Fall For Anything (6 page)

Milo drops Missy off at home first. I like that. I’m in the backseat, staring out the window, counting the tops of streetlights.

“Why did you lie to them?” Milo asks.

I shrug but I don’t say anything.

After that, I become my mother.

Which means for four days I stop brushing my hair and live in my housecoat and shuffle around the house, mute and sad, and I don’t answer my phone.

Milo sends me four text messages. One a day.

STATION’S BORING WITHOUT YOU. MISSY’S NOT HERE ALL THE TIME, WHATEVER YOU THINK.

COME OVER TODAY.

OR CALL ME.

ARE YOU OKAY?

The truth is, I’m fine. I’m kind of tired of everything, I guess, but I haven’t given up—I’m only pretending to, so I can drive Beth insane.

It might be working. She says one hundred words for every three she manages to force out of my mom and every two she forces out of me and her eyes develop this panicked glint.

That’s sort of cool.

Day four starts like: Beth bursts into my room and tries to wake me up. I keep my eyes closed, but I pick at the mattress, so she knows I’m awake—I’m just not responding to her.

“Eddie! Up!” She sits down on the edge of my bed and shakes my leg. “Up! Up! Up!”

She waits about five minutes for me to acknowledge her and when I don’t, she gives up, gets off the bed, and leaves the room. That’s nice. I stretch out and stare at the ceiling.

“Eddie!”

When I finally come downstairs, Mom is curled up on the couch with a book. When she sees me, she puts the book down and holds her arms out. I go to her and I let her hug me.

She kisses the side of my face and says, “I love you.”

“I love you too, Mom.”

Just that—it exhausts her. By the time I’m halfway out of the room, she’s leaning back and her eyes are closed. Her chest rises and falls so purposefully it’s like she’s telling herself to breathe because she can’t remember how to do it without thinking about it.

I shuffle into the kitchen, where Beth’s washing dishes. There’s a tall glass of orange juice at my seat, plus two vitamins. I’m vitamin-worthy now. Incredible. I sit down and stare at them and then I pick up one of the vitamins. Hold it up and study it. It’s round and orange. Wouldn’t it be amazing if it could fix everything? You put it on your tongue and let it dissolve. All your emotional trauma will end and that broken, cold dead soul will be alive again! And all your physical problems will be cured too. Cancer, illness. Vitamins made out of Nanobots or something, I don’t know.

“You need a boost,” Beth says of the vitamins. She turns the water off and faces me. “I want you out of the house today.”

“What?”

“Get dressed, get out of the house,” she says. “I let you laze about for three days, but don’t think you’ll be spending the summer like that because you won’t be.”

“What?”

“You’re not spending the rest of summer vacation sleeping in late, hanging around inside, breathing recycled air and—” Her eyes travel over me and I can’t believe she’s mistaken my fucking
grief
for
laziness.
“Not brushing your hair. I don’t know if you spend every summer like this, but it doesn’t matter. I need you out of the way while I help your mom. Besides, this isn’t the kind of time you should be wasting. Go! Live!”

I imagine so many horrible things happening to her.

There’s a dirty, rusty old station wagon parked in the muck at Tarver’s.

I press my face against the driver’s side window and look in. There’s a Coke in the drink holder and crumpled fast food wrappers scattered on the passenger seat. On the floor, a nickel catches the sunlight and glints at me. In the backseat, there’s a discarded jacket and an iPod and a couple of paperbacks with the front covers ripped off.

“Hi, Eddie.”

I step back. Culler is rounding the building, lowering his camera. I know instantly he’s taken my photo and he knows I know it. He points behind him. “I couldn’t tell it was you from way back there. I took the shot just in case you were stealing my car.”

“Not stealing it.” I shove my hands in my pocket. “I thought it was your car.” I pause. “I mean, I knew it was your car.”

He stops a few feet from me.

“Thank you for the card,” he says.

“It was nothing.”

“No, it was really nice. And I appreciate it.” He looks away. “I do miss him.”

