Fall For Anything (16 page)

“I’m not.” I don’t even think it. Just say it.

“What?!”

I have to hold the phone away from my ear. The idea has me before I have it. It gets tangled up in my stomach. It feels impossibly urgent. I try to swallow, and I can’t.

I’m not coming back.

I don’t have to come back.

“I’m not coming back.”

“You just said—”

“I changed my mind,” I say. “I’m not—”

“Your mother—”

“I don’t care. I’m not coming back.”

“Eddie, I will call the police—”

“Can she handle that? Mom? If you did that?” This must be that attitude Beth was talking about, but I don’t care. “Would she get out of her housecoat ever again, you think?”

“Have you lost your
mind
? This isn’t funny—”

“I’m staying in Haverfield for a few days and you’re going to cover for me—”

“Eddie—”

“Or I won’t come home at all.”

I hang up before she can say anything else. My heart pounds in my chest and when I turn around, Culler is behind me. I feel awake, I feel so awake and alive, like I can breathe after ages of not being able to breathe, and I wonder if this is how Milo felt when he ran away from home in the third grade, like if whatever was suffocating him there just magically stopped as soon as he made that choice—to just go.

But this isn’t running away. Not yet.

But it could be.

“I can take you back,” Culler says, and I don’t know how much he’s heard. “Whenever you want to go.”

“How about a few days from now?”

He laughs. “As tempting as that is—”

“I’m serious.”

He waits for me to continue. I feel nervous, sick. But he’ll say yes to this. I know he will. He has to. He started this. He brought it to me, so he has to.

“Because I told them I wasn’t coming home—”

His smile vanishes. “Eddie—”

“They’re covering for me.” I bite my lip. That’s a lie, maybe. I don’t know yet if Beth will cover for me. But I think she will, because she knows I’m right. My mom is too fragile for this. She’d break. We’d never be able to put her back together. But if I find what I’m looking for, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. “For a few days, until—”

“I could put you up…”

“No—”

“I’m not going to let you wander around Haverfield without anywhere to stay—”

“It’s so we can finish,” I interrupt. Part of me feels really warm at the thought that he wouldn’t just let me fumble, that if I only told him I needed to be away from home, he’d let me be away from home here, with him. “We could do Valleyview, Labelle, and Lissie. Get to those places and see what he left behind. Just get in the car. Go.”

“A road trip,” he says. “That’s what you mean.”

“I have money,” I say really fast. “I’d pay for everything. Gas, food, motel—whatever. Just—I can’t wait all summer. And when I go back home, I’ll probably be in trouble, so I don’t have a lot of time. You’d have to drive and I can’t and—” I swallow. “You have to be there … I mean, you have to.” I grab his arm, like I could convince him to do this just by touching him. “Culler, it needs to be you.”

He stares at me a long time and for a second, I worry he thinks I’ve lost my mind.

But then he asks, “When should we leave?”

Minutes after I tell him we should go. That’s when we decide to leave.

It’s simple. It’s not.

Culler packs a bag of things and we realize I need things and a bag to pack them in. I spend an hour on the main street, going into the last of the open stores, buying, buying, buying up, while he gets ready at the apartment. I get an overnight bag and clothes—nothing fancy—toothbrush, deodorant, hairbrush. I think I spend too much, but I need it all and besides, I got something—money—when my dad died. I just never thought I’d be able to spend it.

This way feels okay because it’s for him.

For as quickly as we prepare, it all takes too much time. Culler thinks I’m covered—I told him I was—but I feel Beth hovering. I feel like I’m waiting for her to change her mind. And then I get the text from Milo, and he throws a wrench into all my plans.

I’M COMING TO GET YOU.

I text him back.

ALREADY GONE. IT’S OK. I PROMISE.

I wait.

CAN I CALL?

TALK WHEN I’M BACK.

BETH ASKED ME TO COVER FOR YOU. SHE’S GIVING YOU A WEEK.

I feel a rush of relief.
THANK YOU.

And then:
I’M GIVING YOU TWO DAYS.

“We have to go,” I tell Culler. “Milo is going to ruin everything.”

“Unsurprising development,” he comments.

“It’s surprising to me,” I mumble.

Culler thinks of all these things I don’t. He packs a cooler full of water and food and sunscreen, so we don’t bake in the car in the day, which I never would have thought of. He packs his camera and tells me it’s the minimum, but a lot of things seem to go with it—extra lenses, lens covers, memory cards, chargers. Just everything. I watch him put it all in the backseat. All this to help him process. I envy him that. I wish I had something to process this through. He even packs the photos my father took. Just in case, he tells me.

And then everything is in the car except us.

We stand outside the station wagon, neither of us moving. This is a big moment and I don’t think we know how to say it. There are sounds all around us. Haverfield is a different place at night than Branford. People talk and walk the street, laughing. Enjoying the summer.

“Okay,” Culler says.

That’s it.

We get in the car.

