The church is plain and so, so neglected.
I don’t understand why anyone would build it just to abandon it. It has echoes of a greatness it never achieved all around it. Like the person who built it wanted to evoke those cathedrals that are so fine and so incredible, they can’t help but steal your breath away whether you’re religious or not. But this church is a failure. Ramshackle and sad. It’s tall. It almost looks taller than it should be or something, like whoever built it was trying to compensate, like height equals grandeur or something, but it doesn’t. Not really.
I try to remember the photograph my father took of the church and try to forget that Culler has those photographs and now I wish I hadn’t given them to him. I want them.
I remember the photo was ominous, which makes my guts twist up because I don’t want it to be an indication of what we’re about to find. The church looked angry.
Today, it looks as tired as I feel. All the staples of an abandoned place are here; what I’m used to seeing. Boarded-up or broken windows, peeling paint. I stare at it and feel all the hours and the road and Culler’s leaving and Milo beside me, and I think no matter what I find here, this trip will have taken something important away from me.
Milo has to force the doors open with my help. The handles are all fucked up, so I have to hold one down while he shoves hard until we have access. We step inside. It’s the mustiest, dustiest, oldest place yet. I don’t know why they don’t just tear it down. No one’s using it.
No one wants it.
“Look at it,” Milo says.
We stand there for a minute, silent. There’s a choir loft above us. The door that leads to it is off the hinges and splintered apart. I keep looking up. The ceiling is ready to go. Spider-webbed stains spread out, like they’re going to consume the place and the day they do is the day it will all collapse in on itself. What if today is that day.
The altar space is at the back, but there’s nothing there anymore. Rows of short metal chairs, dusty and old, face it. I expected pews. Beside the altar is a door leading into another room. I bring my hand to the wall and run my fingers over it. It feels damp.
This doesn’t really seem like a church.
“We’ll find it and then we’ll go,” Milo says.
I point to the choir loft.
“I’m going up.”
“Be careful.”
I step through the door at the side, and climb the creaky, groaning, falling-apart steps—I have to skip over three of them—until I reach the top. It’s worse up here. I don’t understand how the place is sustaining itself. I imagine angels singing up here, praising God, and the floor collapsing beneath their feet. I run my hands over the ruined walls, half-heartedly searching for the last message. I look under things, shift garbage with my foot. It occurs to me I’m stalling. Part of me doesn’t want to find it. I don’t want to go back home and I don’t want this to end.
I don’t want it to end badly. I don’t want it to be worse than what we found in the house.
I walk over to the railing and look down. I watch Milo move along the wall, studying every inch of space on my behalf. He is intent, quiet, and I think about what he said.
It’s like you died that night.
My gaze travels from Milo at the wall to the other side of the room and I catch sight of something that …
“Milo,” I call.
He looks up. “Find it?”
“No.” I point to the side of the room opposite him. “Were you over there yet?”
“Not yet.”
He turns and looks and from his spot he notices the same thing I’m noticing. Intermittent footprints cutting a path through the dust, leading to the wall next to a window. Milo moves to it, but I say, “Wait,” and he stops.
I run back down the steps, almost falling once, sliding into the wall to keep myself upright. I close my eyes briefly and just try to prepare myself for this, whatever it is. Little things are becoming clear: Culler was here. He must have been here.
But was he here before or after he stranded me?
And what if it’s bad.
What if it is so bad, the only way to tell me is not to tell me.
The worst part of having no reason is that there could be any reason. I think of the message in the house. What if knowing is worse than not knowing.
No.
Not knowing is worse.
Milo stays where he is. I follow Culler’s footprints to the far wall, where I see it, but it’s not what it should be. The tell-tale initials of my father’s are still there, scratched hard into the wood, S.R., but whatever they gave weight to is gone.
Culler scratched the message my father left behind out—unless the last thing my father wanted the world to know is as abstract as a square space, purposefully worn away. But it’s not. It can’t be. I think. I don’t know. I don’t—
“Culler was here,” I say. This is what I have decided: Culler was here. He did this. “I think he scratched the message out.”
“What?” Milo asks. He makes his way over to me. “Why?”
