All the Bright Places (34 page)

As I head home to Bartlett, I sing what I can remember of Finch’s Dr. Seuss song. When I pass through Indianapolis, I think of trying to find the nursery where he collected flowers in winter, but instead I keep driving east. They won’t be able to tell me anything about Finch or why he died or what he wrote on the ball of paint. The only thing that makes me feel better is that, whatever Finch wrote, it will always be there, underneath the layers.

I find my mom and dad in the family room, my dad listening to music on his headphones, my mom grading papers. I say, “I need us to talk about Eleanor and not to forget that she existed.” My dad removes his headphones. “I don’t want to pretend like everything’s fine if it isn’t, like we’re fine if we’re not. I miss her. I can’t believe I’m here and she isn’t. I’m sorry we went out that night. I need you to know that. I’m sorry I told her to take the bridge home. She only went that way because I suggested it.”

When they try to interrupt me, I talk louder. “We can’t go backward. We can’t change anything that happened. I can’t bring her back or bring Finch back. I can’t change the fact that I sneaked around to see him when I told you it was over. I don’t want to tiptoe around her or him or you anymore. The only thing it’s doing is making it harder for me to remember the things I want to remember. It’s making it harder for me to remember her. Sometimes I try to concentrate on her voice just so I can hear it again—the way she always said, ‘Hey there’ when she was in a good mood, and ‘Vi-o-let’ when she was annoyed. For some reason, these are the easiest ones. I concentrate on them, and when I have them, I hold on to them because I don’t ever want to forget how she sounded.”

My mom has started to cry, very, very quietly. My father’s face has gone gray-white.

“Like it or not, she was here and now she’s gone, but she doesn’t have to be completely gone. That’s up to us. And like it or not, I loved Theodore Finch. He was good for me, even though you think he wasn’t and you hate his parents and you probably hate him, and even though he went away and I wish he hadn’t, and I can never bring him back, and it might have been my fault. So it’s good and it’s bad and it hurts, but I like thinking about him. If I think about him, he won’t be completely gone either. Just because they’re dead, they don’t have to be. And neither do we.”

My dad sits like a marble statue, but my mom gets up and kind of stumbles toward me. She draws me in, and I think:
That’s how she used to feel before any of this happened—strong
and sturdy, like she could withstand a tornado
. She is still crying, but she is solid and real, and just in case, I pinch her skin, and she pretends not to notice.

She says, “Nothing that happened is your fault.”

And then I’m crying, and my dad is crying, one stoic tear at a time, and then his head is in his hands and my mom and I move like one person over to him, and the three of us huddle together, rocking a little back and forth, taking turns saying, “It’s okay. We’re okay. We’re all okay.”

The Pendleton Pike Drive-In is one of the last of its kind. What’s left of it sits in an overgrown field on the outskirts of downtown Indianapolis. Now it’s like a graveyard, but in the 1960s the drive-in was one of the most popular sites around—not just a movie theater, but a kiddie park with a mini roller coaster and other rides and attractions.

The screen is the only thing that remains. I park on the roadside and approach it from the back. It’s an overcast day, the sun hidden behind thick, gray clouds, and even though it’s warm, I shiver. The place gives me the spooks. As I tramp over weeds and dirt, I try to picture Finch parking Little Bastard where I parked my car and walking to the screen, which blocks the horizon like a skeleton, just as I’m walking now.

I believe in signs,
he texted.

And that’s what the screen looks like—a giant billboard. The back is covered with graffiti, and I pick my way across broken beer bottles and cigarette butts.

Suddenly I’m having one of those moments that you have after losing someone—when you feel as if you’ve been kicked in the stomach and all your breath is gone, and you might never get it back. I want to sit down on the dirty, littered ground right now and cry until I can’t cry anymore.

But instead I walk around the side of the screen, telling myself I may not find anything. I count my steps past it until I’m a good thirty paces in. I turn and look up, and the wide white face says in red letters,
I was here. TF.

