “I’m meeting Hailey to study.”
“See you in a few days,” he called after me, when I was already halfway down the steps.
But his phone, the entire trip, went straight to voicemail. He said he forgot his charger. He said he was just really busy. But not too busy to return home with a school T-shirt and a hangover.
Just leave it, Jessa. I hear him again.