I cringe. “Honesty is not the best policy?”
“She’s very unoriginal.”
“She’s fairly well-known.”
“Most unoriginal people are.”
“Does that mean my father was unoriginal?”
“No. Besides, by the time he died, he wasn’t that well-known.” He pauses and laughs again, looking away from me like I’ve unnerved him a little. “I’m just talking.” He runs his hand through his hair. “Should we go?”
I don’t want to go back. I don’t. The idea of going back makes me feel so sick, now that I’m so far from home. And then I have this crazy vision of Culler and me traveling so far away together. It’s insane but I’m desperate not to go back to Mom, to Beth, to Milo. I search for something to say and there’s nothing. My eyes travel to the station wagon.
The box inside.
I glance at Culler. He stares up at the sky and then stands and my heart jumps. I grab his leg without thinking and before he can ask me what’s going on, I say, “I wonder what he thought was worth leaving behind.”
Culler looks at me. “You want to open the box?”
At first, I thought I’d wait until I was alone to open it because it’s private, but I’d never get that moment. Beth would be on me from the minute I brought it into the house and who knows how Mom would deal with it. Not that this truly matters, since I’m just using it as an excuse to stay longer. Still. Culler is probably the best person to do this with. Logically.
“Yeah,” I say. “If you’ll—if you want to…”
“I’d be honored,” he says, and then his face reddens when he realizes how formal it sounds coming out of his mouth. “I mean it, though. I would be.”
He holds out his hand and helps me to my feet. We stand there for a second, staring at the box, and my heart pounds and I realize how big this is and how I used it, just so I could spend more time with Culler.
Now I feel really sick.
But I pretend like it’s nothing I can’t handle. I open the door and pull the box out and my hands hang on tight this time. Glass clinks inside and I don’t want to think about what I broke, but I’ll know in a second.
I set the box on the pavement and we stare at it. The seams are taped perfectly, and my skin crawls at the idea of him taping this up, knowing the whole time he would kill himself and I would come here and find it. Anger wells up inside me, turns my blood hot. He knew. Of course he knew. Duh. But I feel dumb because some part of me was pretending his death was something he committed to on the spur of the moment. Not an intention he kept with him, close to his heart, while he was with us.
Acting like everything was fine.
I bend down and dig at the tape but my fingernails are useless against it. Culler bends down beside me and he has a Swiss Army knife attached to his car keys. He runs it down the middle of the tape, cutting a perfect line. The cardboard releases its hold. A sharp little sound. He steps back and waits for me to open it. I will open it. I’ll open it. I open it.
I pull the cardboard flaps aside and stare into the box.
The edges of six frames stare up at us.
Six photographs.
Culler and I look at each other. I sit down and he sits next to me and I pull the first frame out and the next, and the next, and the next. The fifth one is the one I broke. I want to pick the ragged glass edges out of the black border but I don’t. I lay them all out, until we’re surrounded.
The photographs are of six locations. All black-and-white. I only recognize one of them—Tarver’s. It’s the third photograph I set out. It was taken at night and the building looks like it’s glowing, and I don’t even know how that’s possible because there are no lights at Tarver’s.
The stars are all behind it.
For a second, I can feel myself up on the roof. At night. I can feel it like I’m in the photograph. My head spins a little. I close my eyes for a second and then I open them again.
“Tarver’s,” Culler says, following my gaze. He points to the first photograph I set out, a run-down-looking barn. “That’s an abandoned barn … I was there when he took that one…” He points to the third photograph I set out: an empty house. The doors and windows are boarded up. “I was there for that one too.”
He skips over Tarver’s and goes straight to the fourth photograph. It’s of a beaten, falling-apart gazebo in the middle of a field. He shakes his head.
“But not that one.” He moves on to the next. “That’s an old, abandoned one-room schoolhouse. I was with him for that one too…” And then there is the last photo. A worn-down, tired-looking church. “Not that one.”
He leans back and takes a longer look at them, totally awed in a way I am just not comprehending.
“Jesus,” he says quietly. “These are the last photographs he worked on…”
He’s thinking that’s amazing and I am thinking:
These are what my dad thought was worth leaving behind and they are nothing.
“You should have them,” I say abruptly.
