And because his story is also mine, because we’re woven together—his arm on my side of a photo, my hand on his—I have to know.
I slip the bus ticket into my back pocket and log onto his computer, a simple combination of four characters—his birthday month and year—I’d seen him enter a thousand times. Even Mia could’ve figured this out. His documents are all there, the English essays, saved homework assignments. His music folder, organized into playlists. On impulse, I click the playlist with my name, and the familiar melody fills the room: a scrapbook of songs, whether we liked them or not, but that told the story of us. Homecoming, the lyrics I got so wrong that Caleb couldn’t help but sing them every time he heard them; the song that played all summer, words belted out in the car on the way back from the beach.
And then abruptly I turn it off.
There’s something too close about it, that brings me right back.
Instead, I focus on this other Caleb. The one who received letters and hid them in books. Who had bus tickets to places I’ve never heard of. Who took Max’s money. Who left my race and was on his way to somewhere unknown when he was swept away.
I wonder if there was someone else, all along. I remember the way I’d find him sitting at the computer over this last summer, turning off the monitor screen when I walked in. I assumed it was college stuff, but the moments become recolored in my mind. I open the Internet program and see that he’s cleared his browser history. But I do the same. It’s a habit, from when I shared the computer with Julian and accidentally stumbled onto his last visited site—realizing the same could happen to me. I wonder if Caleb was messaging someone through the computer app, but I don’t know his password for that, and his phone is gone, swept away with the river, and him.
I do, however, know his email password. At least, I used to.
I’d been sitting at his desk, spinning in his chair, while he did homework on his bed. It was the middle of last school year, just before our ski trip. “Hey,” he’d said. “I need to print something out from my email. Do me a favor, log me in.” He barely glanced up from his notebook.
I typed his username, but the password wasn’t saved.
His eyes were fixed on the screen beyond when I looked back. “GreenRiver36,” he said.
“Huh?”
He gestured to the screen. “My password.” Then he looked back down, as if it wasn’t a big deal.
Except it was. To me, I imagined it was like giving someone the key to your apartment. Permission to be there when they were not. To check in, if you so desired. It was a combination of his lacrosse number, our school color, and our school name.
—
He knew I knew it, so part of me wonders if he changed it after the breakup. Or maybe before. Maybe when he started getting secretive, he changed it right then.
Still, I try.
I type in his email account username, and then his password, and I’m not surprised when I get the message telling me that the Password is incorrect.
But what makes me pause, what makes me freeze, my hands hovering over the keyboard, the words blurring, is the line below:
Password last changed 49 days ago. If this is incorrect, please click here to report.
I pull up the calendar on my phone. Look at the dates. Forty-nine days. I do the math. Check again. Look over my shoulder at the lacrosse stick wedged against the door.
His password was last changed two days after he died.
“Jessa?”
His mother’s voice funnels up the steps, the second before her footsteps. I exit out of the program so she won’t think I was snooping, shut down the computer, and turn the monitor to black before racing to the door. I slide the lacrosse stick from its position, opening the door just as her hand turns the knob.
“Hi,” I say.
She tips her head to the side gently, probably noticing I’m out of breath and flushed. “I wasn’t sure if you were still up here. It’s been so quiet.”
I nod, gesturing to the boxes. “I did the drawers. The sports stuff.”
My mind is swirling, the words on the tip of my tongue: Someone changed his email password. Someone else has been through his things. Through his email. Through here.
My first thought, the first image I see, is of Caleb, hovering over a computer screen somewhere, changing his password. But I shake the thought, the painful hope, before thinking of all the other possibilities: Eve, Mia, Max; a nameless girl whom he knew just as well, who sent him letters, who he met up with—
Eve frowns. “Will you be coming directly from school tomorrow?”
It’s then I notice that the sky has gone dark, the shadows from the fan slanting across the walls.
“I think so,” I say. I grab my purse and brush by her, my body trembling.
She grabs my bag as I pass, our bodies filling up the narrow stairwell. “Leave everything.”
I flinch. “I did.”
Her fingers don’t let up, but they don’t tug harder, either. “Can I see?” she asks.
I nod, offering my purse over to her. I have this fear that she will bar me from this room, from their lives, once more, and I’ll never know what happened. I have this instinct that she doesn’t trust me up here all alone, and I’m scared she will change her mind—that just as I’m peeling away the top layer, everything that is Caleb will be gone for good.
She unzips the bag, runs her fingers along my wallet, my phone, jangling the pack of gum and ChapStick, the spare coins, the extra tampon. The pictures are in my room, safely transported the day before. The bus ticket is wedged into the back pocket of my jeans. If she sees the strip of condoms I’ve stuffed into the bottom of my purse, she doesn’t say.
“Okay?” I ask, but I’m already pulling my purse away. I want her hands out of my things—my things—but I don’t want her to keep me from coming back. It’s a tightrope, and I don’t know how to manage her. It must be the same for her: that she both wants me here, doing this for her, and doesn’t want me here, my hands in her son’s things, reminding her of the start of the chain of events—Caleb at my meet, the beginning of the end. All I know is there is not space for both of us in this room.
Eve says nothing, but she doesn’t object as I make my way down the staircase, my feet moving Caleb-speed, my body trembling, the air thrumming. I move quickly, terrified that she’ll notice the outline of the ticket in my pocket, that she’ll stop me, and call me back.
I burst through the front door and race to my car, and it’s not until I have the car running that I put my hands on my head and take a deep breath. I breathe slowly with my eyes closed before placing my hands on the wheel. The front porch light flicks on, and as I pull away, I see the curtains move.
—