If He Had Been with Me (26 page)

“So,” Finny says, but doesn’t continue.

“What?” I say.

“It’s you and me now, right?”

“Phineas Smith, are you asking me to be your girlfriend?” I can’t help giggling.

“Well, yeah.” He shifts underneath me. “Is that weird?”

“Only because it feels like we’re already so much more than that.”

He relaxes again. “Yeah, I know. But it’ll have to do for now.”

“You still have to break up with Sylvie,” I say quietly.

“I know,” he says. “I’m going to. Tomorrow.”

“You mean today,” I say. He looks over at his window.

“Oh. Right.” He squeezes me again. “We should get some sleep, I guess.”

“Yeah. I guess.” I close my eyes, and we are quiet. The room is still and silent, and outside, the sun has risen on a hot August day.

I wake many times. We shift and change positions together; he nuzzles me, I move up against him. He holds my hands, my neck, my face. I dream, I wake, I see him, I sleep.

***

Finny’s cell phone rings. He tenses and sits up. I am still and confused for a moment, and then I bolt upright. It looks like early afternoon. Finny is standing in the middle of his room, picking his jeans off the floor and digging through the pockets. I fold my arms over my breasts as I watch him. He opens his phone, looks at it, and presses a button. The ringing stops. Still holding his pants, he turns and looks at me. I stare back at him.

“Hey,” he says.

“Was that her?”

“Does it matter?” He sets the phone on his nightstand.

“Yes.”

“It was,” he says. I look away, down at the covers on my lap. I hear his jeans hit the floor, and the bed creaks as he sits down. The blanket shifts as he climbs back in next to me. “Come here.” He pulls me down next to him and holds me the way he did last night.

I think of Sylvie at some airport, excited about seeing Finny again soon. I think about how I laughed when Jamie told me he and Sasha had discovered they had feelings for each other. I realize how different this story must be from all of their points of view.

“Do you feel guilty?” I ask. He doesn’t answer right away.

“Yeah,” he says. “But I also feel like I’ve been loyal to something bigger.”

His phone beeps. He has a text message.

“You should see who it is,” I say.

“I don’t want to.”

“It could be The Mothers, and if we don’t answer, they’ll think we’re dead and come back early.” He sits up and looks at his phone. His back is turned to me as he types a reply. He doesn’t say anything when he turns back around. He lies back down on his side and I curl up next to him so that we face each other.

“It was her again,” I say.

“I told her that I won’t be meeting her plane. I’ll go see her after she has dinner with her parents.”

“Oh. When?”

“We have a few hours. Go back to sleep.”

“I’m not tired.”

“Me neither.” He reaches over and strokes my hair. I close my eyes but do not doze. His fingers are gentle on my scalp and I shiver once. “Do you regret it?” he asks after a while. I open my eyes again. He looks worried.

“No,” I say, “but—” I lower my face so that I can’t look at him. “I wish it had been your first time too,” I say. He stops stroking my hair and his hand drops on to the bed between us. When he speaks, it is slow and haltingly.

“The first time—we were both so drunk neither of us can remember it. And then it turned out—” he pauses and frowns “—that she couldn’t do it unless she was drunk. And if she was drunk, it felt wrong to me. It didn’t happen often or even go well when it did. So—I mean—in a lots of ways, it was a first for me.”

“What do you mean she couldn’t do it unless she was drunk?” I ask.

Finny looks away and mumbles. “Someone hurt her once.”

“Oh,” I say. We are quiet for moment. I reach over and cover his hand with mine. He turns his palm facing up and our fingers twine together. Our eyes meet again.

“I wanted something better for you,” Finny says. “That’s why I made you promise not to do it when you were drinking. But really, the idea of you ever doing it with anybody drove me crazy. You remember how you told me that you were going to after graduation, and then the day after you were sitting on the porch and you said you were waiting for Jamie?”

“Yeah?”

“I went up here and punched the wall. I’d never done that before. It hurt.”

“You thought—”

“Yeah,” Finny says. He still holds my gaze, but his expression shifts into some mix of emotions I can’t quite figure out. “Then after I found out you guys had broken up, it was hard to see you miserable over him when I was so happy I wanted to pick you up and spin you around,” Finny says.

“You were sad that time Sylvie broke up with you,” I say. “I was so angry at her for hurting you that I thought about pushing her in front of the school bus.”

“I was sad,” Finny says. I can’t help the sliver of jealousy that pierces my stomach. “But it was my own fault,” he adds. “I told everybody that I didn’t like it when they made comments about you and Sylvie got jealous. She asked me if I had feelings for you and I told her to drop it and kept trying to change the subject. She could tell.”

“Why did you get back with her?” I ask the question even though I’m not sure I want to know the answer.

