Hailey
Caleb was gone at first light. At least, I thought he was.
I woke up face down on a beat-up mattress and breathed in the mildew. Strangely enough, I'd slept better here than most nights at my dad's. The worn out, broken-legged bunks felt realer to me than my old bedroom. I guess comfort was a matter of place and people, but with Caleb missing I couldn’t find any calm in that empty house.
I tried not to freak out first thing. Losing it five miles into the trek down to Charlottesville wouldn't do either of us any good. If Caleb had been around, he would've told me to keep it together.
But he wasn't, so I couldn't. Even with my cut up fingers crossed, nothing good could come from a missing a boy with cracked ribs, a bullet wound, and a ten-foot drop between him and the ground.
I wondered if my mom felt like this, the panicked emptiness of starting a search and rescue for someone inevitably missing. But at least I had her left to worry about. Caleb didn’t have anyone. I’d watched him flicker in and out of being conscious of his losses over the last day.
One minute he'd look brittle enough to break, and the next he'd smile and laugh like nothing was wrong. Like he hadn't lost anyone. Like it wasn't because of me. But the shadow of my dad’s murders was always there, lingering behind Caleb’s silence, behind his sadness.
The wind came rattling through the tree house and I followed the gusts outside, my body less than happy about me pushing it this hard, this fast, this early.
Rolling down a hill in a trash can left me a little more than sore and a little less than broken, but lucky none the less. I tip toed to the outside porch, wary of each creak and groan in the floorboards.
Not too keen on gambling my life on two feet, I hit the floor on all fours and slugged myself over the splinters until I reached the edge of the ladder. Sure enough, Caleb’s scuffed up Chucks were sprawled out at the base of the trunk peaking under the cuffs of his blue jeans.
From the ankles down, nothing was visibly broken. I called out to him, but when silence answered, hurricane freak-out kicked the butterflies in my stomach into chaos.
Common sense said to climb down to Caleb, to climb towards the truth, but a new fear had its teeth lockjaw tight around my throat. Maybe he was fine. Maybe he wasn’t. The terror of too many what if’s paralyzed me, pinning my arms and legs in place for too long.
I stayed still, my face flat against the wood while I lost the fight to angry conscience. I looked down at the big beautiful oak tree standing between me and Caleb, and willed my body to conquer the space. There was an odd peace in ignorance for a sliver of time, but it didn't last long. It never does.
My feet hit the ground before my head was ready to, but I walked over to a very pale Caleb despite myself. Someone had bundled him up in a brown leather bomber jacket during the night.
It only could've been Jack, and knowing that made me a little more than uneasy. But the air was too calm for Jack to be hiding somewhere in the shadows. Caleb was sleeping peacefully—all signs of a better day ahead than our last.
He looked different this morning—a good kind of different, like something had settled in him that hadn't had the chance to in a long while. The light coming in from the east lit up his always-rosy cheeks bright enough to sweep away the shadows.
Maybe this was the kind of peace he'd had before everything went south. Before dealing with my dad, losing his mom, or knowing me.
Somewhere in the middle of all the sticks, stones, and rivers in these woods were a thousand roads for me to run away to. A thousand ways out of a situation I should've wanted to run from.
To the outside world, leaving was a matter of telling myself that Caleb was the man the news made him out to be—violent, dangerous, everything opposite the truth. But if I left all of this, chances were I'd walk right back into my wonder-less life, where no one realized I needed a Wonderland to not feel alone.
I followed Caleb across that train station 'cause it meant I didn't have to board another train by myself, or face my dad. I’d needed the change, I’d needed the company, but I wish I'd known the cost.
Caleb shuffled around under his jacket until the sleeves slipped off his scrawny shoulders. The air on the ground was 6:00 a.m. chilly, so I sat down next to him and covered up the both of us. I tried keeping things subtle by not moving in too close, but a quick brush of my hand against his changed all that.
My skin caught fire faster than a sunburn but the warmth went deeper. I shook off the shock and tried to find neutral comfort in our closeness, but I’d stopped feeling neutral about him lately.
He'd started to feel safe to me, safer at least. Maybe a little more than safe, but figuring things out beyond that point was complicated.
I leaned against him and he let me. Maybe he didn't care, or maybe he was too tired to notice, but it was nice having at least one easy morning like this. We probably didn't have too many left.
Caleb snaked his fingers around mine all of a sudden and squeezed the life out of my palm. I sat up stiff as a tree trunk, and yanked my hand back into my lap, mortified. No matter how I thought about it, my decision to join him in a one-person sleepover, looked creepy—incredibly creepy.
"You alright, Hailey?"
"Perfect."
