I heard Caleb and Max behind the closed door. “Sorry, man.”
“Whatever,” I heard Caleb say. “I don’t get why she’s making this into a whole thing.”
It was true, we’d been going out for the whole school year, more than seven months now. He was my boyfriend. We were clothed (mostly). Mia was one thing, but Max? I groaned out loud, covering my face with my hands.
Caleb met me on the porch steps. “I’ll come over when my mom gets home, okay? Anything going on at your place today?”
I shrugged. “I think Julian’s planning to watch game tapes or something. And my parents are still in vacation mode. You can come over whenever.”
He scrunched up his nose. “We can go to a movie. There’s one I wanted to see anyway.”
“What’s wrong with my place?”
“Nothing, Jessa.”
But it wasn’t nothing. I realized then how often we came here, instead of going to my house.
He looked over his shoulder, at the laughter coming from inside, from Mia. “Every time I show up, your family seems surprised to see me.”
I laughed. “It’s denial, Caleb. I’m the youngest. And Julian keeps that part of his life totally out of my parents’ eyes. Or he tries to, at least.”
He grunted. “And the questions,” he continued. “I feel like your dad is probably running some background check on me.”
“Oh my God, don’t be such a baby. He is not. Questions are, like, his way of being polite.”
“Guaranteed he knows my blood type.”
I laughed and smacked him in the arm. But when he showed up later that afternoon, he didn’t come inside. He already had tickets for that movie.
“Just, hold on,” I’d said, taking out my phone. “I told Hailey I’d be around.”
“You can let her know on the way,” he said, already walking toward his car. “We’re going to be late.”
And I remember feeling, for the first time, that there were two Calebs: the person he was with me alone, and the person he was outside of his room. Was that why I spent so much time over there, instead of at my place? Because I liked him better that way? The boy on the beach, in the bunker, when the rest of the world felt far away. I wondered if I secretly wished that was all of him. And whether he felt the same about me.
The rest of the lacrosse bag is empty, and I leave it, together with all his gear, in a corner. I know it was expensive. It can probably be resold, along with his guitar. I assume Eve will take it away, put it wherever she’s keeping the boxes.
I can almost feel Caleb slipping away—the person I thought I knew. The way I felt him slipping back then. I close my eyes, trying to hold tight to him. To remember the feel of his fingers lacing through mine, the sound of his laughter, the words he’d whisper just to me.
But I open my eyes, and I’m in an empty room, alone, with nothing but the ticking of the clock for company. I can’t hear his voice, just the steady tick, tick, tick.
And then: there he is. He’s standing on his bed, leaning toward the clock, reaching for the minute hand.
—
“Here?” he asked, dragging the minute hand around. The curtains were open beside him, and snow was starting to fall outside the window. Icicles clung to the roof overhang; it was early February.
“No, it’s before noon. You need to move the hour hand,” I said.
He leaned back, looking it over. “It looks like it’s right to me.”
“Only if you’re operating in Daylight Saving Time.”
“Isn’t it only like a month until the time changes back? At this point I might as well leave it.”
“It drives me crazy,” I said. I couldn’t stand that it was always wrong—like his room was a place that operated outside the rules of time and space.
“Jessa,” he said, tapping his hand against the clock, “this is a commemorative Giants’ Super Bowl clock. It’s meant to drive Sean crazy. Not you.”
Sean was an Eagles fan, and so Caleb took extra pleasure in these items, as if they could keep Sean from his room, just by threat of seeing them.
—
Now, looking at the clock, it seems like it tells the perfect time. The second hand ticks steadily along; nothing else moves.
I finally can’t take it any longer, the steady ticking, each beat farther and farther from a world where Caleb existed. I pull his desk chair to the wall, stand on top, and then I tear the blue and red clock from the pin in the wall—and still, it ticks in my hand. I turn it over to fumble for the battery pack, to make it stop, because it seems the only fair thing to do—
But there, tucked into the wire casing, is a rectangular ticket, like all the stubs he kept in his desk.
I slip it out, and it’s a bus ticket, from the spring—never used. Never taken. It leaves from here and goes to some town I’ve never heard of in Pennsylvania. I look at the dates—to be used within a year of purchase. I can’t figure out how this was Caleb’s. If he had any intention of using this, and why.
I open the map program on my phone, pull up a search page. I plug the name of the town in, and the map zooms in to the northern edge of the state. There’s nothing there that seems familiar. I zoom back out to see the path from Caleb’s town to there. It crosses the river, the border of the state. Something registers from the edge of my memory—the familiarity of the region.
I think of the name on the picture, of us on the hike. Delaware Water Gap. I wonder if this was some halfway meeting point.
I try to remember the dates on the pictures. I’m trying to remember why we went there. Why there. I wish I had the pictures, but they’re home. And now I’m wondering if we went there for some other reason, unbeknownst to me.
Maybe he went back; maybe it was a central meeting point that he was scoping out. I picture a girl, a hug, a smile. It seems obvious that’s who the letter was from, and this is the purpose of the bus ticket. Maybe he was supposed to go meet her there, where she lives. Maybe it’s Ashlyn Patterson, and they started up again after the ski trip. Though he has a car. He had a car. Surely he could’ve driven himself there just as easily?
Eve’s footsteps echo from the floor below, and I quietly ease the blue door shut. I unzip the lacrosse bag in the corner and wedge the stick over the handle, behind the dresser, trying not to make any noise as I do, like Caleb once did.
This other life of his gnaws at me, until I have to know. Until the voice that says What’s the point? He’s gone is silenced. Because the point is that it’s not only Caleb’s story, but mine.