Forever Finley

by Holly Schindler

  The conversation was snipped short by Annie’s old principal, who was casting that word at her again: proud. They were all saying it: So proud of you, Annie.

  But phones were ringing, too, and anyone who wasn’t at the exhibit was starting to urge their loved ones to leave—hurry, hurry, not a minute longer. The streets were getting worse. Ice was growing fatter on power lines. The station was calling, too, insisting the reporter wrap it up before they all wound up being the lead story—an overturned news van, wheels spinning against the black night sky.

  “Justin,” Damien barked, throwing his coat back on. “Come on—let’s go.”

  But Denise waved him off and grabbed Justin’s arm. “I can’t stand this. Work it out. Please. I’ll leave you and Annie alone. Hash this out, once and for all. I’ll disappear to my loft upstairs. Just call me when you’re ready to leave, and I’ll come down to lock up.”

  The last footstep died; Annie and Justin were alone, staring at each other.

  “Hey,” Justin said. The first word he’d said to her in six years.

  “Hey.”

  Frozen rain continued to click against the windows, typing all the words floating through their heads that neither one of them was saying. The wall of ice between them was growing ever thicker.

  “You did it again,” Justin finally said.

  “Meaning you hate these, too.”

  He shrugged.

  “I can see it in your face, Justin.”

  “So what? Everyone else liked them.”

  “You don’t. Obviously.”

  “They’re just—” He gestured toward the closest line of paintings, stuck his hands in his pockets, sighed.

  “What? Just say it, already.”

  “Cold, okay? They’re cold.”

  Annie’s eyes narrowed. Her mouth opened and she took the kind of deep breath that announced she was about to explode.

  “You’re smart, Annie. Maybe too smart. You learned what the critics wanted and you gave it to them. I guess you deserve kudos for that.”

  “Your argument’s growing thinner by the second.” Annie’s voice crackled. “Tonight’s crowd wasn’t exactly brimming with critics. They liked my work.”

  “You don’t think they’re critics? You don’t think they write reviews with their checkbooks? You went to the school of what Finley likes for eighteen years before you headed off to college. You know instinctively what everyone around here considers ‘art.’ And you gave them that.”

  “So you don’t approve of either my critic-pleasing or my crowd-pleasing work. What do you like, Justin? Any of it?”

  “These things are like—paint-by-numbers. Not because they’re not good—you can paint, sure. You can draw anything you want to. Because you don’t paint from the same place anymore. You paint with your head. There’s no joy here. There wasn’t in New York, either.”

  “Pot, meet kettle,” Annie thundered, lashing out at Justin now like a wounded animal. “What was that mess of a book you wrote?”

  “You—you read my book?” he stuttered, the word—mess—repeating in his mind, throbbing like an intense headache. What right did she have—what did she know about literature? About writing a novel?

  “Yes, and I have never in my life read such an eloquent description of paint drying. What happened to you? What happened to all those creatures you made up—right back there!” She pointed at the back corner of the coffee shop.

  “They were childish,” Justin insisted, mad and hurt and at a loss for any proper comeback.

  “They had life!” Finally, she was saying it. Even as the voice in her head screamed at her to shut-up, not come down to his petty level. “I read those stories thinking, What next? I couldn’t wait to get to the next page. You want to know what I wanted to do with the pages of your book? Tear them out and use them to clean my brushes.”

  “Annie, there’s no need for you to try to settle some score. One-up me.”

  “I’m not—I’m being serious!”

  “I’m telling you,” Justin went on, “if you’d go back to old way you painted, when it was your life’s greatest passion, the world would be yours. You’re better than anyone else. But no one will see that if you keep pandering to the expectations of your audience—whether it’s a bunch of highbrow critics or your old second-grade teacher.”

  Battle lines drawn, Annie stomped across the floor, yanking down a strip of butcher paper. A sly grin spread across her face as she carried it to the back table and spread it flat. “Get some pens,” she shouted, as if demanding he choose weapons for a duel to the death.

  Justin retrieved several—both from his own jacket pocket and the drawer beneath Denise’s cash register.