He pauses for only a second before answering. “You loved Jamie all this time too,” Finny says. “Didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Then why don’t you understand? I wanted—I tried to love only her. When I told you last month that I was going to break up with Sylvie, it wasn’t because I thought I had a chance of being more than just your friend. It was because loving you from a distance was one thing, but it wouldn’t have been fair to her if I were in love with my best friend.”

I sit up and pull the blankets with me so that he can’t see my body. I can’t look at him. Everything he has said has made me so sad and so happy and more than anything else, I am so frightened.

“Autumn?” I hear the bed creak as he sits up too, but I hang my head and refuse to look at him.

“What if you see her and realize this was all a mistake?” I say.

“That will not happen.”

“It could.”

“It won’t.”

“If you love her—”

“But if I have the chance to be with you—God, Autumn, you’re the ideal I’ve judged every other girl by my whole life,” Finny says. “You’re funny and smart and weird. I never know what’s gonna come out of your mouth or what you’re gonna do. I love that. You. I love you.”

I raise my head a little. He’s staring at me with an expression I’ve never seen before. I watch his eyes study my face.

“And you’re so beautiful,” he says. I duck my head back down and try to hide my face. My cheeks are warm. Finny laughs. “Now, I
know
you already knew that.”

“It’s different when you say it.” He laughs again.

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re so beautiful.” Finny puts his hand under my chin and turns me to face him. He looks me in the eye. “Last night was the best thing that ever happened to me and I would never think it was a mistake unless you said it was.”

“I would never say that.”

Finny leans his forehead against mine. “Then everything is going to be okay. We’re together now. Right?”

“Of course.”

Again, Finny laughs at me. I pull my face away from his and look at him.

“I never, ever thought this would happen,” he says. “And then you say ‘of course’ like it’s the most natural thing in the world.”

“Doesn’t it feel like it?”

He laughs again, quietly this time, and the tone is different. “How did we ever get here?” he says. I don’t know what to say to that. So I just look at him. And then he smiles at me and pulls me toward him again and I sit on his lap with his arms around me and it is the most natural thing in the world.

Finny is supposed to leave in a few minutes. He’s in the shower, and I’m in his room, dressed and waiting. I made his bed and tried to cover up the blood stain, and now I’m sitting in the middle of it with my knees curled to my chest. The sky has clouded over, and even though it is still early evening, it looks almost dark out.

I hear the shower stop; I rest my chin on my knees. It takes forever for me to hear him in the hall. He comes in fully dressed and rubbing his wet hair with a towel. He looks at me.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says.

“Can’t you wait until tomorrow?”

“I want it to be over,” he says. “I want it to be just us.” He drops his towel on the floor. He takes a baseball cap off his dresser and covers up his wet head, then takes it off and runs his fingers through his hair. He turns back to me.

“Walk me out?” he says. I nod, and he holds out his hand to me.

I follow him to his car, and then we stand looking at each other.

“I promise you,” he says, “I’ll come back as soon as I can. It may take a while though.”

“Please don’t go,” I say. He puts his hands on my shoulders and pulls me to his chest. “I have to do this,” he says. “You know that, Autumn.”

I can’t answer him because I know he is right. He lays his cheek on the top of my head.

“Here is what we’ll do,” he says. His voice is soft and light, as if we are making the sort of mischievous plan we made as children. “When The Mothers get home, you go to bed early, and when I get back I’ll sneak in your back door and come to your room. And then I’ll hold you all night.”

I raise my head to look at him.

“Okay,” I say. He smiles and leans down to kiss me. He kisses me once, and then I lean in for another. We kiss for a long time after that. I lean back against his car and he presses into me. Both of us are breathing harder. If I can just keep kissing him, then he’ll never leave.

A car door slams. We both look up but we don’t separate. The Mothers are in the other driveway, unpacking cases of wine from the trunk. They are pointedly not looking at us.

“Do you think they saw?” I ask.

“Definitely,” he says.

“Oh God,” I say.

“I think my mother has a special bottle of champagne hidden away for just this occasion,” Finny says.

“Oh God,” I say again. Finny looks down at me and smiles.

“I’ll be back to help you fend them off.”

“Okay,” I say. This time I resist the urge to tell him not to go. His smile slowly fades and he takes a deep breath. My arms drop from his neck reluctantly. He kisses my mouth quickly and takes a step back. He turns to open the car door and I take a step back too. He looks at me again, and just before he gets inside, he smiles again.

“After this,” he says, “things are going to be the way they were always supposed to be.” Then he climbs inside and closes the door.

He starts the engine without looking up at me again. I stand in the yard and watch his car until it is gone.

It begins to rain.

