Page 11 of Fragments of the Lost
Part of me thinks it was just habit.
Part of me thinks he’d forgotten he didn’t need to be there anymore.
Part of me thinks it was Max, who he came for.
But the fact remains that he told his mother he couldn’t watch his sister Mia because I had a race. He always used to come to my meets. I wonder if it was a slip of his tongue, a mistake, that the breakup hadn’t quite registered yet. Or if he hadn’t told his mother and didn’t want to. If he was thinking, even then, that we might mend things. If he’d come because he wanted to—and then, for some reason, decided he didn’t want to be there after all.
Or if he just didn’t want to watch Mia. He was good with her, and Mia idolized him, but he also wouldn’t rearrange his own schedule just to accommodate his mother’s, or Sean’s.She already has two parents,I’d once heard him say to his mother as an excuse. I’d watched her flinch, turn away, and wondered if she could hear the longing for the same thing in his voice, underneath the bitterness.
So he said he couldn’t watch Mia, and then he came to my meet. I saw him there, not quite registering the surprise of it. I asked him to hold my necklace. The gun sounded. The rain started, but it began as a steady drizzle. It wasn’t until the end of the race that it started falling fast, and hard. We kept running anyway, as we always do—the winner of the boys’ race was probably already finished by then anyway.
The rain kept coming. By the time I crossed the finish line, mud-streaked and dripping wet, Caleb was gone.
I wonder if maybe it was that—the rain picking up, and not me—that made him leave early. He came home first, we know that. From the neighbor who saw his car, to the clothes on the floor, to the timing.
Meanwhile, we waited out the rain after the race, the coaches and spectators all dripping inside the athletic center after, the floors slick with muddy water, the lobby humid and sweaty. I remember pressing my hands to the glass doors, watching the way the rain came down in a sheet. “It’s like standing inside a waterfall,” Hailey said. Her hands pressed to the glass beside mine, her nails painted alternating green and black, our school colors.
We stayed there, sitting cross-legged on the linoleum, playing with a stack of cards from Oliver’s bag, while others spent the time on their phones, leaning back on their gym bags. Max tapped out a rhythm on the floor with two pencils—taken from Skyler, who was doing her homework. One hour passed. Two. Before the school deemed it safe to drive, and the flash-flood warnings were over.
And while we sat there—deliberating over our hand of playing cards; counting out a frantic beat; trying to remember how to find the inverse tangent; taking a nap—what were you doing, Caleb? Where were you going?
No one is sure. But the last thing you said to your mom was about me. The last place you said you’d be, with me. Had something else driven you to this sequence of events? To convince you to go home, and to leave again?
It’s a mystery that has me complicit, in this room. Because I want to know. And I have this painful hope that I will pull open that drawer, or find a note in your handwriting hidden under that book, or see something on a calendar I didn’t know existed, and everything will become clear. The mystery solved. And I will be absolved.
Caleb, please, I need to know.
It’s impossible not to notice that Julian’s home. My father is making chicken potpie, his favorite. My mother has the laundry basket on the coffee table, and there’s a pile of Julian’s folded shirts on the couch while she watches television.
Even if they hadn’t given me fair warning (a verbal countdown, each morning), it would be obvious. So much of our family life revolved around Julian’s ball games and his schedule these last few years, it’s like we don’t know what to do with each other now that he’s gone. So my parents take it upon themselves to make his return visits as welcoming as possible, to entice him to want to return.
They do his laundry. They cook his favorite meals. They leave him be. There’s a calm in the house when he’s home, like I know my place again in our family unit. Without him here, I feel my parents’ focus too strongly, like they’re surprised by the person I have become.
“Where’ve you been?” my mother says, her substitution for a greeting because I’m supposed to be engaging in family time, now that Julian’s home.
“Helping Eve with the packing,” I say.
“Oh,” my mother says, and her voice falls, her face falls. She moves around the couch, places her hand on the side of my head, and I look away, too aware of her gaze. “How is she? I can’t believe they’re really doing it. Really moving.”
I don’t answer any of it, because really, what is there to say? Sean’s gone and Caleb’s gone and soon they’ll be gone, too. Nothing more to remind us.
“I need to go back tomorrow.”
I feel the tension through her arm before she trails her fingers through my hair, and she shifts her focus. “But you’re going to miss seeing your brother. He leaves tomorrow evening.”
“I’m seeing him now,” I say.
She shakes her head. “He’s going out after dinner. Some baseball thing. Oh, you should go.” Then, she calls louder, “Julian! Do you think you could bring Jessa with you?”
“Ugh, Mom, stop.” The last thing I want is to be dragged around as an appendage to Julian. It’ll be a bunch of people I’ve known for what feels like my whole life, mixed with my classmates who know me with Caleb. A blending of worlds, and I won’t know which person to be.
“It’s fine,” he says, stepping out of the kitchen, where he was undoubtedly helping my father, because Julian can also cook, of course. “I’m going back to talk to the team at the coach’s place.”
It’s fine,he says, like I am the chore.
“God, don’t do me any favors, Julian. What ifIdon’t want to go?”
My mother mumbles at the television, picking up another shirt to fold. Julian grins and tilts his head. “Would you rather…,” he says, letting the thought trail off. He raises his hands in a balance of scales, as if to say:Pick, Jessa.A night home with your parents asking you questions, trapped in this house? Or an escape.
