Mia smiled, but she wrinkled her nose at me. “That’s not possible,” she said. “You can’t scare someone to death. You have to hurt them.”
I jerked back, her words in sharp contrast to her easy smile. “Mia,” said Caleb, coming down the steps in a new change of clothes, “stop being creepy.” He picked her up and threw her over his shoulder, flipping her upside down and back onto her feet in one smooth motion as she squealed with laughter.
Then he turned to me. “You really want to be scared to death? Listen to a child tell you about the people who come out of the walls at night.”
“Oh my God, stop,” I said, and even though he was laughing, the goosebumps rose on my arms.
He took the Swiss Army knife back, and slid it into the front pocket of his khaki shorts. “Mia,” he said, “wanna go to the park with Jessa?”
“I thought you had to paint,” she said, her face scrunched up in confusion.
“That can wait.”
“You’re painting?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Found some paint cans in the garage. Figured it was time for a change.”
“I can help,” I said, feeling there was something I could finally do.
He paused, and it looked like he was trying to think up some excuse. But then he shrugged. “If you want,” he said, wandering through the kitchen. I followed him into the garage, where he pulled a few paint cans from under the tool bench. There was one of eggshell white, unopened, and one of a deep blue. “Rustic Sea,” he said, reading the label.
“Probably too dark for the walls,” I said.
“Probably. But who said anything about the walls?”
We painted the door to the bunker that day—front and back and sides.
—
Now Max is holding the same knife in his hand, and I’m trying to remember what else Caleb said that day. If he ever explained the rocks in the tires, the water on his shoes. Max said he had car trouble, and I assumed he had to get the tires replaced. He hadn’t driven me anywhere the rest of August. But he came by for my birthday dinner over Labor Day weekend, and he drove me to school the first week, and he never mentioned anything about it again.
Max turns the knife over in his hand and the side of his mouth quirks up.
“The first time I met Caleb, we were eleven, and he had this thing with him.” Max’s voice drops lower. “I knew there was a kid my age who had moved in behind us, because my mom kept talking about it. I saw him in the yard in the afternoons, so I kind of timed it so I was out at the same time once. He was using this knife to make a sign. He was carving words in a piece of wood.”
“The Bunker,” I say, and his eyes cut quickly to mine.
“How’d you know?”
“I found it.”
“No kidding.”
“It’s in a box with his personal things now.”
He holds the knife in front of his eyes. “Well, that was it. That’s how we met. The beginning of it all.”
I’m captivated by Max’s story of the knife, so different from my own.
These fragments of a lost life are not just that—they’re pieces that belong to me, to Max, to everyone who knew him. We are connected through the moments.
The knife in Max’s hand, where it had been in Caleb’s before, and mine before that. Everything connected.
“So he was here at some point,” I say, nodding to the knife. The space feels claustrophobic, and haunted.
Max frowns, opens his mouth, then shuts it because we hear the car engine rumbling in front of the house, but there’s no window from the attic space to see who it is.
“Go,” he says, his eyes wide, as I scramble past him through the entrance.
Max is out right behind me, sliding the bookcase back into position, both of us heading out the blue door toward the steps.
“Wait,” I say. I turn back and dive onto my knees, reaching for the box under the bed that I had forgotten, with the pictures of his father—the things Caleb was searching through. Max stands at the entrance waiting, but he’s mumbling Come on come on come on in an endless string, even as we’re on our way down the steps.
I frantically take the steps to the second floor, then turn to Max above and whisper, “Shut the door.”
I slow to a tiptoe on the first-floor steps, listening.
It’s Eve. I know it’s Eve because there’s a rhythm to her steps, something I can picture in my head, in time to the noise outside. Max grabs my hand and yanks me around the corner of the kitchen just as Eve slides the key into the lock. I am so grateful that Max locked the door behind us, so there’s no evidence. We go straight for the garage door—unlocking it and pulling it open just as the front door opens.
I ease the garage door slowly shut, keeping my hand on the knob, and I listen. We’re standing in the pitch dark, the roller shades pulled down over the garage windows. I hear Eve drop her keys on the entryway table, and I decide it’s now or never.
I slide Caleb’s old key into the door, and slowly, slowly slide the lock back into place. I press my ear to the door and hear her steps enter the kitchen. I stop breathing. Max stops breathing.
She pulls open a drawer, and another, and another. She opens the fridge. I think maybe she’s making lunch, and I know we’re trapped. There’s no way out until she leaves.
I stand silently in the middle of the garage as my eyes slowly adjust to the dark, the only light coming from the edges of the shades and the strip under the garage door. Max sits on a rolled-up carpet, places his face in his hands, and waits. The rolled-up carpet comes into focus, the slivers of light from the corner of the window shade illuminating the maroon around the edges.
There’s a whole row of them, and I see they’re all bound with plastic wrap. I look around the cluttered area, and the rest of the scene comes into focus. Boxes. Caleb’s boxes. As if waiting for a moving truck, or a dumpster.
All these things I’ve sorted through and labeled—and for what? It sits in the dark of the garage now, shoved into corners, out of sight.
Behind the boxes are a few suitcases, but they don’t look familiar. Maybe they’re Mia’s, or Eve’s. I gently tug on the zipper of the nearest one, and see men’s clothes inside. But they don’t look like Caleb’s. I wonder if they once belonged to Sean, if he neglected to take everything, if Eve was tasked with sorting through the fragments of the life he left behind as well.
Behind Max, there are items sitting on a toolbox that must’ve once belonged to either Caleb or Sean—forgotten, abandoned, along with the people they left behind. Some are familiar: the letter opener, an assorted collection of electronics. Things taken from the boxes I’ve packed. They’ve been sorted through, reordered, mostly Caleb’s personal items.