  “Go,” Annie commanded.

  “Go where?”

  “Get started. Write me a story like you used to.”

  “I’m not seventeen years old anymore. It’ll sound childish.”

  “No, it won’t. Just write a wild, imaginative story—if you still even know how.”

  “Fine,” Justin said. “But you’re going to paint the illustrations.”

  “What for, so you can tell me how terrible they are?”

  “They won’t be. Not if you draw the way you used to.”

  “I don’t exactly carry paints in my purse.”

  Justin eyed Denise’s last remaining tray of espressos—half of which hadn’t been touched in the race for everyone to get out ahead of the worst of the storm. He grabbed plastic utensils and a pile of paper napkins, and a glass of water from the counter—along with two lemon bars for energy. “Paint with the napkins and plastic,” he said. “Use the water to dilute the espresso, change the color. Latte art—get it?”

  “Trite,” she growled, accepting her lemon bar. “Besides, you can’t really think a bunch of smears of coffee will look like anything.”

  “You can make anything look amazing.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Yeah, really.”

  They narrowed their eyes at each other; as though hearing the shot of a starting gun, they both lunged forward. Justin scribbled a few opening paragraphs as Annie threw down a basic background landscape.

  “Got my planet sketched,” Annie announced, sticking her head over Justin’s shoulder. After reading his opening lines, she began to dip her napkins into the espresso and the water.

  “Hey!” Justin shouted, getting a glance at her work. “I never said my alien had warts.”

  “That alien’s a newspaper critic, for your information.”

  “You sure she’s not an artist? Look how big her head is!”

  Laughter rattled; butcher paper was ripped from the roll and clattered as it was spread on one table, then another. Annie smeared, she slapped. Her manicured fingertips absorbed the coffee the same way it had once absorbed her inks. Her hand moved as quickly as Justin’s—as quickly as children could add details to their most fanciful daydreams.

  No longer walking the tightrope of anyone else’s rules, Justin shouted out a flurry of ideas about warring planets. Annie’s drawings turned wilder, until she was snatching a Cuppa ball cap from the merchandise display in order to keep her hair out of her eyes, and Justin was shucking the jacket he’d worn beneath his topcoat, rolling his sleeves. Annie was yelling at him—not angrily, just insisting he hurry up with the story.

  She’s back, Justin thought. The girl under those bleachers, the one who danced. Fueled by her return, he was reading out loud, editing as he went, taking detours until something made her double over with laughter or cheer. Here they were, in their back corner, where no idea was stupid or foolish or unpolished. Everything was possible, and there was no fear of a wrong move.

  The setting of Justin’s story grew closer, less like some uninhabitable planet. Two very recognizable creatures began to grace his sentences—two friends. Aliens who aren’t so alien after all, as Annie’d once said.

  She hurried back to the counter, digging through coffee supplies. “Ah-ha!” she shouted. “I
figured Michael’d have some of it in here.” She mixed her new ingredient with water, held the plastic cup to show Justin. “Matcha,” she announced, bringing the bright green-tea pigment to her paper. And suddenly, what had looked brown and somewhat barren was alive again, green shoots branching out everywhere.

  When Annie paused to wrap her arms around his neck, hugging him in a quick burst, he knew, I’m back, too.

  They were startled apart by a knock at the door.

  “It’s Natalie,” Justin said, grabbing the door handle.

  “Who?”

  “You know. The videographer. From the news station. Last night.”

  “Last night?” Annie repeated, as stunned by the stream of sunlight filtering in through that plate glass as she’d been by the knock at the door.

  “Sorry,” Natalie said, slipping inside. “I forgot my light meter.” She pointed at the front counter, snatching a black electronic object. “The ice and the snow make the town look beautiful,” she went on. “I wanted to be sure to get some shots before it disappears.”

  Turning on her heel, she paused to glance at the wild frenzy of scribbled-on butcher paper—wads of it, laid out over nearly every table in the shop, Justin’s words filling the spaces between Annie’s images.

  “These are fantastic,” Natalie blurted, unable to keep from touching a few scenes as she edged back toward the door. “Are you guys working on a project together?”

