“Hey, Eddie!” I get to my feet. Milo is standing outside Fuller’s. Half-outside, half-inside. He’s holding the door open. “Eddie! Hey!”
“What do you want?” I call to him. The station wagon pulls up beside me. I wipe my suddenly sweaty palms on my jeans.
“We’re in a fight?”
“Yeah.”
“Good to know,” he calls. I round the station wagon and open the door. Milo frowns. “Who’s that?”
I wave at him and I get in the car. My heart is beating fast. I turn to Culler and I smile at him, but that feels instantly weird. This is not a happy trip. But Culler smiles back at me. He has nice teeth. Today he is wearing a black T-shirt. Black jeans. Ray-Bans.
I wish I could see his eyes.
“Fuck me,” I say suddenly, and his smile vanishes and my face turns red. “I mean—I forgot the studio key. I have to give it back. Maggie asked.”
“It’s okay,” Culler says, pulling away from the curb. “I have a key.” He glances at me. “Your dad made me a copy. We’ll leave it for them and you can keep his. You shouldn’t have to give something like that up.”
I don’t know what to say. It’s such a nice thing for him to offer. But horrible. It never occurred to me to want to keep my father’s key, but now it seems like the most obvious thing in the world. It meant something to him; it should mean something to me.
“Thank you for driving me down,” I say.
“Thank you for letting me drive you,” he says. “Thought the last time I’d see that studio was the week before he died. I wouldn’t have felt right going in there with him gone.”
With him gone. These are sad words.
“You worked in the studio?” I ask.
“I watched him work in the studio. I would bring my stuff down to show him. My darkroom is digital. It’s all set up at my place—”
“Where do you live in Haverfield?” I interrupt. “Do you live alone?”
Culler laughs.
“You don’t know anything about me, do you?”
I blush. “Sorry—”
“It’s okay.”
But it’s not okay. I can’t reconcile this gap in knowledge. That there is someone out there who maybe misses my dad as much as I do, and I never heard about him. Or maybe I did and I just didn’t pay attention. Dad, mentioning some student—the first student he’d ever taken on—at some point, and Culler’s name going over me, because it wasn’t important because it didn’t affect all the stupid little things I was doing every day.
And now, here he is. Culler Evans. I don’t know anything about Culler Evans.
And Culler Evans makes me realize how little I know about my father.
“I should’ve asked him.” I can’t breathe around the idea that there are all these things I don’t know and I never thought to ask, will never get to ask. Who do I get those missing pieces from and will they ever be as good, or as whole, if they come from someone who isn’t him? “How he felt about his photography and everything—why didn’t I…”
“Don’t sweat it,” Culler says. “That’s how kids are with their parents. It’s natural. My dad’s a surgeon and that’s about all I can tell you. The man’s saved people’s lives. I think he’s in a book about something he did.…” Culler laughs. “I just proved my point, didn’t I? It’s like what I said to you—you’ll never understand the scope of your dad’s career because he’s your dad.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
Culler pauses. “Don’t let it get you down. I know just about everything you don’t and I worked with him. I’m just as … lost about this whole thing as you are.”
I feel so bad for that, a total jerk, but I don’t know what to say to make it better. At first I want to tell him that maybe between the two of us, we’ll come up with something, but that almost seems too forward and I’m not sure I believe it.
Instead, I ask, “How did you end up becoming his student?”
“I e-mailed him, believe it or not.”
“How did you get his e-mail address?”
He smiles. “I’m not telling you or you’ll think I’m a stalker.”
“How about a determined fan?”
“I’ll take that. I live in this apartment in Haverfield,” Culler says. Haverfield is halfway between Branford and Delaney. “And your dad was my idol. His work was incredible. The way he arrived on the scene—he just wanted to share his art. That was it. And he did. And then the way he left, when he started feeling compromised, he just cut through the bullshit and went.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“And it drove me crazy that he was close, so I got his e-mail and I e-mailed him and I told him he was the reason I wanted to be a photographer. I offered to assist him for free if I could learn from him. I have an online portfolio, so he checked it out. He said he liked my artist’s statement and agreed to take me on as a student.”
