Page 79 of Fragments of the Lost
“But you have his number. Was he friends with Caleb?”
“No. They met that day. Craig Keegan was pressing him about getting a fake ID. They all got his number.” I’d missed that part of the conversation, but it made sense now why he blew off Hailey for that conversation. As if they all had plans each weekend to go to bars and pass as twenty-one. The idea was ridiculous.
“Fake IDs,” I repeat, and Max’s eyes widen. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Everything in the lead-up to Caleb going over the bridge suddenly shifts, becomes a little less certain.
“Call him,” I say, but Max already has his phone out.
In the silence, Terrance leans forward. “What’s going on?” he asks.
“We don’t know,” I say. “You said this guy left something for him?”
“Yeah, a package. Like a thick envelope. But I wouldn’t take it. Guess they made plans to meet up somewhere else.”
“Max,” I say as he’s leaving a message, “when did he take that money from you again?”
Because suddenly all the fragments are realigning, shifting into place, and they reveal a plan: Caleb taking money, calling Stan, using it for a fake ID, which was delivered to Terrance’s dorm room while he was driving up to see Ashlyn Patterson, asking to see the paperwork for his trust.
And earlier: a man sending Caleb a bus ticket, to visit him in jail, unused. A man leaving him a letter after his release, asking to see him. A hike, where we sat on opposite sides of the river. The briefest contact. The preliminary event.
The phone rings, cutting through the silence.
“Stan, this is Max,” he says. “I need to talk to you about Caleb. About something you gave him.”
I can hear Stan on the other side, something about, yeah, being down at the college for some football game, delivering something for Caleb. But not willing to say anything about any fake ID, one way or the other. “Not on the phone,” he mumbles.
“Caleb’s dead,” Max says, and the silence that follows is excruciating. “We’re trying to figure out what happened to him.”
Then Stan starts talking, and Max turns up the volume on his phone as I lean my ear closer, to hear. “The police better not end up coming to me with this, Max. If that ID has anything to do with it, I could be charged with something.”
I want to punch Stan through the phone. “Tell him we’ll find the ID,” I say.
“We’ll get it,” Max says.
“Well, listen, it won’t be one from New Jersey or anything. You always want to get an out-of-state one, so it’s not looked at as closely.”
“What state?” I say, my voice scratching. “What’s the name on the ID? What’s the state?”
Max goes to repeat the question, but Stan must’ve heard. “The name is whatever we can get, I don’t remember. The state I do remember, because he requested it. Most people don’t care. I mean, it’s just to purchase liquor.” I’m holding my breath. The room is silent as we wait. “He asked for Pennsylvania.”
—
We sit in the parking lot, with the car running, staring straight ahead, into the night sky. We don’t move. We don’t drive.
I think he’s alive.
I think he lied.
I think he was planning this.
I don’t know why.
Max smacks his hand once against the steering wheel, lets a string of expletives fly. “Who does that?” he says. And then louder. “Who does that to people?” Except bypeoplehe means him. I don’t know what the last few months have been like for Max, but I imagine a cloud of grief and guilt, like my own. I reach out and take his hand, slide my cold fingers between his own. We sit there, with his head hanging low, until the phone buzzes in my pocket with another text from my mother.
“I need to get home,” I say.
Max stares out the window, presumably trying to fit his own memories together in a way that makes sense.
My mind keeps circling, doing the same. Sean hit him. I don’t know what happened after that. I don’t know for sure that Sean is dead, and not gone.
