Fragments of the Lost

by Megan Miranda

  “So, you found him,” she says, when I am firmly on solid ground. She doesn’t hand me my coat. She doesn’t come any closer. She has my phone in her hand, but she’s locked out. I wonder what she was looking for.

  “I didn’t,” I say, coughing into my fist. I am shaking so hard I can’t feel my toes. Everything numbs. But, I think, shaking is good. I remember this from science—if you’re still shivering, you’re fine. Maybe not fine. Maybe just okay. Still, I’m okay.

  “You’re a terrible liar,” she says.

  The rain has let up to a drizzle, but it coats everything, and I’m soaked through anyway, and the river continues to rage behind me.

  Finally, her voice tears through the silence. “Caleb!” she yells.

  But only the river answers.

  “Is he over there, then?”

  I want to tell her she’s too late, that he’s gone, that she’s lost her hold on him, but I also want to give him time. I don’t know whether she’ll call the police, set up a roadblock. I don’t know what she really wants, underneath it all.

  “I’ve done everything for you,” she calls, but there’s no one to hear. “And you would just leave us?”

  “I know what you did,” I say, stepping closer, taking my jacket from the ground. “It wasn’t for him.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.

  I think of what I told Caleb earlier, that there was another way, if only he would risk it. “I know that perjury is a crime,” I say. “I know that lying under oath, and sending an innocent person to jail, is punishable with jail time.”

  She stares at me, her eyes wide. She does not know her son discovered this. She doesn’t realize the field is even now.

  Her eyes drift behind her, to everything circling around us. I know what she sees. Slippery rocks, a raging river, a girl reeking of desperation. “You look so cold,” she says. “You shouldn’t be in that water, Jessa.” Except her words carry the weight of a threat.

  But I stare into her eyes, hold her gaze. We are almost exactly the same size. “This time,” I say, “it wouldn’t be an accident.”

  And I see the coiled anger come to the surface and then sink back down. I don’t believe she’s evil. I want to believe she is not a psychopath, or a killer of teenagers. She is, however, protecting something. Her son, yes, but also herself. And if I threaten that, really threaten it, I’m not entirely certain what she’ll do.

  But neither of us will get the chance to find out. Because I hear my name. I hear him yelling it. And my heart flips, my body turns to the sound.

  But at the last minute, just as I’m opening my mouth to call back—Max, I’m here—I feel the world begin to tip. As if I’m leaning too far, because she’s got me in a grip, and she’s pushing me back, holding me so I’m practically leaning over the river, close to the waterfall. “You let him leave,” she says, and the loss is agony, written across her face. And I think that maybe I am wrong, after all. That there is nothing more potent than the power to grasp for something just as you feel it slipping away from your grip. That it’s an impulse in all of us, to fight for the thing that we are losing, even if we’ve already lost.

  She lets go.

  And I fall.

  —

  It only takes me a moment to get my bearings, to think Just plant your feet down, like you did before. Except something’s wrong. The current keeps forcing me down. This is not just a moving current, but a violent one. The current from the waterfall churns the water around me, and though I poke my head through the surface, I cannot catch my breath.

  I picture her on the shoreline, saying, as Max comes into view:

  I got here, and she was gone.

  I found her things.

  Too long in the water.

  She’s gone.

  So I stop fighting so hard against what the current is trying to do. I let go. I let it take me. And after some time, I find my footing downstream, and am able to push my head above water, suck in a breath, just as the current knocks my feet out from under me again. I try once more, standing, and reaching the blade of Caleb’s knife to the shore, wedging it into the surrounding roots before I lose my balance. Locking myself in place as I grip onto a low branch with my other hand. I suck in a gulp of air, then turn to see the light in the corner of my eye.

  It’s not only Max on the shore, now, beside Eve. He’s led some people my way. A few rangers, with radios, one lowering himself into the water already upstream, while Eve looks on.

  I call Max’s name. Everyone freezes. And when the world starts up again, he’s running.

  —

  The first thing I feel, when I’m capable of feeling again, is the warmth of another, sitting beside me in the back of an ambulance. The first words I process, from the person sitting beside me, with his arms around me, trying to transfer more heat: “Somehow,” he says, “I knew you wouldn’t wait.”

  They’re telling Max he has to leave the ambulance, but he isn’t having it, and eventually, they relent. The doors close.

  When I’m sure no one is listening, I press my face close to his, and I tell him the secret. “I found him,” I say.

  It’s the first Monday of winter break, and the doorbell rings. My parents are picking up Julian from the train station again, and I’m almost as excited to see him as they are.

  But this doorbell is not them. I walk evenly down the steps, and peer through the peephole of the front door, and I’m not surprised to see him there.

  I’ve left him a letter.

  Rather, I’ve left Carlton Evers a letter, delivered through the lawyer of the trust.

  I knew it would get to Caleb, eventually, when he came back for the money.

  —

  And so I’m not surprised when he shows back up, after weeks of rumors, standing on my front porch.

  He looks, suddenly, like an adult. I see Mia in the car behind him. I’d heard he came back to his house, when his mother got arrested for the concealment of a body. Caleb said there were no other options, and maybe he thought that was true, but I saw another way. I took action.

