Page 78 of Fragments of the Lost
“Thank you,” I say.
“Jessa? Is everything okay?”
Julian is one state away. One train ride. One car ride. It is both close and infinitely far away. “Yes,” I say.
“I can come home this weekend,” he says. He doesn’t even know what he’s offering, but part of me knew he would do it, that I could count on him.
“Julian,” I say. “You can’t help with this.” Julian is all rational, contained energy. He wants to believe the best of people. He believes that people want to tell him the truth. That he can fix things. But this is an emotional, gut response. You have to be willing to be wrong, and I don’t know if Julian has ever risked his own image in his life. If he’s willing to be the one out on the limb, who falls, who makes a scene. To lean forward and let someone else decide whether to drop you or not. To jump when you can’t see under the surface, when you don’t know what might be hidden underneath.
Terrance agrees to see me. Not that I gave him much choice. I asked him what time would be good for me to stop by, and I must’ve caught him off guard with the question, because he says he’ll be around all evening.
Max drives again, and I direct him. We don’t speak. There’s something too fragile hanging in the balance.
By the time we arrive on campus, it’s dark. My mom calls, asking where I am. My car is home, and I am not. Also, I’m supposed to be sick.
“I was feeling better. Hailey picked me up. We’re at the library,” I tell her, and she pauses, like she can feel the lie.
“Jessa, please come home.”
I wonder if Julian called her to say he was worried. Always thinking it’s the right thing to do, that he knows what’s best for me.
“I will,” I say. “Soon. Mom. I’m just in the middle of something.” I hang up, and I turn the phone to silent.
Terrance’s dorm room is on the third floor of an old building with no elevators. The walls are made of something that looks like cinder blocks, painted over. When he opens the door, he looks too big for the room, which has two twin-sized beds crammed beside two desks, and another above-average-sized guy behind him. The other guy is eating Chinese food from a carton at his desk, and the scent is overwhelming.
I try to picture Caleb here, slide him into context, but I can’t find a place for him.
Max and Terrance do this weird guy-handshake-greeting thing, which seems to be universal, and yet. Terrance gives Max a look that seems to say,What are you doing here?
And Max’s look says,I don’t know what I’m doing here.
And Terrance gives him this warning look like,Did you think this through?
Max, beside me, has not thought this through. Neither of us has. But we’re on the same page, willing to live in the moment, seeing where it takes us.
Terrance leads us to the student lounge, where people are grouped in couches or chairs, and there’s a half-eaten pizza on one of the tables.
I fish for the stack of photos in my bag. I have two shots to show him, different versions of the same man. The photo from when Caleb was a kid, standing beside his father, washing the car. The thinner man with thicker hair, smiling. And then the mugshot, printed off my computer. Hairline receding, slicked back. A little heavier. His face morose, his eyes flat. The corners turned down, just like Caleb’s. A close-up where you can see the lines etching around his mouth and eyes. Neither are recent, but I’m hoping Terrance sees something inside them. “Is this the man who stopped by when Caleb was here?”
But Terrance shakes his head automatically. “Sorry you came all this way, Jessa, but the guy who showed up here was much younger. Like my age.”
“Oh,” I say. I had been picturing someone Sean’s age, a man who had some sort of authority over Caleb.
Terrance’s fingertips push the pictures around, sifting through the arc of Caleb—little boy, teenager, his life out of sequence.
“Okay, we should go,” Max says, but Terrance is still staring at the photos. His fingers haven’t moved from the shot of the group of us at the ball game. Sitting in the bleachers, arms around each other, Hailey laughing, Craig Keegan talking to the guy Stan beside him, the field in the background.
Terrance brings the picture closer to his face, and I’m holding my breath. He puts it back down and taps the edge. “Him,” he says.
I stare at Terrance, confused.
And then he says it again. “Yeah, this is the dude.”
“Stan?” Stan, the guy who got us the tickets for the ball game when we all skipped school. Max had gotten those tickets from him. He’d met us at Penn Station. Craig Keegan had spent half the game asking Stan about the other types of things he could get him.
“How do you know him?” I ask Max. “How does Caleb know him?”
He shakes his head. “From baseball. Little League. When we were kids. He’s a year ahead of your brother. Goes to college in the city. I went to him for last-minute tickets, had to meet up with him to get them. We’re not really friends.”
