Page 57 of Fragments of the Lost
She shakes her head, catches her breath on a hiccup, like she’s trying not to cry. “I heard his footsteps,” she says.
“It was just me,” I say. We’re sitting in the floor of his cleared-out closet now, and she’s letting me hold her. It’s the closest she’s let me get in months, and I take it. I’m scared to make a sudden move, to move at all.
“No,” she says. “Before.”
I feel a chill rise on my arms, the back of my neck. The ghost of someone else here beside me. “I’ve been working in the closet,” I say, for her and for myself. She must’ve heard my footsteps there.
She looks at me then, like I don’t understand. “When he was here, sometimes I would hear footsteps at night. I thought it was a monster. But Caleb said it was just him. His closet is just over my room. I didn’t know aboutthat.” She points to the open doorway, the cold coming in with the dark.
I stroke her hair, just letting her speak. Letting her remember.
“But I also heard him there, after the police came,” she whispers.
My hand stills. The air stills. I wonder if someone was going through his things. Maybe that’s why the desk is in such disarray. Where nothing is as it should be here.
“It could’ve been the police. Or your mom.”
But the key. The hanger. I’m holding my breath. That painful hope that doesn’t settle right with what I know is true.
“He was here, Jessa. A few days later. I heard him at night, after my mom went to bed.”
“Did you see him?” I ask. I realize this is a ghost story, and I’m letting her tell it. I’m feeding it myself, giving her pieces, letting her weave them into a tale, wanting to believe.
She ignores the question, as if she knows that by answering truthfully, the story will shatter, and Caleb will vanish again. “I thought he was looking for his glasses. He’ll come back for them. He has to.”
“Did you tell your mom?”
She nods, then drops her voice. “She said not to tell you, though. She said not to talk to you.”
I smooth back her hair, and she curls herself onto my lap, and I feel, for a moment, like Caleb. I wonder if she feels it, too. Like I am filling a gap that keeps growing, and we’re both here desperately pushing back against it.
“Mia,” I say, speaking gently into her ear. “When, exactly, did you hear someone up here?”
She thinks it was two days after the night the police came, but she’s not sure. That’s what Mia kept saying. But she believed it enough to come straight up here, to the closet, expecting to find someone else.
There was a hanger. A bare piece of wood. His house key.
Mia’s words become a life raft. They become something tangible, with weight. Even if they are a lie, they are something to cling to.
She heard footsteps in the attic two nights after Caleb was swept out to sea. When the police were still searching the river. When the shock waves were still rippling through school, and the rumors were laced with my name. When the looks were not apathetic, but cutting.
But. His key is there.His key.
Maybe she didn’t hear anything. Maybe she wanted to. Or maybe she did, and it was someone else. But Caleb had been in there at some point, because his house key had fallen.
I imagine him taking something from the hanger. Dragging something across the floor. Dropping his key, and not realizing it.
There are too many unknowns: the money he supposedly took from Max, that we cannot find; the unused bus ticket; the story Terrance Bilson told me about his college visit, and the man who showed up looking for him. As if Caleb had this whole other life, hidden underneath.
And I’m back where I started, the very first day I began, as if I’ve been running in place all along:Where were you going, Caleb? Why?
—
By the time I leave—grabbing my purse from the foot of the bed, escorting Mia to her room, descending the rest of the steps on my own—my feelings shift until I’m angry. Angry at Caleb, and angry at myself.
This is all so Caleb, honestly. Every bit of it. Everything that keeps me tethered to that room, even now.
It was the secrets that hooked me from the very start, the things that he doled out to me, in pieces. Letting me believe I was always getting closer, seeing more of him. But now I’m realizing how much of it was only granted to me because his hand had been forced. Three months before he said a word about his father, and only then because I didn’t understand his family’s money situation; a chance encounter with an ex-girlfriend before I even knew she existed.
