And I wonder, for the flicker of a moment, who she expected to see instead.
She’s holding his glasses, I see. Like she intended to give them back to him.
I crawl back toward her so we’re both out of the unfinished space. “Who did you think I was, Mia?”
She shakes her head, catches her breath on a hiccup, like she’s trying not to cry. “I heard his footsteps,” she says.
“It was just me,” I say. We’re sitting in the floor of his cleared-out closet now, and she’s letting me hold her. It’s the closest she’s let me get in months, and I take it. I’m scared to make a sudden move, to move at all.
“No,” she says. “Before.”
I feel a chill rise on my arms, the back of my neck. The ghost of someone else here beside me. “I’ve been working in the closet,” I say, for her and for myself. She must’ve heard my footsteps there.
She looks at me then, like I don’t understand. “When he was here, sometimes I would hear footsteps at night. I thought it was a monster. But Caleb said it was just him. His closet is just over my room. I didn’t know about that.” She points to the open doorway, the cold coming in with the dark.
I stroke her hair, just letting her speak. Letting her remember.
“But I also heard him there, after the police came,” she whispers.
My hand stills. The air stills. I wonder if someone was going through his things. Maybe that’s why the desk is in such disarray. Where nothing is as it should be here.
“It could’ve been the police. Or your mom.”
But the key. The hanger. I’m holding my breath. That painful hope that doesn’t settle right with what I know is true.
“He was here, Jessa. A few days later. I heard him at night, after my mom went to bed.”
“Did you see him?” I ask. I realize this is a ghost story, and I’m letting her tell it. I’m feeding it myself, giving her pieces, letting her weave them into a tale, wanting to believe.
She ignores the question, as if she knows that by answering truthfully, the story will shatter, and Caleb will vanish again. “I thought he was looking for his glasses. He’ll come back for them. He has to.”
“Did you tell your mom?”
She nods, then drops her voice. “She said not to tell you, though. She said not to talk to you.”
I smooth back her hair, and she curls herself onto my lap, and I feel, for a moment, like Caleb. I wonder if she feels it, too. Like I am filling a gap that keeps growing, and we’re both here desperately pushing back against it.
“Mia,” I say, speaking gently into her ear. “When, exactly, did you hear someone up here?”
She thinks it was two days after the night the police came, but she’s not sure. That’s what Mia kept saying. But she believed it enough to come straight up here, to the closet, expecting to find someone else.
There was a hanger. A bare piece of wood. His house key.
Mia’s words become a life raft. They become something tangible, with weight. Even if they are a lie, they are something to cling to.
She heard footsteps in the attic two nights after Caleb was swept out to sea. When the police were still searching the river. When the shock waves were still rippling through school, and the rumors were laced with my name. When the looks were not apathetic, but cutting.
But. His key is there. His key.
Maybe she didn’t hear anything. Maybe she wanted to. Or maybe she did, and it was someone else. But Caleb had been in there at some point, because his house key had fallen.
I imagine him taking something from the hanger. Dragging something across the floor. Dropping his key, and not realizing it.
There are too many unknowns: the money he supposedly took from Max, that we cannot find; the unused bus ticket; the story Terrance Bilson told me about his college visit, and the man who showed up looking for him. As if Caleb had this whole other life, hidden underneath.
And I’m back where I started, the very first day I began, as if I’ve been running in place all along: Where were you going, Caleb? Why?
—
By the time I leave—grabbing my purse from the foot of the bed, escorting Mia to her room, descending the rest of the steps on my own—my feelings shift until I’m angry. Angry at Caleb, and angry at myself.
This is all so Caleb, honestly. Every bit of it. Everything that keeps me tethered to that room, even now.
It was the secrets that hooked me from the very start, the things that he doled out to me, in pieces. Letting me believe I was always getting closer, seeing more of him. But now I’m realizing how much of it was only granted to me because his hand had been forced. Three months before he said a word about his father, and only then because I didn’t understand his family’s money situation; a chance encounter with an ex-girlfriend before I even knew she existed.
I’d believed myself worthy not only of his affection, but of his trust. Except I’d misread the signs. Everything had been situational, a reaction, an answer to a question I had to first ask.
There was always something just under the surface, that I was trying to reach. He kept things just hidden enough to keep me hooked on the intrigue. Doling out the secrets—I don’t like my best friend’s girlfriend—to mask the ones he kept.
The way his eyes turned slightly downward at the edges, pulling me closer, so I could decipher him. The physical differences from his mother, a window to the father he must’ve once known, but whose picture I’d never seen.
The history of the marks on his body: lower stomach, appendectomy; outside of the knee, skiing accident; between the thumb and forefinger, a kitchen knife.
But he’d never let me all the way in. Kept that box of photos for him and him alone, now hidden underneath his bed.
Meanwhile, I gave him everything. What it was like living with Julian (like a shadow), exactly what I had done, and not done, with my last boyfriend (it wasn’t much), a trail of names, an open book. What I wanted to be (a pediatrician), where I wanted to be (somewhere warm all year round), what I wanted to do (Doctors Without Borders, see the world).
He answered by telling me what he wanted to be (happy), where he wanted to be (here, with me), what he wanted to do (not answering, instead giving me a smile that cracked my heart wide open).
I thought because he told me where he was born, brought me to see that old house, told me about his father and the trust fund, that he was letting me further in. That he was giving me everything.
But all I’m left with are these pieces of our lives, sharp-edged fragments that don’t fit the picture of the Caleb I thought I knew.
—
I’m shaking by the time I make it home, everything on autopilot. Running through the last day again in my mind: Caleb showing up at my race; seeing him while I stood at the starting line, and handing him my necklace. Please hold this for me. Please be careful.
What had he come back for? Where was he heading?
I see glimpses: The rain. Caleb launching himself down the steps. The bridge. The phone call. The police. Driving around with Max. The moment we heard.