Page 54 of Fragments of the Lost
“This is how it starts with cats, right?”
—
The first few boxes I pull down are empty, as I recalled them being. But then there’s the sound of shaking, something loose and rattling inside the one at the base. I pull it down, open the top, and see it’s full of Legos. I smile, imagining a smaller version of Caleb sitting on the floor of this room, building a town, or a spaceship. A few pieces are still stuck together, in half-towers, half-robots, shapes I can’t quite decipher.
The box, I realize, has anLon it. And others are labeled as well, as I pull them down and open them. Old figurines, collectibles, baseball cards. The boxes are labeled in marker, with a single letter—a code.LforLegos,BforBaseball,Pfor…People,I guess? They’re action figures, G.I. Joe, stuff like that.
I hear Eve come back in the house, and Mia speaking to her below. I can only hope she’s not telling her about finding me in her room. I hold my breath, waiting for footsteps on the stairs, but eventually the voices settle, the house settles back to silence.
Near the bottom of the boxes, there’s aD,and it’s sealed extra-closed with a rubber band, and I worry for a moment that this is it, some girl, an ex or a new one—something he didn’t want me to see. But the first thing I see inside is a photo of a very young boy beside a man. They’re holding fishing poles. They’re standing knee-deep in a river. Some instinct makes me flip it over, and I see, written in faint pencil:Delaware Water Gap?
It’s his father. It’s so easy to see, from the distance, from the shape of them. Now that Caleb’s older, you can see the resemblance between him and his father from over ten years ago. They’ve met at the center, from opposite directions. Separated by fifteen years or so now. He’s got the same build, the same hair. Which I figured, since Eve’s hair is so dark, and she’s lithe, with green eyes and pale skin, like Mia. But nothing else is in detail. Instead I imagine the man in the photo turns to face the camera head-on, and it’s the replica of an older Caleb, one I will never see, but who once existed in another lifetime.
Then I think,Maybe that’s what we were doing there, on our hike. Retracing the pattern of his father’s life, with places they had once gone together.I move the photo to see what’s below, and there are a few more pictures. They’re all of Caleb and his dad. There are none with Eve. They have years written lightly on the back, with question marks. Words likehome; backyard; summer; winter. There’s one of the two of them cleaning an old black car. There’s a corner of a house behind them, and something about the angle, and the trees behind, make me wonder whether it’s the house we stopped at on the way to Max’s game. In the photo, the younger Caleb has the hose, his father has the sponge. They’re both in bathing suits. Caleb points it at his father, and his father has a hand up—but he’s laughing.
I close the lid, my fingers shaking.
I was doing the same thing Caleb did. Creating a single box remaining, to tell the story of someone I loved, that would one day be stored in my closet.
I don’t know what to do with this. If these photos once belonged to Eve, Caleb took them from her for a reason. He was trying to figure something out, something his mother wouldn’t tell him. If he asked,Where was this taken?surely she would answer. But his father was an off-limits topic. I wondered if they had divorced first. I never knew. Didn’t pry too much, into a thing I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to push Caleb back toward. All I knew: His father died in a car accident when he was five; his mom met and married Sean a few years later; Mia was born when he was nine; and they all moved here just before he started middle school. That’s all I knew of the Caleb before we met.
I let him show me what he wanted to show, and I saw the things I wanted to see.
I’ve started my own box—the box in my mind, that’s markedCforCaleb. It began with my pictures. I’ve taken the seashell. And now these pictures sing in my hand, as if they belong together. I close the shoebox back up and tuck it under the bed, and figure I’ll wait for a moment—when Eve is out, or occupied again. I listen for sounds of water running through the walls, but all I hear is the silence, and the ticking of the grandfather clock, up two flights of stairs.
I stand up and reach my hands to the top shelf, feeling for anything left behind. There’s an assortment of ties, and what look like shin guards, maybe from soccer, though I don’t recall him playing soccer.
My hands brush something larger that rolls when I bump against it, and I strain my fingers, then close them around a rubber edge.
I pull down a flashlight, in black and red, with a switch at the base. I run my fingers over it, push it on, and shine it into the corners. I feel him behind me then, hear his whisper in my ear as this flashlight was in my hand, surrounded by the cold night air, and the dark.
Turn it off,he says.
It was sometime in the middle of March and we were not supposed to be out. Caleb had gotten into some fight with Sean, and Sean had grounded him. But Caleb maintained that Sean didn’t have the right to ground him, daring him to say otherwise.
“You’re not my father,” he’d said. We had come home from school, dropped the keys on the entrance table, and had made it halfway to the steps when Sean rounded the corner from the kitchen. Caleb had not expected for Sean to be here. Apparently he hadn’t expected us either.
“I thought you were supposed to be studying at the library,” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“I thought you were supposed to be at work,” Caleb answered.
“Of course you did,” Sean said. “Is this what you do instead? You tell us you’re busy so Mia has to go to the sitter’s, and then you bring your girlfriend here? You lie to us, and Mia, so you can screw around with her?”
I jerked back. “Hey,” I said. The tone of his voice made me stiffen my backbone, plant my feet.
But Caleb stepped forward. “We came for my books, Sean.”
“Sure you did.”
He brushed by him, pushing his shoulder into his. Sean grabbed Caleb’s car keys from the table.
“Why aren’t you at work, Sean?” Caleb asked, not backing down.
“Leave,” Sean said to me, over Caleb’s shoulder. But I had nowhere to go. Caleb was my ride. I thought, briefly, of heading to Max’s place. Thought about knocking and saying,Caleb’s stepfather kicked me out.Thought about calling Julian, or my parents.
There was something off in the dynamic—I wasn’t sure whether he had caught Caleb, or Caleb had caught Sean, but neither was backing down.
And then, before anyone could make a decision, the lights flickered once and went dead. The washing machine wound down—I hadn’t realized it was on until that moment, when I heard it stopping. Sean frowned, flipping the wall switch a few times.
