All the Bright Places (31 page)

Kate, Decca, and Mrs. Finch are there. When she sees me, Mrs. Finch starts to cry, and then before I can stop her, she’s hugging me too hard and saying, “Violet, we’re so glad you’re here. Maybe you can figure this out. I told Kate maybe Violet will know where he is.”

Through Mrs. Finch’s hair, I look at Kate:
Please help me
.

She says, “Mom,” and touches her once, on the shoulder.
Mrs. Finch moves away from me, dabbing at her eyes and apologizing for being so emotional.

I ask Kate if I can speak with her alone. She leads me through sliding glass doors, outside to the patio, where she lights a cigarette. I wonder if this is the same patio where Finch found the cardinal.

She frowns at me. “What’s going on?”

“He just wrote me. Today. Minutes after the email he sent you. He also sent emails to Brenda Shank-Kravitz and Charlie Donahue.” I don’t want to share his message with her, but I know I have to. I pull out my phone, and we stand in the shade of a tree as I show her the lines he wrote.

“I didn’t even know he was on Facebook,” she says, and then goes quiet as she reads. When she’s finished, she looks at me, lost. “Okay, what does all that mean?”

“It’s a book we discovered. By Virginia Woolf. We’ve been quoting the lines to each other off and on.”

“Do you have a copy of the book? Maybe there’s a clue in the part that comes before or after this.”

“I brought it with me.” I pull it out of my bag. I’ve already marked the words, and now I show her where he got them. He’s taken them out of sequence, picking and choosing certain lines over a series of pages and putting them together in his own way. Just like his Post-it songs.

Kate has forgotten about her cigarette, and the ash dangles, as long as a fingernail. “I can’t figure out what the hell these people are doing”—she gestures at the book—“much less see how it might relate to where he is.” She suddenly remembers
her cigarette and takes a long drag. As she exhales, she says, “He’s supposed to go to NYU, you know.”

“Who?”

“Theo.” She drops the cigarette onto the patio and crushes it with her shoe. “He got early acceptance.”

NYU. Of course. What are the odds we were both supposed to be there, but now neither one of us is going?

“I didn’t—he never told me about college.”

“He didn’t tell me or Mom either. The only reason we found out is that someone from NYU tried to contact him during the fall and I got to the message first.” She forces a smile. “For all I know, he’s in New York right now.”

“Do you know if your mom ever got the messages? The ones from my mom and the psychiatrist?”

“Decca mentioned the doctor, but Mom almost never checks the home phone. I would have picked up the messages if there were any.”

“But there weren’t.”

“No.”

Because he erased them
.

We go back inside, and Mrs. Finch is lying on the couch, eyes closed, while Decca sits nearby arranging pieces of paper across the floor. I can’t help but watch her, because it’s so much like Finch and his Post-its. Kate notices and says, “Don’t ask me what she’s doing. Another one of her art projects.”

“Do you mind if I take a look at his room while I’m here?”

“Go for it. We’ve left everything the way it was—you know, for when he comes back.”

If he comes back
.

Upstairs, I shut the door to his bedroom and stand there a moment. The room still smells like him—a mix of soap and cigarettes and the heady, woodsy quality that is distinctly Theodore Finch. I open the windows to let some air in because it’s too dead and stale, and then I close them again, afraid the scent of soap and cigarettes and Finch will escape. I wonder if his sisters or mom have even set foot in this room since he’s been gone. It looks so untouched, the drawers still open from when I was here last.

I search through the dresser and desk again, and then the bathroom, but there’s nothing that can tell me anything. My phone buzzes, and I jump. It’s Ryan, and I ignore it. I walk into the closet, where the black light has been replaced by a regular old bulb. I go through the shelves and the remaining clothes, the ones he didn’t take with him. I pull his black T-shirt off a hanger and breathe him in, and then I slip it into my purse. I close the door behind me, sit down, and say out loud, “Okay, Finch. Help me out here. You must have left something behind.”