Why. Why. Why. Why.
The question my life has become.
“I knew it,” Milo says as we pass the YOU ARE NOW LEAVING LISSIE, WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED YOUR STAY! sign. “I knew he was just fucking with you—”
“We don’t know anything,” I say, but even I know how weak it is coming out of my mouth. I don’t want to believe this. “Maybe he had a good reason—”
“We know he left you stranded in a fucking motel fourteen hours away from your home. What kind of reason would make that okay—”
“I don’t know. Pull over.”
“What?”
“Pull over,” I repeat.
“Why?”
I unbuckle my seat belt. “Would you pull over?”
He finally pulls the car onto the shoulder and we roll to a halt. I push my door open, get half out of the car, and vomit all over the gravel and the pavement. I swallow once, twice, three times, pull my legs in, and close the door. I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand and lean my head against the seat.
“Okay?” he asks.
I nod, staring straight ahead.
He starts to drive again.
And then it starts to rain.
After a while, the sound of the rain falling against the car and the landscape blurring past the window suffocates me into sleep. Milo shakes my shoulder after I don’t know how long. We’re parked outside a gas station and it’s not raining anymore.
“I have to fill up,” Milo says. “I’ll get some drinks, food. Break for a minute. I’ll call your mom. Stretch your legs or get some air … or something.”
He gets out of the car. As soon as I can’t see him anymore, I get out my cell and call Culler. He must be there by now. It rings. It’s a lonely sound. Pick up, pick up, pick up. And then, after thousands of rings—it feels like—someone picks up.
“Hello?” Topher.
“Is Culler there?”
“I don’t know. Culler, are you here?”
And then I hear him. His voice in the background, asking, who is it?
And Topher says, “I think it’s the lovesick high-schooler.”
It’s quiet for the longest time, then the muffled sound of someone putting their palm over the receiver. He’s there and I want to scream into the mouth of my phone, I know you’re there. I know you’re there. Why are you doing this to me. How could you do this to me.
This kind of anger I’ve never known before. That I’ve gone from Seth Reeves’s daughter who meant something, to this lovesick high-schooler in the span of like twenty-four hours is so unbelievably cruel.
“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” Topher says, and I hear Culler in the background again: Topher, don’t. “Sorry, I mean, he’s not here right now.” He pauses. “But I’ll tell him you called.”
After he hangs up on me, I spend ten minutes in a sleazy gas station bathroom trying to keep it together. If I can get through the next ten minutes without crying, vomiting, or screaming myself hoarse, I can be in a car with Milo. But I don’t know what to do about this humiliation, this hot, uncomfortable sensation all over me like the world can see this on me. I close my eyes and I count, trying to work it out. I count until ten minutes have gone by. I’m shaking, but not crying or sick or screaming.
I make a decision.
When I step out, Milo is leaning against the car.
“I want to stop at Haverfield,” I tell him. “I want to see Culler.”
Culler does not just get to do this to me.
When we finally reach Haverfield, it’s dark.
I watch Milo drive. He’s resigned to this. He doesn’t want to do this, but he’s going to do it for me. I’ll never feel more guilty and less deserving in my life than I do in this moment, and I don’t know why I can’t just say that to him because he deserves that much. I think I don’t say it because I’m too nervous to speak.
Haverfield’s WELCOME sign sends me reeling. My head gets full of all the things I’m going to say to Culler, ask him. If he answers the door and lets me in. Talks to me.
This is so fucked up. No one changes this quickly. I don’t understand how they could. And if he didn’t, that means he was like this all along, but I don’t accept that either.
I’m not that bad at reading people. I can’t be.
I try to give Milo the directions to Culler’s apartment, but I’m hazy on remembering or maybe I’m just tired or maybe part of my brain wants to sabotage me, so I don’t have to do this. We circle street after street for ages, turn left, right, and when I’m about to give up—
There it is.
Milo parks across the road and turns the car off. I sit there for a minute that’s not really a minute, but several minutes, twisting my hands. I want to ask him how to do this.
Because I don’t know how to do this.
“Buzz up,” Milo says. He gets my silence. “Say you have a delivery for Culler Evans.”