Fall For Anything (12 page)

It’s hard to sleep. It eventually happens and when I wake up again it’s late, close to evening late. An entire day passed me by and I’m tired. I am still so tired.

My phone buzzes on my nightstand and I answer it without looking at the number because I’m sure—
so
sure—it’s him.

“Milo?”

“No.” My heart stops at the voice, the familiarity. I shiver; someone walking over my grave. A memory of a different kiss drifts into my head. “Will you meet me?”

Culler.

We decide to meet at Chester’s.

When I ask him what time, he tells me he’s ten minutes away and my stomach flips, nervous, excited. I was in bed, sleeping, and he was making his way to me that whole time.

That’s amazing.

I change into jeans and a hoodie, even though it’s too hot for a hoodie. Now I need an exit strategy. Mom and Beth are downstairs. The sun is dipping into the horizon and neither of them has seen me all day. Neither of them has come for me. I’m afraid I’ll never forgive my mother for all the times she didn’t come for me. But whatever.

I don’t need to think about that now.

I go out the window and sneak away with my bike and more time slips by and I’m afraid he’ll leave before I get there, but that’s stupid. He came out all this way to see me.

I love that thought. It pushes every thought of Milo out of my head.

My heart beats funny when I get to Chester’s. The place is busier than I’ve ever seen it and Culler’s station wagon is parked at the far end of the lot. He’s not in it, though. I wipe my palms on my jeans. I just want to be cool. Basically.

When I step inside, I’m met with a blast of cold air. Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” is playing through the speakers and it’s like I’ve walked into a movie or something. I spot Culler at the back of the room. He waves me over and I cut a path to him through the din of farmers eating and talking, imagining I can feel all of their eyes on me as I do.

“Who’s Milo?” Culler asks as I sit across from him. He has a sloppy-looking canvas bag next to him. “Boyfriend?” Before I can answer, he says, “I hope you don’t mind, but I ordered for you…”

I don’t know which question to answer first, so instead I end up mumbling, “I’m sorry if I kept you waiting…”

“I didn’t give you a lot of notice.” He gestures to my face. “New haircut.”

My face turns red. “Yeah.”

“It really suits you,” he says.

The waitress walks over then, with two Cokes and two plates of fries. She sets them in front of us and Culler actually looks kind of embarrassed.

“I figured nobody hates fries, right?”

“Oh, it’s fine,” I say. “Milo and I always get the cheese fries when…”

Or maybe: shut the fuck up, Eddie.

“Boyfriend?” Culler asks again.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I say. I stare at the fries and try to imagine eating after saying that. I think of Milo’s mouth on my mouth, but I don’t want to think about Milo’s mouth on my mouth so then I think of Culler’s mouth on my mouth and then I feel my face going red again. “He’s my best friend…”

“Best friend? What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing.” It comes out a little stilted.

“I’m just joking.”

I pick at my fries. “I’m not that great.”

I hate that I said that in front of him. I hate how it sounds.

“Not hungry?” Culler asks.

“No,” I say.

“Me neither.” He pushes the fries away and rummages into his book bag. He pulls out a point-and-shoot digital camera—not the nice SLR he usually travels with. He turns it on and gazes at the LCD screen.

“I took the photographs out of the frames. Your dad’s photographs.”

He looks at me. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to give him my blessing or whatever and I try to think of a nice way to say I don’t care what he does with the photos. If he burned them, I wouldn’t care. The last thing my father left meant nothing to me, didn’t tell me anything. And I feel like if I think about that too hard, I’ll do something drastic.

“Oh.”

“They were numbered on the back,” Culler says. “I mean, they were ordered. It went from the barn, to the school, to the gazebo, to the empty house, to the church, to Tarver’s. One, two, three, four, five, six. But we were at Tarver’s first.”

He hands me the point-and-shoot. It’s a snapshot of the back of one of my father’s photographs. There’s a number on it—scribbled in his handwriting. Three. The school.

“Okay,” I say.