Culler’s head jerks up. “What?”
I grab the photos and start putting them back in the box. I want to throw them, but I don’t. I’m shaking. “You should have them. They mean something to you. I don’t get art, really, so I want you to have them—”
“Eddie—”
“No, I’m serious.” My eyes burn. “I want you to have them, Culler.”
“Eddie—”
“Just say you’ll take them,” I snap, and then I feel bad. “Sorry.”
“I’ll take them,” he says. I move to get up, but I can’t. I press my palms into the concrete and I feel his eyes on me. “Eddie … what were you expecting?”
The question takes it out of me and I feel tiredness seeping into my bones from no place I can source. Nothing is right.
“More,” I say.
Culler moves closer to me. “I’m sorry.”
“You know what his note said? It said he had to leave.” My voice breaks. I swallow hard. “That’s it. That’s so much nothing.” I gesture to the box. “And those—aren’t even great photographs. They’re nothing too.”
And then I feel really bad for saying that.
“Eddie,” Culler says. He reaches out and presses his hands against my face. Our eyes meet. “Do you really want me to have the photographs?”
“Take them. They don’t mean anything to me,” I say. “They don’t mean … anything … I thought…” I shake my head. God, I’m going to cry. “I thought they’d mean something—tell me…” And then I do start to cry and I can’t stop. “I needed it to.”
Our eyes meet and something changes. Something changes in him. I feel it through his hands against my face, like everything inside him stops. And then starts again.
He brushes my tears away with his thumbs.
“It’s okay,” he says, but it’s not okay. “Eddie, it’s okay. I understand.”
He leans forward and kisses me.
It’s not just a kiss. His lips are insistent, searching, trying to get the feel of me, and my heart is so heavy and sad. I feel that from him too. This is a funeral kiss. This is a kiss for the dead. We miss my father too much for it to mean more. But it’s still the nicest thing that’s happened to me lately. He feels warm. His tongue is in my mouth.
I think the dumbest thing: I would take off all my clothes for you.
It’s so dumb, but it’s the thought his mouth on my mouth puts into my head.
And when he pulls away, I say the dumbest thing: “I’m seventeen.”
He laughs.
We don’t talk a lot on the way back to Branford. I’m glad because I’m not sure I could trust myself to speak. By the time he drops me back off at Fuller’s, long after Milo’s shift has ended, we say good-bye like nothing happened.
I turn on the computer. I open up a browser and search Culler’s name in Google. His site is the first hit. I don’t know why I didn’t do this before, when we were in the car together, because then I would’ve told him how much I admired his work even if I didn’t really, because maybe then he would have kissed me twice. His site loads quickly. The first page is just his name in small black letters against a white background. It doesn’t even say he’s a photographer.
CULLER EVANS
I click through to the next page, which holds his artist’s statement, but no photos yet. I feel like I’m reading a diary entry. It’s what Culler told me in the car but more intimate, somehow. Personal.
ART IS NOT COMPROMISE. IT’S EVOLUTION—A COMBINATION OF BOLD TRUTHS AND LIES THAT YOU MUST BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO LOOK AT AND BRAVE ENOUGH TO SHARE … I BELIEVE IN ART AT ALL COSTS …
I stare at it for a long time before clicking SELECTED PHOTOGRAPHS.
I am not a great judge of art. I honestly don’t know what it is, or if it can be so defined, but these photographs are raw and strange. They begin and end, sad stories. All of them are sad and I wish he was here, so I could ask him about them. Ask him if it means he’s sad.
There’s one set of photos, a collection of a woman in a hospital bed that seems boring at first, nothing, until the final page, which turns all the photographs into an animation and you can see that the person is slowly exhaling. He’s titled it Last Breath and I’m afraid it means what I think it does and then I can’t stop looking, because if this woman is not dying, I’ve decided she is. That makes me feel really weird.
Another series, Compassion, follows a beautiful woman (girlfriend? I hope not) from a distance. He’s shadowing her. She doesn’t know he’s there. I get absorbed in the story of her day as she moves from place to place, until the last photo is of her lying in an alleyway. In the corner of the photo, a shadowy figure retreats. I pause, my breath all caught in my throat.