“But it’s night.”
“They won’t even think about it until after they’ve answered the door and it’s too late.”
“They’ll recognize my voice.”
“They won’t recognize mine. Come on.”
He gets out of the car. I have no choice but to follow him across the road and he asks me Culler’s apartment number and he buzzes it and does the rest exactly how he said he would.
There’s a delivery for Culler Evans.
The voice upstairs—Topher’s—says he’ll send him right down.
“Easy,” Milo says.
I stare at the door, nervous.
“You have to go for this,” I tell him.
“I’d love to stay,” he says. “Punch him in the face.”
“I don’t need you to do that for me.” I look at him. “Please, Milo.”
“I’ll circle the block.” He steps off the curb and onto the road. “Ten minutes tops, Eddie. We should have been home by now.”
I nod. Milo is getting into the car at the same time Culler opens the door.
When he sees me, he stops.
His eyes widen, his face pales.
And then before I can say anything, he’s holding me.
And the worst part is—I want to hold him.
But I also want to slap him, hit him. Punch him. Tear out his throat.
I want him to tell me what he did to me was a mistake. Some horrible mix-up.
… After I’m done holding him back.
“What are you doing here?” he asks into my neck.
It breaks the moment. Ruins it. Brings me back to this awful reality. I push away from him—not hard. But it’s difficult. There is still that part of me that wants to be near him.
I hate that part of myself. I want to be strong about this.
“You thought I wouldn’t—” I break off. “You really thought I wouldn’t want to know why you—why you left me there?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Eddie, I’m—”
“Why did you leave me there?”
He doesn’t say anything when I want him to be falling all over himself, trying to explain. He opens his mouth—closes it, like the words were there, but left before he could speak them. And then I remember this isn’t just about the motel. Leaving me.
The church. What about the church. Everything.
“Were you scared?” I ask, and my voice is shattering already, hopeful, and I know tears aren’t that far off but I refuse to cry in front of him. “Was that it? Was it about the church? You went to the church—” He flinches and I know I’m getting warmer. “You got rid of the message, didn’t you? What did it say?”
“Eddie,” he says.
“I mean, I was scared about the church too. It’s okay—it’s okay if you were scared.”
But as soon as I say it, I hate myself for giving it to him. He’s quiet. I wait. I want to shake an explanation out of him.
“You left me,” I say.
“I was going to call you in a couple of weeks,” he says with a feeble kind of urgency. I can’t believe this is all he’s giving me. “Eddie, I—”
“Why did you ruin the message? That was mine. It was more mine than yours—”
“I was scared,” he chokes out. “Eddie—”
I cover my mouth with my hand. His words send a shock through me. That’s what I wanted to hear. It’s true. It’s true. Didn’t I say I would forgive him that, if he was scared. But maybe not. Maybe I can’t forgive him this. But maybe I should. And what does that mean, if he was scared? It was bad? Worse than what we found in the house?
“Was it bad?” I ask. He doesn’t say anything. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
He just stands there for the longest time. I wait and I wait and I can’t stand it and I realize that’s it: it just stops here. He won’t say more. If Culler won’t say more, I have to leave. I blink back tears. I’m not ready to leave. I can’t. I didn’t get what I came for.
I turn to look for Milo. He hasn’t circled back yet.
“It doesn’t matter,” Culler finally says. “What was at the church.”
I face him. “It’s all that matters! It’s the only thing that matters.” And he starts shaking his head and I can’t believe this. “What’s wrong with you? What did I—Culler, what did I do?”
“Eddie,” he says, and the way it comes out of his mouth is too many things, it’s familiar, almost comforting, and that makes me think, no, Culler would never leave me stranded at a motel, fourteen hours away. But it’s sad, too. It’s pitying me. “You didn’t do anything … you…” He pauses. “You did everything but everything you did was right.…”
“I don’t know what you mean.…”
Culler closes his eyes. They stay closed and he breathes slowly, like this is hard, but I don’t understand. If he didn’t want it to be hard, he shouldn’t have left me at that motel. He opens his eyes.
