Page 70 of Fragments of the Lost
Caleb was looking at his eighteenth birthday as a way out, but it wasn’t. Still, I didn’t think that would be enough to make him take off, to set something like this in motion.
She takes my arm, and I smell mint from her breath. “Please don’t tell,” she says. I picture Caleb leaning closer, the scent of her enveloping him, the laughter on his face. Her hand is trembling. “My dad will kill me,” she adds. “Listen, Caleb asked to meet me when he was going to be up at our school last May, said he had some questions that he didn’t want my dad to know about. He asked if I could make him a copy of something, or take a picture. I almost did it, but I chickened out. When I saw him, I told him I couldn’t do it. Then he called again at the beginning of the school year. Like, the first weekend, asking if he could stop by. I thought maybe you guys had broken up and he was coming to seeme,but when he showed up, he was asking to see the setup of his trust. Caleb had seen the paperwork from his grandparents before, I’m sure. It didn’t seem like a big deal. My dad doesn’t need to know about this.” I can feel she’s close to tears, and I don’t want to see them. They’re tears for herself, not for Caleb, and I have no room for anyone else’s guilt.
But something isn’t sitting right, in her explanation. “You mean his father, not his grandparents,” I say, my voice in a whisper, out of respect for the dead. “The money is from hisfather.”
She stops crying, shakes her head. “No, his grandparents. He’s got some trust from them.”
“Right, only you’re wrong—it’s from his father.”
“No,” she says, her voice rising, her spine straightening, and I think she’s the type of person who likes being right most of all. “That’s kind of the catch. It skips his father. It goes right to him.”
“What do you mean, it skips his father?”
“Just that. I don’t know why. All I know is that it skips his father.”
“His father is dead,” I say. I picture the suit in Caleb’s closet. The letter opener that’s been passed down. The pictures hidden in a box on a shelf. The thing he was missing in his life, that he slowly let me see.
She scrunches her nose. “His father is not dead. That’s why my dad’s in charge of it in the first place.”
—
Max is silent as we walk back to the parking lot. He puts a hand on my shoulder near the car, where I’ve frozen.
The dates line up. This is where Caleb disappeared to, that weekend he was supposed to be at the college visit, staying with Terrance. At least part of the time. He took his car and drove up here and asked Ashlyn to see the paperwork. What did he see? What had been set in motion thatday?
And then there’s the other issue—the one that feels worse, like I’ve stumbled upon answers only to discover I don’t like what I’ve found. The knowledge that Caleb lied to me from the start. That the moment he told me about his father, rested his forehead against my stomach—a moment that made me feel infinitely close to him—was all a lie. And I’d fallen for a version of him who wasn’t real, who neverexisted.
That he must’ve had a moment where the truth was right there, so close to the surface, and he looked up in my eyes, and found me lacking.
My phone rings when we’re halfway home, and the name flashesEve.I pick it up, and the voice on the other end feels closer, more personal. “Jessa?” she asks.
“Yes?” I say.
“Is there a problem?” she says.
I worry that maybe she knows where I am. That she knows there’s nothing but problems. In the silence, she continues, “I thought you’d be here after school.”
I look at the clock, realize that she probably expected me over an hour ago. I look at Max, who shakes his head. She must not have seen my car at his place.
“Yes, sorry,” I say. “I’m running late. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.” I need what’s in that room. I need to dig all the way to the bottom, because it’s all that’s left from him.
After another ten minutes of silence, I ask Max, “Is it true, about his dad?”
His hands tighten. “He told me he was dead, too. Ashlyn could be wrong.”
“Right,” I say. But everything twists inside. The more I learn, the less I feel I know. The less certain I am about anything. This person I thought knew me better than anyone, and I hadn’t known anything real about him.
I feel distant, distracted. I look at Max, and wonder who he really is, too.
We park in front of Max’s house, so I can get my car. There’s a pang of worry, that Eve has seen my car here. I don’t want her to know I’ve been with Max all along. But I shake the thought. What are the chances?
“I’m going to show up,” Max says. “I don’t want you there alone with her.”
“Max—”
“I’m not asking for your permission, Jessa.”
“What are you going to do?”
