Fall For Anything (17 page)

Valleyview is smaller than Haverfield and bigger than Branford, but all of these places manage to look the same in certain ways. The people feel and look the same, like they’ve settled here even though they know there’s something more—something better—just beyond where they are.

Small-town life.

Culler and I find a diner that’s open twenty-four hours. We drink coffee and have eggs and bacon. I turn my phone back on and Milo calls immediately, but I don’t answer and Culler says we can go straight to Labelle. It’s only three hours away. The early traffic wouldn’t be so bad. We could get there three hours on the nose. But I see how tired he is—his eyelids are drooping—and I suggest a motel.

“Not for the night,” I add hastily, because even though we both knew this was coming, I’m sort of embarrassed about it now. “I mean—just for some of the morning. And you can sleep and recharge and I can take a shower … we can leave at like one and get there by four and then we can find the house…”

“Okay,” Culler says. His voice is thick, exhausted. “That … yeah.”

“You remember where the house is?”

“It took a while for your dad to find it … I remember where it is.”

“Good.”

We check into a little motel just outside of Valleyview. It’s cheap but I guess you get what you pay for. I stand aside while Culler uses my money to pay for the room because I don’t really want to deal with picking double or single beds and it’s probably sad that whatever Culler picks, I’ll go along with.

Also I want to see what he picks.

“Excuse me, miss?” The desk clerk asks. Culler and I turn. I point to myself and she nods. She’s an elderly woman. “Can I have a word with you?”

I make my way over to her, looking back at Culler, who shrugs.

“Yes?” I ask politely.

She leans forward like she’s going to tell me a secret. This close up, she’s really creepy-looking, which just makes this whole place creepy by association. I have visions of
Psycho.

Getting stabbed to death in the shower.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

I’m so confused about it. I have this really stupid moment where I think she knows my dad died. That suddenly, my grief is visible, radiating off me and telling the world I am a very, very sad girl. And then I realize she’s looking very pointedly at Culler, and in this light, with his unshaven face, the bags under his eyes, he looks older than he is.

And I always look as young as I am.

“Oh!” I force a smile. And a laugh. “Yeah, it’s fine. He’s just my brother…”

“Oh,” the woman says skeptically. “I see.”

“But thank you.” I try to sound gracious, like
thanks for caring.

She nods again and I go back to Culler and I think I’m going to die laughing, which is a nice change of pace. He mouths,
what?
And I shake my head. When we get outside, I tell him what happened and he laughs about it, but not quite as hard as I do.

“Like, I think she thinks you’re dangerous,” I say. “Like you’re kidnapping me or something. I think that’s hilarious.”

“Yeah,” he says, but he’s less amused.

“What?” I ask.

“Tired.” He opens up the door to our room. I try not to get overwhelmed by the motel-ness of it. It’s tidy and it’s neat but I have the feeling this is the type of place that can never be
clean.
There are two beds and I’m not sure how I feel about that and before I can decide how I feel about it, Culler’s saying, “I just wonder how much trouble I could get in for this.”

“What do you mean?”

But I know what he means. I think.

He shakes his head.

“Forget it,” he says. “It’d be worth it, anyway…”

I’m going to remember he said that forever. He flops down on the nearest bed, feet dangling over the side, and he’s asleep within minutes. I brush my teeth and take a shower and change into some of the clothes I bought, but I’m awake. Totally awake.

I watch Culler for a long time. His chest rising and falling. I’m the age of consent. I think. It’s not something I’ve thought about before. Does it matter if you choose to be in a car with someone? If they’re just driving? If Milo decides to tell Beth that I’m not thinking straight since my dad died, and I can’t make decisions, I wonder if she’ll jump on that and have the police here in a second. And then all anyone will remember was that I “ran away” with a twenty-year-old student of my father’s. My phone rings. I glance at Culler. He doesn’t stir. I take the phone into the bathroom, closing the door behind me, and I answer it, but I don’t say anything. Milo knows I’m there. All these minutes pass.

“Hi,” I finally say.

“Hi,” he says.

“We found another one,” I say. “We’re in Valleyview, but we’ll be leaving soon.”

“Beth told me you told her you weren’t coming back.”

I roll my eyes. “I just said that…”

“But I told her you would and she believes me.”

“Okay.”