  I couldn’t live with someone else’s secrets like that. And I don’t think Eve would have let me live, knowing I held her secrets in my hands.

  Caleb had told me about the cameras. About the fact that he was driving, yes, but I knew where they were heading. I knew they’d taken Sean’s car to sell, too, and that the cameras would show his mother following behind him. A sliver of evidence, to get the investigation moving. I didn’t know what would happen next. He said it was self-defense, but she still covered up a death.

  I didn’t go to see him, when I heard he was back. I had said what needed to be said, done what needed to be done. I had already found what I’d been looking for.

  So now he stands here, the car full of luggage, and I know he’s leaving for good this time.

  “I came to apologize,” he says.

  I run through the list of things he could apologize for: lying to me, leaving me—twice—letting me believe he was dead. “And to thank you. You were right. There was another way.”

  “I told you there was. You needed to trust me.”

  “You’re right,” he says. “I did. I do. I don’t know if you can understand this, but I had been betrayed by everyone who I trusted, and it spilled over to you. You didn’t deserve that. Or the things I said to you.”

  I accept his apology, but his words linger. This lack of trust, filtering to the rest of his life. And look where it got us.

  “What’s going to happen? To you?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I don’t know yet. But I’ve been talking to the lawyers about testifying. About deals. There are different possibilities.” They haven’t charged him with anything yet, so I had to hope there was a chance they would not.

  I nod. There’s unfinished business, and my dad had told me this could take months, years, to play out. I heard, through my parents, that, since Caleb’s return with his father, they were add
ing to the list of his mother’s charges—charges of perjury, at the very least, from the case years ago. It would take time to resolve, I knew.

  Police had been searching for Sean’s body in the Pine Barrens, but they’d yet to find anything, and his mother wasn’t talking.

  For Caleb, it was just beginning. But this part wasn’t my story, anymore.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, looking at the car beyond.

  “With my dad,” he says.

  I had heard, through school, through rumors and the spin everyone put on the story, that Caleb, now officially an adult, would be granted temporary custody of Mia. That the money would still be his, but that there was a death certificate to undo, a mess of paperwork to sort through. And so Caleb is, in a sense, still a ghost. Existing neither here nor there.

  But the person on my porch is real. And I remember, again, that I loved him once.

  “Come in,” I say. “I have some of your things.”

  I lead him upstairs, where I’ve kept the fragments that led me to him. The shoebox, with the D on it, the photos of him and his father, from years earlier. The Swiss Army knife, found in his attic, that I kept as I swam through the river. The seashell. His house key. And last, the pictures of us.

  “Jessa,” he starts, and how can anyone begin to even say it? To sum it all up, in a box? In a sentence?

  How can I absolve him, and myself, for all of it?

  “I know,” I say.

  You know you’re near when you can hear them.

  The gulls.

  They call loudly, from the distance, in the summer.

  In the winter, there are fewer of them, and the sound is fainter, but they’re still there. Coming in from the north, to replace the ones who fly south. A permanent fixture.

  I crack the car window, out of habit, like I’m waiting for them. And when I hear the first call, I know I’m there.

  —

  I’m at the beach, and I’m alone, because it’s still cold. It’s just me and the birds, and I don’t mind it.

  I wrap my jacket tighter around myself as the wind blows up off the ocean, the sand getting caught in my hair.

  In the distance, I see a single shape, running from the direction of the pink hotel. He’s not the most graceful, and he looks like he’s about to keel over, but he keeps a steady, even pace. He slows when he approaches, the sound of his steps growing louder, along with his breathing.

  “I thought I broke you of beach runs,” I call over my shoulder.

  He holds up his finger, bends over, rests his hands on his thighs to catch his breath. “I’m determined not to lose next time,” he says.

  I laugh. “Lose to who?” Because Caleb is leaving. I know they’ve seen each other, because they live back to back. I’m sure they had their own things to work out.

  “To you, Jessa,” he says. “What, you scared to race again next summer?”

  “No, I’m not scared,” I say.

  “Anyway,” he says, “baseball season starts soon. And I really do need to stay in shape.” He looks back down the beach. “God, that run really is the devil.”

  “I know it is,” I say, “and it doesn’t really get any easier, for the record.”

  “Noted, and noticed. What are you doing today?” he asks, changing the subject, but I’m not ready for it. Not for this question. Not for an answer.

  “My big plan is to do this,” I say, gesturing to the beach. “Oh, and Julian’s coming home tonight. So we’ll probably have family time.”

  He waits for a few minutes, then says, “I’d join you in the whole watching-the-ocean-and-thinking-about-life thing, but I’m kind of gross right now. So, I’ll see you?”

  I smile over my shoulder. “See you,” I say.

  I watch him walk back over the dunes, to the wooden steps.

  In the next few months, he’ll be hearing from colleges. In less than a year, he’ll be gone. I don’t know how much time we have. I don’t know what will happen between then and now. I don’t know whether it’s worth the risk.

  I don’t know whether I can ever trust myself with someone again, whether I’ll feel the need to hold back, pull back, always wondering if I’m getting the truth.

