All the Bright Places(83)

I sit back, and above my desk are the storyboard Post-its for Germ. I’ve added a new category: Ask an Expert. My eyes move past these to the piece of paper that describes what the magazine is about. They rest on the last line: You start here.

In a minute, I am up and out of my seat and searching my room. At first, I can’t remember what I’ve done with the map. I feel this white rush of panic, which leaves me shaky, because what if I’ve lost it? It will be another piece of Finch, gone.

And then I find it in my bag, on my third time checking, as if it appeared out of thin air. I spread it out and look at the remaining points that are circled. There are five more places to see on my own. Finch has written numbers beside each one so that there’s a kind of order.





VIOLET


Remaining wanderings 1 and 2


Milltown, population 815, sits close to the Kentucky border. I have to stop and ask someone how to get to the shoe trees. A woman named Myra points me toward a place called Devils Hollow. It doesn’t take long to run out of paved road, and soon I’m driving down a narrow dirt trail, looking up, which is what Myra told me to do. Just when I think I’m lost, I come to a fourway intersection that sits surrounded by woods.

I pull the car over and get out. In the distance, I can hear the sound of kids yelling and laughing. Trees stand at all four corners, their branches filled with shoes. Hundreds and hundreds of shoes. Most are draped across the limbs by the laces like oversized Christmas ornaments. Myra said she wasn’t sure how it began, or who left the first pair, but people travel from all over just to decorate the trees. There’s a rumor that Larry Bird, the basketball player, left a pair up there somewhere.

The quest is simple: leave a pair behind. I’ve brought a pair of green Chuck Taylors from my closet, and a pair of yellow Keds from Eleanor’s. I stand, head tilted back, trying to decide where to put them. I’ll hang them together on the original tree, the one heaviest with shoes, which has been struck by lightning more than once—I can tell because the trunk looks dead and black.

I pull a Sharpie from my pocket and write Ultraviolet Remarkey-able and the date on the side of one of the Chuck Taylors. I hang them low on the original tree, which looks too fragile to climb. I have to jump a little to reach the branch, and the shoes bob and twist before settling. I hang Eleanor’s Keds beside them.

That’s it then. Nothing more to see. It’s a long way to drive for trees of old shoes, but I tell myself not to look at it that way. There might be magic here too. I stand watching for it, shading my eyes against the sun, and just before I walk back to the car I see them: way up on the highest branch of the original tree, hanging all alone. A pair of sneakers with fluorescent laces, TF in black on both shoes. A package of blue American Spirits pokes up from the inside of one.

He was here.

I look around as if I might see him right now, but it’s just me and the kids who are laughing and hollering from someplace nearby. When did he come? Was it after he left? Was it before that?

Something nags at me as I stand there. The highest branch, I think. The highest branch. I reach for my phone, but it’s in the car, and so I run the short distance, throw open the door, and lean across the seat. I sit half in, half out, scrolling through my texts from Finch. Because there aren’t many recent ones, it doesn’t take long to find it. I am on the highest branch. I look at the date. A week after he left.

He was here.

I read through the other texts: We are written in paint. I believe in signs. The glow of Ultraviolet. It’s so lovely to be lovely in Private.

I find the map, my finger following the route to the next place. It’s hours away, northwest of Muncie. I check the time, turn on the engine, and drive. I have a feeling I know where I’m headed, and I hope it’s not too late.


The World’s Biggest Ball of Paint sits on the property of Mike Carmichael. Unlike the shoe trees, it’s a designated tourist attraction. The ball not only has its own website, it’s listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. It’s a little after four o’clock by the time I get to Alexandria. Mike Carmichael and his wife are expecting me because I called them from the road. I pull up to the structure where the ball apparently lives—in a kind of barnlike shed—and knock on the door, my heart beating fast.

When there’s no answer, I try the handle, but it’s locked, and so I walk up to the house, heart going faster because what if someone has been there since? What if they’ve painted over whatever Finch might have written? It’ll be gone then, and I’ll never know, and it will be like he was never even here.

I bang harder than I mean to on the front door, and at first I think they aren’t home, but then a man with white hair and an expectant smile comes walking out, talking and shaking my hand and telling me to call him Mike.

“Where are you from, young lady?”

“Bartlett.” I don’t mention that I’ve just come from Milltown.

“That’s a nice town, Bartlett. We go there sometimes to the Gaslight Restaurant.”

My heart is beating into my ears, and it’s so loud, I actually wonder if he can hear it. I follow him to the barn-shed, and he says, “I started this ball of paint nearly forty years ago. The way it came about, I was working in this paint store back in high school, back before you were born, maybe back before your parents were born. I was playing catch in the store with a friend and the baseball knocked over this can of paint. I thought, I wonder what would happen if I painted it one thousand coats? So that’s what I did.” Mike says he donated that ball to the Knightstown Children’s Home Museum, but in 1977 he decided to start another one.