“You are, aren’t you?”

I don’t say anything. That is unbelievably cruel of me to do, I know. But he knows I’m coming back and I don’t want to say it. I just don’t.

Because I’ve started to like pretending I’m not.

“I’m sorry we fought,” I whisper. “Milo, you’re my best friend…”

Neither of us says anything for a while. I pick at my nails and hear cars rushing down the highway through the tiny square window in the bathroom.

“I thought you were dead,” he says.

“What?”

“When I found you.” He pauses. “You were so still … I thought … I don’t know. I thought you were both dead…”

I grip the phone tight, but I keep my mouth shut.

“If you come back,” he says, “I’ll tell you the rest.”

“Milo, I’m coming back.”

“I know. But I wish you wanted to, though.”

I’m crying. I don’t know when that happened. I brush the tears away and take a deep breath, and then I realize more tears are coming and I can’t talk to him anymore.

“I have to go,” I say, and I hang up.

I run the messages over in my head, like what we’ve found so far makes it totally possible to anticipate what we’re about to find next.

FIND ME

ALL OF THESE THINGS GONE COLD AND

NOW I’M HERE I LOOK UP I SEE

Culler and I don’t talk much on the way to Labelle. Maybe there’s no talking between me and Culler because I’m thinking of Milo. I can’t stop thinking of Milo and our conversation and coming to the same conclusion over and over again: maybe I was the constant that faltered.

I don’t know. It scares me if that’s true.

I need to stop thinking.

I roll down my window all the way. Culler turns on the radio, cranking the volume so it can be heard over the wind. I close my eyes. Sight gone, my other senses heighten. The smell of the car. The sound of Culler breathing—maybe I’m imagining that, but I swear I hear it. I feel the car accelerate. We’re going faster than we should.

The kind of speed that if we hit something, we would die.

Culler reaches over and presses his hand against my eyes. Just for a second. I keep my eyes closed and the only thing to do is take in the music, the sound around me. Every time I feel my mind drift back to the things that make me sad, I feel the music, the speed of the car, pull me back, like a temporary lifeline amidst all this other noise.

Eventually, the music stops, though.

Culler keeps driving and I listen to the road.

I open my eyes and he is looking at me in a way I can’t describe.

We get to Labelle at around five, which makes us late because Culler takes a wrong turn and we have to double back. Labelle is smaller than Branford. That combined with Culler’s memory means we find the abandoned house easily. At least we don’t lose a lot of time.

It’s in a rough-looking part of town. Every time I glimpse people wandering this street they all look sad, and I feel sad for them. I don’t know why that makes me homesick, but it does. Culler can’t get enough of photographing me walking it. He tries to explain it to me. He says something about the juxtaposition, how determined I look against this dying place, but I don’t get it. But I love how passionate he sounds about it, I think.

“You sound like you’re getting it back,” I tell him, nodding at his camera.

His face turns a shy red.

The house is at the very end of the street and God, it’s depressing. It could be the most depressing place yet. I studied the photograph my father took of it first and the photo is exactly what I’m seeing now, like he didn’t have to try at all to bring the bleakness through.

He just took the shot.

It’s sad when a place that has probably seen family, love, and death turns to nothing. It’s rotting and worn. It looks like something bad happened to it that it just couldn’t recover from.

It’s … see-through, almost. Solid, but its guts are on display. The windows on the first floor are boarded up, the ones on the second are broken. The doors have been ripped away. We approach the house carefully, looking up and down the street. This is the most public place we’ve had to visit, and we don’t want to get busted for trespassing or anything.

I keep thinking about what Culler said—I could get him in a lot of trouble, maybe.

We walk the overgrown path. Culler steps aside and I enter the house first. The floors are cheap wood, old weathered faces beneath our feet; something you’d cover with carpet, but the carpet is gone now, has been gone a long time. Ripped up.

Culler starts taking photographs. Of me.

He shadows me, at first, while I look around.

The hallway is a wreck. To the left, there are stairs. To the right, two rooms. Garbage litters the space, forming a trail to the back door—or the hole where the door used to be. Stained yellow wallpaper falls off the wall. Black mold—I think—edges down from the ceiling. I peer into the first room to the left. The kitchen. It’s even worse off and there is no way we’ll be able to get inside to look there. There’s garbage everywhere. Random pieces of wood, lumber. Old plastic toys, which I can’t quite figure out. The floors are linoleum, something seventies, I think. The counters and cupboards must have been white a long time ago, but they’re completely stained and the doors are hanging off the hinges. The drawers have been taken out and thrown on the ground.

