What’s the point? He’s gone.
I decide these college letters will go in the box of his personal things. So his mother can see the Caleb who might’ve lived. All the potential paths he could’ve taken. All the men he could’ve become.
Underneath the college letters are a collection of notebooks with spiral bindings that I recognize from school. They say MATH and ENGLISH and SCIENCE on the fronts, in black marker. He never got rid of them, even after the semester was over, saying they might be useful one day, which made me laugh. But he was serious.
All this planning, Caleb. All these things you kept.
And then there’s the letter opener, buried below. The light from the uncovered window hits the sharp point, and I grab it in my hand, the metal colder than I expected.
The first time I saw this, one Saturday in early July, it was on his bedside table. I’d thought it was a knife. He thought that was hilarious.
I’d been sitting on the edge of his bed, waiting for him to finish his shower. I’d used the hose in his backyard to wash away the sand and the salt. We’d just come in from the beach, the one place where everything felt normal, and I’d tell myself it was all in my head; the silence and the distractions, the distance I felt growing between us.
He’d stood in the doorway, rubbing a towel over his drying hair, grinning. “Badass with a letter opener,” he said.
“A what?” I looked again. It looked like a miniature sword, fashioned into a point.
“An opener. For letters.” He walked across the room, took it from my hand, demonstrated on a folded-over piece of paper on his desk. A sharp tear of paper, the sound like nails on a chalkboard.
“I’m sorry, we need a tool for that?”
He smiled, flipped it around, showing me the base. “It was my grandfather’s. Then my father’s. Now it’s mine.”
The initials DE were engraved into the silver handle. The letter opener became something else in his hand. Pieces of his family, passed down.
Now I wonder who this would go to next. Mia has a different father. Maybe his mother knew of some other descendants of his grandfather. Maybe there were cousins. He never mentioned them, if he had them.
There was something serious about the moment I’d held it in my hand that first day, as if I were holding generations and history and blood and weight.
But I’d made light of it instead, desperate for these moments when we were laughing, and everything felt fresh and surface-new. I took it back from him and held it in my hand like a miniature sword, keeping light on my toes, backpedaling as if defending myself. He sidestepped behind me, wrapped me up in his arms so I lost my concentration, kissed me on the neck and disarmed me in the same breath. Smiled with the letter opener in his hand as he spun me around.
“Cheater,” I said.
“Practice,” he said, smiling wide. Then he turned and flung the letter opener at the wall, like we’d seen in a hundred different action movies. But it ricocheted off the wall at the base instead, landing on the carpeted floor with a faint thud.
I’d burst out laughing, from the impulsiveness, from the ridiculousness. Anything to fill the silence, where the gap between us grew.
—
The spot on the wall where the letter opener hit has a faint chip in the paint, and I find my eyes drifting there now. I can see it, in the light. But there are several scratches. I stand, as if compelled by the wall across the way, and I walk around the bed, my fingers raised in front of me, until they touch the wall, the chips and dents in the gray paint. I run my fingers through the grooves, unable to decipher the dent he had made that day from all the others.
Because it seems like he must’ve sat on his bed, practicing that throw, over and over, afterward. Seeing if he could get the point to stick in the plaster. Driven by the idea of it. Practice, he’d said.
I bring the letter opener closer to my face, turning the blade over. There’s a streak of gray along one of the edges, like it had been embedded in the wall. And suddenly it’s not my hand, but his, clenched in a fist around the base. For a second, I catch the faintest scent of the river, and my grip loosens, the blade drops, and Caleb is gone again.
Bending down to pick up the letter opener, I see a shadow in the shape of feet under the gray bed skirt that skims the floor. Almost as if someone is standing at the other side of the bed, watching me. But lifting the bed skirt, everything slips into focus: they’re just shoes. I pull out the boots, which turn from shadowed shapes to a muddy brown in the sunlight. The rubber soles still have pebbles lodged in the grooves. The laces are undone and stiff from dirt and dried water. I put them aside, thinking trash—because really, they’re kind of gross—but they’re also pretty good hiking boots, or so he informed me.
When we went hiking in the beginning of June, I wore sneakers. My running shoes. They’d gotten me through all sorts of terrain, up and down hills during cross-country practice, through wind and rain and the occasional snow day.
Caleb picked me up that Saturday morning before dawn, and I was the only one awake in my house. It felt like the world was ours. He raised an eyebrow at my gray and purple bag. My backpack, really. And my choice of footwear. My sneakers. It felt like he was criticizing me with his look, when all he’d said the day before was, Will you come on a hike with me tomorrow?
“Sorry, I didn’t have time to go shopping for camo-style hiking gear,” I said. “But it gets the job done.”
We left at six a.m. and drove for just about two hours, past signs for the Delaware Water Gap.
I slept on and off most of the way there. The crunch of loose gravel under the tires was what woke me, as we pulled off the main road. My head was leaning against the window. I caught Caleb staring out the front window, looking up.
“We’re here?” I asked.
We pulled off the road at a sign with an arrow, a hiking trail name, an icon for picnic tables. Caleb eased slowly into a small circular lot made of dirt, where another pair of hikers were loading up supplies from their trunk.
He shifted into park. Twisted in his seat for his hiking boots, changed out of his sneakers.
This was my second indication that hiking was not going to be what I thought it was. My first indication being the six a.m. start time.
It didn’t take me long to realize that the sneakers were a mistake. The rocks were slippery with morning dew, nearby moisture from the stream trickling down beside us. I stayed on the dirt path, feeling blisters forming at my heels, even though I’d run in these shoes up and down hills and dirt tracks before. There was something to the motion that was different, and at one point I threw my backpack to the ground and let out a huff.
“Come on,” Caleb said, unamused.
“Maybe I should leave the bag and just try running.”