Chapter 13 Finley’s Interlude #2
There’s more paperwork and phone calls to be made, but after, he makes himself macaroni and cheese the way his mom used to.
It tastes like ash, but he chokes it down anyway, eating it straight out of the pot while sitting on the floor in front of the stove, and he thinks about the promise he made.
How when he thinks of home, he doesn’t think of Silver Springs or the cottage on Fern Street but somewhere he’s never been before, homesick for a place that might not even exist outside his dreams.
One thing is for certain—he can’t stay here.
He drives. When that’s not enough, he gets on a plane. Another one, and then another after that.
He sleeps in hostels, at train stations, and on beaches. It takes him a couple of years, but eventually he hits every continent. He spends a month tending bar in Hvar for a little extra cash, then moves on to the next place, never staying anywhere long.
Sometimes he thinks he’s losing his mind, dreaming words in a language he doesn’t understand, waking in the night and reaching across the bed for a body that’s not there.
But he keeps moving, keeps chasing a feeling he can’t name.
He looks for it in the mountains of Peru and on the beaches of Goa and in other people’s beds.
A waitress in Billings who smells like apple pie and tastes just as sweet.
A surf instructor in Nazaré with calloused hands and a jaw covered in stubble, which Finn doesn’t expect to like as much as he does, and he spares a passing thought as to what his friends back home would think about it, then decides he doesn’t care.
It doesn’t happen right away, but when it does, he’s so blindsided by the thought that he might be turning into his dad, searching for happiness when he should be making it, that he throws up in the bushes outside a Waffle House in Memphis.
Mark calls him when he’s on a train to Berlin.
Kaitlyn’s having a baby. Finn knew this already, knew it in the abstract sense, but Mark doesn’t mean it like that.
Kaitlyn’s dilated ten centimeters, she’s about to start pushing, and if Finn isn’t in Silver Springs in the next forty-eight hours so that he can meet his goddaughter, so help him god, Mark will find him and drag his ass back home.
It’s not his home anymore, but what he chooses to fixate on is merely semantics to someone else, so Finn bites his tongue and books himself on the first flight he can find.
She’s an itty little thing, his goddaughter, her head fitting in the palm of his hand and her scrunched toes not even reaching the crook of his elbow.
Bea’s fingers curl around his thumb, and just like that, he’s wrapped around her tiny finger.
He aches, that homesick feeling inside him growing stronger, the yawning in his chest impossible to ignore.
His love for this little girl with pink skin and dark, downy hair is so visceral it hurts.
When his friends ask him to stay, he does.
He lets Mark and Kaitlyn set him up again, this time with the labor and delivery nurse who helped with Bea.
Her name is Chelsea, and on paper, she’s perfect.
Smart, kind, and she fills out her scrubs nicely.
They don’t have the same sense of humor—his jokes fall flat more often than not—and sometimes her perfume gives him a headache, but Finn wants to make this work, and he throws himself into making it happen.
They’ve been dating a little over a month when Chelsea starts talking about the future, asking Finn how many kids he wants one day, and that same sense of wrongness creeps up on him the way it always does.
With a grim sort of resignation, he accepts that no amount of time or trying is going to change how he feels, how he doesn’t feel, what it is he’s looking for.
Everyone talks about sparks, but he’s holding out for a love that sets his soul on fire.
His friends aren’t surprised. Not when he tells them that he and Chelsea decided they were better off as friends, and not when he tells them he’s leaving town again.
He heads west, spends a few days in Austin and a few more in and around Bisbee before he heads up the Pacific Crest Trail, veering inland once he makes it to Oregon.
He’s in the Eagle Cap Wilderness, hiking up Sacajawea Peak, the highest point in the Wallowa Mountains, when he gets the call.
Two of his best friends…gone.
He manages somehow to get a seat on the last flight out, and he spends the whole time in the air thinking about how he just did this, how it feels like it was just yesterday that Mark was calling him and telling him to get his ass on a plane to meet his goddaughter.
He thanks God Bea wasn’t in the car and then feels like he’s going to throw up for feeling grateful about any part of this.
His friends are dead, and there’s a little girl who’s going to grow up never knowing her mom and dad.
So no, he’s not grateful. He curses the same God he just thanked, a God he’s not sure he believes in, and he moves on autopilot, grabbing his bags and renting a car, headlights too bright against the asphalt.
After the funeral, Mrs. Hawkins, Mark’s mom, pulls him aside, asking to talk to him.
While everyone else is at the wake, she sits him down and across a table set with coffee that goes undrunk tells him what only a handful of people, Mark and Kaitlyn included, already know.
Parkinson’s, she explains. The diagnosis is recent, her symptoms mild for now. They won’t be forever.
She loves Bea, would do anything for her, she says, but long-term, she can’t be what Bea needs.
Maybe right now she can, but soon she won’t be able.
Kaitlyn’s parents have both passed, and neither she nor Mark had any siblings.
She lays it all out for Finn, and still he struggles to see where she’s going with any of this, not until she comes right out and says it.
They’ve named him Bea’s legal guardian.
He’s speechless. It takes actually seeing it in writing for him to believe it, and it still doesn’t completely sink in until Monty’s helping him haul Bea’s crib into the spare bedroom of the house he grew up in and Chrissy and Peyton and Monty’s little sister, Savannah, are helping him paint.
That night, he sits, watching Bea sleep, watching her belly rise and fall with each breath, and…
he’s not sure how to feel about any of this.
How he’s supposed to feel, if there’s even a right way to feel after your two best friends die and leave you their kid.
He’s honored that Mark and Kaitlyn chose to entrust him of all people with their daughter’s well-being, to raise her in their stead.
But he’s also brassed-off that they didn’t bother to pause and consider that maybe this was something they ought to tell him about, and a part of him thinks bitterly that they finally got their wish, that he’s back in Silver Springs for good, just like they wanted.
As soon as the thought crosses his mind, he feels guilty.
This isn’t what anyone wanted, and he knows it.
Finn doesn’t know what he’s doing, but Bea is counting on him, so he puts one foot in front of the other.
Grace—Mrs. Hawkins—watches Bea when she can so that Finn can take over the bar.
The nights are hard, and Finn can’t remember the last time he slept deep enough to dream.
Maybe it’s for the best he doesn’t. There’s still this yawning feeling inside him that he’s pretty sure is never going to go away, but he can ignore it.
He’s got a purpose now. He might not know what he’s doing half the time, but he knows why he’s doing it.
Bea needs him more than he needs this thing he’s been searching for—a place, a feeling, something he’s not sure even exists.
Finn is thirty-two.
He’s in the middle of doing inventory when she walks into the bar, his bar now, and everything changes.
His knees go as weak as a newborn calf’s when he looks at her, and he steadies himself with a hand against the bar.
She’s beautiful, her hair a glorious tangle around her face, her eyes the color of a storm at sea.
But it’s more than that. It’s strange—he’s self-aware enough to know it—but looking at her humbles him the same way staring up at the stars does.
Like he’s part of something grand and infinite, something bigger than his brain can comprehend.
The yawning feeling in his chest quiets, replaced with a gentle but incessant tug behind his sternum as he asks her if she’s all right, because she’s looking at him like she’s seen a ghost.
It takes a bit of back-and-forth, but then she smiles, and it feels like this is the thing he’s been searching his whole life for.
It feels like coming home.