  But I do know certain things about Max. And I know things about myself now, too.

  He looks back once, and I wave, caught, not bothering to hide it. He laughs as he walks away.

  It feels like the start of something here. Still, I worry we’re already too close to an end.

  Except maybe it goes farther back, our beginning. Maybe it was a month ago, on the side of the river, hidden by the trees. Or maybe the start was that day over the summer in a field, looking for Saturn. Or the moment on the bridge back in the spring, when he held me, and I fell. Maybe it’s even earlier. Him in my kitchen, with my brother, when I gave him a drink.

  No, my brother said, in warning.

  Yes, I think.

  It’s three days after Christmas, and the sky is a clear, deceptive blue. There’s no snow on the ground. It could be spring, if not for the trees missing the leaves. It could be summer, if I lie on my back, looking straight up.

  Which I’m now doing.

  Julian looks at me funny from the sliding glass doors to the kitchen, but he doesn’t say anything. He knocks on the window, holds up a mug of hot chocolate, offering. But I shake my head and go back to the sky.

  My phone dings beside me. It’s an email from a store, no signed name. But I feel the smile growing. I can’t stop it.

  It’s a gift for an app that’s less than two dollars. It’s the perfect gift.

  It’s a night sky app. I download it onto my phone and hold it toward the daytime sky, scanning it across the horizon. And my screen lights up with all the things I can’t see, that are there anyway.

  “What are you doing?” Julian asks.

  “Look,” I say, and he tips his head to the sky. “Perseus.”

  “Um,” he says.

  “You can’t see it,” I say. “But it’s there. It’s still there.”

  “If you say so, Jessa,” he says.

  I catch Julian staring up at the sky, his eyes squinting, and I say, “Hey, Julian, was it worth it? All the years of baseball games and practices and clinics?”

  He tilts his head, confused.

  “I mean, are you happy?”

  He grins. “Well, I do hate it when I lose. Or when I have a crappy outing. But yeah, Jessa, I love the game. Being on a team. The good days. Yes, it was worth it.” Then he laughs. “You know, no one’s ever asked me that before.”

  “Huh,” I say.

  “Don’t stay out too long,” he says. “It’s colder than it seems.”

  Julian closes the door, but he leaves me the hot chocolate. I sigh, and I take it.

  Then I sit up and send Max a message: I hear you can see Saturn tonight.

  This is a lie. I don’t know whether you can see Saturn tonight. But I’ve made up my mind, and I hope this means that he has, too.

  He writes back: I know just the place.

  —

  I don’t even wait for dusk. I know it’s coming, but I’m too early. Still, I bundle up in layers. A jacket, a scarf, a hat, gloves. “I’m taking the car,” I call to Julian, and I don’t give him a chance to complain.

  I pull into the parking lot, empty except for one other car—old, broken in, familiar. I have to go through a group of trees before the field, and at first I don’t see him.

  But then I do. He’s lying on his back between the goalposts, holding his phone to the sky, just as I was doing earlier.

  He sits up when he hears my footsteps, and the look on his face almost kills me. The unrestrained smile, holding back nothing.

  “You’re here early,” he says.

  “So are you,” I say.

  I’m all nervous, anxious, contained energy, and it has nowhere to go. And so I don’t wait, not any longer. I’m sure this time. It’s not the moment, or the setting, or the fact that we are missing so
meone else. It’s him. It’s Max.

  I close the gap between us, and I kiss him. I feel him smiling in the second before he kisses me back. His hand at the side of my face, his fingers in my hair. Everything that makes Max Max.

  When I pull back, I feel like the world should be changed somehow, but it’s eerily the same. The world is silent. Max is silent. Even the wind has died down.

  “Everything is so still,” I say, feeling the calm settle through me as well, now that I’m here, sitting beside him—decided on something.

  He looks off into the distance. “Right now we’re hurtling through space at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. We’re practically flying.”

  I turn my head to face him, scrunch up my nose, laugh. “Why do you know that?”

  He grins, cuts his eyes to me, to see my reaction. “I have a thing about space. I’m thinking about studying astronomy.”

  I can’t stop the smile that spreads across my face. I lean closer. “What else don’t I know about you, Max?”

  “Wait and see.”

  Thank you to everyone who helped take this project from idea to finished book:

  My agent, Sarah Davies, for all the guidance and support on each and every project.

  My editor, Emily Easton, whom I’ve had the privilege of working with on six books now!

  Phoebe Yeh, Samantha Gentry, and the entire team at Crown Books for Young Readers/Random House. I’m so fortunate to work with you all.

  My critique partners, who are always willing to brainstorm ideas and talk through plots. Thank you to Megan Shepherd, Ashley Elston, Elle Cosimano, and Romily Bernard for the insightful feedback, support, and friendship.

  And last, as always, thank you to my family.

  Megan Miranda is the acclaimed author of The Safest Lies and the adult national bestseller All the Missing Girls. She has also written several other young adult and adult novels, including Fracture, Vengeance, Hysteria, Soulprint, and The Perfect Stranger. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children. You can follow Megan on Facebook at @AuthorMeganMiranda, or on Instagram and Twitter at @MeganLMiranda.