All the Bright Places: Part Three

I don’t know how to put all of what we’ve seen and done together into one comprehensive something that will make sense to anyone but me.

It was like the aurora borealis.

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.

There’s something shrill and hopeful and terrified in her voice.

His mother lets out a sound I’ve never heard before, low and guttural and terrible.

Once again, I want to throw the phone into the water so it will stop, but instead I keep saying “I’m sorry” over and over and over, like a recording, until the sheriff pries the phone from my hand.

They are hovering too much and watching me.

After the preacher is finished, everyone moves toward them to shake their hands and offer condolences.

I stand, thinking how it wasn’t an accident at all and how “suicide victim” is an interesting term. The victim part of it implies they had no choice.

Charlie mutters, “What a bunch of phonies,” and I’m not sure if he’s talking about our classmates or the Finch family or the entire congregation.

Bren’s voice is brittle. “Somewhere, Finch is watching this, all ‘What do you expect?’ I hope he’s flipping them off.”

Before Brenda can answer, Finch’s mother is suddenly beside me, red eyes peering into my face.

I can’t breathe, and then I feel someone pulling me away, and my father says, “I think we’ll take her home.” His voice is curt and cold.

At school, the entire student body seems to be in mourning.

This is part of the suicide-by-association phenomenon.

It’s a tough question to answer, and, ultimately, a pointless one to ask.

Like it’s the most logical thing to do because what else is there?

“I wanted to check in . . . with you to see . . . if you need any help . . . and also to tell you ... to feel free to turn in whatever .. . you have so far ... I obviously .. . understand . .. that there are extenuating .. . circumstances.”

Must treat her carefully, because she is fragile and might break if expected to do the same as everyone else.

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 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.

There’s something soothing about the mindless, easy motion of it.

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.

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.”

What’s left of it sits in an overgrown field on the outskirts of downtown Indianapolis.

The back is covered with graffiti, and I pick my way across broken beer bottles and cigarette butts.

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.

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 effect is beautiful and eerie, and the place seems to glow.

Taylor Prayer Chapel was created as a sanctuary for weary travelers to stop and rest along their way.

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 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.