Filed to story: If He Had Been With Me Book PDF Free
Mom describes every outfit she has purchased in great detail so that by the time we’re in the car, I almost don’t need to go through the bags. But I do so that I can thank her for each one as we drive home. Our chatter covers the hole in our day’s adventure, the lack of excitement they’d hoped to inspire.
Everything having to do with this baby reinforces the fact that Finny’s not here.
For all of us.
Yet we want this. I want this.
He would want this.
But that doesn’t make doing this without him any easier.
So this is where I live, in a place where every shade of joy must be painted over in the black of Finny’s death, muted to the gray of willfully existing.
two
“This is awesome,” Angie says, glancing up from Guinevere to smile at me. Her face is luminous and shadowed with exhaustion.
I hadn’t planned to tell her so immediately. We’ve hardly spoken in months, but the moment I saw her round face and short figure, my heart leapt, and a feeling of safety came over me.
I suppose it has been a while since I was with a friend.
The tiny basement apartment is cluttered with the lives of three humans and their shoes. I’m perched on the edge of the secondhand plaid couch, which is covered in unfolded laundry. Angie is on the floor changing Guinevere into a “First Christmas” onesie, even though it’s the first week of November. She snaps the last button and looks up at me.
“It is awesome that you’re pregnant, right?” She sits back on her heels.
“It’s good.” I sound like I’m talking about a meal at a restaurant that wasn’t quite what I expected. “It’s scary,” I add, and I still sound like I’m talking about mayonnaise.
“It’s terrifying!” Angie sings as she tickles Guinevere’s chin. She rolls the baby onto her stomach in a square of sunshine cast through the small window. “And it doesn’t stop. Sorry.”
“What doesn’t stop?”
“Motherhood never stops being scary.”
She laughs. I don’t.
Angie stretches her arms above her blond head and groans. She yawns and blinks at me.
“Stand up and let me look at you,” she says.
I oblige, and she nods sagely.
“I can tell,” she says. “I totally see it.”
“No, I can barely feel it, Ang.” The button on my jeans is undone, but my zipper zips.
“I see it,” she says. “When are you due?”
“May Day,” I reply, and then, “May first. Not the distress call.”
Angie smiles and yawns again. “Yes, I can see Auntie Aut’s bump, can you, Guinnie?” She lies down on the floor with a groan. “Sorry, Autumn. I am just so tired.”
“It’s okay. I’m tired too.” I sit back on the couch and watch her coax a smile from her child. The Mothers were thrilled when I said I had reached out to Angie and needed a ride to her place. It’s nice seeing her. It’s weird seeing her as a mother.
There’s this confidence about Angie that startles me. I’d first noticed it at the hospital last summer, but it’s more pronounced now.
When she answered the door, she was holding the baby on her hip, and after hugging me and inviting me inside, Angie said, “Sorry. I felt her head, and I need to change her into something warmer,” so she had.
“Is that a trick or hack or something?” I ask her. “What you said a minute ago about feeling her head?”
“No, her head just didn’t feel warm enough.”
“What’s warm enough?”
“How she normally feels.” She yawns again. “Sorry. She sleeps through the night most of the time. But when she doesn’t…”
I wait, but she says nothing more. I gaze around the room, at the crib and queen-size bed. It felt like a lot more space when I visited a year ago, when we were all still in high school.
“Isn’t it weird,” Angie says, “to think about the last time you were here?” She stares up at the ceiling.
“So much has changed since then,” we say at the same time, then laugh.
“I know I sent a text,” Angie says, “but I want to say in person I’m sorry about Finn.”
“It’s his baby,” I say.
Angie laughs so loud she covers her mouth. I’m startled enough that the pain of thinking about Finny is stunted.
“Yeah, of course it is,” she says and giggles. “I mean, who else?” She sits up and looks at me.
I raise my eyebrows. “Some people would have guessed Jamie.”
Angie shakes her head. “You were never going to do it with Jamie. Anyone could see that.”
“I would have,” I say. “If he hadn’t cheated on me.”
“Nope.” Angie’s voice has a finality like her certainty while talking about her daughter. “It wasn’t there with you guys.”
I can’t disagree, but I don’t like her seeing something in me that I didn’t know about myself. If it was obvious to her that our relationship wasn’t meant to last, how dense was I to have missed it?
“How did you know it was Finny’s though?” I ask. “We haven’t seen each other in months. I could have met someone new.”
“No way.”
“I don’t see why that’s an impossibility,” though I don’t know why I’m protesting.
Angie gets off the floor and comes to sit next to me on the couch.
“It was obvious at the hospital after Guinnie was born that something had already happened with you guys,” she says, but I shake my head.
“We were only friends then.”
Angie rolls her eyes so hard that it looks like it hurts.
“You guys were never just friends, Autumn, and you know it.” She studies my face. “You know that everyone knew, right?”
“I didn’t know that there was anything to know,” I say in a daze.
“You didn’t know that Finn Smith was into you?” She says it like I’m telling her I don’t know my middle name.