Page 50 of Fragments of the Lost
“Max?” I said, wondering if the line had gone dead.
A beat of silence, and then, “Jessa—” It came out in a choked whisper, and I sat on the edge of my bed.
“What is it, Max?What?”
I could count the heartbeats echoing in my head in the moment before he answered. “They think his car went over the bridge.”
I felt the air rush from my lungs. “What? Theythink?” There was nothing substantial about his sentence. I had just seen him. He was justthere.
It was all maybes anyway. I could do maybes, too. “Then they’re not sure. He’s probably getting food or something. Or at a friend’s house.”
Anyplace else.
“The guardrail is missing,” he said. “Caleb is missing.”
But I was shaking my head. There was another explanation. He had my necklace. I’d asked him to hold it for me. The last time I’d seen him, from the starting line of the race.
“I’m coming to get you,” Max whispered.
I had gotten dressed and run down the stairs and waited on the front porch, mumbling some frantic excuse to my parents, who were too confused to object, who seemed to sense that we were fighting against some inevitable outcome.
I had thought Max was coming so I could help in some search, so we could figure out where Caleb truly was, and we could all breathe a sigh of relief. But he wasn’t. He drove to their house, with the cop cars in front, and the men framed in the doorway, and then he kept going, and I realized he didn’t know where to go at all, so we just kept driving.
After a while, I focused on the smiling face of the bobblehead toy on the dashboard in front of me, and nothing more. Watching as it bounced along. Something so normal, so simple.
We drove and drove, for hours. Until his phone rang in the cup holder, and he pulled over to pick it up, and I could overhear, with finality, in the moment he squeezed his eyes shut.
He picked me up so we wouldn’t be alone, when we heard.
Max sees me staring at it now and says, “That was his, you know.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“He won it in one of those toy vending machines on the boardwalk. Determined it was a piece of crap. Stuck it there on the way home. Said it fit the décor.”
I laugh, slightly. We were always teasing Max about his car.
“But he was right,” Max says, grinning. “It really does.”
The whole time I’d been focused on this, trying to keep my mind from drifting to Caleb—when really it was him, all along.
No one answers the door at Caleb’s after school. The car is here, and after enough time has passed, I try the handle. It turns, and the door squeaks open as I gently push it ajar.
“Hello?” I call, my voice echoing off the walls. I peek inside, and the paintings and pictures are down. The area rugs removed, so all that remains are discolored squares of wood, darker than all the rest.
“Eve?” I’ve beaten Mia’s bus by at least an hour, given that I’ve left before last period, like I promised. I take out my phone, standing just inside the entrance, and scroll to the contact she’s entered in my phone. I send her a text:I’m here.
I hear a chirp from somewhere in the house—through the kitchen. Eve is nowhere to be found. I call her name again, softly. I don’t see her phone anywhere. Peering down the hall, I see her bedroom door is closed. I send another note:The front door was open.
This time, the chime comes from close by. Through the closed door leading to the garage. I place my ear to the door, and I hear something moving across the floor. My phone chimes as I’m reaching for the handle:Go on up. I’ll be there shortly.
The door to Mia’s room is open on the second-floor landing, and the floor looks exactly the same as the last time I peered into her room. As if even the disarray and life I had envisioned was an illusion. Maybe everything was frozen in time here too, after all.
As I step through the entrance of her room, the surface of her desk beside her bed comes into view, covered in books and pencils and crayons. Everything’s scattered. And then I see a navy blue edge, and I’m propelled across the room on a mission.
Half-buried under an open sketchpad is the case for his glasses.
I wasn’t even looking for them today, but here they are, in my hand. The last piece of Caleb that I thought would lead to some other understanding, that could lead me to where he might have been going. But instead they have been here, in Mia’s room, all along.