“I decided to go to the barn, because I can’t keep going to Tarver’s, right? It’s about twenty, thirty miles outside of Haverfield. I took some photos. It was the first time I’d been there since…” He leans forward. “It was almost spiritual, in a way. I can’t describe it. I felt like something bigger than me was going on. Have you ever felt that way? I used to feel that about my photographs but this was even more than that—it
was
that, but it was something else…”

There’s only one time I can remember feeling that way.

“What?” Culler asks, sensing it.

“When he died … I felt that…,” I say. Culler reaches over and squeezes my arm, but I still don’t get it. “This is what was important? I don’t…”

Culler takes the camera back from me.

“I didn’t want to leave,” he says. “I took photographs of every corner of that barn.” He pushes a button on the camera and then hands it back to me. “And I found this.”

I stare at the tiny screen.

At first, I’m not sure what I’m looking at, and then—I am.

I am looking at words, carved, etched, clawed, into a rotting piece of wood. I put the camera down and cover my mouth with my hand.

The diner feels very far away.

“Eddie,” Culler says. I can’t speak. He says my name again. “Eddie.”

I shake my head. My eyes sting. My lower lip is trembling. I turn my face to the window, so no one else in the diner can see how fucked up I look right now. Culler gets up and sits beside me, taking the outside of the booth so no one can see me. I keep my face turned from him. I don’t want him to see it any more than he has to. He leans into me.

“Okay?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not okay.”

I turn to him. He is so close, I can see his eyelashes. His lips are close.

I hate myself for thinking that now.

“You think … he put that there.”

“The photos are numbered,” he explains, his voice quiet, careful. “They’re like a map. We know he put his initials on the door in Tarver’s. That was the
last
photo he numbered. The barn was first—and I find that there? I mean … I guess it’s possible it’s the weirdest, cruelest coincidence on the planet, but I don’t think it is…”

“Secrets on City Walls,”
I say. “That’s what it reminds me of…”

“Yeah,” Culler says. I notice his voice is shaking, like he’s ready to give too—this is that hard for him. And then I feel terrible, because of course this would be that hard for him. “That’s what I thought too. If the photos
are
a map, we’ll have to go to each place … see if we can find—”

“Him?”

I wish I could take it back as soon as it’s out of my mouth, but I can’t. Culler freezes, deer in the headlights, and then slowly sinks back in his seat, like I’ve taken his essence and what’s left can’t keep itself upright. I don’t know what to say. And then he laughs and it cuts through me because it sounds like he’s about to break.

“It’s fucked up that I was thinking that too,” he says. “I miss him … so much.”

“Me too,” I say.

“I can’t work. I can’t sleep. This is—I think I’d take any answer.” He takes a shuddering breath in and out. “Just any…”

He rests his head against my shoulder and I bring my right hand to his face, awkwardly, my palm against his cheek, my fingers at the edge of his hair. I sense people looking at us, but I don’t care. I let him stay like that and I try to be the one who is together.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Culler, I’m so sorry…”

We stay like that for a long time and I feel his grief, the way this is all on him and I know I don’t feel that with Milo, who doesn’t feel this like Culler and I do.

Culler exhales slowly and raises his head. He looks like he’s going to cry. We are so close, even closer than before. He leans to me for a minute, and I think he’s going to kiss me but then he moves back and runs a shaking hand through his hair.

“The second photo is the school.” His voice is strained. “I’m going to go there, see if I can find something. If there’s nothing there—”

“Then it’s nothing,” I say.

But it has to be something. It
has
to be. I don’t know what to call it. A note. An explanation. Art. The last thing he wanted the world to know. Me to know. His family.

My thoughts are racing, my pulse is racing.

This is what I have been waiting for.

“You have to come with me,” Culler says.

We stare at each other. Everything is too much in this moment. But it’s good. It’s good for once. Part of me feels like I should be jumping up and down, excited, a whole world opening up, a world where the dead can speak, maybe. I look around the diner. People are eating. The world just maybe changed, and these people are acting like nothing’s happened. My gaze travels over Roy Ackman at the far end of the room, shoving a burger into his face. I ran into his truck.

