“So,” Culler says after a while, and I turn my face from the window. “When we get to Valleyview we’ll find a motel and look for the gazebo in the day. Find the message and then get to Labelle as fast as possible. How much time did you say Milo was giving you?”
“Two days.”
“Okay.”
My cell phone rings. I turn it off and feel my face go red.
“Is that him?” Culler asks.
“Probably. Never mind about Milo, though.” I clear my throat because I do not want to talk about Milo with Culler. “Thank you for doing this with me…”
“Thank you for letting me.”
“You need it too.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. “I do.”
“What was my father like with you?” I ask.
Culler is quiet for a long time, weighing the question. While he does that, I prepare to hear about a man I never knew, a man separate from my father. The one I want to know.
The one who would kill himself.
“Sometimes I want to ask you the same thing,” he says, glancing at me. “What your father was like with you…”
“I asked you first.”
“Well, he was kind,” Culler says. “He was very kind, very passionate. Inspiring. But quiet … and when he was on to something he was really intense and you could tell he felt it—that he had an idea and he was going to turn it into something amazing—just by being near him.”
“Topher said you were an art school reject,” I say, and then I feel bad because those weren’t Topher’s exact words, but I’m too tired to think of a nicer way to say it. “I mean—”
“I thought I wanted something different then.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I think it must’ve happened for a reason.” He looks at me. “I thought it was over for me. I was really head fucked about it. But it brought me to your father and he made me feel like, for the first time I was doing something right … I always felt like the camera was what I needed to make sense of everything—to ask questions and then make answers out of the photographs I took. And then I felt—I feel so strongly—I have to share those questions and those answers. To me, that’s art. He really understood.”
“Are they posed?” I ask. “Your photographs.”
He tenses. I feel it. It is too personal. I shouldn’t have asked.
“They’re truths,” he says, which I guess is a vague way of saying yes and no. “But they’re lies. Constructs.” He looks at me for as long as he can before turning back to the road. “Eddie, I think … sometimes lies bring you to the truth … or help you reconcile with it…”
I roll up the window. The road moving under the car is hypnotic and I know I’m going to fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep.
“Ever since he died, it’s like it’s gone,” Culler says. “It’s like … there’s something between me and the photographs I want to take…”
I don’t say anything. It’s so sad. I wish my dad were here. Not just to be here, but because I wish he would answer for this. I want to make him answer for how sad this is.
“I want it back,” Culler says after a while. “More than I can say.”
My eyes drift shut.
“Eddie, we’re here.”
My neck is stiff and my back aches. Here? We’re here. Culler shakes my shoulder and says my name again. I open my eyes and rub my face and wait for the car to materialize around me. It’s still dark out. The clock says it’s three in the morning. Over six hours have passed and my eyes were closed that whole time.
“I’m so sorry,” I mumble. Even in the dark, I can see how pale and tired he is. I wish he’d said something. If he’d said something, I would have stayed awake.
“It’s okay,” he says. “You were spent. Anyway, we’re here.”
And then I realize—here. Not just here in Valleyview, still moving and passing a WELCOME TO sign. But here. This is here: we’re parked at the side of the road—a back road, by the look of it. Thick, healthy-looking trees line either side of it.
“Here,” I repeat.
“Through those trees on my side”—he points—“I found the gazebo. It took me a while.”
I’m awake now. I’m so awake.
“God.” It’s already happening. “But it’s too dark to see…”
“I have a pair of flashlights in the back,” he says. “Part of an emergency kit in case something happens on the road. I thought we could look now instead of tomorrow. We can look tomorrow, if we don’t find anything tonight. But since we’re pressed for time.”
“Are you tired?” I ask.
“Yes,” he admits. “But not for this.”
We look at each other. We’re doing this.
We open the car door and get out at the same time. I stretch, my bones crackling and popping, while Culler goes into the back for the flashlights. He turns one on, briefly illuminating his face, the bags under his eyes. He hands one to me and then he goes back into the car, grabs his camera, and gestures to me to follow him. We walk down the ditch. My footing isn’t as steady as Culler’s. He seems firm on his feet, already familiar with the place after walking it once. I slide beside him a little, almost fall, and he grabs me by the elbow.
