“You doing okay?” he whisper-yells.
Okay? Whatever it is I’m doing, it’s not okay on any level. My hand is on the ball cap, scared to move it from its spot on the door, as if I am the great disturbance of this room. The air changes. The room changes. The meaning behind Max’s words changes.
“Tell her I need some tape,” I call. This is the only thing I can think of to say. I can picture Caleb on his bed, trying not to smile. The way he thought it was cute when I said the wrong thing.
I prop open the first box, scoop up the clothes, the ball cap, all of these things that Caleb once loved, and I pile them into the bottom of the box with a knot in my throat. I look around the room, expecting that something will have changed, but everything remains the same.
We’re here. Caleb’s gone.
I hear Max talking low downstairs again, Caleb’s mother’s voice in response, and he’s the one who brings the tape. I hear his slow steps on the wooden stairs, the creak that Caleb used to leap over on the way down. Max shuffles his sneakers against the rug at the entrance, and I can almost hear the zing that would always come after, when Caleb touched the light switch—how he always seemed to accidentally charge himself on the rug, shocking himself on the way in.
But Max doesn’t touch the light switch. He doesn’t move any closer. “I told her I’d do it,” he says. He doesn’t look at me when he says it. Max and Caleb aren’t related, but they told me they once had the whole sixth grade convinced they were. They don’t even look that much alike—Max is tall and thin, with pitch-dark hair, where Caleb was more broad-shouldered, his light brown hair even lighter in the summer. But there’s a similar cadence to the way they speak, a lilt, like a script they both tend to follow. A habit of people who’ve known each other for years, who’ve spent so much time together.
I ignore him, emptying an entire drawer into a new box in one fell swoop. A summer wardrobe. An entire season. Months and months of a life. Just gone.
He leans against the wall behind me. I see his sneakers, notice him rock back on his heels, like he isn’t sure whether to stay or go. “We missed you at the meet,” he says.
That’s when I notice his hair is still wet from a shower, his school track pants and jacket still on. He must have come straight from the meet. Today was the last race of the season. I’ve missed this one, and every one, since September.
And for a moment, I can hear the cheers of an early Saturday-morning race, smell the dew on the grass, feel the adrenaline surging to my toes. I reach for the necklace at my collar on instinct, then remember it’s no longer there. I finally have it back in my possession, but I know I’ll never wear it again.
Like everything else in this room, the necklace belongs to another time. Even the weather has turned. Caleb’s summer wardrobe will never be needed again.
“Jessa—” Max says, reaching for the box. “Here, let me help.”
“She wants me to do it,” I snap, folding over the top of the box, holding out my hand for the tape. I position the box between my legs and peel the tape across it, the noise cutting through the room. I slice it off, stick another strip across in the opposite direction, a crooked X. I pick up the box and thrust it at Max. “Here. So tell her. Tell her I’m doing it.”
I push him with the box, and he backs away, and he keeps going, as if he cannot stop the momentum. I hold tight to the feeling, and I keep moving.
—
I’m doing the clothes. I’ve done the hard part, the ones on the floor, the ones I can picture him still in. These will all be donated, I assume, belonging to someone else soon enough. I do this every year, cleaning out my closet, making room for the next size, or the next style, or finding the ones that had accidentally been shrunken in the dryer by my dad. The emptiness of the closet only temporary, a gap that would ultimately be filled. A sign of change—with the seasons and me.
The clothes in the drawers are the easy part, indistinguishable in their current form, folded into tight squares. They smell like laundry detergent and dryer sheets, the pine scent from the inside of the dresser. I leave them folded and try not to look too closely. The drawers are mostly jeans, khaki shorts, gym shorts. The T-shirts with band names and brand names. Socks and undershirts and boxers. I don’t differentiate. I don’t care. She said pack, and I’m packing. It all goes into the same place, before it can register. I’m taping boxes, I’m stacking them on the floor, on to the next, and the next, and the next.
At some point I hear the back door open and close, and I know that Max has left. I know because I go to the window and watch as he walks across the backyard, his head tucked down—how he pushes the latch at the back of the fence and looks up once before slipping to the other side, where he lives. I duck myself behind the window curtain, but it’s too late.
And then I see her reflection in the window, filling up the doorway. I spin around, my back pressed to the wall beside Caleb’s bed. Her eyes are red-rimmed and she’s staring at the boxes, and then she’s staring at me, standing beside the window. I think she’s going to tell me it’s okay, that I should go home, because she always had a soft spot for me—inviting me to stay for dinner, asking about my plans—but instead I see she has a black Sharpie in her hand. “You need to label them,” she says, her voice cool and flat.
And what can I do except take the marker from her hand and nod?
His clock on the wall above me keeps ticking. A cruel, even tempo. On and on, a tally of moments in which Caleb remains further and further behind.
I want to tell her that I haven’t had lunch yet; that my brother is home from college this weekend; that I’m sorry.
“I’m almost done with the clothes,” I say, because she’s still standing there, and I don’t really know what to say to her, this woman I believe secretly blames me for the death of her son.
It’s not until I turn to the closet that I hear her footsteps retreating on the stairs.
The hamper in the corner is empty, and I fold the wooden stand, flattening the fabric to a square on the floor. But underneath, right side up, is a slab of wood with words carved in and a rope attached by nails to the edges. I run my fingers over the letters—this must’ve once hung from his doorknob when he was younger.
The Bunker, it says, and even here, even now, I can’t stop the smile from spreading.
—
Last year, Labor Day weekend, my first time seeing his house. The first official day of us. I had just turned sixteen, the day before.