“What?”
But he didn’t answer, and he ignored the directions I gave him. “Just, hold on.”
We drove for miles, past cornfields, into a more densely wooded area, down curvier roads. Eventually, he swung the car onto an unmarked drive down an unpaved road.
“There,” he said, nodding out the front window.
He eased the car to a slow stop, but left the engine running.
“Whoa.” We had pulled up alongside what looked like an old barn, blackened in sections and caved in, with boarded-up windows. “What is this place?”
He turned off the engine and grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment. “Come on, want to check it out?”
I didn’t, really. But I didn’t want to sit in the car alone while Caleb did, either.
“Caleb, my parents will be worried if I don’t show up.” They would already be there by now, arriving with the team. And the game was set to start in ten minutes. Julian was pitching, and I should be there.
“Five minutes,” he said, brushing the comment aside.
The grass was overgrown and dry, dead around the perimeter, a scorched earth. The door was thin, and gave with the slightest shove. Inside smelled of exposed wood, singed plastic, mold. Caleb had his flashlight in his hand and shone it across the floor, because the windows were boarded up. The floorboards were angled haphazardly, and seemed to give way underneath, to a blackened hole below. I heard birds flying by from outside the boarded-up windows.
Caleb laughed at my expression. “It’s just a house, Jessa,” he said.
“It’s about to collapse,” I said. “Caleb, don’t.” But he was already heading for the stairs.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, and I held my breath, listening to his steps, the door creaking open, more steps, a pause. Eventually, he made his way back downstairs, looked around the remains of the kitchen, and returned to the front door, where I had never left.
“Satisfied?” I asked.
He pursed his lips, his eyes taking in the rooms again. “I was born here,” he said.
“Oh.” I looked around again, placing the furniture from his house into these hollowed rooms instead, trying to see it as a home.
“I don’t remember it. I just wanted to see.”
And then my body stiffened. “Is this where…your dad…” But I let the thought trail. I felt the ghosts circling, smelled the fire, heard a baby cry.
“No,” he said. He brushed the hair from my face, stepping closer. “That was a car accident. I was five. I don’t remember this place at all. I don’t know what happened to it.”
—
Now I turn the book over in my hands. I don’t remember what happened after, with the book. I just know I found it in his car, and then forgot about it. We left the dilapidated home. Went to Julian and Max’s game. Had dinner with the team at a diner after to celebrate, the parents all sitting in half the restaurant, Caleb and I tucked in a booth with Max and a few of his friends on the other side. I left with my parents, after. He must’ve brought the book inside when he got back home, adding it to the collection on his shelf.
It looked like there was still a bookmark inside, which there hadn’t been that day. That day, it had been folded open, stuck at the place he’d left off. I thought of him coming back up here, rereading sections of the book. Putting it down, forgetting about it. I opened the book, to see where he’d given up.
He was in the middle of a chapter, no rhyme or reason. Except it isn’t a bookmark, but an envelope folded in half. I unfold it, see the jagged top, the black script that had once been out of focus, that he didn’t want me to see. His name is written on the front. Just his name.
I pull the notebook paper from inside, read the words he wanted to keep hidden:
C—I miss you. I miss you so much. But I’m scared that if I send you this and you don’t show up, it will be even worse.
There’s nothing else. This big envelope for three sentences. Three sentences, to break my heart.
I’m holding a secret. Something I don’t understand. Someone he was talking to months before we broke up. Someone who missed him, whom he cared for enough to hide from me.
It was no secret that Kylie Vann once had a crush on Caleb. It was no secret that she asked him to help her with homework in the back room of the school library, and then kissed him when he wasn’t expecting it. He told me right away. That’s how we operated. That’s how I thought we operated.
I feel dizzy with the words. With the truth. With the memories. While I had been so frantic trying to hold together the pieces of us, had he already let us go, and just neglected to tell me?
Secrets. He knew how to reel them out, how to hook you with them. And so he must have known how to hold them.
What I thought I knew about Caleb: the books he read and loved. The things he didn’t want me to see, and why he didn’t want me to see them (college letters, an uncertain future between us). What he really didn’t want me to see: something deeper, darker, more personal. The simmering of a betrayal.
Max had already uncovered the spot between the mattress and the box spring. I’d gone through his drawers, his closet, the books knocked off the shelves. But now I find myself on my hands and knees, my face pressed close to the carpet, the manufactured fibers scratching at my cheek, looking for more. Looking for what else Caleb wanted to keep hidden.
There’s an indentation in the carpet, about ten inches from the foot of the bed, as if the entire bed has been shifted just slightly to the left recently. It could be from Max tearing through Caleb’s things, or before. Impossible to tell now, with the room out of order, the perspective shifted.
The first thing I do is check for any other place he might have stashed money, thinking this might be where he’d hidden Max’s, if he’d truly taken it. My hands brush against the base of the box spring, the metal bed frame, but there’s nothing else. No taped envelope, no packet of cash. Now that he was eighteen, maybe he finally opened that bank account after all.
There’s a duffel bag, big and bulky, taking up most of the floor beneath his bed. I angle it out, dragging the bag across the carpet, and it snags on a metal foot of the bed. This is his gym bag, for his lacrosse gear; he’d swing it up and over his back, wearing the strap across his chest.
But unzipping the bag, the first thing I see are the long, slender ski poles, the goggles, the hard immobile boots that he’d attach to his skis. As if he stored all his off-season gear in one location. Anything worth something, all stashed under the bed until winter.
I leave the ski poles inside, as they span the length of the bag, giving it shape, along with his lacrosse stick. The goggles, I hold up to the window, though, watch as they color everything red, dulling the glare.
I slip them over my eyes and stare at my hands. They look like they belong to someone else, in another time and place.