All the Bright Places (35 page)

A woman works behind the counter. I buy a pack of gum and a water, and I tell her I’m looking for a lake and a church, someplace lovely. She screws up her mouth as she jabs at the cash register. “Emmanuel Baptist Church is just up the highway there. They got a lake not far past it. Not a very big one, but I
know there’s one because my kids used to go up there swimming.”

“Is it private?”

“The lake or the church?”

“Either. This place I’m looking for is private.”

“The lake’s off of Private Road, if that’s what you mean.”

My skin starts to prickle. In Finch’s text, “Private” is capitalized.

“Yes. That’s what I mean. How do I get there?”

“Keep heading north up US 150. You’ll pass Emmanuel Baptist on your right, and you’ll see the lake past that, and then you’ll come to Private Road. You just turn off, and there it is.”

“Left or right?”

“There’s only one way to turn—right. It’s a short road. AIT Training and Technology is back in there. You’ll see their sign.”

I thank her and run to the car.
I’m close. I’ll be there soon, and then it will all be over
—
wandering, Finch, us, everything
. I sit for a few seconds, making myself breathe so I can focus on every moment. I could wait and save it for later—whatever it is.

But I won’t because I’m here now and the car is moving, and I’m heading in that direction, and there’s Emmanuel Baptist Church, sooner than I expected, and then the lake, and here is the road, and I’m turning down it, and my palms are damp against the steering wheel, and my skin has gone goose-pimply, and I realize I’m holding my breath.

I pass the sign for AIT Training and Technology and see it up ahead at the end of the road, which is already here. I’ve dead-ended, and I roll past AIT with a sinking feeling because
there’s nothing lovely about it, and this can’t be the place. But if this isn’t the place, then where am I supposed to be?

The car crawls back along Private Road the way I came, and that’s when I see the bend in the road that I didn’t take, a kind of fork. I follow this now, and there’s the lake, and then I see the sign:
TAYLOR PRAYER CHAPEL
.

A wooden cross, tall as a man, sits in front of the sign by a few feet, and behind the cross and the sign is a tiny white chapel with a tiny white steeple. I can see houses beyond, and the lake to one side, the top of it green with algae.

I turn off the engine and sit for a few minutes. I lose track of how long I’m there. Did he come here the day he died? Did he come here the day before? When was he here? How did he find this place?

Then I am out of the car and walking to the chapel, and I can hear my heart and, somewhere in the distance, the sounds of birds in the trees. The air is already heavy with summer.

I turn the knob, and the door opens, just like that, and inside the chapel smells fresh and clean, as if it has been aired out recently. There are only a few pews, because the entire place is smaller than my bedroom, and at the front a wooden altar with a painting of Jesus and two vases of flowers, two potted plants, and an open Bible.

The long, narrow windows let in the sunlight, and I sit in one of the pews and look around, thinking:
What now?

I walk to the altar, and someone has typed up and laminated a history of the church, which is propped against one of the vases of flowers.

And now I know why Finch chose this place—for Eleanor and for me. And for him too, because he was a weary traveler who just needed rest. Something pokes out of the Bible—a white envelope. I turn to the page, and someone has underlined these words:
“Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky.”

I pick up the envelope, and there is my name: “Ultraviolet Remarkey-able.”

I think of taking it to the car to read what’s inside, but instead I sit down in one of the pews, grateful for the sturdy, solid wood underneath me.

Am I ready to hear what he thought of me? To hear how I let him down? Am I ready to know exactly how much I hurt him and how I could have, should have, saved him, if only I’d paid more attention and read the signs and not opened my big mouth and listened to him and been enough and maybe loved him more?

My hands are shaking as I open the envelope. I pull out
three sheets of thick staff paper, one covered in musical notes, the other two covered in words that look like lyrics.

I begin to read.

I am crying—loud and hiccuping, as if I’ve been holding my breath for a very long time and finally, finally can breathe.

I read and reread the words.

I read and reread them until I know the words by heart, and then I fold up the papers and slide them back into the envelope.
I sit there until the tears stop, and the light begins to change and fade, and the soft, pink glow of dusk fills the chapel.

It’s dark by the time I drive home. In my bedroom, I pull out the staff paper once again and play the notes on my flute. The tune finds its way into my head and stays there, like it’s a part of me, so that, days later, I’m still singing it.