What a lie. What long-nosed lie. Halfway between trying to explain myself, and over thinking things, my brain stopped working. I should’ve been able to come up with something perfectly reasonable to explain how'd I'd ended up under his jacket, but there wasn't anything reasonable about it.
"You sure? I didn't mean to scare you or nothing, " he said.
"Well you did! I had no idea where you were when I woke up. I thought you'd fallen out of that tree overnight and killed yourself."
"Did I just hear, the Hailey Anderson, say she was worried about me? You sure you didn't hit your head?"
Caleb smiled so big the whites of his teeth caught the sunlight. I would've liked to disappear into that jacket, but that didn’t happen. I turned marinara red instead.
"How'd you get down here? I didn't even hear you leave last night," I said.
"That's 'cause you sleep like a bear and snore pretty loud too."
He half-laughed to himself like there was some truth to what he'd said. Clearly there wasn't. Anderson women did not snore. Caleb dropped the palm of his hand on top of my head and left it there long enough to make me nervous.
"My old man showed up. We got into it, so I climbed outta the tree so I wouldn't wake you up is all," he said.
"He's gone now, right?" I asked. Caleb blew a tuft of warm air out of his nostrils.
"Yeah, I don't think he'll be back here again."
"He didn't do anything, did he?"
"You ask a lot of questions, Hailey. Too many, sometimes."
I should've kept my mouth shut. Caleb never said anything to me about his dad, but he had scars older than his bullet wound that he didn’t talk about. Maybe they'd come from Liam at some point, but the way he'd acted under his dad's roof said otherwise.
"We just talked for a little bit. He'll be alright, and so will I. Plus, I got a new jacket with a full bottle of morphine inside, so I'd say this morning's going pretty good."
Caleb got to his feet as fast as his body would let him, and slipped his arms into the sleeves of Jack's leather bomber. He stretched out the front so he could see the US military patches over the left breast pocket.
Even with his back to the sun, Caleb lit up like a kid who’d learned how to take pride in his father for the first time. He traced the grooves in the patches in circles, like touching each one made them feel more real each time around.
"How do I look? Like a tough guy?" He asked.
"Yep. Terrifying."
"Come on, Hailey at least lie to me a little. I think it looks alright. Plus you can't see that I'm all banged up with this on."
I slid up the rough bark of the tree, walked over to Caleb, and straightened out his jacket. He puffed up like a soldier while I fumbled around the corners of his collar trying to fix the mess he'd made of it.
"There, much better. If you did something about your hair you'd look like the real deal," I said.
"My hair's wrong too? Geeze, you city girls are picky. Go on and fix it if you think you know what you're doing."
Caleb stepped in close, a little too close, enough to make my skin buzz and send the hairs on my arms skyward.
I waited for him to lower his head so I could reach him easier, but he didn't, he just stood there with that Union Station smirk on his face—the one that always made me uneasy. But I stood my ground, and with a little help from my tiptoes, I got all ten fingers into the tangles on his head.
Even after a half a day in the D.C. sun and a night drenched in Manassas rain, his hair felt like down feathers under my fingertips. With a little bit of effort, and the right kind of gel, he could’ve looked like a workingman straight out of the fifties.
I slicked back the last bit of hair over his forehead, and grazed an inch long, squeamishly deep gash above his eyebrow. Count on Caleb to keep it hidden.
"When did you get this?"
“I don't know. Back at the slaughterhouse, I guess. It doesn't even hurt."
I tapped the corner of his cut to catch his bluff.
"Geez, Hailey! I got into a fight with Liam, okay? You know how he likes hitting people when he’s pissed. It’s not as bad as it looks. He could’ve shot me. Beats dying, right?"
My throat tensed up just trying to find a way to answer to him, but words aren't always band-aids for broken people.
Liam had written a family history in his brother's skin, and despite the pain, Caleb carried the burden of bruises, breaks, and bullet wounds like they didn’t matter. They mattered to me, even if I didn’t say it out loud.
I guess that made me just as guilty of keeping secrets as he was. Salt-water trailed halfway down my face before I realized I’d caved into crying again.
But in the middle of all my chaos, Caleb took my face in his hands, and smiled away the same sadness in me that he'd already learned how to live through. Maybe he’d be the first person to put an end to the make-believe-me. Maybe he already had.
"I'll walk you home if you promise not to flood the woods on the way, alright?" He said.
I nodded twenty tears down onto his baseball tee, my mouth too shaky to find a smile. But in that tiny space between seconds, when our quiet bloomed into something beautiful, he kissed me.
He kissed me.
Tragically.
Recklessly.
Like there were never walls between us. Like we could outrun our sadness. We kissed until I couldn't breathe, until the space between his lips drew out the blue in my blood. He tugged me to him by the corners of my t-shirt, and I came tumbling, trailing behind runaway lips, ready to follow his lead home.