Page 10 of Fragments of the Lost
I took one step closer. “How about now?”
He scrunched up his nose. “Still nothing.”
“Why don’t you put your hot glasses back on then?”
He lunged off his seat for me, missed as I sidestepped, and I was laughing. He caught me around the waist, pulled my body flush with his. “Got you,” he said, and his eyes searched my face, his smile stretching wider.
“My contacts were bothering me. Those are emergency only,” he explained.
“So put them back on.”
“Oh no, no no no, you do not get to see me in my glasses until you definitely, one hundred percent, have fallen in love with me.”
I froze in his arms, and he seemed to sense something then. If only he had understood it was that moment itself. That moment, that insight, that vulnerability that did me in.I felt his breath on my face. His lips gently pressed to mine. He didn’t make me say it, and didn’t say anything back. He stepped away, put the thick-rimmed glasses back over his nose, so his eyes looked so large, so freaking blue, and went back to his work.
It was later that night, when he told me. When he was dropping me back off at home, and the sky was dark, and the heat in the car was running, and I was bundled in my jacket with a hat pulled down over my ears. “I love you too, you know,” he said, like he’d been thinking about it. His voice was low, and his words hung in the space between us.
“Too?” I asked.
“Yeah, too,” he said.
“You’re doing it all out of order,” I said, but I was smiling, my whole body thrumming.
“Doesn’t mean it’s not true,” he said, unbuckling his seatbelt and leaning toward me.
I whispered it to him then, like I was the first one to say it, in the moment before his lips met mine.
“I knew it,” he said, and the memory of his smile warmed me as I walked to my front door in the cold winter night.
—
I shift the contents of his top drawer around, checking again—nothing. Next I check the surfaces of his dressers, the backpack in the corner, still filled with a few notebooks from the last day at school. The glasses are a part of him that only I had been allowed to see.
And now they’re gone. Missing.
I didn’t hear Eve coming up the steps. Didn’t feel her standing at the top of the steps. Didn’t notice until I spun around and saw her standing there, watching.
“What are you looking for, Jessa?” she asks, not unkindly, but not gently, either. She has no need to be gentle with me any longer.
I tell his mother. “I can’t find his glasses.” But she doesn’t seem to get the implication. She does not understand the significance for me. Because there’s always this hope, somewhere in my mind, that this is all some huge misunderstanding. And the glasses seem to support this fact. That there’s something we are all missing, that is so obvious, that I am bound to uncover.
She ignores my comment about the glasses. “You’ve only just started,” she says, and I nod. They could be anywhere, she’s implying. Keep working, she’s implying.
But it’s dinnertime on Saturday, and my parents expect me home, and I tell her this.
She considers, nods once, relieving me of my penance.
“When should I expect you tomorrow?” she asks.
Tomorrow, Sunday, there’s still so much to do. “In the morning,” I say. “As soon as I’m up.” And when I leave his room, she pulls the door shut behind me.
—
There’s a mystery, if you can call it that, at the heart of Caleb’s last day. It’s why his mother blames me. It’s why I come here, letting her blame me, in the hope that I will find out the truth. It’s why people don’t quite know what to say to me—whether to feel sympathy or something else. It’s a mystery that keeps me tethered to this room, this hope that if I keep at it, I will finally and completely understand.
Because I don’t. And it grates at me. This is the first thing, and it’s abigthing, for which I cannot get a clear answer. And I worry that the moment will always sit incomplete. There will be no resolution that will let me move on. I can see it, even now, as if I am ten years older, looking back.
And that is the question of where Caleb was going, and why he was at my cross-country meet to begin with.