I don’t need to worry that Finch and I never filmed our wanderings. It’s okay that we didn’t collect souvenirs or that we never had time to pull it all together in a way that made sense to anyone else but us.

The thing I realize is that it’s not what you take, it’s what you leave.

It’s a white-hot summer day. The sky is a pure, bright blue. I park the car and walk up the embankment and stand for a long time on the grassy shore of the Blue Hole. I half expect to see him.

I kick off my shoes and cut through the water, diving deep. I’m looking for him through my goggles, even though I know I won’t find him. I swim with my eyes open. I come back up to the surface under the great wide sky, take a breath, and down I go again, deeper this time. I like to think he’s wandering in another world, seeing things no one can ever imagine.

In 1950, poet Cesare Pavese was at the peak of his literary career, applauded by his peers and his country as the greatest living Italian author. In August of that year, he took a lethal dose of sleeping pills, and even though he kept a daily journal,
no one could ever truly explain why he did it. The writer Natalia Ginzburg remembered him after his death:
“It seemed to us that his sadness was that of a boy, the voluptuous heedless melancholy of a boy who has still not come down to earth, and moves in the arid, solitary world of dreams.”

It was an epitaph that could have been written for Finch, except that I’ve written one for him myself:

Theodore Finch—I was alive. I burned brightly. And then I died, but not really. Because someone like me cannot, will not, die like everyone else. I linger like the legends of the Blue Hole. I will always be here, in the offerings and people I left behind
.

I tread water on the surface under the wide, open sky and the sun and all that blue, which reminds me of Theodore Finch, just like everything else reminds me of him, and I think of my own epitaph, still to be written, and all the places I’ll wander. No longer rooted, but gold, flowing. I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me.

Every forty seconds, someone in the world dies by suicide. Every forty seconds, someone is left behind to cope with the loss.

Long before I was born, my great-grandfather died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His oldest child, my grandfather, was just thirteen. No one knew if it was intentional or accidental—and being from a small town in the South, my grandfather and his mother and sisters never discussed it. But that death has affected our family for generations.

Several years ago, a boy I knew and loved killed himself. I was the one who discovered him. The experience was not something I wanted to talk about, even with the people closest to me. To this day, many of my family and friends still don’t know much, if anything, about it. For a long time, it was too painful to even think about, much less talk about, but it is important to talk about what happened.

In
All the Bright Places
, Finch worries a lot about labels. There is, unfortunately, a good deal of stigma surrounding
suicide and mental illness. When my great-grandfather died, people gossiped. Although his widow and his three children never spoke about what happened that day, they felt silently judged and, to some extent, ostracized. I lost my friend to suicide a year before I lost my father to cancer. They were both ill at the same time, and they died within fourteen months of each other, but the reaction to their illnesses and deaths could not have been more different. People rarely bring flowers to a suicide.

It was only when writing this book that I learned my own label—Survivor After Suicide, or Survivor of Suicide. Fortunately, there are numerous resources to help me make sense of this tragic thing that happened and how it affects me, just as there are numerous resources to help anyone, teen or adult, who is struggling with emotional upheaval, depression, anxiety, mental instability, or suicidal thoughts.

Often, mental and emotional illnesses go undiagnosed because the person suffering symptoms is too ashamed to speak up, or because their loved ones either fail to or choose not to recognize the signs. According to Mental Health America, an estimated 2.5 million Americans are known to have bipolar disorder, but the actual number is a good two to three times higher than that. As many as 80 percent of people with this illness go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed.

If you think something is wrong, speak up.

You are not alone.

It is not your fault.

Help is out there.

SUICIDE PREVENTION

DIAGNOSING MENTAL ILLNESS IN TEENS

SURVIVORS

BULLYING

ABUSE

In June of 2013, two days after finishing up work on my seventh book and sending it off to my New York publisher, I had an idea for another story, in spite of the fact that I was burned out and ready for a much-needed break—I’ve been writing back-to-back books for the past couple of years.

This idea was different, however. For one thing, it was personal. For another, it was YA. I’ve spent my career in adult fiction and nonfiction but, creatively, I was ready for something different.

I wanted to write something edgy.

I wanted to write something contemporary.