“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.