This room is full of me. She said it herself. I can’t cut these down the middle, an arm on my side, a hand on his. There’s no easy way to untangle the images.
The pictures stop long before the end. We go to a baseball game, we take a picture in this room, sitting on this bed, with him kissing my cheek, holding the camera, me scrunching up my nose while laughing. We go on a hike. And then they stop. I wonder if there was a moment up here where he knew. Just like the beginning. Whether he knew first. Whether I did. If it was a moment for him, where he could see it clearly. Or whether, like for me, it was a feeling I didn’t recognize at first, sitting in the pit of my stomach, waking me up at night—gently gnawing, a slight unease. Not a bang, not a fight, but a slow and inevitable slide.
I flip over the last picture, the one from the hike, and there’s the date again. June of this year. Five months ago. My name below. Jessa Whitworth, Delaware Water Gap. As if this were merely a file already, a piece for a museum archive. As if he knew someday, somewhere, these would belong to someone else.
Once they’re all down, I flip over the stack as I go to slide them into my bag, and there we are again—at the beach.
Now I want to ask him, What did you know, Caleb? That a year later, you’d be gone and I’d be peeling all evidence of you and me off the wall? That your mother would hate me, and Max wouldn’t look me in the eye, and your baby sister wouldn’t say a word to me, no matter how many times I said hello?
Salt water helps you float, you said that first day we met at the beach, when I told you I couldn’t swim well. That I didn’t like the feeling of the current in the ocean. That I had this irrational fear of being swept out to sea, and that nobody would ever find me.
You laughed.
Caleb, you laughed.
After the pictures come down, the walls are bare, except for a few pieces of sticky tack, and the ticking clock above his desk, which was more a piece of football memorabilia than a functioning clock, since you couldn’t really make out the numbers. The room looks like it did that first day, when I came up here and he told me it was the bunker. It feels like forever ago. It feels like a moment ago. One year together, a bell curve in photos.
There’s a version of me and Caleb that fell apart. There’s a version of him that braced his arm against the doorjamb, banning me from his life from then on. There’s a version of me who walked away. There’s a version of him who changed, grabbed his keys, left this room for the last time—
But right now I want this part of him. I want to find him here, see him at the moment when everything was right.
I know what I’m looking for. A navy blue, hard case, usually kept in the top drawer of his desk. But it’s not where I thought it would be. It’s not where it’s always been.
It’s almost desperate, the way I’m ignoring everything, wasting time in search of this one item: it’s a case for these generic black glasses that he’s had forever.
They had smudged lenses that he’d have to rub against the hem of his shirt constantly. He’d only wear them at home, even though he would sometimes complain about his contacts bothering him. Sometimes I wondered if some days he wasn’t wearing his contacts either, if that accounted for the faraway look, the things he didn’t notice about me, that he ignored. I like to think it was that, at first: that he just couldn’t see it.
But he hated these glasses. Hated wearing them, and hated being seen in them.
I caught him in them the first time I came up to the bunker unannounced. It was just before Christmas break, I remember, because he was working on a history paper due the last day of class, which he claimed was ruining the holiday spirit. He had his headphones on when I knocked, and he hadn’t heard me. I cracked open the door, careful to inch it open, call his name—give him time to react. But he was sitting at his computer and had a textbook out in front of him. He had a thick pair of glasses on, and they turned his expression solemn, his face more boyish. The music drifted faintly across the room.
It took a moment for him to register my presence, and then he spun his chair toward me, swiped the glasses off his face in one quick motion, as if I’d caught him doing something embarrassing, like I had stumbled upon him writing in a diary.
It was the moment I fell. When I knew it was more than a crush—that I was drawn by more than the charisma, the smile, the way he made me feel like I was someone worth desiring. No, it was this. This moment. I almost said it right then, was sure he could see it in my stunned expression, but his gaze had gone watery, and he said, “I’m pretending that I can see you right now, but I totally can’t.”
“At all?” I asked.
“I mean, I can see like the shape of you,” and he ran his hand in the air, tracing my outline. A shiver ran through me. “But I can’t tell if you’re, like, smiling or laughing or totally appalled right now.”
I took one step closer. “How about now?”
He scrunched up his nose. “Still nothing.”
“Why don’t you put your hot glasses back on then?”
He lunged off his seat for me, missed as I sidestepped, and I was laughing. He caught me around the waist, pulled my body flush with his. “Got you,” he said, and his eyes searched my face, his smile stretching wider.
“My contacts were bothering me. Those are emergency only,” he explained.
“So put them back on.”
“Oh no, no no no, you do not get to see me in my glasses until you definitely, one hundred percent, have fallen in love with me.”
I froze in his arms, and he seemed to sense something then. If only he had understood it was that moment itself. That moment, that insight, that vulnerability that did me in. I felt his breath on my face. His lips gently pressed to mine. He didn’t make me say it, and didn’t say anything back. He stepped away, put the thick-rimmed glasses back over his nose, so his eyes looked so large, so freaking blue, and went back to his work.
It was later that night, when he told me. When he was dropping me back off at home, and the sky was dark, and the heat in the car was running, and I was bundled in my jacket with a hat pulled down over my ears. “I love you too, you know,” he said, like he’d been thinking about it. His voice was low, and his words hung in the space between us.
“Too?” I asked.
“Yeah, too,” he said.
“You’re doing it all out of order,” I said, but I was smiling, my whole body thrumming.
“Doesn’t mean it’s not true,” he said, unbuckling his seatbelt and leaning toward me.
I whispered it to him then, like I was the first one to say it, in the moment before his lips met mine.
“I knew it,” he said, and the memory of his smile warmed me as I walked to my front door in the cold winter night.
—
I shift the contents of his top drawer around, checking again—nothing. Next I check the surfaces of his dressers, the backpack in the corner, still filled with a few notebooks from the last day at school. The glasses are a part of him that only I had been allowed to see.