I want to get up and go over to him and say,
Roy, the world has changed. Maybe.

I pick up the camera with shaking hands and stare at the LCD screen, the two words carved into that barn outside of Haverfield. I touch my fingers to them.

FIND ME

S.R.

This is the part where Beth yells at me when I step through the door.

This is the part where Mom cries on me after Beth is done yelling at me. Normal. It’s so depressing how these things become normal. Like brushing your teeth. People being depressed and angry in this house is as unextraordinary as shoving a toothbrush in your mouth and running it back and forth across your teeth. It’s like flossing, or getting dressed.

Mom cries on me, gaspy awful sobs against my shoulder, and her tears go straight through the material of my shirt. She says, “I went into your room to talk to you. The window was open and I didn’t know where you went—I thought you were mad at me—I thought you ran away—”

All I can say is,
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,
but I don’t feel it. I mean, I
am
sorry and I hate that she’s crying and I hate that I worried her, but something more important has happened. I feel that more than anything else.

I go upstairs to my room and lay on the bed, fully clothed and nowhere close to sleeping even though the sooner I sleep, the sooner I wake up to go with Culler to the old, abandoned schoolhouse that is two miles outside of Ellory and an hour outside of Haverfield to see what my father might have left for us there.

Milo calls me.

“Hi,” he says, and suddenly I’m back beneath that streetlight with him and my stomach curls in on itself. He kissed me. “Beth called here, looking for you. I was so shocked to hear her voice, I fucked up and told her I didn’t know where you were.”

“They thought I ran away,” I say. “Because I went out the window. It was bad.”

“Jesus. Maybe you should start using the front door.”

“Maybe.”

“Were you at—” he pauses. “I mean … were you … there?”

“No.”

“Where?”

I could lie to him. I should lie to him, maybe. If I don’t tell him the truth and I deny I was at Tarver’s, he’ll just think I was at Tarver’s anyway.

“Culler Evans wanted to meet me. At Chester’s.”

Silence.

“That student of your dad’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” Milo says. “Chester’s? Like a—I mean, why?”

This is stressing me out already. I don’t even know why it’s stressing me out. It shouldn’t stress me out. I shouldn’t care that I kissed Milo anymore. That’s small and stupid and petty.

What Culler showed me, that’s big. That’s bigger than anything.

It’s so big, all I should want to do is share it with my best friend.

“Do you remember…” I don’t even know where to start. “Do you remember when I told you that I went to Tarver’s and my dad had carved his name into the door…?”

He pauses. “Yeah…”

And then I tell him the rest, the way Culler told it to me, and it comes out of my mouth excited and urgent and hopeful, which is nothing I showed in front of Culler.

I believe in this. I do.

“What do you think?” I ask, when I’m done.

He’s silent. I wish I could see his face, the shock, the way it felt. The world ending. Does it feel like that to Milo too, or is it just me? Just me and Culler.

“How did you two meet again?” he asks. “He’s twenty-one?”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I honestly have no idea.”

“It’s my dad, Milo.” I swallow. “The place is near Ellory. The school. We’re going there tomorrow to see if there’s anything else—”

“I’ll go with you.”

The first thing I think is,
no, no, no, no, no.
And I don’t know why I think that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, that I wouldn’t want him there.

I wanted to tell him about it, so why wouldn’t I want him there?

“Eddie, he meant something to me too,” Milo says.

How can I say no to that.

I call Culler. I tell him about Milo. He tells me to drive to the school with Milo and he’ll meet us there and that moment in Chester’s, where his head was against me and I could feel his grief, seems so far away. I feel like I’ve fucked up something really fundamental here, but I don’t know what or how.

The house is still. After a while, I hear Beth walk past my room and into the guest room. There is a familiarity to her footsteps now and I fucking hate it, but I’m not as bothered by it as I usually am. I can’t get my father’s words—maybe my father’s words—carved into wood out of my head. I know I’m not going to find him—I know that. He’s dead. I saw him dead. I saw him that night. Dead at Tarver’s. Tarver’s, where he scratched his name into the door.