  “Yeah,” Justin announced. “First work by Manga-We Productions.” The thought had formed in his head as a tease—but the moment the words hit the air, he knew he meant it.

  Annie smiled in agreement at her daydreaming friend with the big eyes that still saw everything. Her smile grew as Cuppa filled with the outdoor sounds of gurgling gutters, of the rhythmic dripping of icicles, and of branches crackling as the weight of ice lifted.

  Forget February

  For some, February 14 is nothing more than a never-ending twenty-four hours.

  The legend of Amos Hargrove’s enduring love is a silly fairy tale. Just ask Kelly and Nathan, arguably the two most anti-Valentine’s Day residents of Finley. His spirit does not still exist, and he does not play matchmaker or bring luck to those who need it…or does he?

  In Finley, Missouri, Valentine’s Day had long ceased being merely a celebration of love, and had become something of a patriotic holiday. To celebrate Valentine’s Day was to celebrate Finley—its traditions, its history, its magic. Of course it was; the town itself had been founded on a broken heart.

  Or so legend had it. The story of Finley was a tale told and retold through the decades, preserved by the townspeople as they’d preserved their own family heirlooms. Amos Hargrove’s story was a source of pride; Finley residents marveled at the details in the same way they marveled at the way their own great-great grandmother’s porcelain chocolate pot had survived the New Madrid earthquake that rang church bells and knocked down trees and forced the Mississippi to run backward.

  In life, Amos Hargrove had been a romantic (or so the story always began, every single time, no matter who was doing the telling). A man who’d believed in love as strongly as he believed in God. He’d said as much even when he was still little more than a boy—a teenager, modern-day storytellers called him—pledging himself to his sweetheart, his Finley, named for the river that had always separated his family’s homestead from hers. He’d wiped tears from her cheeks and placed a lock of her hair, the color of pale yellow Missouri primroses, in a gold filigree memento locket to be carried safely in a pocket next to his heart. This was no time for sadness, he’d insisted, but something to celebrate. Each second past was a second closer to returning to her, his love.

  Easy to make such proclamations, perhaps, when you are a soon-to-be soldier who has not yet seen the reality of war.

  He rode off, blowing a kiss as his horse galloped away, his fair love’s hair in his pocket. He donned the blue wool Union uniform, and embarked on four years of hell. Of dirt and terror and the loss of much of his hearing to canon fire and many of his friends to musket balls. Of the screams of soldiers being ripped in half. Of starving and crawling and shivering and, later, of battling back from heatstroke. Even the months began to bleed, one into another. The passage of time, for poor Amos, was as arduous as any task his lieutenant heaped upon him.

  Through it all, her letters arrived. She wasn’t saving her love for his return, collecting it to be presented once Amos was safely home. She was sending her affection to him each day while they were apart. Her love was in the ink on her paper, in the breezes that blew from home to caress his skin, in the stars that hovered above him at night. She reminded him of it each time she took a moment to write of their families, the farms, the look and feel and smell of home. “Forever, Finley,” she would sign each new epistle, her cursive letters growing shaky with emotion.

  And it had powered Amos through: her words, her love, her lock of hair.

  It had continued to power him, even after the Battle of Palmito Ranch, when Amos had dragged himself from the banks of the Rio Grande and begun his long journey home. His feet carried him—just as they carried the other soldiers, all of them walking through state after state to return to the remnants of plantations or homesteads. But not as much as the loving phrase: Forever, Finley, and the assurance that he had done it—he had survived—he would be in her arms again.

  Amos was already screaming her name as he rounded the final bend in the road, wearing boots he’d taken from a fallen comrade, his uniform still reeking of gunpowder and fear, his stomach empty and his heart spilling over. He was met instead by her disheveled father, who relayed the unbelievable news: Finley had herself succumbed to pleurisy earlier that very morning, slipping away at the very moment Amos’s feet had hit the dirt of her family’s farm. Perhaps she had known he was calling her name, her father tried to comfort Amos. Perhaps it had been the last music she’d heard.