I let myself feel the smallness and closeness of the closet pressing in on me, and I think about Sir Patrick Moore’s black hole trick, when he just vanished into thin air. It occurs to me that this is exactly what Finch’s closet is—a black hole. He went inside and disappeared.

Then I examine the ceiling. I study the night sky he created, but it looks like a night sky and nothing more. I look at our wall of Post-its, reading every single one until I see there’s nothing
new or added. The short wall, the one opposite the door, holds an empty shoe rack, which he used to hang his guitar from. I sit up and scoot back and check the wall I was leaning against. There are Post-its here too, and for some reason I didn’t notice them the last time.

Just two lines across, each word on a separate piece of paper. The first reads:
long, last, nothing, time, there, make, was, to, a, him.

The second:
waters, thee, go, to, it, suits, if, the, there.

I reach for the word “nothing.” I sit cross-legged and hunched over, thinking about the words. I know I’ve heard them before, though not in this order.

I take the words from line one off the wall and start moving them around:

Nothing was to him a long time there make last.

Last a long time make there nothing was to him.

There was nothing to make him last a long time.

On to the second line now. I pluck “go” from the wall and place it first. “To” moves next, and so on until it reads:
Go to the waters if it suits thee there.

By the time I’m back downstairs, it’s just Decca and Mrs. Finch. She tells me Kate has gone out to look for Theo and there’s no telling when she’ll be back. I have no choice but to talk to Finch’s mom. I ask if she’d mind coming upstairs. She climbs the steps like a much older person, and I wait for her at the top.

She hesitates on the landing. “What is it, Violet? I don’t think I can handle surprises.”

“It’s a clue to where he is.”

She follows me into his room and stands for a moment, looking around as if she’s seeing it for the first time. “When did he paint everything blue?”

Instead of answering, I point at the closet. “In here.”

We stand in his closet, and she covers her mouth at how bare it is, how much is gone. I crouch in front of the wall and show her the Post-its.

She says, “That first line. That’s what he said after the cardinal died.”

“I think he’s gone back to one of the places we wandered, one of the places with water.”
The words are written in The Waves,
he wrote on Facebook. At 9:47 a.m. The same time as the Jovian-Plutonian hoax. The water could be the Bloomington Empire Quarry or the Seven Pillars or the river that runs in front of the high school or about a hundred other places. Mrs. Finch stares blankly at the wall, and it’s hard to know if she’s even listening. “I can give you directions and tell you exactly where to look for him. There are a couple of places he could have gone, but I have a pretty good idea where he might be.”

Then she turns to me and lays her hand on my arm and squeezes it so hard, I can almost feel the bruise forming. “I hate to ask you, but can you go? I’m just so—worried, and—I don’t think I could—I mean, in case something were to—or if he were.” She is crying again, the hard and ugly kind, and I’m ready to promise her anything as long as she stops. “I just really need you to bring him home.”

I don’t go for her or for his dad or for Kate or for Decca. I go for me. Maybe because I know, somehow, what I’ll find. And maybe because I know whatever I find will be my fault. After all, it’s because of me he had to leave his closet. I was the one who pushed him out by talking to my parents and betraying his trust. He never would have left if it hadn’t been for me. Besides, I tell myself, Finch would want me to be the one to come.

I call my parents to tell them I’ll be home in a while, that I’ve got something to do, and then I hang up on my dad, even as he’s asking me a question, and drive. I drive faster than I normally do, and I remember the way without looking at the map. I am scarily, eerily calm, as if someone else is doing the driving. I keep the music off. This is how focused I am on getting there.

“If that blue could stay for ever; if that hole could remain for ever.”

There was nothing to make him last.

The first thing I see is Little Bastard, parked on the side of the road, right wheels, front and back, on the embankment. I pull up behind it and turn off the engine. I sit there.

I can drive away right now. If I drive away, Theodore Finch is still somewhere in the world, living and wandering, even if it’s without me. My fingers are on the ignition key.

Drive away
.

I get out of the car, and the sun is too warm for April in Indiana. The sky is blue, after nothing but gray for the past few months except for that first warm day. I leave my jacket behind.

