The day of Thanksgiving is more of the same, but I get through it, and that feels like the main thing.
Mom cooks for twice the amount of people at the table, even after Vanessa and Stephen's emergency grocery run she still forgets the gravy, and we all eat until we feel physically sick.
Nobody mentions Josh, or the article, which comes as a huge relief. It means I don't have to figure out how to explain anything, how to tell the truth about my own experiences while making sure my words don't negate the validity of someone else's. It means I don't have to talk about how much I miss him, or how that doesn't make sense now I know what a horrible person he was. And it means I don't have to remind everyone that, like some horrific curse, this is the second death our family has been shaken by in five years.
I stay home for the rest of the weekend. Classes don't start again until Monday, and the longer I stay here the less appealing the thought of going back to my empty dorm room becomes. I haven't heard from Elliot, Fazia, or Adam since being here, but I know they're spending the holiday with their families—Elliot with his latest foster family. If I head back, I'll only be alone to wallow in everything I'm feeling, so I might as well stick around.
"Morgan."
The voice catches me on Saturday morning, when I'm sitting at the dining table and halfway through a bowl of Vanessa's weird ultra-healthy cereal. She and Stephen are out on a run; they invited me to join, but I wasn't exaggerating when I said I'd rather take my chances with the early death.
So I'm alone when Mom pokes her head through the kitchen door.
"Hey," I say. "What's up?"
She steps into the room and approaches the dining table. Before she says anything, I can tell there's something on her mind. "Do you have plans for today?"
I shake my head. "No, why?"
"I only ask because I thought you might be seeing Hanna, or something. She must be back for the holiday too, right? But anyway... I wanted to ask you a favor."
The mention of Hanna catches me off guard. I don't know why I haven't thought about it, but of course she would be home for Thanksgiving too. No matter how busy she is at college, with GXRL and her hordes of friends and everything else going on, she would never pass up the opportunity to go home and spend the time with her mom. It means she's only a ten-minute drive away.
"Oh, she had a lot on," I say, by way of an excuse. Mom still doesn't know that we haven't been on speaking terms for months, and I plan to keep it like that for as long as possible. "I'll see her when we get back. But yeah, I can help out. What do you need?"
She pauses. "I was thinking about starting to clean out the basement."
This stops me in my tracks.
"You are?"
"I know I've been putting it off for a long while, but... I think it's time. If we tackle it together, maybe we can face it."
On the surface, it doesn't seem like a big deal. But to anyone in this house the implications are obvious and near earth-shattering. Because the basement is—or was—Caleb's territory. It was the space he managed to wrangle after guilt-tripping my parents about the fact his bedroom was the smallest. Until I was about twelve, it was used solely for storage, but then one day Mom and Dad were struck by inspiration to throw away all the random unnecessary crap and transform it into a space we could actually use. Somewhere along the way, they'd agreed to throw in an extra couch and our old TV and a twenty-year-old pool table I hadn't even known we owned, and Caleb claimed the basement as his own personal man cave.
When his friends came over after school, they would disappear for hours down there, only emerging in search of snacks or the bathroom. And Caleb was so popular he could fill it with different friends every day of the week. All through high school, it was the place to be.
My parents had plans to renovate it again once Caleb went to college. But it wasn't a major priority, so they didn't get to it in his first semester.
Then, of course, he didn't come home at all—and it's lay untouched ever since.
Dad's ventured down there a few times when we've needed stuff from storage, but for the most part it's been a no-go zone. Not because it's plagued by sadness; in fact, it was the setting of some of Caleb's happiest memories. But even though we've known we'll have to do it eventually, clearing it out and repurposing the space has always felt like a step too far.
The fact that Mom is considering it now is a sign that things have changed.
"Are you sure?" I ask carefully.
She nods. There's a certainty to the motion that I don't expect, and it offers me the reassurance I'm looking for. "Yeah, I am."
And that's it: the day's plans are settled. I clear away my cereal bowl and head upstairs to get changed out of my pajamas. When I head downstairs, Mom's already got the basement door open, and she's standing at the top of the stairs looking down. The significance of the moment is obvious.
She glances over her shoulder at me. "You ready?"
I nod. "Yeah."
I follow her down, taking it one slow step at a time. It's not a dark or creepy basement at all—the opposite, in fact, with a new bulb so glaringly bright it makes me squint at first. It is cold, though. Mom turns up the thermostat when she gets to the final step, but it'll take a while to heat up, and a shiver down my spine gets there first.