In that moment, my knees give out and down I sink, into the dirt and the weeds and the trash. What was I doing when he was here? Was I in class? Was I with Amanda or Ryan? Was I at home? Where was I when he was climbing up on the sign and painting it, leaving an offering, finishing our project?

I get to my feet and take a picture of the skeleton screen with my phone, and then I walk up to the sign, closer and closer, until the letters are huge and towering above me. I wonder how far away they reach, if someone miles from here can read them.

There is a can of red spray paint sitting on the ground, the cap neatly on. I pick it up, hoping for a note or anything to let me know he left it for me, but it’s just a can.

He must have climbed up by the steel latticework posts that anchor the thing in place. I rest one foot on a rung, tuck the paint can under my arm, and pull myself up. I have to climb
one side and then the other in order to finish it. I write:
I was here too. VM.

When I’m done, I stand back. His words are neater than mine, but they look good together. There we are, I think. This is our project. We started it together, and we end it together. And then I take another picture just in case they ever tear it down.

Munster is almost as far north and west as you can get and still be in Indiana. It’s called a bedroom community of Chicago because it’s only thirty miles outside the city. The town is bordered by rivers, something Finch would have liked. Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery sits on a large, shaded property. It looks like a regular church in the middle of some pretty woods.

I roam around the grounds until a balding man in a brown robe appears. “May I help you, young lady?”

I tell him I’m there for a school project, but I’m not sure exactly where I’m supposed to go. He nods like he understands this and leads me away from the church and toward what he calls “the shrines.” As we walk, we pass sculpted tributes of wood and copper to a priest from Auschwitz, and also St. Therese of Lisieux, who was known as “The Little Flower of Jesus.”

The friar tells me how the church and the tributes and the grounds we are walking on were designed and built by former chaplains from the Polish army, who came to the States after World War II and fulfilled their dream of creating a monastery in Indiana. I wish Finch were here so we could say,
Who dreams of building a monastery in Indiana?

But then I remember him standing next to me at Hoosier Hill, smiling out at the ugly trees and the ugly farmland and the ugly kids as if he could see Oz.
Believe it or not, it’s actually beautiful to some people.…

So I decide to see it through his eyes.

The shrines are actually a series of grottoes built out of sponge rock and crystals so that the exterior walls sparkle in the light. The sponge rock gives the place a kind of oyster-shell, cave quality that makes it seem ancient and folk-arty at the same time. The friar and I walk through an arched doorway, a crown and stars painted across the top of the face, and then he leaves me on my own.

Inside, I find myself in a series of underground hallways, cobbled in the same sponge rock and crystals and lit up by hundreds of candles. The walls are decorated with marble sculptures, stained-glass windows, and quartz and fluorites that capture the light and hold it. The effect is beautiful and eerie, and the place seems to glow.

I come out into the cool air again and go down into another grotto, another series of tunnels, this one with similar stained-glass windows and crystals built into the rock walls, and angel statues, heads bowed, hands folded in prayer.

I pass through a room arranged like a church, rows of seats facing the altar, where a marble Jesus lies on his deathbed above a base of glittering crystals. I pass another marble Jesus, this one tied to a pillar. And then I step into a room that glows from floor to ceiling.

The archangel Gabriel and Jesus are raising the dead. It’s
hard to describe—hands reach upward and dozens of yellow crosses race across the ceiling like stars or airplanes. The black-light walls are lined with plaques paid for by families of the dead who are asking the angels to bring their loved ones back to life and give them a happy eternity.

In the outstretched palm of Jesus, I see it—a plain, non-glittering rock. It’s the one thing that looks out of place, and so I pick it up and exchange it for the offering I’ve brought—a butterfly ring that once belonged to Eleanor. I stay awhile longer and then go blinking into the daylight. In front of me are two sets of stairs, side by side, and a sign:
PLEASE BE REVERENT. DO NOT WALK ON THE HOLY STAIRS! YOU MAY ASCEND ON YOUR KNEES. THANK YOU!

I count twenty-eight steps. No one is around. I could probably walk right up them, but I think of Finch being here before me and know he wouldn’t have cheated. So I drop to my knees and go up.