“What’s your artist’s statement?” I ask. “Where do you go to school?”
Culler laughs. I like the sound of it.
I like that he can laugh despite where we’re going and what we’ll do when we get there.
“I don’t go to school for this. I don’t care about school. I care about art, about sharing it. Art is to be shared … that’s my objective. Sounds familiar, I know.”
“Vaguely,” I say.
“That’s why all my work goes online. He said I reminded him of him, except more uncompromising. He said it was good I figured out how to put myself out there on my own terms. He’d never be able to do that, because of his legacy.”
My stomach twists. “You think that’s why—”
“No,” Culler interrupts. He takes off his glasses and sets them on the dash. He glances at me and I like his eyes. I like his eyes when they’re looking at me. “Eddie, if I can promise you anything, I promise you, he loved his work.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Anyway, he called me a raw talent—an intuitive photographer, which is a nice way of saying I’m completely ignorant about the technical aspects of photography, but a good photo is a good photo, right? He’d let me observe him at work and gave me advice on how to get the photos I wanted to shoot out of my head. It was kind of informal, but it was absolutely incredible … he made me believe I could do this for real and until I met him I wasn’t always sure.” He pauses and clears his throat. “But now I’m sure. That’s what I mean when I say your dad changed my life.”
“I’m glad you met,” I say honestly.
“Me too. I love the way he told stories. Plastered them all over city walls just to get them out there,” he says. “And that’s what I want to do, at any cost. I want to share my stories. He respected that. It’s about putting what’s inside of you out there.” Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but he almost looks like he could cry and that makes my throat tight. “I haven’t, though, since he died.”
“How come?” I ask.
“Nothing seems important enough anymore.” He reaches for his glasses and puts them back on. “Now I just want to know why. I need to know why.”
The way to Delaney is mostly fields and farms, horses, cows, guinea hens, until it is suddenly, miraculously, a city that is not really much more special than a town like Branford, except it has a mall, and every fast-food chain you could ever want to eat at. And a studio, where four artists gather—no, three …
“Me too,” I tell him. “More than anything.”
There’s nothing else until I know why.
The studio is a brick building with huge windows just on the outskirts of Delaney. It’s two stories. The first story is a kind of common area, with separate work spaces. The second story is where the photography happens. There’s a darkroom and a long stretch of space for shoots and equipment. Background paper, lights, soft boxes, umbrellas, and so much other stuff I can’t even remember the names of—I’ve only been here a handful of times in my life and like I said, I’m no artist. I almost tell Culler about the time I accidentally walked in on one of Maggie’s shoots, but I’m glad I think better of it because it was something naked and bondage-y.
I was fifteen.
When Culler and I let ourselves in, Maggie is in the kitchen area, flipping through a magazine. The place is pretty messy, considering so few people work in it. But it’s artfully messy. Pretentiously messy. Artists work here.
“Have you got the key?” Maggie asks. That’s how she greets us. Maggie is a lithe blond thing. She’s twenty-seven. Her work is about sex and gender and violence. I used to love her photos, loved sneaking looks at them and marveling over all of the ways people can fuck and pose and not look like they’re posing.
“Always so good to see you, Maggie,” Culler says, digging into his pocket. He tosses the key at her. It hits the table, slides off, and lands on the floor at her feet.
“I didn’t know you two were friends,” Maggie says. “Hi, Eddie.”
“Where is everyone?” I ask.
“Rick’s not here, surprise, surprise,” she says. Rick Vance is closest to my dad’s age, maybe a little younger. He had his day, I guess, but now he hardly ever works. He pays for the space just in case. Dad used to say he was waiting for Rick to realize his heart wasn’t in it, but he was fine with Rick paying rent until he did. “And Terra’s shooting upstairs, so you can’t go up there right now, but it doesn’t matter—your dad’s stuff is down here anyway.”
She says this so casually, like it’s nothing. Like I’ll just get what my father left behind and take it to the house, where he’s alive and waiting for me.
Not like he’s dead and this is what’s left of him.