Page 9 of Fragments of the Lost
There’s one from when we were still just friends, sitting at the beach. I have my cover-up on, my hair is wild, my nose is sunburnt, I can feel the sand gritty beneath my toes. August, that first summer, which the date on the back confirms. Caleb held the camera away from us and leaned in close, telling me to smile, but in the photo I’m mostly squinting against the glare.
I knew that day,he’d said, pointing to this picture on his wall.
I smiled to myself.
I knew before. The first day he sat beside me and took my soda, the flip of my stomach, the way he made me feel like I was someone worth knowing.
Next there’s the shot my mom took before the Homecoming dance, the first picture of us as a couple. We were practically glowing, smiles so wide I could still remember the feeling—how I couldn’t wait to get out of the house, how I was just about bursting, something fighting its way to the surface.
Caleb is—was—a collector. Which was basically about half a step from a scrapbooker. He kept everything. Ticket stubs from our dates, old graded assignments, notes passed back and forth. So it shouldn’t surprise me to find the months and years written on the backs of the pictures. Still, there’s something almost desperate about it as the dates progress, the way they’re faint, written in the corners, as if he knew he would one day look through them as memories. As if he could feel, even back then, the gradual unraveling of us. Trying to hold on to the moment, even as he could feel it slipping. A date scribbled on the back, a piece of sticky tack, Caleb pushing the photo onto the gray wall, standing back to look it over.
Next to come down is the photo from Halloween, where Hailey and I kept up our yearly tradition of dressing as a famous set of twins, even though we looked nothing alike (per the school rules, we had to remain in dress code, so we had to get creative). We had gone as the twins fromThe Shining,since Hailey was in the midst of a Stephen King kick. Never mind that Hailey was at least four inches taller than me, or that her eyes were brown to my blue, or that she took after her father’s side of the family, from Puerto Rico, her skin a deeper shade of olive, while I was incapable of tanning. Hailey curled her long dark hair to make it look shorter, and I tucked my blond hair into a brown wig, and we’d both slipped a barrette into the side. We’d found the matching dresses at a thrift shop and tied a bow around each. In the photo, Caleb stands between us in a cape, his button-down shirt open up top to reveal the letterS,the blue of his Superman uniform. (There was nothing in the dress code about capes, he claimed.)
Then the one at a Christmas party, our eyes sparkling like the lights around us. Next, the ones of us sitting in this room, when I started to spend more time here than at my own house. There’s one including Max. One with Caleb’s little sister, Mia, on my lap. I freeze, thinking I should leave this for her instead, but no. I keep going. Keep moving. They all go facedown on the carpeted floor, the dates a timeline that I could order, piecing together our relationship, like a bell curve.
I watch as my hair grows longer, my smile more comfortable, how we slide together, our arms entwined, a second nature. I pull them all off the wall, one by one, flip them facedown in a pile. These don’t need to be boxed up, but I can’t bring myself to throw them out, either.
His mother wants his personal items in a separate box. But this isn’t something I’d want her to sort through on her own. These, I decide, are mine.
This room is full of me. She said it herself. I can’t cut these down the middle, an arm on my side, a hand on his. There’s no easy way to untangle the images.
The pictures stop long before the end. We go to a baseball game, we take a picture in this room, sitting on this bed, with him kissing my cheek, holding the camera, me scrunching up my nose while laughing. We go on a hike. And then they stop. I wonder if there was a moment up here where he knew. Just like the beginning. Whether he knew first. Whether I did. If it was a moment for him, where he could see it clearly. Or whether, like for me, it was a feeling I didn’t recognize at first, sitting in the pit of my stomach, waking me up at night—gently gnawing, a slight unease. Not a bang, not a fight, but a slow and inevitable slide.
I flip over the last picture, the one from the hike, and there’s the date again. June of this year. Five months ago. My name below.Jessa Whitworth, Delaware Water Gap.As if this were merely a file already, a piece for a museum archive. As if he knew someday, somewhere, these would belong to someone else.
Once they’re all down, I flip over the stack as I go to slide them into my bag, and there we are again—at the beach.
Now I want to ask him,What did you know, Caleb?That a year later, you’d be gone and I’d be peeling all evidence of you and me off the wall? That your mother would hate me, and Max wouldn’t look me in the eye, and your baby sister wouldn’t say a word to me, no matter how many times I said hello?
Salt water helps you float,you said that first day we met at the beach, when I told you I couldn’t swim well. That I didn’t like the feeling of the current in the ocean. That I had this irrational fear of being swept out to sea, and that nobody would ever find me.
You laughed.
Caleb, youlaughed.
After the pictures come down, the walls are bare, except for a few pieces of sticky tack, and the ticking clock above his desk, which was more a piece of football memorabilia than a functioning clock, since you couldn’t really make out the numbers. The room looks like it did that first day, when I came up here and he told me it was the bunker. It feels like forever ago. It feels like a moment ago. One year together, a bell curve in photos.
There’s a version of me and Caleb that fell apart. There’s a version of him that braced his arm against the doorjamb, banning me from his life from then on. There’s a version of me who walked away. There’s a version of him who changed, grabbed his keys, left this room for the last time—
But right now I want this part of him. I want to find him here, see him at the moment when everything was right.
I know what I’m looking for. A navy blue, hard case, usually kept in the top drawer of his desk. But it’s not where I thought it would be. It’s not where it’s always been.
It’s almost desperate, the way I’m ignoring everything, wasting time in search of this one item: it’s a case for these generic black glasses that he’s had forever.
They had smudged lenses that he’d have to rub against the hem of his shirt constantly. He’d only wear them at home, even though he would sometimes complain about his contacts bothering him. Sometimes I wondered if some days he wasn’t wearing his contacts either, if that accounted for the faraway look, the things he didn’t notice about me, that he ignored. I like to think it was that, at first: that he just couldn’t see it.
But he hated these glasses. Hated wearing them, and hated being seen in them.
I caught him in them the first time I came up to the bunker unannounced. It was just before Christmas break, I remember, because he was working on a history paper due the last day of class, which he claimed was ruining the holiday spirit. He had his headphones on when I knocked, and he hadn’t heard me. I cracked open the door, careful to inch it open, call his name—give him time to react. But he was sitting at his computer and had a textbook out in front of him. He had a thick pair of glasses on, and they turned his expression solemn, his face more boyish. The music drifted faintly across the room.
It took a moment for him to register my presence, and then he spun his chair toward me, swiped the glasses off his face in one quick motion, as if I’d caught him doing something embarrassing, like I had stumbled upon him writing in a diary.
It was the moment I fell. When I knew it was more than a crush—that I was drawn by more than the charisma, the smile, the way he made me feel like I was someone worth desiring. No, it was this. This moment. I almost said it right then, was sure he could see it in my stunned expression, but his gaze had gone watery, and he said, “I’m pretending that I can see you right now, but I totally can’t.”
“At all?” I asked.
“I mean, I can see like the shape of you,” and he ran his hand in the air, tracing my outline. A shiver ran through me. “But I can’t tell if you’re, like, smiling or laughing or totally appalled right now.”
