It’s … see-through, almost. Solid, but its guts are on display. The windows on the first floor are boarded up, the ones on the second are broken. The doors have been ripped away. We approach the house carefully, looking up and down the street. This is the most public place we’ve had to visit, and we don’t want to get busted for trespassing or anything.
I keep thinking about what Culler said—I could get him in a lot of trouble, maybe.
We walk the overgrown path. Culler steps aside and I enter the house first. The floors are cheap wood, old weathered faces beneath our feet; something you’d cover with carpet, but the carpet is gone now, has been gone a long time. Ripped up.
Culler starts taking photographs. Of me.
He shadows me, at first, while I look around.
The hallway is a wreck. To the left, there are stairs. To the right, two rooms. Garbage litters the space, forming a trail to the back door—or the hole where the door used to be. Stained yellow wallpaper falls off the wall. Black mold—I think—edges down from the ceiling. I peer into the first room to the left. The kitchen. It’s even worse off and there is no way we’ll be able to get inside to look there. There’s garbage everywhere. Random pieces of wood, lumber. Old plastic toys, which I can’t quite figure out. The floors are linoleum, something seventies, I think. The counters and cupboards must have been white a long time ago, but they’re completely stained and the doors are hanging off the hinges. The drawers have been taken out and thrown on the ground.
The living room is slightly less disastrous. It’s littered with empty booze bottles, another space for people to come out here to hide and drink, and there’s a couch next to the wall with a number of questionable stains all over it. There’s a space next to it where a fireplace used to be. An old chandelier hangs from the ceiling by a thread. It smells terrible.
It’s hard to breathe in here.
“Where do we start?” I ask Culler.
“You take the upstairs and I’ll take the downstairs,” he says.
“Okay.”
He takes a photograph as I climb the rickety old stairs. I keep close to the wall. The banister doesn’t look very stable.
Upstairs is somehow less derelict. The sun shines in through every broken window and I can hear kids playing down the street, outside. There’s a bathroom, except there’s a hole in the floor where the toilet used to be and the porcelain sink has been shattered. Two bedrooms. One has delicate-looking wallpaper, faded yellow, with white flowers on it. The other bedroom is all peeling paint, so much so that if I squint, it looks like the walls are melting. I’m wandering around that room and taking it in …
I’m not even really looking for it when I find it.
Was I a good daughter.
I remember the first time this thought slipped into my head. It was three days after, and Beth came over with all these pamphlets about coping that she’d gotten from God knows where—maybe she’d made them herself from information she’d gleaned from support Web sites—and one of them kept reemphasizing the importance of NOT BLAMING YOURSELF and it hadn’t even occurred to me that maybe I should have been doing that until then.
Was I a good daughter.
Was I a bad daughter.
And then I decided he would have said if I was, he would have said that if he felt it, because it’s not like he had anything left to lose by telling the truth.
And then I pushed all those thoughts straight out of my head. It wasn’t me.
Except something about eliminating myself as a possibility made the question of why he killed himself worse somehow. And was I really sure it wasn’t me? Five days after, I needed to know why. Why. Why. It was a thought-loop. Seven days after was my first visit to Tarver’s. The relief of not finding proof of myself as one of the reasons my father killed himself at that place was huge, even though I couldn’t force myself onto the roof. Still, the question just got bigger.
Worse.
I’m sitting in a bedroom where the paint is peeling, my arms wrapped around myself. I wonder what happened in this place when it was new. Who lived here and what they did, and were they good people. Were they sad people. Are they dead now. Questions about things that don’t matter, so I can push that other question out of my head: was I a good daughter.
It might have been me.
Imagine you’re the weight around a person who jumps.
That you are what keeps them falling.
Culler sits across from me and he is holding my hands. I can’t feel it. My stomach hurts. I think this is homesickness again. It’s familiar. I remember when I was five. My very first sleepover. I thought I’d last the night, but I didn’t. I called my parents in the middle of the night.
My dad picked me up.
“You wanted an answer,” Culler says. I wonder how long we’ve been sitting here. “More than anything, Eddie. That’s what you wanted.”
THESE BURDENS
NOTHING WORTH
STAYING FOR
S.R.
