All the Bright Places(78)

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.”





VIOLET





April 26 (part two)


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.