Fall For Anything (14 page)

Were they all posed?
I swallow the question. I don’t know why. Somehow, it seems too personal to ask that. To ask him to reveal what’s behind his photographs. Like, you don’t just ask a photographer to demystify his work. You either buy in or you don’t.

“Some people don’t get it, though,” Culler adds, nodding at Milo. “It’s okay. I didn’t mean to make him uncomfortable. Some people really hate the camera. It’s fair.”

“It’s how you process,” I echo.

“It’s about all I’ve got to process with lately, since I’m so blocked on my work. Everything makes more sense to me when it’s a photograph,” Culler admits, and he actually shifts a little, awkward and open, and I want to hug him. “I hate telling people that because they think it’s a crutch that means I can’t deal, but things are honestly clearer to me. I can’t fathom being here, doing this, without my Nikon whether or not these pictures turn into art…”

“I get it,” I say. I think I do.

Culler leans forward and brings his mouth close to my ear.

“You get me.”

My legs feel weak. I want to melt.

“I’m not finding anything,” Milo calls.

“
He
actually makes a lot of sense through the lens,” Culler says, moving back. He smiles. “I think he likes you. He looks at you that way.”

And then my face turns about a thousand shades of red. I clear my throat and point to the camera, desperate to change the subject.

“So you’re not working on anything right now? You’re still stuck?”

“Yeah. It’s like I said, it doesn’t seem important.
This
is what is important.” He gestures around the room and my heart aches for him because I know how much it sucks to have this thing consume every part of you. This question. To have it keep you from the thing you really love to do just makes it that much worse and I’m glad I don’t create. I’m just glad. He squeezes my arm. “It’s okay, Eddie. We’ll figure this out and it’ll be okay, I promise.” I think,
God, I hope so.
“Anyway, we should keep looking.”

He moves past me to examine the far wall, the windowsills. I do a slow crawl around the room, worried I’m looking too hard or not hard enough. I’m worried that something is here and I’ll miss it. I’m worried nothing is here. I feel the slow passage of time as we look for a ghost, my father’s ghost. I think another hour must go by in total, focused silence.

I’ve made my way to the blackboard, when something catches my eye on the wall beside it. Small little markings that, as I get closer, reveal themselves to be words.

“Oh,” I say.

Milo and Culler are next to me in a second.

We stare at what I’ve found.

ALL OF THESE THINGS

GONE COLD AND NOW I’M

S.R.

Culler takes a photograph. To process it.

I think Milo is in it, but he doesn’t protest. He’s totally shocked. His silence speaks such volumes. He thought this was a nothing trip, I know it. He didn’t believe in this and I’ll ask him about that later. I run my fingers over the letters again and again and again, hands shaking, until Culler finally suggests we go outside. I want to ask him if this is what it felt like for him, finding the first message. My heart is pumping pure adrenaline and I want to scream, but I can’t because no sound I make could be big enough for what I’m feeling.

We sit on the grass and stare at the school.

“What does that even mean?” Milo asks after a minute.

“I don’t know,” Culler says.

“What’s the next place?” I ask Culler. “We should go there. Like now.”

“The gazebo.”

“You know where that is?”

“Yeah. I figured it out. It’s six hours from here,” Culler says. “It would be a trip.”

“But when can we go?”

“Eddie,”
Milo says, and I stare at him. He stares back at me and then he runs his hands through his hair. “It’s just—S.R. could be anyone…”

“I don’t think so,” Culler says. “He did the same thing for—”

“
Secrets on City Walls,
” I finish. “It can’t be a coincidence.”

Head rush. I feel every word of saying that so much, I have to close my eyes. Milo touches my shoulder and I force myself to open them and he moves his hand.

“I mean, it’s him,” I say.

“Yeah.” Culler digs into his pocket and pulls out a tiny notepad and a pen. He scribbles down what we’ve found, even though he took a photograph. This feels weirdly absurd—like in the movies, this would be a high-stakes drama mystery. Letters from a dead man and the three of us playing detectives, seeking it out. Real life is always quieter and anticlimactic somehow.