At the top, the friar appears and helps me to my feet. “Did you enjoy the shrines?”

“They’re beautiful. Especially the black-light room.”

He nods. “The Ultraviolet Apocalypse. People travel hundreds of miles to see it.”

The Ultraviolet Apocalypse
. I thank him, and on my way to the car, I remember the rock, which I’m still holding. I open my palm and there it is, the one he first gave to me, and later I gave to him, and now he has given me back:
Your turn
.

* * *

That night, Brenda and Charlie and I meet at the base of the Purina Tower. I’ve invited Ryan and Amanda to join us, and after we’ve climbed to the top, the five of us sit in a circle, holding candles. Brenda lights them, one by one, and as she lights them, we each say something about Finch.

When it’s Bren’s turn, she closes her eyes and says, “ ‘Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee!’ ” She opens her eyes again and grins. “Herman Melville.” Then she hits something on her phone, and the night is filled with music. It’s a greatest hits of Finch—Split Enz, the Clash, Johnny Cash, and on and on.

Brenda jumps up and starts to dance. She waves her arms and kicks out her legs. She jumps higher and then up and down, up and down, both feet at a time like a kid having a tantrum. She doesn’t know it, but she’s flip-flapping like Finch and I once did in the children’s section of Bookmarks.

Bren shouts along to the music, and all of us are laughing, and I have to lie back and hold my sides because the laughter has taken me by surprise. It’s the first time I remember laughing like this in a long, long time.

Charlie pulls me to my feet, and now he is jumping and Amanda is jumping, and Ryan is doing this weird step-hop, step-hop, and shake-shake-shake, and then I join in, leaping and flip-flapping and burning across the roof.

When I get home, I’m still wide-awake, and so I spread out the map and study it. One more place left to wander. I want to
save this wandering and hang on to it, because once I go there, the project is over, which means there’s nothing left to find from Finch, and I still haven’t found anything except evidence that he saw these places without me.

The location is Farmersburg, which is just fifteen miles away from Prairieton and the Blue Hole. I try to remember what we planned to see there. The text from him that should correspond—if it lines up the way the others have—is the last one I received:
A lake. A prayer. It’s so lovely to be lovely in Private.

I decide to look up Farmersburg, but I can’t find any sites of interest. The population is barely one thousand, and the most remarkable thing about it seems to be that it’s known for its large number of TV and radio transmitter towers.

We didn’t choose this place together
.

When I realize it, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

This is a place Finch added without telling me.

I’m up and out of the house early the next morning. The closer I get to Prairieton, the heavier I feel. I have to drive past the Blue Hole to reach Farmersburg, and I almost turn around and go home because it’s too much and this is the last place I want to be.

Once I get to Farmersburg, I’m not sure where to go. I drive around and around this not-very-big place looking for whatever it is Finch wanted me to see.

I look for anything lovely. I look for anything having to do with praying, which I assume means a church. I know from the internet there are 133 “places of worship” in this tiny town, but it seems odd that Finch would choose one for the last wander.

Why should it seem odd? You barely knew him
.

Farmersburg is one of these small and quiet Indiana cities filled with small and quiet houses and a small and quiet downtown. There are the usual farms and country roads, and numbered streets. I get nowhere, so I do what I always do—I stop on Main Street (every place has one) and hunt for somebody who can help me. Because it’s a Sunday, every shop and restaurant is dark and closed. I walk up and down, but it’s like a ghost town.

I’m back in the car and driving past every church I find, but none of them are particularly lovely, and I don’t see any lakes. Finally, I pull into a gas station, and the boy there—who can’t be much older than me—tells me there are some lakes up north a ways off US 150.

“Are there any churches out there?”

“At least one or two. But we got some here too.” He smiles a watery smile.

“Thanks.”

I follow his directions to US 150, which takes me away from town. I punch on the radio, but all I get is country music and static, and I don’t know which is worse. I listen to the static for a while before turning it off. I spot a Dollar General on the side of the road and pull over because maybe they’ll be able to tell me where these lakes are.