“I’m right here,” I say, after I manage a breath. The cold was shocking, and it stole my breath, seized my lungs. I tread water in the middle of the river, slowly making my way closer to shore. But Max swims arm over arm, his face focused in concentration.
He’s angry when he reaches me, when his arms snake around me, so he’s sure he has me.
Max is struggling to swim, weighed down by his jeans and his thick sweatshirt. “You were supposed to take off your sweatshirt first. You’re going to be freezing,” I say. And suddenly I’m the one helping hold him up instead.
He’s coughing. I can’t tell whether he’s laughing when we make it to shore. I pull myself out, and Max stands beside me. My body is covered in goosebumps. I’m shaking anyway.
He steps away, looks me over quickly. “He would hate me right now.”
“He would be too cold to hate you,” I say, wrapping my arms around myself, fighting for some extra heat.
“Fine, then your brother would hate me.” His teeth chatter as he speaks, the whole effect vaguely unsettling, like the words don’t quite count right now. “Remember the party your parents had for the baseball team at the end of the year when I was a freshman? Before you were at school with us?”
But I don’t, not really. Not until he starts telling me the story, and I see the memory playing out, through his eyes. “You were in the kitchen and you poured me a soda and I don’t even remember what we were talking about,” he says, “but I guess I was laughing, because when you left the room your brother stood like three inches from me and just said, No.” He smiles now, thinking about it. “Just that. No. I’ll be honest, it was pretty effective. I was terrified of your brother.”
I reach for his hand, cold and clammy at his side. And when he doesn’t object, I rest my forehead on his shoulder, breathing him in. But all I get is river.
His body is close, shivering, he’s wound tight. I feel his heartbeat against my ribs, but he’s looking beyond me. His other hand rests against the back of my head, and I feel his fingers move gently through my hair.
I press my lips to the side of his jawbone, and he softens. He lowers his head. “Jessa, I’m not him,” he says.
I run my hand up the side of his face, feel the contours that make Max Max.
He’s not, it’s true. He’s the one who got me to jump. The one who drove me home after the breakup. The one who picked me up when Caleb went missing. The one who came back for me when I was lost in the crowd.
“I know,” I say.
I hold my breath. I wait. The trees are hiding us, and the cold is inside us, and I was a girl who just jumped on her own. For a moment, we are not ourselves. Separate from all the events leading up to this, and the ones that will soon come after. The words we say here don’t count. The things we do, only half-real.
Only maybe they’re not. Because as he finally lowers his lips to my own, I think I have never felt something so real.
—
Max’s house feels warm and welcoming, even as I’m shivering in someone else’s clothes. I’ve followed him back here, after we separated. After he pulled back and said, his forehead still resting against mine, You’re going to get hypothermia, seriously, and we walked back to our cars together, like nothing at all had happened.
The front door leads to the kitchen and the living room together, the only parts of the house I’ve seen before. There are family photos on the beige walls; Max is an only child, so it’s all him, except for a photo from his parents’ wedding.
My living room is like this too, covered with images of me and Julian, and in that one moment I realize what’s missing from Caleb’s. There are no pictures of him when he’s younger on the walls of his house. There are pictures of Mia, and Caleb with Mia, both not until he’s older.
“Eve doesn’t have pictures of Caleb growing up,” I say. “Downstairs.”
But Max frowns, turning back to the fridge to scrounge for food, and I realize my mistake. I know what he’s thinking: everything I say, everything I see, is in comparison to Caleb.
Max: taller, leaner. His kisses more tentative, unsure. My first thought down on the riverbank, when he finally lowered his lips to mine, was frustration that he was pulling away and stepping back, until something tipped and he pulled me closer, our clothes cold and clinging to our skin, my body trembling against his. Everything natural and easy from there, where Caleb was all anticipation and surprise; it was as if I’d known Max forever, and this was the way it was meant to be.
I wonder if it was just the moment, two people missing the same thing, seeking comfort in each other. If now that we’re back in his kitchen and reality, he will say something like Listen, Jessa—
Things that felt possible an hour earlier seem suddenly overexposed in the reality of our lives. He looks like he wants to say something, like he’s on the cusp, but instead he looks me over again. “You’re still shaking,” he says.
Our clothes are in the dryer, and Max has changed into something warmer. Meanwhile, I’m wrapped in Max’s sweatshirt, and a pair of his mom’s pajama pants. Still, the chill lingers.
“I’m freezing. It seemed like a better idea an hour ago.”
He cracks a grin, and a laugh slips through. Then he bites it back, as if remembering why we are here. “About earlier,” he starts, and I lean forward. Earlier, as in when I kissed him, and he kissed me back? Earlier, as in when I threw myself into the river and he followed? Earlier, as in when I told him that Caleb might not be dead and he started to believe me?
But before he can continue, there’s a sharp noise from the back of his house, like a waiter dropping a tray of dishes.
I jump, on edge, while Max walks to the living room windows, peering through the blinds. “My neighbor,” he says. “Dumping the trash. It’s garbage day tomorrow. We keep the containers in the alleys behind our houses until garbage day, when we drag them around to the front.”
I stand beside Max. The neighbor doesn’t see us. She heaves another bag into the bin beside it. The bottles crash against one another as she drops her recycling inside.
My gaze shifts to the house over the fence, and I know Max is doing the same.
Just like that, we know what we have to do. I see him staring out the back window, to the high wooden fence.
“They’re gone,” he says.
“How can you tell?”
He points to the window of the garage, the shades pulled closed. “The garage light is always on when they’re home now.” There’s only darkness behind the shades now.
“Always?”
He shrugs. “Seems that way to me.”
“That sounds like a really inexact science.”
He turns to face me. “I want you to show me, Jessa. Show me the room. The hidden attic space behind his closet. The things that made you think he’s alive.”