But if there are words between the barn and Tarver’s … they could tell me what I need to know. They could tell me why.
Why.
The word makes my head quiet. Every time I think it, I am met with silence. It’s all I think.
Why, why, why.
Because his suicide note was nothing. It was love and giving up, but no real reason. These things don’t give you peace when all is said and done. They just make you feel worse.

I get up and open my door slowly, pad down the hall and down the stairs. I open the door to my dad’s office and I’m wondering about when we’re going to start clearing it out and if we’re ever going to clear it out, when I spot Mom sitting in his chair. Her head is against the back of it; her eyes are closed. At first I think she’s dead.

And then she opens her eyes and stares at me.

“Uhm,” I mumble, feeling caught. “I’ll…”

“Did you need something?” she whispers.

I shake my head. “Did you?”

“No, I was just…”

“I can go.”

“No, just—”

The weirdness of the situation hits us both then. I am talking to my mother like she’s a stranger and I’ve intruded on her space and she’s responding to me in the same way. Her face dissolves and she holds out her arms, but I stay where I am. I want to go to her—there are no words for how much I want to go to her—but for some reason, my feet won’t move.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I just miss him.”

I swallow. “Me too.”

“I know. I know, Eddie.” She rubs her forehead and then she laughs and then she cries. “God, I don’t know what I’m doing. Do I? So I don’t do anything.” I don’t know what to say. She looks at me. “I’m not there for you. It’s your father and I’m not even there for you.”

“Yes, you are,” I say, fidgeting, but I’m lying and she knows it.

“I know you have a hard time with Beth.” She sniffles, and every second that passes is one I wish I’d never opened this door. “But she brings order. And I need that because I can’t … I can’t do that right now. You know?”

“I know.”

“I know you wouldn’t—you wouldn’t think it, but she misses your father very much.”

“I know, Mom.” Robot words coming out of my robot mouth. “It’s okay.”

“I’ll get better. This won’t be…”

She trails off. Her eyes drift to the note on the desk, still in front of her, and a shadow passes over her face. I feel closer to my mother, in that small moment, than I ever have because I know she finds it as unsatisfying, as unacceptable as I do.

“Did I miss something?” I ask.

She looks at me. “What?”

“Was he suffering?” I feel so stupid. Of course he was suffering. You don’t just choose to end your life because you’re not suffering. “I mean, it’s like…” And every time I speak her face is just more and more shattered and I don’t want to continue, but I guess I have to. “I don’t know who he was … that he’d do that.”

“He was your father,” she says. “He loved you.
That’s
who he was.”

I shake my head slowly, because that’s not who he was.

And then I realize I haven’t really thought of him that way in a long time. As the man who laughed and smiled and joked and valued the people he lived with. The man who did every stereotypical father cliché in the book and acted like he loved it. I don’t think of him anymore. I buried him. Now it’s like I’m looking for answers to a stranger’s death and I couldn’t tell anyone why it’s so important to me, because this stranger didn’t do anything for me. He never showed himself to me—this tortured artist, who hated being here so much, who could find no good in anything. He just left, killed himself, and he ruined everything. So why should I care? Why?

The disconnect is incredible and lonely.

Mom thumbs at the note.

“It’s not good enough, is it.”

I shake my head, but she doesn’t look at me. She gets up, clutching his housecoat closed, and moves to leave.

She stops and kisses my forehead.

“I’m still here,” she says.

That’s another lie, though.

She leaves me alone in Dad’s old office. I stand in the doorway for a long time and then I cross the room and sit in his chair. It’s still warm, from her sitting in it. I try to feel the place as it would feel if he were still alive. I pick up the note.

He had to go. He loves us forever. Who writes that? I don’t know who this person is, but I know my father is underneath it somewhere, and I miss him.

I have to get him back.

I close my eyes and think of the photograph Culler showed me. I see it in my head perfectly. He’ll be there, at that school. Another piece of my father. And then another. Six pieces. I will find them all, put them together. I’ll find him.

And then I’ll let him go.