Filed to story: If He Had Been With Me Book PDF Free
So it goes.
It’s at the end of the day, when Coach yells, “Showers!” that my brain short-circuits. The feeling I had in Alexis’s basement returns, and I’m watching myself.
Finn is dead.
High school is over.
I stand and watch as the kids jog to the locker room. Coach turns and sees me and opens his mouth to yell at me before he remembers. I take a step forward.
“I, uh, think I’m going to head home to shower?” I can’t believe that I’m allowed to say that.
Coach nods. “Do you think you’ll be back tomorrow or next week?”
“No,” I say. “I got what I needed today. Next week, I leave for school, and I’ll have places to run there that don’t…” I was similarly inarticulate when I showed up three hours ago, but he understands this time too.
“The only way out is through,” he says, nodding. It’s something Coach has said a lot over the years, but it’s always been when one guy was surrounded and he needed to push his way out before the ball got stolen.
But it makes sense here and now too.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think I just realized that.”
He claps me on the back once, then makes a face and laughs at how wet my shirt is as he wipes his hand on his jeans.
“Go get that shower, Murphy,” he says. “Go off to school. You’ll find the way through.”
It’s not that I feel better as I drive away, but I feel more hopeful that what he said was true.
nine
A few days later, I take a break from packing my room and see that I have a voicemail.
“Hey, Jack,” Angelina says. “It’s Finn’s mom.”
I can tell she wasn’t saying that because she thought I wouldn’t recognize her voice or know who she was, but because she wanted to say his name, claim him. I swallow the lump in my throat and try to focus on the point of her call. She’s selling Finn’s car, but the garage said there were personal effects that needed to be removed. Would I help?
I’m surprised. Finn kept his car so clean that it became a joke on the soccer team. I call her back and get the address of the garage where his car was towed after the accident. They say I can come by today if that works for me, and it’s a task I want to get over with, so I head over.
The man leading me out to the lot seems to have no idea that tragedy has struck.
As he unlocks the gate, he turns to me and says, “Damage was minimal. You sure your mom wants to sell?”
I shrug.
I’m holding Finn’s key chain, one of the last things he ever touched. I squeeze it and think about time travel again. It would be so easy to save Finn’s life if it weren’t for time and space.
“So, uh, if you’re sure you don’t want us to fix her up, empty her out, and we’ll have you sign something for your mom in our office.”
I don’t bother correcting him before he walks away.
Finn’s little red car.
Like being in his house, I should have expected this flood of memories.
There’s the first time I saw this car: Finn, proud but embarrassed to be proud, driving me around the block once before dinner because my mom was only letting me go because she had a soft spot for Finn.
The late nights after a party, the early mornings before soccer practice.
Sometimes we bickered. Sometimes we laughed.
Mostly, we listened to music and didn’t realize that we had a limited time together.
Maybe if I had known that it would be this hard, I wouldn’t have come. But who would?
And then there’s the hole in the windshield.
Looking at it makes me feel like I saw Sylvie fly through it.
How did she live?
I remind myself that one life wasn’t exchanged for another. Had Sylvie died on impact, Finn would still have run to her, would still have been so anxious that he didn’t see the downed power line in the puddle next to Sylvie.
I take a deep breath and do what I came to do.
There isn’t much. I grab his stack of CDs and an umbrella from the front. From the trunk, I retrieve his jumper cables and first aid kit. There’re taco and candy wrappers in the back seat, which is a surprise bordering on shock. It’s only because of those wrappers that I look underneath the front seat.
Then I see the bag.
As I pull it out, even though I know it’s not drugs, the thought still crosses my mind, given it was concealed and wrapped so carefully.
It quickly becomes obvious why he had hidden the bag.
He’d said that he was running an errand before getting Sylvie.
He’d said he was “all the way sure” that Autumn loved him.
It also explains why there was trash in Finn Smith’s car.
Suddenly, I hate that girl so much. Autumn was the reason Finn was breaking up with Sylvie and driving in the rain. She was the reason he was distracted that night.
If he hadn’t been cheating on Sylvie the night before, Finn probably would have told her that they needed to go home, that they could talk on the phone the following day. But his guilt—his guilt over what Autumn had gotten him to do—had kept him out all night, even though it was getting late, even though it was raining hard and he hated driving in the rain.
If you took Autumn out of the equation, Finn would still be alive.
With a paper sack full of the meager items left in Finn’s little red car, I leave the garage and call Finn’s mom. She asks if I can come by, so I drive to Finn’s house.
She looks thinner and like she hasn’t been sleeping well, but Angelina’s smile is genuine. She opens the screen door for me, and I go into the foyer. I normally wouldn’t have gone so long without seeing her. I can’t remember the last time that a week went by without me being at Finn’s house. Hugging Angelina feels natural, even though it was something we never did when he was alive.
“Thank you,” she says. “I hope that wasn’t too much to ask.”
“No,” I say. “I’m glad to help. There was an umbrella in the car that had French words printed on it. I thought that was probably Sylvie’s, but I brought the rest of the stuff.” I hand her the paper sack.
She looks inside it for a moment. “Would you listen to the CDs, Jack?”
I nod. “Thank you.”
She hands me the stack of CDs and then takes out the first aid kit. She holds it tenderly in her hands. A shadow crosses her face. “If only,” she whispers. And I understand.
If only this could have somehow saved him. If only his cautious nature had somehow saved him.