It feels like being in one of the funeral cars, with my mom. Parked behind the hearse, waiting to pull out in traffic. Holding her hand. It’s not exactly like that, but it feels like that. One of those moments where you know things are going to be so different afterward. When I found my dad, I knew things were going to change forever, but sitting next to her, getting ready to see him buried, I felt it in a different way. Everything ached.

This reminds me of that—how it aches.

But it’s a better ache, too.

I’m hopeful.

I can’t remember the last time I felt hopeful.

The ride to Valleyview is quiet. Maybe because it’s night and because there are so few cars on the road. Maybe Culler needs to absorb this in silence because it’s happening to him too.

Six hours of road are stretched ahead of us and it’s starting to sink in, what I’ve done. Milo texts me as soon as we pass the
THANK YOU FOR VISITING HAVERFIELD
! sign. It’s like he can sense that I’ve reached that point of no return. We go back and forth.

PLEASE LET ME CALL.

NOT A GOOD TIME.

WHY?

ON THE ROAD.

WHERE?

DOESN’T MATTER. EVERYTHING’S OK.

My stomach twists with guilt. Beth probably made it sound bad, what I said to her. But he knows me. He should know I only kind of meant it.

Streetlights disappear. The farther we get from Haverfield, the more stars there are. I roll down the window and rest my head against the frame, hoping the mild summer air will keep me awake. I’m crashing, but it wouldn’t be fair to Culler to fall asleep.

“So,” Culler says after a while, and I turn my face from the window. “When we get to Valleyview we’ll find a motel and look for the gazebo in the day. Find the message and then get to Labelle as fast as possible. How much time did you say Milo was giving you?”

“Two days.”

“Okay.”

My cell phone rings. I turn it off and feel my face go red.

“Is that him?” Culler asks.

“Probably. Never mind about Milo, though.” I clear my throat because I do
not
want to talk about Milo with Culler. “Thank you for doing this with me…”

“Thank you for letting me.”

“You need it too.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I do.”

“What was my father like with you?” I ask.

Culler is quiet for a long time, weighing the question. While he does that, I prepare to hear about a man I never knew, a man separate from my father. The one I want to know.

The one who would kill himself.

“Sometimes I want to ask you the same thing,” he says, glancing at me. “What your father was like with you…”

“I asked you first.”

“Well, he was kind,” Culler says. “He was very kind, very passionate. Inspiring. But quiet … and when he was on to something he was really intense and you could tell he felt it—that he had an idea and he was going to turn it into something amazing—just by being near him.”

“Topher said you were an art school reject,” I say, and then I feel bad because those weren’t Topher’s exact words, but I’m too tired to think of a nicer way to say it. “I mean—”

“I thought I wanted something different then.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I think it must’ve happened for a reason.” He looks at me. “I thought it was over for me. I was really head fucked about it. But it brought me to your father and he made me feel like, for the first time I was doing something right … I always felt like the camera was what I needed to make sense of everything—to ask questions and then make answers out of the photographs I took. And then I felt—I feel so strongly—I have to share those questions and those answers. To me, that’s art. He really understood.”

“Are they posed?” I ask. “Your photographs.”

He tenses. I feel it. It
is
too personal. I shouldn’t have asked.

“They’re truths,” he says, which I guess is a vague way of saying yes and no. “But they’re lies. Constructs.” He looks at me for as long as he can before turning back to the road. “Eddie, I think … sometimes lies bring you to the truth … or help you reconcile with it…”

I roll up the window. The road moving under the car is hypnotic and I know I’m going to fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep.

“Ever since he died, it’s like it’s gone,” Culler says. “It’s like … there’s something between me and the photographs I want to take…”

I don’t say anything. It’s so sad. I wish my dad were here. Not just to be here, but because I wish he would answer for this. I want to make him answer for how sad this is.

“I want it back,” Culler says after a while. “More than I can say.”

My eyes drift shut.

“Eddie, we’re here.”

My neck is stiff and my back aches. Here? We’re here. Culler shakes my shoulder and says my name again. I open my eyes and rub my face and wait for the car to materialize around me. It’s still dark out. The clock says it’s three in the morning. Over six hours have passed and my eyes were closed that whole time.

“I’m so sorry,” I mumble. Even in the dark, I can see how pale and tired he is. I wish he’d said something. If he’d said something, I would have stayed awake.

“It’s okay,” he says. “You were spent. Anyway, we’re here.”

And then I realize—here. Not just here in Valleyview, still moving and passing a
WELCOME TO
sign. But
here.
This is here: we’re parked at the side of the road—a back road, by the look of it. Thick, healthy-looking trees line either side of it.

“Here,” I repeat.

“Through those trees on my side”—he points—“I found the gazebo. It took me a while.”

I’m awake now. I’m so awake.

“God.” It’s already happening. “But it’s too dark to see…”

“I have a pair of flashlights in the back,” he says. “Part of an emergency kit in case something happens on the road. I thought we could look now instead of tomorrow. We can look tomorrow, if we don’t find anything tonight. But since we’re pressed for time.”

“Are you tired?” I ask.