I walk past the
NO TRESPASSING
signs and the house that sits off the road and up a driveway. I climb up the embankment and go down the hill to the wide, round pool of blue water, ringed by trees. I don’t know how I didn’t notice it the first time—the water is as blue as his eyes.

The place is deserted and peaceful. So deserted and peaceful that I almost turn around and go back to the car.

But then I see them.

His clothes, on the bank, folded neatly and stacked, collared shirt on top of jeans on top of leather jacket on top of black boots. It’s like a greatest hits of his closet. Only there. On the bank.

For a long time, I don’t move. Because if I stand here like this, Finch is still somewhere.

Then: I kneel beside the stack of clothes and lay my hand on them, as if by doing so I can learn where he is and how long ago he came. The clothes are warm from the sun. I find his phone tucked into one of the boots, but it’s completely dead. In the other boot, his nerd glasses and car keys. Inside the leather jacket, I find our map, folded as neatly as the clothes. Without thinking, I put it in my bag.

“Marco,” I whisper.

Then: I stand.

“Marco,” I say louder.

I pull off my shoes and coat and set my keys and phone beside the neat stack of Finch’s clothing. I climb onto the rock ledge and dive into the water, and it knocks the breath out of me because it’s cold, not warm. I tread circles, head up, until I can breathe. And then I take a breath and go under, where the water is strangely clear.

I go as deep as I can, heading straight for the bottom. The water feels darker the deeper I go, and too soon I have to push up to the surface and fill my lungs. I dive again and again, going as deep as I dare before running out of breath. I swim from one end of the hole to the other, back and forth. I come up and then go down again. Each time, I can stay a little longer, but not as long as Finch, who can hold his breath for minutes.

Could
hold.

Because at some point, I know: he’s gone. He’s not somewhere. He’s nowhere.

Even after I know, I dive and swim and dive and swim, up
and down and back and forth, until finally, when I can’t do it anymore, I crawl up onto the bank, exhausted, lungs heaving, hands shaking.

As I dial 9-1-1, I think:
He’s not nowhere. He’s not dead. He just found that other world
.

The sheriff for Vigo County arrives with the fire department and an ambulance. I sit on the bank wrapped in a blanket someone has given me, and I think about Finch and Sir Patrick Moore and black holes and blue holes and bottomless bodies of water and exploding stars and event horizons, and a place so dark that light can’t get out once it’s in.

Now these strangers are here and milling around, and they must be the ones who own this property and this house. They have children, and the woman is covering their eyes and shooing them away, telling them to get on back in there and don’t come out, whatever you do, not till she says so. Her husband says, “Goddamn kids,” and he doesn’t mean his, he means kids in general, kids like Finch and me.

Men are diving over and over, three or four of them—they all look the same. I want to tell them not to bother, they’re not going to find anything, he’s not there. If anyone can make it to another world, it’s Theodore Finch.

Even when they bring the body up, swollen and bloated and blue, I think:
That’s not him. That’s someone else. This swollen, bloated, blue thing with the dead, dead skin is not anyone I know or recognize
. I tell them so. They ask me if I feel strong enough to identify him, and I say, “That’s not him. That is a swollen,
bloated, dead, dead blue thing, and I can’t identify it because I’ve never seen it before.” I turn my head away.

The sheriff crouches down beside me. “We’re going to need to call his parents.”

He is asking for the number, but I say, “I’ll do it. She was the one who asked me to come. She wanted me to find him. I’ll call.”

But that’s not him, don’t you see? People like Theodore Finch don’t die. He’s just wandering
.

I call the line his family never uses. His mother answers on the first ring, as if she’s been sitting right there waiting. For some reason, this makes me mad and I want to slam the phone off and throw it into the water.

“Hello?” she says. “Hello?” There’s something shrill and hopeful and terrified in her voice. “Oh God.
Hello?!
”

“Mrs. Finch? It’s Violet. I found him. He was where I thought he would be. I’m so sorry.” My voice sounds as if it’s underwater or coming from the next county. I am pinching the inside of my arm, making little red marks, because I suddenly can’t feel anything.