But devastating all the same.

Culler hands me the notepad—he’s written both messages so we can get a look at them connected—and it slips through my fingers. Dead hands. I wonder if this is forever. I’ll go through life with my hands like this because it’s not something you can just cure, I don’t think. Only live with.

“Maybe you should see a doctor about that,” Culler says, picking up the notebook. I rub my hands together. “Are they numb or what?”

“She doesn’t need to see a doctor,” Milo says.

“And you’d know that, because you’re one yourself.”

“No,” I say, and they both look at me. “I mean—Milo’s right.”

“Then why are they fucked up?”

“I can’t tell you. Milo doesn’t like that story and I only know half of it.”

“Eddie, come on,” Milo says.

“Tell me the half you know,” Culler says.

“It’s none of your business,” Milo snaps.

Culler whistles. “Testy. Are you always this testy?”

“It’s from when I found my dad,” I blurt out, before Milo can say anything back. My hands come back to me then. I take the notebook from Culler and stare hard at the words, like they’d tell me more than what’s on there.

FIND ME / ALL THESE THINGS GONE COLD AND NOW I’M / S.R.

That doesn’t even make any sense. But it will.

It
will.

I mean, it has to.

“You found your dad?” Culler asks. I jolt back to this conversation. Milo is glaring at me, but Culler looks really intrigued. “What was that like?”

“Seriously,” Milo says. “Eddie, what are you—”

“I found my dad,” I say, “and Milo found me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it was…” I shrug and the way Culler is looking at me is like he needs to know and that makes me want to tell him. “I mean, I wasn’t there when it happened.”

“How soon after?”

“I don’t…” I honestly don’t know. “I think he was cold.”

“You think?”

“Eddie,” Milo says again.

“I think he was cold,” I say. “But his hands felt warm to me. But I think he must’ve actually been cold. I don’t know…”

Culler leans forward. “I don’t understand.”

I laugh. I don’t know why I laugh. It’s a shock of sound coming out of my mouth and I feel truly self-conscious, like I’m about to turn myself inside out. I can’t stand the way Milo is looking at me. I’m not looking at him, but I know how he’s looking at me.

“I found him and I…” I rip out tufts of grass with my hand. Plain speaking is the worst. This is the first time I’ve really said it out loud. “… lay next to him and I held his hands.”

Culler stares at me in amazement.

“I don’t know why,” I add hastily, because it sounds sort of … wrong. Weird. Maybe it was, but I can’t change that it was the first thing my head told my body to do before it all shut down. “It’s just—what I did, and now my hands are fucked up. I’m not stupid, I know it’s totally in my head, but…” I shake my head. “Everything after that is sort of tangled up. Like, pieces. I don’t really remember. Milo knows it but…”

He won’t tell me.

Culler turns to Milo and I know what’s coming next. “What’s the other half of the story? That you won’t tell her?”

“It’s none of your business,” Milo says for the hundredth time.

Culler nods at me. “Maybe so, but isn’t it hers?”

I don’t say anything, as much as I agree. It’s mine. It’s mine because it happened to me, but Milo won’t tell me. I stare at him and Milo realizes I’m not going to help him out of this. Or pretend it’s okay. It’s not okay that he won’t tell me.

It’s mine.

“Okay, fine: you were in shock,” Milo says, and it’s like gutting me. He just puts it all out there like that, when I know it was more than just that. “I called 911. That’s it.”

I get up and walk away from them and keep walking because I need to be away from Milo right now. I’m sick and shaky, angry. It’s the scary kind of calm anger that almost always ends up badly if you stick around. They give me space, for a moment. I get to the other side of the school when Milo shows up and says, “Are we going now?”

