Margaret: Dude, come on.I really hope he’s not hiking the Appalachian Trail again. I don’t want to go months without talking to him, and I can’t see myself hiking out there in search of him. For one, there are bears, and for two, I’d obviously never find him, no matter how noble or romantic my intentions. Also, I have class.
As I walk away from his house, I realize his car isn’t in the driveway.
Duh, I think to myself.
And then: I’ll try again tomorrow.* * *I try again Tuesday. And Wednesday. No car, no Caleb. My roommates tell me to stop being a child and just call him, see when he’ll be home, and then talk to him in person, but I don’t.
Thursday, I go over again. I knock one million times and wait at least ten minutes, but there’s nothing so I finally unlock the door and go inside.
There’s mail all over the entryway. I’ve never seen mail there before. Caleb doesn’t leave mail on the floor. He’s not a mail-on-the-floor guy.
At last, standing in his house, I call him.
The call goes straight to voicemail. I try again. Same.
Slowly, carefully, I collect the mail from his floor. I sort it into a looks legit pile and a pretty sure this is junk pile, then put both piles on the kitchen table before heading upstairs, where I stand in the door to his bedroom for a long moment, afternoon light leaking through the curtains.
The bed is made. Everything is in place, though I notice his phone charger isn’t there.
And then, despite myself, I go in. I sit on his bed, and I feel half like an intruder and half like I’ve come home, and for the first time the thought strikes me that this could be the last time I’m in his house.
If he never wanted to speak to me again, the girl who cost him everything, I don’t know if I could blame him.
I lie on his bed and put my face right on his pillow, then inhale, and suddenly it feels like he’s there, like we’re lying naked and sweaty on his bed and we’re laughing about something, still casually tangled.
Smell isn’t like the other senses. When you see or hear something, those signals get filtered through a part of your brain called the thalamus, which then relays the signals on. Not smell. Our sense of smell is hooked right into the limbic system, the emotional response part of our brain.
I breathe in again, just for good measure, and it’s a gut punch.
Then I roll over, onto my back, and call him one more time.
Voicemail.
I lie there for a long time, thinking. I’m thinking that it’s probably super weird that I’m in his bed. I’m thinking that he hasn’t been here in days and I don’t know where he is. I think there’s a possibility he’s never coming back, though it seems remote.
And then, finally, I think of someone who’ll know. I pull out my phone. I do a single google search, take a deep breath, and hit the phone number.
“Loveless Brewing,” says a friendly female voice. “Tammy speaking.”
I did not have a plan for this.
“Hi, Tammy,” I say after a quick, awkward silence. “Would it be possible to speak with Seth Loveless?”
“I can check, sweetheart,” she says. “What’s this concerning?”
She sounds so nice that I don’t even mind being called sweetheart.
“It’s a whole long thing, really,” I say. “Can you just tell him it’s Thalia?”
“Of course, hon,” she says, and if I didn’t know better I’d say there was pity in her voice. “But he might be busy right now so chances are he’ll have to call you back.”
“That’s fine,” I say.
“One sec,” she says, and then the hold music starts, some instrumental version of the John Denver song Country Roads.
I start pacing, fully prepared to wait a while, but instead the music clicks off after about thirty seconds.
“Thalia?” a familiar-ish voice says. “Oh, thank fuck. I’m nearly out of room for bookshelves.”Chapter Fifty-OneCalebI stand back and survey my work, folding my arms over my chest as I do.
Not bad. They still need to be painted, and I don’t think Seth’s walls are perfectly even because the very top of the right side has about a half-inch gap between the wood and the wall, but it’ll do.
I should ask Seth if he still has any of the paint he used to paint that wall, I think. That would be the easiest way to match it and make them look like built-ins —
The key turns in the front door, and out of habit, I glance at the clock.
Then I frown, because Seth is hardly ever home before six and it’s four-thirty.
“ — That every bag had one single poison M&M in it, but you couldn’t learn how to tell the poison M&M until you were ten,” Seth is saying, and I frown harder because whoever he’s telling the story about Eli’s M&M lie to, it’s not one of my brothers.