Late in the night, I hear footsteps in the hallway. I roll over and look at the door. It opens slowly.

“Finny?” I say. There is silence.

“Oh, Autumn,” my mother says.

On August 8th, Phineas Smith died, and I can imagine every detail of that night. I can see his face and the curl of his fingers around the steering wheel. I can hear his breathing and I feel the race of his pulse.

I know what he was thinking about as he took that turn too fast.

I know what they had been arguing about before the little red car spun out.

I know that Sylvie’s face was already streaked with tears when she crashed through the windshield.

It’d be wrong to say Sylvie killed Phineas. She was the instrument of his death, but not the cause. If he had been with me, Finny would still be alive. If he had been with me, everything would have been different. But whose fault is it that he wasn’t?

I see Finny sitting in the red car, perfect and untouched. Rain falls through the hole in the windshield but he does not feel it. He feels nothing. He thinks nothing. He is alive.

Stay
. I whisper to him.
Stay
in
the
car. Stay in this moment. Stay with me.

But of course he never does.

Suddenly, as if he has been punched, his senses come back to him. He feels the warm leather seat beneath his jeans, and the steering wheel clutched in his fingers so tight that his knuckles are white. He sees the glass glittering around him and the gaping hole in front of him. And through that hole where the windshield once was, he sees her. Through the blackness and the rain he sees Sylvie lying in the road, still and quiet.

Stay,
I whisper.

Just as suddenly, his hands unclench from the wheel and he is taking off the seat belt that spared his life, opening the door and running down the road toward her.

I see the puddle of water by her head even though he does not. I see the black glistening power line that the storm has torn down draped through the water. Finny does not; he only sees her, what he thinks is his destination.

Sylvie lies on the other side of the puddle, safe and unmoving, only serving her purpose.

He kneels before her. He says her name. She does not move. He is filled with a fear and panic that matches my own in watching this moment. To steady himself, he lays his left hand down by her head.

Death happens to him more suddenly than I can describe to you or even care to imagine.

It’s late September now. Without talking about it, we all knew I wouldn’t be going away to college this year. I stay in my room most days and tell The Mothers that I am reading. Aunt Angelina still sleeps over here every night, but my mother no longer has to beg her to eat. My father takes me out to lunch once a week; he thinks that he’s distracting me when he talks about taking me with him on his next trip abroad.

I had to go see Dr. Singh again. He asked me a bunch of questions and I told a lot of lies. He upped my prescription and let me go.

I haven’t taken my pills in a month now.

Today is the day halfway between our birthdays and the leaves have begun to change. I lie in bed and look at Finny’s window. This September was so hot and dry that some of the leaves have already turned brown and died, and in this setting, the beginning of autumn is dull brass instead of gold. I can see some of the roses still blooming in my mother’s garden. Brown on the edges and bright in other colors, they open and unfold, their petals drooping downward, dying just as their lives have begun.

They’ve stayed past their time, and I’ve realized that I have too.

In the end, my decision comes down to one thing: I think Finny would forgive me. It wouldn’t be what he wanted for me, but he would forgive me. And if I continue to try to survive without Finny, there are paths I could go down that he would think were much worse than this.

The afternoon passes into evening and then night. I wait until I can no longer hear The Mothers talking together before bed. I step carefully on the stairs, avoiding every creak I can remember. In the kitchen, I leave the note on the table. It took longer to write than I thought it would. I finally had to accept that I wouldn’t be able to say all of the things I wanted. I go to my mother’s butcher block, and this is the only I time I ever pause, and it is to consider if I should take the biggest knife since it is what I imagined, or if I should be practical and choose the one that would do the best job. But if I am caught with this note, I will have to tell lots of lies for days or maybe weeks until they will leave me alone long enough to try again, and so I decide that if I am determined enough, it won’t matter which knife I take and so I take the big one.

As I sneak out the back door, I spare a moment to glance at the backyards where we played together, at the tree where we never built our tree house. But I hurry across the grass to his yard, and run past the spot where he kissed me first.

Aunt Angelina is always losing her things, so she keeps an extra house key under the empty flowerpot on the front porch. After I unlock the door, I put the key back so that maybe she won’t realize I used it and blame herself. It’s the least I can do; this is already not fair to her. But the temptation to be close to him one last time is too great for me to resist.

The house is quiet, empty, shadowy. The stairs creak as I go up, but there is no one to hear and I relish the sound, remembering how we ran up the stairs together.

The door to Finny’s room is closed. I knew it would be. No one has been in there since he and I walked out of it holding hands.

I use clear tape to hang the sign I made on the door.

Please, do not try to break down the door. It is too late for you to do anything. Call the police and let them handle this part.

And I come into this room and lock the door behind me.