“Careful,” he says.
The weeds and the grass are ankle-deep and make my skin itch. It’s buggy too, but these are small things, little nothings. All this inconvenience will reveal something great to me. I try to remember what the gazebo looked like in the photograph my father took, but for some reason I can’t. I keep visualizing summer, something whole and complete. People there.
But when we step past more brush and through a clearing, Culler’s flashlight glares over something much less whole.
“The water tower’s just beyond it. You can barely see it.”
I look behind me and I can’t see the car anymore.
I turn back to the gazebo. We run our flashlights over it, slowly uncovering it. It’s so much of a skeleton, it’s hard to imagine what it must have looked like when it was new. The roof is all gaps, empty spaces where shingles used to be, and the trees seem to reach for those holes. The ground is swallowing it up. Grass creeps up the steps, the floor. I get dizzy—it’s that same dizzy anticipation I felt when I was at the school.
“What if you’d never figured it out?” I ask Culler in a hushed voice, as we take the first steps inside of it. “This place won’t be around forever. It’s rotting away…”
I can’t finish that thought. The idea of the last things my father had to say being lost to time—none of us ever knowing—is terrible.
Culler goes to the right, moving the flashlight slowly over the wood. I’m two steps to the left when my foot goes through the rotting floor.
“Ow, shit—” A jagged piece of wood digs into my anklebone. “God—”
“Fuck,” Culler mutters. He waves the flashlight over my leg. He sets it down and tries to pull the wood back from my ankle with his fingers, but he can’t. “Can you—”
“Yeah, it’s just—”
“Easy…”
I pull my foot out slowly. The wood tears at my skin and by the time I’ve freed myself, I have a scrape and it’s trickling a little blood. I wiggle my ankle around. It feels okay.
“Maybe we should come back in the day,” Culler says uncertainly.
I shake my head. “No—we’ll do this now.”
“Eddie—”
“Seriously, it’s fine.”
He pauses and then goes back to his side of the gazebo and I go back to mine, waiting for the light to find me my father. It takes so long in the dark. Sometimes I get confused and end up combing through the same place twice. I feel bad for Culler, who must be aching and sore after all that time driving. I want to ask him if he stopped the car, even once, but I feel too guilty to.
After a while, he takes out his camera and takes some photographs, illuminating the whole gazebo with his flash, and for a little while, he becomes my light, and then we separate.
And then Culler says, “Found it.”
Something about the way he says that makes me turn to ice. I stay where I am, staring at nothing, at the glow of the flashlight.
“It’s okay,” he says softly. “It’s not bad.”
I make my way over to him slowly. He steadies his flashlight and it takes a minute for my eyes to make out the deep grooves in the wood, and that thought of missing this to time, to weather, to ruin, crosses my mind again and makes me uneasy.
HERE I LOOK UP I SEE
S.R.
I press my fingers to the letters. I close my eyes. My blood feels hot, feels like it’s burning itself through my veins. It’s going to feel like this every time we find these. Intense.
“Find me,” I murmur. “All these things gone cold and now I’m…”
Here I look up I see.
Culler doesn’t say anything and I can’t pinpoint the strange disappointment in my heart. I think I was expecting more. How am I always expecting more? This is so much more than I used to have. No, I wasn’t expecting more.
I was expecting to understand.
“There are still two more places,” I say.
Culler takes a photograph of the message.
“Two more,” he repeats, and it’s clear from his voice that, post-discovery, there is something unsatisfying about this one for him too. It’s supposed to make more sense, not less.
I look up.
“Oh,” I breathe.
“What?” Culler asks.
I point. He looks up. Through the skeletal gazebo roof are so many stars. So many. We’re so far from the kind of light pollution that spoils the view, I think I’m seeing every star that is actually in the sky and I can almost convince myself they’re coming down on me, and I wonder if that’s what my dad meant by this one.