“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.
I’m slowly edging down the roof when Milo’s car pulls up in front of the house.
He sees me.
There’s not a whole lot I can do about it. He stares up at me from the driver’s side, his mouth open, like he can’t believe what he’s stumbled upon. I guess it must look strange. I don’t know why. We see this stuff in movies and television shows all the time.
Anyway, he just sits there, in his car, watching, and I have to jump. I feel self-conscious, wrong, doing it in front of him. I land hard but easy. I straighten and brush my legs off.
Milo gets out of the car.
“Do I even want to know?”
“Taking the front door isn’t nearly as exciting,” I say.
“Beth give you a curfew?”
“What are you doing here this late?” I ask him.
“What are you doing climbing out of a window and scaling down a roof this late?” Before I can say anything he says, “Or maybe a better question: why are you ignoring me, and does climbing out of a window and scaling down a roof have anything to do with it? Because I’m really curious now.”
“I’m not ignoring you.”
“Yes, you are. Since Deacon’s,” he says. “I texted you four times and you didn’t get back to me. If this is about Missy—”