“ ‘You were in shock,’ ” I say. It comes out as weak when I was hoping it would come out a cuttingly accurate imitation of him. “ ‘I called 911. That’s it.’ That’s it? That’s so
it
, you can just say it now but you’ve been blowing me off about it since it—”

“Look, I’m sorry,” Milo says. “But you made me do it and I’m not sharing my life with that douchebag and
you’re
not sharing my life with him, okay?”

“You don’t even know him!”

“And how long have
you
known him? Since second grade?”

“Jealous?”

That is so pathetic, but it’s all I have.

“Eddie,
stop
it,” he snaps. “I’m not doing this here.”

“Why not? This is the best place to do it.”

“And that’s another thing,” Milo says, because I guess he just can’t help himself. “This doesn’t seem at all fucked up to you?”

“No. It seems perfectly normal to me.”

“It’s fucked up,” he repeats.

“Why are you even here then?” I ask. “If all this stuff about my dad bothers you this much?”

“Eddie, I’m not here for your dad.”

“I thought he meant something to you.”

“What else was I going to say? Okay, fine, Eddie, you go off with this—how old is he again? This twenty-something pretentious art fuck who looks at you like—” He stops. “No—you’re right, it’s about your dad. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“So…” I pause. “It’s only about my dad when it’s not about you.”

It’s so quiet between us.

“He did mean something to me. I liked your dad,” Milo says. “I loved your dad. He was great. He treated me like a member of your family. I was never an imposition. And when my dad moved out, he took me aside one day and told me if I needed anything just to ask. I miss him too. A lot.”

I try to remember this man Milo is talking about. For a second, something inside of me—I remember my dad, taking a moment to smile at both me and my mom before going off to do whatever he did. He’d just pause and appreciate …

And then Milo ruins it: “But if he left messages for you to torture yourself with … I think less of him.”

I can’t believe he just said that.

“Then maybe you should go back to Branford,” I say.

“I’m not leaving without you.”

“Well, I’m not going with you. So.”

He laughs bitterly. “Wow. You like him, don’t you?”

“I—”

“You like him,” he repeats.

He’s hurt. I look away.

“Milo—”

“It’s fine,” he says, shrugging. “I’m just saying.”

“Well, what do you want me to say? You still make me feel alone,” I say. “And you’re not honest with me—”

“I’m not honest with you?” Milo asks, but the way he asks it is the worst. Like it’s a question that doesn’t mean anything, and the answer only vaguely interests him.

“You keep things from me. You won’t tell me about that night…”

“Did you ever—” He makes a frustrated noise and buries his face in his hands, and when he lowers his hands, he is so sad. I hate seeing that on him. “Did you ever think that maybe it’s hard for me?” he asks. “Eddie, I can’t stand to think of you the way I found you that night. I think half the time you forget it happened to
me
too.”

And that makes me cry. I brush the tears away, frantic, and he reaches for me and I move back from him and I look at him, but I can’t stand to look at him. I can’t do this with him. It’s too hard.

“Don’t—you’re right. I’m sorry. But you should go back,” I say, walking away from him. “I don’t want you here…”

“Eddie—”

“No, go
back,
Milo. I can’t—I’ll be fine.”

I walk around the school and lean against it, covering my face with my hands, crying stupid, until I hear Milo’s car start up and leave. I wipe at my eyes and try to calm down enough to find Culler, but when I look up, he’s there, his camera resting against his chest.

“That sounded intense,” he says.

“You were listening?”

“I didn’t catch all the words,” he says. “But it sounded intense. And now he’s gone, so I don’t think I’m wrong…?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s fine.”

“I don’t have a ride home.”

“Yes, you do.”

Culler reaches forward and runs his thumbs over the top of my hands, like they don’t belong to me, and I feel different parts of my heart separating into pieces, like the piece that’s with Milo in his car, the piece that knows why I stayed here and let him go, the piece that likes Culler touching me, and the piece that remembers the last and first time he kissed me. So many pieces.

I let him take a photograph of my hands.

I don’t know why.