“I felt something for you,” he says. “And I got ahead of myself … I couldn’t…”
“Culler—”
“Eddie, I put the messages there.”
It’s like—I can’t breathe. There’s no air. I step back from him. The words sink in and I decide—no. This is a joke. He’s joking now. This is crazy and cruel, but it’s a joke.
“I don’t…”
“I’m sorry, Eddie,” he says. “I’m—”
“You’re lying—”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I—”
And he keeps saying it, he won’t stop saying it, and the more he says it the more I know it’s true because people aren’t just this sorry for nothing.
My face starts to crumple. What he says goes all through me and makes me numb. He put the messages there.
“Eddie, your father—”
“Stop it—don’t talk about my father—”
“He was my … idol,” he says, and his voice breaks. He rubs his face and steps back and from here, I can see he’s shaking. “He was the only person who had any kind of belief in what I was doing and what I was trying to do.…”
“Stop it—stop talking—”
“And I’m so like you. I just wanted to know why—”
“Stop,” I moan. “You lied to me.”
“I couldn’t work. I couldn’t get past it. I couldn’t get it out of my head—why he’d do that, but he didn’t leave anything behind—but you know that.” He sounds desperate now. He knows I’m shutting down. “I’d go to Tarver’s all the time with my camera and try to figure it out and then I met you, and you were sneaking out there and I thought—she’s like me—and the feeling got worse, because I know you needed to know too—”
“Don’t…” I bring my hands to my eyes and all I can see is him, his camera. It’s in my head. Everywhere. His stupid artist statement, what he said to me in the car: sometimes lies bring you closer to the truth. “Did you make it up just so you could photograph it?”
“No—not—I mean—”
I bury my face in my hands and he touches my arm and I jerk away.
“Don’t touch me—”
“I told you—my work is questions, I can make answers out of art. And then I can let it go. Eddie, that’s what I do. Except—I didn’t know how to this time and then we went to the studio and you gave me those photographs—”
I shake my head. “I can’t believe this—”
“And you were so upset because they didn’t mean anything, and I thought, I can give that to her. I can make them mean something—and I thought I can work it out, I can make sense of it for myself with my camera, and I’ll be okay and I can give you some kind of peace too. And I thought … I thought that’s what Seth would have wanted. Or that he would understand—”
“Please stop, Culler—”
“But mostly because I felt something for you. I wanted to help you.”
Milo says I died the night my father died, but he was wrong. I’m dying here, in front of Culler. I can feel my blood stop flowing in my veins, my heart slowing until it stops, and when I try to breathe, nothing happens. My lungs have given up. They don’t want air.
“I thought I could give you an answer you could live with, but…” He swallows. “But it was just … lies. And you were so, so honest with me. In the motel, that night. And I couldn’t lie to you anymore. I woke up. I panicked and I left.” I am dead. I’m dead. “Eddie, I’m sorry—”
But I don’t want to hear anymore. I turn and make my way off the curb. I don’t know how I make my legs move me forward when all I want to do is sit in the middle of the road and wait for the first car to take me out. I’m already dead, see. It wouldn’t make a difference.
“Eddie, wait—”
I stop. I don’t know why I stop.
But I don’t turn around.
I won’t turn around.
“Tarver’s,” he starts, and I close my eyes and it’s almost like he senses it, because he breaks off and waits and when I open my eyes again, he speaks: “His initials in the door there … that wasn’t me. It was him.”
I spot Milo’s car making its way towards me. It sidles up to the curb and I cross the road and get in the passenger side and then I stop dying. I come alive. The worst kind of alive. My heart beating.Blood raging through my veins. I’m breathing too hard, too fast. Milo stares at me, alarmed, but he doesn’t ask. He won’t ask. But I have to tell him.
I can’t not tell him this.
“Culler lied,” I say. “About everything. The messages. Everything.”