“I just thought…” I shrug. “I mean, sometimes I forget I’m not the only one.”

“Well, in a way you are. You’re his only daughter.”

“I guess. Thank you for your card…”

“Of course.”

“So, did you figure it out?” I ask.

“Nope. You?”

“No…”

He squints at me. “He leave a note?”

“Would you believe that’s the second time I’ve been asked that in less than a week?”

“I’d believe that.”

I swallow. “He did.”

“I won’t ask you what it said,” he says, which is good, because I don’t want to tell him it didn’t say anything. It didn’t say why. He leans against the car and taps his fingers against his Nikon and stares up at the sky. “What do you come out here for, besides that?”

“What do you mean?”

He pats the side of the car. I lean beside him.

“I take photos,” he says. “Just knowing it inspired him; that he came here to be inspired … I’m hoping to feed off that. You don’t take photographs, do you?”

I shake my head. “Does that surprise you?”

“No,” Culler says, smiling. “Did you ever really get how famous he was at a certain point in his life? Within certain circles? I’ve always wondered what it must be like to have a kind of celebrity parent. Can their kids ever understand that scope? Their impact?”

“Probably not.”

“Your father changed my life.”

“Wow,” I say, but I’m not being sarcastic. I mean it.

Culler looks to the building. It’s silent and I don’t want it to be silent. I want to hear him talk more. I want to hear him talk more about my dad.

“It was all over when I was born,” I say.

Culler nods. “He told me he liked Branford because no one understood.”

That’s something I’ve heard my dad say before. He chose Branford because it’s not that the people here are or were unaware of his past, it’s that it’s almost too big for so small a place. Beyond comprehension. Or maybe it really
is
that no one cares.

He liked it here, anyway.

“If I was him, I’d stay where people understood,” Culler says. “I’d never walk away.”

I rub my arm. “… Do you think he hated the work?”

“God, no,” Culler says. “He hated the community, sharing his work. If he hated the art, he would’ve stopped. But he kept going. He was constantly looking for inspiration.”

Our eyes meet. We’re both thinking the same thing.

“Maybe he loved the work,” I say, “but couldn’t find inspiration anymore.”

“
That
would be a good reason to off yourself,” Culler says.

I am not a creative person. I used to be embarrassed to say so. It’s just not the way I think. I can’t draw, I don’t sing, I’m not a photographer or a writer or anything. Some people just aren’t. I’m one of them. I can appreciate art, though. I’ve been moved by it. I try to imagine what it must be like to have art inside of you and then to not have it anymore. To lose it, to not be able to find it, to search for it …

Maybe that
is
a good reason to kill yourself.

And now I want this possibility out of my head because it makes my chest ache. It makes me want to cry. It makes me want to scream.

But I’m quiet beside Culler. I’m not even breathing.

“But I don’t think that was his reason,” Culler says after a minute, but there’s a tinge to his voice, like he doesn’t totally believe it.

“What was it about this place?” I ask. “That kept him coming back to photograph it?”

“No idea.”

We stare at the building.

There is nothing about this place.

“Eddie,” he says after a minute. “Can I show you something?”

I stare at him and he stares at me. Last time, I would have said no, but now we’ve exchanged sympathy cards so I guess that changes everything.

“Okay,” I say.

He walks across the lot wordlessly, and I guess I’m supposed to follow after him, so I do. The closer we get to the warehouse, the more uneasy I feel. My stomach is cold. When Culler gets to the entrance, the two massive, rusting doors at the front, I know he wants to go in.

I feel dizzy.

“I—”

I stop.

Culler turns. We stand like that, about five feet between us. He stares at me for a long minute. The breeze picks up and brushes my hair against my face and he raises his camera to his eye and snaps a photograph, startling me.

“Sorry,” he says. “You were a perfect photograph.”

“It’s okay,” I mumble, even though I’m not sure it is, but I remember my father’s random bursts of inspiration, the ones that had him kissing us frantically on the cheeks and running out of the house. Except I can’t quite believe I’d inspire a photograph. “I can’t go on the roof.”