The living room is slightly less disastrous. It’s littered with empty booze bottles, another space for people to come out here to hide and drink, and there’s a couch next to the wall with a number of questionable stains all over it. There’s a space next to it where a fireplace used to be. An old chandelier hangs from the ceiling by a thread. It smells terrible.

It’s hard to breathe in here.

“Where do we start?” I ask Culler.

“You take the upstairs and I’ll take the downstairs,” he says.

“Okay.”

He takes a photograph as I climb the rickety old stairs. I keep close to the wall. The banister doesn’t look very stable.

Upstairs is somehow less derelict. The sun shines in through every broken window and I can hear kids playing down the street, outside. There’s a bathroom, except there’s a hole in the floor where the toilet used to be and the porcelain sink has been shattered. Two bedrooms. One has delicate-looking wallpaper, faded yellow, with white flowers on it. The other bedroom is all peeling paint, so much so that if I squint, it looks like the walls are melting. I’m wandering around that room and taking it in …

I’m not even really looking for it when I find it.

Was I a good daughter.

I remember the first time this thought slipped into my head. It was three days after, and Beth came over with all these pamphlets about coping that she’d gotten from God knows where—maybe she’d made them herself from information she’d gleaned from support Web sites—and one of them kept reemphasizing the importance of NOT BLAMING YOURSELF and it hadn’t even occurred to me that maybe I should have been doing that until then.

Was I a good daughter.

Was I a bad daughter.

And then I decided he would have said if I was, he would have said that if he felt it, because it’s not like he had anything left to lose by telling the truth.

And then I pushed all those thoughts straight out of my head. It wasn’t me.

Except something about eliminating myself as a possibility made the question of why he killed himself worse somehow. And was I really sure it wasn’t me? Five days after, I needed to know why. Why. Why. It was a thought-loop. Seven days after was my first visit to Tarver’s. The relief of not finding proof of myself as one of the reasons my father killed himself at that place was huge, even though I couldn’t force myself onto the roof. Still, the question just got bigger.

Worse.

I’m sitting in a bedroom where the paint is peeling, my arms wrapped around myself. I wonder what happened in this place when it was new. Who lived here and what they did, and were they good people. Were they sad people. Are they dead now. Questions about things that don’t matter, so I can push that other question out of my head:
was I a good daughter.

It might have been me.

Imagine you’re the weight around a person who jumps.

That you are what keeps them falling.

Culler sits across from me and he is holding my hands. I can’t feel it. My stomach hurts. I think this is homesickness again. It’s familiar. I remember when I was five. My very first sleepover. I thought I’d last the night, but I didn’t. I called my parents in the middle of the night.

My dad picked me up.

“You wanted an answer,” Culler says. I wonder how long we’ve been sitting here. “More than anything, Eddie. That’s what you wanted.”

THESE BURDENS

NOTHING WORTH

STAYING FOR

S.R.

Culler says I can’t stay here in the house forever, but I think he’s wrong. I could stay forever and wonder about being too much of one thing and not enough of another, but he won’t let me. He makes me leave. He pulls me to my feet and walks me out of the house. I feel my body half-heartedly trying to direct myself back, but he won’t let me.

I leave my voice in there, I think. My heart.

“You’re making me nervous,” Culler says. We’re in the car and my head is against the window and my eyes are closed. “I wish you’d say something.”

There is nothing to say. These burdens. Nothing worth staying for.

What could I even say.

We go to a motel on the other side of town, next to a public playground. LISSIE PARK MOTEL. It’s so depressing. It’s this small strip of rooms that faces the parking lot. And I bet a lot of them are homes. I bet some people live here always. Are they worse off than me?

Culler lets me into our room first. There’s only one bed—something I should think about, maybe—and I curl up on it, bringing my knees to my chest while he moves around, taking off his shoes. Setting his camera down. After a while, he sits next to me and puts his hand on my legs.

“There’s still one more place,” he says.

But he sounds as uncertain about it as I feel.