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I take a swig from Milo’s flask and hand it back to him. He screws the top back on. He inherited the flask from his grandfather and stole the liquor from his mom. The circle of life.
Or something.
“Do you think she’s gone yet?”
“Beth?” he asks. I nod and he laughs. “No. She’s going to stay there until you get back so she can give you the last word. ”
“I fucking hate her. ”
“I know you do. ”
We’re sprawled out on the dry, yellow grass next to Ford River, which curls through Branford. This summer is so dry, the water barely trickles by the stones that peak far past its surface. It’s painfully low. You could walk across it and never get your feet wet.
“Watch this,” I say, getting up. “I mean, watch me. ”
“Twist my arm. ”
I give Milo a look. He returns a lazy smile. I stand, slip out of my sandals, and edge my way down to the bank. I place one bare foot on a large, sturdy rock and move to the next closest rock easily, even though it’s smaller. I hop to the next and the next and then I’m in the middle of the river, which seems far enough. I face Milo and he claps.
“Take that show on the road,” he calls.
I bow and make my way back to him. I settle on the ground and ease my head against his outstretched shins, like they’re a pillow. I stare at the sky. It’s clear, no clouds or anything. Just the sun, until it burns out billions of years from now.
“What are you thinking?” Milo asks. I hold up my hands. I don’t even say anything and he goes, “Eddie, please don’t make me feel up your hands again. ”
“Why?”
“Because I won’t. ”
“I bet if I asked, you would. ”
“Probably. ”
Milo would do almost anything for me. He’s been my best friend since second grade, when a brief but weird obsession with the original Star Trek got him sort of ostracized at the same time all the girls in our class decided a girl named Eddie must actually really be a boy. By third grade, we weren’t so outcast anymore, but we were beyond needing other people. We still are. Anyone else who happens on the both of us, they’re just temps.
Like that girlfriend he had that one time.
“Tell me about that night,” I say.
He shakes his head.
He would do almost anything for me.
I look back at my hands.
“They are dying. ”
He turns his head toward the water and squints, like he’s caught sight of something very interesting, but it’s a lie. The sun is on him and he looks like he just rolled out of bed, but he always looks like that. His longish brown hair is always messy around his head. His blue eyes always look kind of sleepy. I lower my hands.
“So, are you going to be home later tonight?” he asks.
“Later like when?”
“Like, after ten. ” He’s leaving me soon. I can feel it. Mostly because he has a part-time job at Fuller’s Gas and it’s getting to be that time. “I have to go to work. ”
“I’m crashing early tonight,” I lie.
I like to make my nighttime escapes unnecessarily dramatic because it makes it easier to ignore the weight in my chest. I can briefly fool my body into believing I’m going on an adventure.
The adventure starts when it’s late enough that everyone is asleep, usually just Mom, but sometimes Beth. Tonight Beth is staying over. I get out of bed as quietly as possible and then I open my window, fighting with it, because the house is shrinking or the window is expanding—I’m not sure—and when it’s open, I crawl onto the roof, which slopes down, and make my way carefully to the very edge of it on my butt until my legs dangle over the side. It’s not a long drop by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels farther standing up, so I don’t.
I’m still impressed with the fact I can jump off the roof and land perfectly each time. Okay, not the first time. Definitely not the first time. I landed hard on my knee that time, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from leaving. It was enough that I bled, sticky red all down my leg—but that just told me I was alive.
I jump.
It’s effortless.
It is so easy.
I land. The ground is a shock against my feet, like it always is. Landing makes me dizzy. My cell phone vibrates in my back pocket. Milo. I ignore it.
I grab my bike and I get on it and I just go.
Branford is so still this late at night. Shuts down after nine o’clock. There are no cars headed anywhere and the roads are silent. Every so often I pass a house with an air-conditioner in the window and its rattling drone fills the street. When it fades, there’s only the soft rush of my bike wheels on the pavement. The first night, I walked. It’s too far to walk.
He walked.
I come out here every night.
It’s still dark out when I get back, close to morning.