“Oh,” he says.

“I just … can’t.”

“I would’ve never asked you to.”

“Okay.”

“It is inside, though. What I want to show you,” he says. He holds out his hand. “Let me show you, Eddie. It wouldn’t be right if I didn’t.”

I stare at his hand for what feels a long time and then I put my palm against his, but my fingers stop working again. I can’t actually hold his hand. Culler doesn’t even blink or ask me why—he just closes his fingers around mine, simple as that, and in that moment it’s electric. I am touching someone who really understands. I can do this. I can go in.

I will let him show me whatever he wants to show me.

He lets go of my hand and pulls the doors open. The entrance into Tarver’s is like a black hole, even though it’s day, even though light is pouring in through the windows. Death has been here and where death has been no light shall ever be.

Or something.

Culler takes my hand again and walks me inside.

I don’t know anything about the history of Tarver’s Warehouse. What people did here. How they worked. Who they worked for. Why. I never thought to ask my father and my father never thought to tell me. The place is empty and strange and echoey and dusty. Really dusty. I sneeze and instantly feel like I’ve broken the sacredness of this moment.

Culler leads me away from the center of the room and down the side of the wall. The ground is concrete and dirty and full of debris. I step over pieces of wood. I have no idea where they came from. Eventually, we get halfway through the building.

“How do you get onto the roof?” I ask, fighting the nausea the question inspires.

“You just keep going up,” Culler replies. He points to a door on the opposite wall. “There are stairs behind there. What I want to show you is over there. I just want to take you to the door, though. Not through it.”

I nod, but I don’t feel nearly as steady about this as I look.

It’s different in the day. I’ve been inside at night, when everything looks like nothing, no color. In the light, I see the door is faded red and I know every time I see red from now on, I’ll think of my father’s death. Culler takes my hand and then he presses it against the space just above the doorknob. There’s a difference in texture. I notice it immediately.

We stand there.

He takes my photograph and before I can tell him to stop, he says, “Lower your hand,” and I do, and then he says, “Do you see it?”

Etched into the rotting wood—maybe by a key, something—
S.R.

I feel like someone has turned my head off, my heart.

I face Culler, my mouth open, but I’m not sure what I should say.

“Did you put that there?” he asks.

“What? No—”

“I didn’t either.”

I turn back to the scratch marks. The name. I can’t believe this. I press my hand over the letters again, rub my palm over them and try to feel them—more.

I suck in a breath and pull my hand away.

“What?” Culler asks.

I shake my head and stare at my palm. My hand is shaking and a little splinter has planted itself directly into that soft space of skin just under the base of my thumb. It stings. Culler steps forward and sees it. He uses his fingernails to try to dig it out.

Too many things are going on in my head.

“He put it there,” I say.

“Yeah,” Culler says. “I think so.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.”

“The night he died?” I ask him this like he would know the answer.

“Maybe.” He finally gets the splinter out. He looks at me and his eyes are intent. “Maybe not.”

“S.R.—that’s like—”

“Secrets on City Walls,”
Culler says. “He’d put those photographs up everywhere and they’d have his initials on them. First thing I thought of too.”

I stare at the scratches. “But … why would he do that?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to show you.”

I feel lightheaded.

“Are you okay?” Culler asks. I must look like I’m spacing.

“Uhm … I have to go to his studio. I have to clear it all out,” I say. “Everything.”

“309 Hutt Street. Delaney,” he says.

“How did you know?”

He smiles faintly. “Where do you think I learned?” And then I flush and he frowns. “They want you to clear it out already?”

“They’re renting the space … they don’t want anything to get lost in the shuffle…”

“Maggie Gibbard, right?” he asks. “She’s full of it. She just wants it gone. Twit.”

“Maybe.” But I don’t really have a problem with Maggie. “… And my mom can barely get out of bed, so it’s just me. I have to get his stuff. I don’t even have a way down there.”

“I could take you,” he says.

Which is exactly what I wanted him to say.