“Did Caleb say if he and Marian were ever…involved?” I said. “Romantically?”
Thoughtful, he puffed out his cheeks and stared up at the ceiling fan. “I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Why? Were they?”
I explained about Adelaide’s letters. There hadn’t been many from Caleb, certainly not love letters, but I knew he’d gone to see her in Alaska, and Ruth’s letter suggested a man had come between them. Carol Feiffer had given Marian and Caleb a romance, and the Day brothers had run with it, but it seemed more like conjecture than anything. While I was talking, Kalani crept out and climbed up next to Joey without looking at me. She was fiddling with a plastic mermaid doll.
“No kidding,” Joey said when I was done. A chuckle worked its way up from his belly. “That old dog. You know, thinking about him…he never seemed to be looking for, like, a partner. He had these relationships that went on for a year or two and were sort of casual but also sort of intense, and then they’d fall apart. He’d be alone for a while, and then he’d find a new woman when he felt like it. Almost to the end he had girlfriends. They’d come and hang out and cook him dinner. So maybe this thing with Marian was more of the same. Like, if their paths crossed, then great. They’d pick up where they left off.” He pulled Kalani into his lap, said, “Or maybe she was the big one. Maybe he never settled down with anyone because he didn’t want to replace her.”
“Seems crazy to carry a torch for someone who’s been dead for decades.”
“I just mean maybe he didn’t stop missing her. But I did always wonder why he never settled down.”
“You never asked him why?”
“Nah. He would have just made some joke. I wish I could tell you more. I saved some of Caleb’s stuff, though, if you want to see it. I got it out after you emailed.” Setting Kalani on her feet, he got up and went inside, followed by the child, and came back out with an open cardboard box.
* * *
—
The top layer of Joey’s box was a mess of photos in no particular order. I took them out one by one, making a stack. Sitting beside me, he pointed to a black-and-white photo of a dark-haired, vaguely Asian-looking man in an army uniform sitting on a stone wall. “That’s Caleb,” he said.
I turned the photo over. Sicily was penciled on the back.
“Go play, Kalani,” Joey said, nudging the girl toward the yard, where she darted into the plastic playhouse like a gopher into a hole.
There were color photos, some faded: Caleb on a horse, his hat ringed with fuchsia flowers. Caleb with a woman at the beach, with another woman at what looked like a wedding reception, sitting with a third woman on a cement structure on a hillside, their legs dangling. “That’s Cheryl, who I talked about,” Joey said, pointing. She had long, wavy blond hair. “That’s a pillbox lookout station from the war. It’s still there.” Caleb riding a horse up to its chest in the ocean. An ancient black-and-white studio photo of a pale girl with dark, tucked-up hair in a tarnished silver frame. She wore a dress with a lace collar, and the image was ghostly and washed out with age. “I think that was his mother,” Joey said. “All he ever said about her was that she was a drunk and had bad luck.” Three children sitting unsmiling on a fence, all in overalls: Caleb with Marian and Jamie Graves. Nothing on the back. Teenage Joey grinning in a striped T-shirt, tending something on a smoking BBQ while Caleb looked on, holding a beer. Another black-and-white photo of Caleb in uniform, cigarette in one hand, leaning back in a leather booth. Cocktail glasses glinted in the flash. Marian Graves, in her blue ATA uniform, was beside him, looking away. On the back: London 1944.
Under the photos was a bundle of letters, tied neatly together with a shoelace. Joey reached for them, embarrassed. “Those are from me, when Hanako and I did a road trip on the mainland. We were only gone for a month, but I wrote him every day.”
Under the letters was a paper folder, soft with age. Inside were press clippings about Marian’s flight, from both before and after she went missing, haphazardly folded. “Caleb collected those,” Joey said. “I was surprised when I found them. Usually he wasn’t into saving things.”
I started unfolding the brittle paper. “I think sometimes people hope if they amass enough scraps eventually the whole picture will become clear.”
“Is that what you’re trying to do?”
“I don’t know what I’m trying to do,” I said.