My mom has started to cry, very, very quietly. My father’s face has gone gray-white.
“Like it or not, she was here and now she’s gone, but she doesn’t have to be completely gone. That’s up to us. And like it or not, I loved Theodore Finch. He was good for me, even though you think he wasn’t and you hate his parents and you probably hate him, and even though he went away and I wish he hadn’t, and I can never bring him back, and it might have been my fault. So it’s good and it’s bad and it hurts, but I like thinking about him. If I think about him, he won’t be completely gone either. Just because they’re dead, they don’t have to be. And neither do we.”
My dad sits like a marble statue, but my mom gets up and kind of stumbles toward me. 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. She is still crying, but she is solid and real, and just in case, I pinch her skin, and she pretends not to notice.
She says, “Nothing that happened is your fault.”
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.”
VIOLET
Remaining wanderings 3 and 4
The Pendleton Pike Drive-In is one of the last of its kind. What’s left of it sits in an overgrown field on the outskirts of downtown Indianapolis. Now it’s like a graveyard, but in the 1960s the drive-in was one of the most popular sites around—not just a movie theater, but a kiddie park with a mini roller coaster and other rides and attractions.
The screen is the only thing that remains. I park on the roadside and approach it from the back. It’s an overcast day, the sun hidden behind thick, gray clouds, and even though it’s warm, I shiver. The place gives me the spooks. As I tramp over weeds and dirt, I try to picture Finch parking Little Bastard where I parked my car and walking to the screen, which blocks the horizon like a skeleton, just as I’m walking now.
I believe in signs, he texted.
And that’s what the screen looks like—a giant billboard. The back is covered with graffiti, and I pick my way across broken beer bottles and cigarette butts.
Suddenly I’m having one of those moments that you have after losing someone—when you feel as if you’ve been kicked in the stomach and all your breath is gone, and you might never get it back. I want to sit down on the dirty, littered ground right now and cry until I can’t cry anymore.
But instead I walk around the side of the screen, telling myself I may not find anything. I count my steps past it until I’m a good thirty paces in. I turn and look up, and the wide white face says in red letters, I was here. TF.
In that moment, my knees give out and down I sink, into the dirt and the weeds and the trash. What was I doing when he was here? Was I in class? Was I with Amanda or Ryan? Was I at home? Where was I when he was climbing up on the sign and painting it, leaving an offering, finishing our project?
I get to my feet and take a picture of the skeleton screen with my phone, and then I walk up to the sign, closer and closer, until the letters are huge and towering above me. I wonder how far away they reach, if someone miles from here can read them.
There is a can of red spray paint sitting on the ground, the cap neatly on. I pick it up, hoping for a note or anything to let me know he left it for me, but it’s just a can.
He must have climbed up by the steel latticework posts that anchor the thing in place. I rest one foot on a rung, tuck the paint can under my arm, and pull myself up. I have to climb one side and then the other in order to finish it. I write: I was here too. VM.
When I’m done, I stand back. His words are neater than mine, but they look good together. There we are, I think. This is our project. We started it together, and we end it together. And then I take another picture just in case they ever tear it down.
Munster is almost as far north and west as you can get and still be in Indiana. It’s called a bedroom community of Chicago because it’s only thirty miles outside the city. The town is bordered by rivers, something Finch would have liked. Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery sits on a large, shaded property. It looks like a regular church in the middle of some pretty woods.
I roam around the grounds until a balding man in a brown robe appears. “May I help you, young lady?”
I tell him I’m there for a school project, but I’m not sure exactly where I’m supposed to go. He nods like he understands this and leads me away from the church and toward what he calls “the shrines.” As we walk, we pass sculpted tributes of wood and copper to a priest from Auschwitz, and also St. Therese of Lisieux, who was known as “The Little Flower of Jesus.”
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. I wish Finch were here so we could say, Who dreams of building a monastery in Indiana?
But then I remember him standing next to me at Hoosier Hill, smiling out at the ugly trees and the ugly farmland and the ugly kids as if he could see Oz. Believe it or not, it’s actually beautiful to some people.…
So I decide to see it through his eyes.
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 sponge rock gives the place a kind of oyster-shell, cave quality that makes it seem ancient and folk-arty at the same time. The friar and I walk through an arched doorway, a crown and stars painted across the top of the face, and then he leaves me on my own.
Inside, I find myself in a series of underground hallways, cobbled in the same sponge rock and crystals and lit up by hundreds of candles. The walls are decorated with marble sculptures, stained-glass windows, and quartz and fluorites that capture the light and hold it. The effect is beautiful and eerie, and the place seems to glow.
I come out into the cool air again and go down into another grotto, another series of tunnels, this one with similar stained-glass windows and crystals built into the rock walls, and angel statues, heads bowed, hands folded in prayer.
I pass through a room arranged like a church, rows of seats facing the altar, where a marble Jesus lies on his deathbed above a base of glittering crystals. I pass another marble Jesus, this one tied to a pillar. And then I step into a room that glows from floor to ceiling.