“Yes,” he admits. “But not for this.”

We look at each other. We’re doing this.

We open the car door and get out at the same time. I stretch, my bones crackling and popping, while Culler goes into the back for the flashlights. He turns one on, briefly illuminating his face, the bags under his eyes. He hands one to me and then he goes back into the car, grabs his camera, and gestures to me to follow him. We walk down the ditch. My footing isn’t as steady as Culler’s. He seems firm on his feet, already familiar with the place after walking it once. I slide beside him a little, almost fall, and he grabs me by the elbow.

“Careful,” he says.

The weeds and the grass are ankle-deep and make my skin itch. It’s buggy too, but these are small things, little nothings. All this inconvenience will reveal something great to me. I try to remember what the gazebo looked like in the photograph my father took, but for some reason I can’t. I keep visualizing summer, something whole and complete. People there.

But when we step past more brush and through a clearing, Culler’s flashlight glares over something much less whole.

“The water tower’s just beyond it. You can barely see it.”

I look behind me and I can’t see the car anymore.

I turn back to the gazebo. We run our flashlights over it, slowly uncovering it. It’s so much of a skeleton, it’s hard to imagine what it must have looked like when it was new. The roof is all gaps, empty spaces where shingles used to be, and the trees seem to reach for those holes. The ground is swallowing it up. Grass creeps up the steps, the floor. I get dizzy—it’s that same dizzy anticipation I felt when I was at the school.

“What if you’d never figured it out?” I ask Culler in a hushed voice, as we take the first steps inside of it. “This place won’t be around forever. It’s rotting away…”

I can’t finish that thought. The idea of the last things my father had to say being lost to time—none of us ever knowing—is terrible.

Culler goes to the right, moving the flashlight slowly over the wood. I’m two steps to the left when my foot goes through the rotting floor.

“
Ow,
shit—” A jagged piece of wood digs into my anklebone. “God—”

“Fuck,” Culler mutters. He waves the flashlight over my leg. He sets it down and tries to pull the wood back from my ankle with his fingers, but he can’t. “Can you—”

“Yeah, it’s just—”

“Easy…”

I pull my foot out slowly. The wood tears at my skin and by the time I’ve freed myself, I have a scrape and it’s trickling a little blood. I wiggle my ankle around. It feels okay.

“Maybe we should come back in the day,” Culler says uncertainly.

I shake my head. “No—we’ll do this now.”

“Eddie—”

“Seriously, it’s fine.”

He pauses and then goes back to his side of the gazebo and I go back to mine, waiting for the light to find me my father. It takes so long in the dark. Sometimes I get confused and end up combing through the same place twice. I feel bad for Culler, who must be aching and sore after all that time driving. I want to ask him if he stopped the car, even once, but I feel too guilty to.

After a while, he takes out his camera and takes some photographs, illuminating the whole gazebo with his flash, and for a little while, he becomes my light, and then we separate.

And then Culler says, “Found it.”

Something about the way he says that makes me turn to ice. I stay where I am, staring at nothing, at the glow of the flashlight.

“It’s okay,” he says softly. “It’s not bad.”

I make my way over to him slowly. He steadies his flashlight and it takes a minute for my eyes to make out the deep grooves in the wood, and that thought of missing this to time, to weather, to ruin, crosses my mind again and makes me uneasy.

HERE I LOOK UP I SEE

S.R.

I press my fingers to the letters. I close my eyes. My blood feels hot, feels like it’s burning itself through my veins. It’s going to feel like this every time we find these. Intense.

“Find me,” I murmur. “All these things gone cold and now I’m…”

Here I look up I see.

Culler doesn’t say anything and I can’t pinpoint the strange disappointment in my heart. I think I was expecting more. How am I always expecting more? This is so much more than I used to have. No, I wasn’t expecting more.

I was expecting to understand.

“There are still two more places,” I say.

Culler takes a photograph of the message.

“Two more,” he repeats, and it’s clear from his voice that, post-discovery, there is something unsatisfying about this one for him too. It’s supposed to make
more
sense, not less.

I look up.

“Oh,” I breathe.

“What?” Culler asks.

I point. He looks up. Through the skeletal gazebo roof are so many stars. So many. We’re so far from the kind of light pollution that spoils the view, I think I’m seeing every star that is actually in the sky and I can almost convince myself they’re coming down on me, and I wonder if that’s what my dad meant by this one.

Here. Look up.

I see.

“It’s beautiful,” Culler whispers.

But how could my dad have known we’d find this place in the dark and see that? That anyone who found his last words would? I get another cold feeling in my stomach, something that tells me this is not what my father meant.

Or what if it was?

We go back to the car, and Culler shows me the photograph of the gazebo. The one my dad took. Even in the dim glow of the flashlight, my father’s vision turned the gazebo a dark and unfriendly place, and the trees around it are sinister things. I feel heavy just looking at it. And I think, no, that’s not what my father meant. It couldn’t have been.

Because I can’t convince myself the man who took this photograph looked up and ever really saw the stars.