All the Bright Places

FINCH
Day 22 and I’m still here
The minute we walk into my dad’s house, I know something’s wrong.
Rosemarie greets us and invites us into the living room, where Josh Raymond
sits on the floor playing with a battery-operated helicopter that flies and
makes noise. Kate, Decca, and I all stare, and I know they’re thinking what
I’m thinking: toys with batteries are too loud. Growing up, we weren’t
allowed to have anything that talked or flew or made a sound.
“Where’s Dad?” Kate asks. Looking through the back door, I can see the
grill sitting closed. “He came home from the trip, didn’t he?”
“He got back Friday. He’s just in the basement.” Rosemarie is busy
handing us sodas to drink straight out of the can, which is another sure sign
that something’s wrong.
“I’ll go,” I tell Kate. If he’s in the basement, it can only mean one thing.
He’s in one of his moods, as Mom calls them. 
Don’t mind your father,
Theodore; he’s just in one of his moods. Give him time to settle down, and
he’ll be fine
.
The basement is actually nice and carpeted and painted, with lights
everywhere and my dad’s old hockey trophies and framed jersey and
bookshelves packed with books, even though he absolutely does not read.
Along one entire wall is a giant flat screen, and my dad is planted in front of
this now, enormous feet on the coffee table, watching some sort of game and
shouting at the television. His face is purple, and the veins in his neck are
hulking out. He’s got a beer in one hand and a remote in the other.
I walk over to him so I’m in his line of sight. I stand there, hands in
pockets, and stare at him until he looks up. “Christ,” he says. “Don’t go
sneaking up on people.”
“I’m not. Unless you’ve gone deaf in your old age, you had to hear me
coming down those stairs. Dinner’s ready.”
“I’ll be up in a while.”
I move over so that I’m in front of the flat screen. “You should come up
now. Your family’s here—remember us? The originals? We’re here and we’re
hungry, and we didn’t come all this way to hang out with your new wife and
child.”
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I can count on one hand the times I’ve talked to my father like this, but
maybe it’s the magic of Badass Finch, because I’m not one bit afraid of him.
He slams the beer so hard against the coffee table that the bottle shatters.
“Don’t you come into my house and tell me what to do.” And then he’s off
the couch and lunging for me, and he catches me by the arm and 
wham
, slams
me into the wall. I hear the crack as my skull makes contact, and for a minute
the room spins.
But then it rights itself, and I say, “I have you to thank for the fact that my
skull is pretty tough now.” Before he can grab me again, I’m up the stairs.
I’m already at the dinner table by the time he gets there, and the sight of his
shiny new family makes him remember himself. He says, “Something smells
good,” gives Rosemarie a kiss on the cheek, and sits down across from me,
unfolding his napkin. He doesn’t look at me or speak to me the rest of the
time we’re there.
In the car afterward, Kate says, “You’re stupid, you know that. He could
have put you in the hospital.”
“Let him,” I say.
At home, Mom looks up from her desk, where she is attempting to go over
ledgers and bank statements. “How was dinner?”
Before anyone else can answer, I give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek,
which—since we’re not a family that likes to show affection—leaves her
looking alarmed. “I’m going out.”
“Be safe, Theodore.”
“I love you too, Mom.” This throws her even more, and before she can start
crying, I am out the door to the garage, climbing into Little Bastard. I feel
better once the engine has started. I hold up my hands and they’re shaking,
because my hands, like the rest of me, would like to kill my father. Ever since
I was ten and he sent Mom to the hospital with a busted chin, and then a year
later when it was my turn.
With the garage door still closed, I sit, hands on the wheel, thinking how
easy it would be to just keep sitting here.
I close my eyes.
I lean back.
I rest my hands on my lap.
I don’t feel much, except maybe a little sleepy. But that could just be me
and the dark, slow-churning vortex that’s always there, in me and around me,
to some degree.
The rate of car exhaust suicides in the States has declined since the mid-
sixties, when emission controls were introduced. In England, where emission
controls barely exist, that rate has doubled
.
I am very calm, as if I’m in science class conducting an experiment. The
rumble of the engine is a kind of lullaby. I force my mind to go blank, like I
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do on the rare occasions I try to sleep. Instead of thinking, I picture a body of
water and me on my back floating, still and peaceful, no movement except my
heart beating in my chest. When they find me, I’ll just look like I’m sleeping.
In 2013, a man in Pennsylvania committed suicide via carbon monoxide,
but when his family tried to rescue him, they were overcome by the fumes and
every single one of them died before rescue crews could save them
.
I think of my mom and Decca and Kate, and then I hit the opener, and up
goes the door, and out I go into the wild blue yonder. For the first mile or so, I
feel high and excited, like I just ran into a burning building and saved lives,
like I’m some sort of hero.
But then a voice in me says, 
You’re no hero. You’re a coward. You only
saved them from yourself
.
* * *
When things got bad a couple months ago, I drove to French Lick, which
sounds a helluva lot sexier than it is. The original name was Salt Spring, and
it’s famous for its casino, fancy spa and resort, basketball player Larry Bird,
and healing springs.
In November I went to French Lick and drank the water and waited for it to
fix the dark, slow churning of my mind, and for a few hours I actually felt
better, but that might have been because I was so hydrated. I spent the night in
Little Bastard, and when I woke the next morning, dull and dead feeling, I
found one of the guys who worked there and said to him, “Maybe I drank the
wrong water.”
He looked over his right shoulder, then his left, like someone in a movie,
and then he leaned in and said, “Where you want to go is Mudlavia.”
At first I thought he was high. I mean, 
Mudlavia
? But then he said, “That
up there’s the real deal. Al Capone and the Dillinger gang always went there
after some sort of heist. Nothing much left of it now except ruins—it burned
down in 1920—but them waters flow strong as ever. Whenever I get an ache
in my joints, that’s where I go.”
I didn’t go then, because by the time I returned from French Lick, I was
tapped out and that was it, and there was no more traveling anywhere for a
long while. But Mudlavia is where I’m headed now. Since this is serious
personal business and not a wandering, I don’t bring Violet.
It takes about two and a half hours to get to Kramer, Indiana, population
thirty. The terrain is prettier here than in Bartlett—hills and valleys and miles
of trees, everything snow covered, like something out of Norman Rockwell.
For the actual resort, I’m picturing a place along the lines of Middle Earth,
but what I find is acres of thin brown trees and ruins. It’s all crumbling
buildings and graffiti-covered walls overgrown with weeds and ivy. Even in
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winter, you can tell nature is on a mission to take it back.
I pick my way through what used to be the hotel—the kitchen, hallways,
guest rooms. The place is grim and creepy, and it leaves me sad. The walls
still standing are tagged with paint.