Culler says I can’t stay here in the house forever, but I think he’s wrong. I could stay forever and wonder about being too much of one thing and not enough of another, but he won’t let me. He makes me leave. He pulls me to my feet and walks me out of the house. I feel my body half-heartedly trying to direct myself back, but he won’t let me.
I leave my voice in there, I think. My heart.
“You’re making me nervous,” Culler says. We’re in the car and my head is against the window and my eyes are closed. “I wish you’d say something.”
There is nothing to say. These burdens. Nothing worth staying for.
What could I even say.
We go to a motel on the other side of town, next to a public playground. LISSIE PARK MOTEL. It’s so depressing. It’s this small strip of rooms that faces the parking lot. And I bet a lot of them are homes. I bet some people live here always. Are they worse off than me?
Culler lets me into our room first. There’s only one bed—something I should think about, maybe—and I curl up on it, bringing my knees to my chest while he moves around, taking off his shoes. Setting his camera down. After a while, he sits next to me and puts his hand on my legs.
“There’s still one more place,” he says.
But he sounds as uncertain about it as I feel.
I wake up after midnight.
Music thrums from one of the rooms down the strip. I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling. A small sliver of light is above me, from a minute gap in the curtains, and Culler is next to me. I turn my face to him. His lips are parted. The way he breathes makes me feel something about him that I don’t think there are words for.
I get out of bed quietly and lock myself in the bathroom, keeping the light off. I lean against the door and text Milo too many times, but he never replies. He must be sleeping too. The things I say to him are going to scare him when he wakes up, but I can’t help myself, because it’s what is in my heart and what is in my heart is killing me.
TODAY I FOUND OUT I’M A BURDEN.
& NOTHING WAS WORTH STAYING FOR.
IT’S BAD HERE.
BUT I THINK I MUST’VE KNOWN.
ONE MORE PLACE.
I WANT THIS TO BE OVER.
I WANT IT TO END.
I MISS YOU.
I’M SORRY.
I turn off my phone. I shower in the dark and let the water run over me slow and hot. It feels like suffocating and that almost feels like a distraction. Almost.
I cry.
I press my palms against my eyes and try not to be loud, but really I want to scream. I turn off the water and grab a towel, wrapping myself in it. I press my forehead against the door and then step back into the room and the light next to the bed is on. Culler is sitting up, awake. I don’t say anything to him. He doesn’t say anything to me. The carpet feels rough and dirty under my feet. I walk over to the window and look out. The station wagon is parked out front. There are people down the way, sitting on the curb. They look drunk and unhappy.
I move from the window and my eyes drift to Culler’s camera in its case, open, staring up at me. I pick it up and raise it to my face. Blackness. The lens cap is still on.
I twist it off and look through it and I can feel Culler’s eyes on me.
I turn to him and see him through the lens, a photograph waiting to happen.
Or it would be, if I could see it. But I can’t. Nothing about his face, the place around us, changes. It’s not art. It is still, unforgivably, the same. I wonder if my dad looked through his camera and saw the same nothing special I’m seeing right now.
Maybe that’s what happened, why he killed himself.
Because how can you live with that, when you’ve known something so extraordinary?
But that wasn’t it, was it, because if I know anything after today, it’s this:
“It wasn’t his art,” I tell Culler. “It was everything else.”
He holds his hand out.
“It was me,” I say.
I hand him the camera and he turns it on me. He turns it on.
I don’t say, take a photograph, and I don’t say, take a photograph of me like this, but maybe it’s understood.
The towel slides down until it’s off, and I’m naked in front of him, and I’ve never been more exposed in front of someone else in my life, but it doesn’t matter because I want to be.
“You are beautiful,” Culler says, staring at me, as though this has only truly occurred to him now. He looks at me like I’m the only person in the world, like even he’s an afterthought in this space. Like it’s me and only me.
The soft sound of the shutter release. I wrap my arms around myself and my skin is cold, my hands are cold. I run my hands over my arms and try to imagine the way the light looks on my body. I take three steps toward Culler and I’m shaking. This is forever, these photographs. His taking them. For some reason I think of Beth and how old she is and how she’ll always be old, and how she was probably never this young. I am so young.
I step between Culler’s legs.
He lowers his camera and stares up at me.
“You trust me,” he says quietly.