The basement looks exactly as I remember it. There's a three-seater couch in a questionable tartan pattern, on which the middle seat sags well below the two edges. It faces the TV, which rests on a makeshift stand, constructed from various sturdy books and boxes and a flat sheet of wood. The pool table sits in another corner, buried now under a thick layer of dust. Everything else is just storage: cardboard boxes stacked pretty much from floor to ceiling. It's nothing special, but being here still takes my breath away.
Because I can feel Caleb here, somehow.
I'm almost convinced that if I turn around, I'll see his perfectly mussed blond hair, the sharp blue eyes every girl at our high school used to swoon over, his favorite worn-to-death Red Sox jersey. He'll reach down and ruffle my hair like he always used to, and he'll laugh and tell me to get a grip when he notices my eyes are getting misty.
But he doesn't, of course.
It's just me and Mom down here.
I hear her take a deep breath. I'm on high alert, ready to step in for comfort if it all gets too much, but she keeps it together. Takes a few slow steps deeper into the room. Looks around to take everything in.
"I always hated that couch."
It's not what I expect to hear, but it pulls a smile onto my face. "Yeah?"
"When your dad brought it back from that yard sale, I wanted to kill him," she says. "I told Caleb he could have a couch down here if he could find one and get it here for less than fifty dollars. That was supposed to be an impossible task. The two of them weren't supposed to show up with that hideous thing stuffed into the back of the car."
"I didn't know you told him that."
"The fifty-dollar rule?" she says, to which I nod. "Yeah. I thought I was so smart for thinking of that. I mean, I know it's possible to get a couch for that money, but that wasn't supposed to be the difficult part. Caleb was fourteen at the time—short of him getting his friends to help out and carry one all the way back home, he didn't have any way of transporting a couch back here. Or at least he wouldn't have, if his father hadn't offered to help him out."
My smile widens. "Wait, that wasn't part of the plan?"
"No!" she says emphatically. "I thought it was obvious! I didn't think I'd have to give him specific instructions: do not help your son bring a Goddamn awful couch home so he can junk up the basement more than necessary. But as it turns out, I definitely did. Worst moment of oversight of my life."
We're both laughing now, and the longer I look at the burgundy-and-yellow tartan, complete with questionable stains on several seat cushions, the funnier it seems to get. It's obvious why it cost fifty dollars; what's less obvious is why someone would've paid full price for it in the first place. But I remember Caleb being so proud of himself for finding it. It may have been the world's most awful couch, but it was also his couch. And that was all that mattered.
"I had no idea," I tell Mom. "I also didn't know it bothered you that much."
She lets out a defeated groan. "I mean, it's out of my sight down here, so I guess I can't complain too much. But that wasn't what I was thinking at the time. Your dad will tell you that."
"And it hasn't grown on you since then?"
She gives me a look, but then glances back toward the couch, studying it for a few seconds longer. "Maybe a little," she admits. "But only because Caleb had such a soft spot for it. We can't throw it out now, can we? It'd be like betraying him. It's only fair that the couch lives on—and the more I hate the sight of it, the happier it would make him."
"You're right," I tell her. "It has to stay."
There's a beat of silence, a window of quiet in this private space. It's been a while since we talked properly about Caleb. He's not a taboo subject in himself—after the initial shock wore off, we all made an effort to keep him in everyday conversation, because even though he wasn't around anymore it didn't mean he wasn't part of the family.
But since the spring, when Josh died and I came back home, I don't recall anyone talking about him. Not to me, at least. Probably because I was in such a fragile state, and my family didn't want to risk setting me off all over again. I was scared of that, too.
But here, now, it's nice to let his name flow freely again. It's like a weight off my shoulders.
I feel more at peace when Mom hands me a bucket of cleaning supplies, and together we get started on the mammoth task of cleaning this place up. There's a lot to do—mainly because of the years of dust that have accumulated—but it doesn't carry the sadness I thought it would. I feel Caleb here, in the very fabric of the place—and yet it doesn't make me miss him any more than I have done for the last four years. In fact, it feels like progress.
I've been dreading coming home for Thanksgiving, because I assumed it could only make things worse.
But I'm starting to question whether that's ever been true at all.
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Here we are! A little trip down memory lane and a look back at Morgan's late brother. It's weird that I have so much love for him as a character when he doesn't feature in either timeline. What do you guys think? Like him, or don't know enough about him to make a judgement?
I've mentioned this many times, but I'm ahead on writing the manuscript vs my uploads, and right now I'm writing the FINAL EVER chapter of this story. It's been two years in the making, so it'll be weird to finish! But I'm very excited for you guys to see what's to come. Let's just say the tension ramps up from here on out...
Until next time...
- Leigh