On April 5, one year since Eleanor died, Violet and her parents drive to the A Street Bridge to lay flowers. In the ground is the license plate Finch had found and fixed up, buried into the ground like a plaque, surrounded by a garden of flowers. Standing there with her parents, it hits that they have survived. She wonders when Finch was there, when he found the license plate, and then she starts talking about Eleanor, bringing up memories.
At home, she thinks about Germ, and her mother’s question about why she wants to start a magazine. She writes down a few epithets, but crosses them out. She thinks of Finch and Amanda, and of the calendar where she used to X out days because she just wanted them to be over. She lands on “Germ Magazine. You start here.”
She hasn’t heard from Finch in weeks, and she is angry with him for leaving without a word, angry at herself for being easy to leave. She assumes they’re broken up, and goes through the regular mourning period after a breakup. She goes on a date with Ryan and hangs out with Amanda. She is spending more time with Brenda, who has been working on Germ with her and has become basically her closest friend.
In late April, Kate Finch shows up at Violet’s house asking if she’s heard from Finch. He didn’t check in the day before—which he had been routinely—and he sent her a strange, nostalgic email. Violet received a message, too: it is once again words from The Waves. He also sent messages to Brenda and Charlie. Violet panics and goes to Finch’s house, where his mother and sister are all in a state of worry and confusion. Piecing together the post-it notes left on his wall, Violet discovers that he’s left he words to the line he spoke when the cardinal died: “There was nothing to make him last a long time,” as well as “Go to the water if it suits thee there.” She knows she will find him in one of the spots they wandered, and she knows he will be gone. She drives to the Blue Hole. Little Bastard is there, and his clothes are there. She considers turning back, because then Finch will still be alive somewhere. Even if he is gone, she thinks, he isn’t nowhere; he found that other place at the bottom of the water. The sheriff comes and it’s the divers who find his body, though Violet can’t confirm it’s him: it looks nothing like the Finch she knows. Violet makes the call to Mrs. Finch to tell her that she found him, that her son is dead.
At the funeral, Violet is angry with everyone. She feels like everyone there is a phoney, and she is angry that Finch did this to her, after he lectured her so much about living. She can never understand why he did it, and she blames herself for not doing more to help him, for not being enough to make him want to live. Violet meets with Mr. Embry, who admits that he feels some responsibility for Finch’s death, and so he knows how she’s probably feeling too, but that she can’t blame herself. It’s neither of their faults, and you can only do so much when someone is hiding things from you. He gives her a handbook for survivors of suicide, and one line sticks out to her: your life is now “forever changed.”
When the geography teacher says Violet can turn in whatever she has for the Indiana project, she says it’s okay, she will do it. She rereads the messages between her and Finch from the beginning, and then writes a letter to him in her notebook. “You saved my life,” she writes. “Why couldn’t I save yours?” (353) In a panic, Violet searches for their map, one of the remaining vestiges of Finch. There are five more spots to see, and Finch has numbered them, obviously in an order. She goes to a shoe tree, where Finch hung a pair of shoes on the highest branch one week after he disappeared. Then she goes to the World’s Biggest Ball of Paint, where Violet paints the whole thing a shade of blue similar to Finch’s eyes. When she signs the guest log, she sees his name, beside a quote from Dr. Seuss: “Today is your day. You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away!” Beside her name, she writes in the next line of the poem.
Back at home, Violet tells her parents she doesn’t want to forget about Eleanor; she doesn’t want to pretend like nothing happened. She goes to two more spots on the map—a sign where Finch has written he was there, and a shrine in a monastery showing The Ultraviolet Apocalypse. Violet, Brenda, Charlie, Ryan and Amanda go to Purina Tower to listen to Finch’s favorite music. They all say something about him, and Violet laughs for the first time in a long time. She realizes that the final wandering spot is a place Finch added himself. His hints lead her to a small church near a lake, which Violet reads is a sanctuary for weary travelers, built in the memory of those who lost their lives in car accidents. She knows he chose it for her and for Eleanor.
An envelope sticks out of a Bible: it has her name on it. She worries that it will say all the ways she let him down—how she wasn’t enough for him. Instead, it is lyrics about how happy she made him, and how lovely he made her feel. Violet weeps for a long time in the church pew. In the final chapter, she returns to the Blue Hole. She recounts the story of Cesare Pavese, who died too soon, and then comes up with her own epitaph for Finch. As she swims in the blue water, under the blue sky, reminded of Finch, she thinks of her own epitaph, still to be written, and her own life, still to be lived.
Analysis:
Even though Finch is gone, his character is still very much alive in these final chapters of the novel. He the narrative focus here: everyone is trying to find him when he disappears and everyone is trying to grieve him once he’s found. Finch leaving clues behind for Violet feels like a characteristically Finch thing to do; throughout the novel, particularly in their relationship, he was always several steps ahead.
At the end of the book, Finch is still a participating actor: he still has agency and can still speak to Violet and teach her lessons even after he’s gone. This all gives power to back Finch. In a conversation about suicide, where those who die are often talked about as “powerless,” or as “victims,” that shift feels like a political or philosophical move on Niven’s part. Finch may have died, but he isn’t gone; as Violet says, she is “forever changed.” Not just by the loss, but by knowing Finch, who will stay with her forever.
The ending of the novel holds a powerful symmetry with the earlier part. Finch guided Violet through her grief over Eleanor, shepherding her into the new season of her life. And again, with his own death, he does the same: she has her time to be angry, to be upset, but Finch has planned everything—and knows Violet well enough to trust she will find what he wants her to find—so that by the time she is ready, she can discover all the things he wants her to hear. Only then, crying in the pews of the church for weary travelers and reading his lyrics for her, does Violet fully forgive him and, more importantly, herself.
The theme of wandering comes back in the end as the plot line of the project has to be tied up. Violet refuses an extension or a new project; she will do this one, as she is stronger than she used to be. But of course, she isn’t really alone. Finch has chosen all the spots for her to go, and he’s left his mark there for her to see and cherish. It hearkens back to the earlier scene with the crane, when Finch says he, too, is wandering, evoking the famous line from Tolkein: “Not all who wander are lost.” The line could almost be an epigraph for the novel, as its message seems to speak on every page. Even when Finch is dead, Violet finds solace in this idea: he isn’t lost forever, he has discovered some other place.
The final image of the book is a powerful one: Violet swimming in and under all that blue. Water has been a recurring motif in the novel, with both restorative and destructive properties. The foreshadowing set up in the beginning did in fact come to fruition, with Finch dying by drowning, and in this very body of water where Violet swims in the end. And yet, where we might expect to see her having a difficult, painful moment, she has a triumphant one. She thinks of Pavese, of his epitaph by Natalia Ginzburg, which could belong to Finch, but then she reclaims his story, writing her own epitaph for him. She isn’t going to give up on water the way she gave up on driving. She knows he will always be there, and that everything forever will remind her of him. She wonders about her own life, of all the places she’ll go, like in the Dr. Seuss poem they shared. She wonders what her own story will be, and feels brave enough to find out. She isn’t stuck, she’s moving: literally swimming around the Blue Hole, thinking about the future. And she feels Finch’s presence all around her in the glimmering water.