I can’t get inside the house like how I get out of it. I go around the back and in through the glass doors off the patio that open into my dad’s old office. I sit in his old chair, at his desk. I lean my head back and close my eyes. The chair is falling apart because he wore it down, got it to fit him perfectly. He refused to throw it out and now I’m trying hard to belong to the space he left behind, but I’m awkward and small and I don’t.
Sometimes, when my eyes are closed, I can convince myself I smell him: old paper and musk and something chemical. I open my eyes, expecting to see him but there’s nothing.
The door creaks open.
My heart stops. I jump out of the chair fast.
Beth. She turns on the light and squints at me.
“I thought I heard someone,” she says.
I don’t say anything. Just wait for her to go. Of course, she doesn’t. She steps inside and moves around the office slowly, taking it all in. I don’t know if she’s been in here since my dad died. She pauses and studies some of the photographs he took that hang on the wall. Leave. I don’t say it, though. It’s a miracle she hasn’t noticed I’m still dressed.
“Such a waste,” she murmurs.
“What’s a waste?” I ask.
She gestures to the photos. “To have that kind of gift … to have people respond to it. ” She pauses. “And then to just … stop sharing it. ”
My father was famous.
A long, long time ago.
Maybe famous is the wrong word. My father was an artist, and to other artists he was a star. But I only know this about my father so long after it’s been true, maybe star is the wrong word too. When he was twenty, he went by his initials, S. R. , and turned an entire city into his own personal art gallery. He spent a year pinning his photos all over city walls, shots of people close and touching everywhere, until eventually, the media noticed. It took six months for them to out him, and when they asked him why he’d done it, he said, I want to share my work with the world. Simple. The world was charmed.
Later, he told me it wasn’t his art or his sincerity, it was just the right time. Either way, he was briefly catapulted into the kind of life I’ve never been able to imagine him living, but spend more and more time trying to imagine him living.
Secrets on City Walls became a book.
His work was in actual galleries, in far more places than he’s ever been.
When my dad was twenty-five, some celebrity of the day announced in an interview she’d started a collection of his work and she wanted them all, every last photo, and then everyone else did too—even if they didn’t, not really.
That was when my father walked away from it all.
He says—said, said—that’s what people remember about him most: he had the world at his fingertips and he walked away. He asked that he be forgotten, so he could give his art back to himself. Somehow, everyone found that message way less endearing.
At thirty, he moved to Branford. Branford is a good place to be fo
rgotten.
To become a reclusive artist who never stops creating, but stops sharing.
He worked in a studio two hours away until he died.
And now he’s dead.
“Oh,” I say. “I thought you were talking about his suicide. ”
She gives me this look.
“I don’t need to say that about his suicide. ” She points to a photograph next to his bookshelf. It’s of my mom, dad. Me. Family portrait. She points to Mom and Dad and she says, “Twenty. Your mother was twenty when they eloped. He was forty-five. ”
“Really?” I ask. “Wow, Beth. I totally did not know this. ”
She ignores my tone. “She was only twenty-four when she had you—she was never an adult without your father, Eddie. ” She fixes me with one of her trademark looks of superiority. “Maybe you could remember that the next time I’m asking you to do something to make it a little easier for her, like tidying up the living room. Because when you act like that, you’re not making it hard on me. You’re making it hard on her. ”
“Good night, Beth. ”
She sighs, but she gets the hint. She turns off the light and leaves me in the dark. I sit back down in the chair and close my eyes, trying to conjure my father’s ghost, waiting for the Seth Reeves I knew to feel close.
The Seth Reeves I knew: gentle and quiet. Giving. The man who laughed every time someone mistook him for my grandfather, which happened a lot because, at sixty-four, he looked like one. The man who killed spiders at my tearful requests and tried—and failed—to teach me to drive, danced with his wife in the kitchen and smiled …
That man would never get rid of himself.
So now I am looking for his death in his art.
It’s the thing I know least about him.
I reach across his desk and rest my hands on the note he left, which has stayed there since we found it. I run my fingers over the paper, crumpled from Mom’s grasp before she set it back and smoothed it out as much as she could, pretending it hadn’t been touched or read. All it says is that he had to leave, he loves us both. My mom clutched her chest the first time she read it and I thought she was going to die and I glimpsed a future, myself alone—completely alone—and thought I would die too. But I’m still here. And he’s not.