  Amos collapsed, his knees giving way. He fell onto the dirt path in front of his sweet Finley’s family home, certain, then, that his own death was imminent. After all the years spent staring down the worst that mankind had to offer—he would die here, of exhaustion, of disenchantment, of his broken heart.

  But, as the legend goes, the same moment that his cheek—covered in wild, vine-like bearded overgrowth—struck the ground, the memento locket fell from his pocket. It rolled toward his face and popped open.

  Amos wasn’t just looking at a lock of primrose-colored hair; he was looking at her, his Finley. She was reaching forward to wipe the tear from his filthy, matted cheek. “This is no time for sadness,” she assured him. Just as he had assured her before riding away. “We’ll be together again. Here in the place we love.”

  And Amos had believed her—of course he did; he believed in love like he believed in God, after all.

  Like a man preparing for a bride, Amos began to make a home for Finley.

  No—not just a single house. Amos created an entire hometown, named after the woman who would eventually return to him. A town she would love even more than the farm she had known as a girl. Using his family’s considerable fortune, he enlarged the mill and filled the fields with businesses, a church, houses brimming with neighbors who prospered because of Amos, the visionary. Every new endeavor turned to gold; some referred to Amos, in complete earnestness, as their very own Midas. Finley continued to power him forward, just as she had powered him through the war. Instead of holding his love, preserving it, collecting it for the moment of their reunion once his own life came to a close, he continued to share his love for her. And the town he founded was his love letter: Forever, Finley…

  The people of Finley adored Amos. The children were his own; they scampered about his feet to be near him, the kind man who always had time for them, who never scolded them, corrected them, but allowed them to be just as they were, beautiful and free, like wildflowers that had never known pruning shears. Those children blossomed into adults who found their own way, as everyone foun
d their way in Finley. Businesses continued to thrive. Boys took brides and grew new generations of wildflower-free children. Yes, no one had a single doubt: Amos had a touch just as golden as the lock of hair he still carried with him always.

  As it went with all men, though, time had its way with Amos, stripping the color from his hair and the strength from his body. When Amos passed, the people of Finley held their collective breath, expecting a sign. A sighting, perhaps, of Finley and Amos, finally hand-in-hand, walking together through the manicured streets—or behind the town’s chapel.

  But in reality, Amos’s hope—his unending yearning—remained unfulfilled. The legend, told and retold, claimed he had yet to connect with Finley, his one and only. His yearning became part of Finley’s identity, infiltrating the air inside the town. As a result, no one in Finley ever applied the word homesick to that sudden desire to make a U-turn, which hit them all the moment Finley slipped from the rearview mirror—why, that was surely the mystical Amos Hargrove, calling one of his children to come back.

  Of course it was Amos, everyone knew. His name floated alongside any inexplicable occurrence, anything remotely coincidental: He orchestrated events, manipulated surroundings. He mended fences, played matchmaker. No happenstance crossing of paths occurred without a longtime resident insisting it was the work of Amos. His name was mentioned in every survival story, whether it involved a traffic near-miss or tornado. Lonely girl, new to town? Amos would tug at her heartstrings, making sure she was open to meeting the companion he was personally sending her way. Two lifelong friends engaged in the kind of misunderstanding that would end their friendship for good? Could an unexpected January ice storm lock them in, forcing them to work things out, bringing them back together again? In Finley, yes. And in Finley, it was no mere accident. It was Amos.

  And so they came, the residents of Finley. The flocked to Founders Park on the first of February, where they all knew they would find the yellow morning sun warming Amos’s bronze likeness, standing as it had since his passing at the riverbank near the ancient mill. They flowed in a steady stream, their feet like horse hooves against the old single-lane bridge that stretched across the cold winter water separating the park from the mill. They came bearing glittering white lights and giant red hearts and chubby Cupids and arrows, extension cords and pink tinsel. They came to bathe the park in Valentine’s Day decorations, and to give back to Amos as he’d given to them, providing not only their hometown, but lovely neighbors, prosperity, the sense of belonging. The people of Finley believed in happy endings just as strongly as Amos had believed in love.