Filed to story: If He Had Been With Me Book PDF Free
“Autumn?”
Sylvie nods. “I thought about asking Angelina, but I could tell she knew that Finn and I were breaking up that night and why. It felt better not to ask.”
“Autumn told me that she felt you should have the funeral.” It hadn’t made sense to me when Autumn said it, and I don’t expect it to make sense to Sylvie, but she nods.
“I didn’t expect that of her,” she says.
We’re quiet again. The wind is starting to feel like the beginning of an afternoon storm. We won’t be able to stay much longer.
“Um, you didn’t want to be alone with your poet or anything, did you?”
“My poet?” Sylvie cracks another sad smile. “She was the first poet to ever win a Pulitzer, so she’s hardly ‘mine.’ But no and thank you for asking.” She pauses. “You need a ride home, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah?” I say. “Sorry. I didn’t plan my day well.”
“Most people don’t,” Sylvie says as she puts her jacket on again. She touches the poet’s headstone with two fingers. “All right, let’s go,” she says to me.
Sylvie remembers the way back to Finn’s grave without checking her map. By the time we return to the site, the rain is starting, and we hurry past him and to her car. It feels like a betrayal to leave him in the rain.
Inside her car, I open my mouth to ask Sylvie if she’s sure she wants to drive in the rain, but before I can, she says, “In case you’re going to offer to drive, the reason I drove separately from my parents is because I can’t ride in a car driven by anyone else. I’ll be fine. Put on your seat belt.”
I look back as she drives us away from him, but I comfort myself remembering Autumn will come by later to see that Finn is settled in.
seven
A week after the funeral, I get a text from Charlie, my next oldest brother and therefore, by Murphy tradition, the one responsible for things like getting me off the kindergarten bus and teaching me to drive.
Mom says you’re not running.
Translation: Are you okay?
I text back.
Been hot. Busy packing for the dorm.
Translation: I’m fine.
Charlie replies.
Mom also said you hadn’t packed at all.
Translation: Bullshit.
I’ll go running later today.
Translation: I’m fine.
Mom asked me to come home and help you pack.
Translation: Bullshit.
I’ll get her off your back.
Translation: I’ll get it together.
OK. Same. Go run.
Translation: I’ll tell Mom you’re fine but don’t make a liar out of me.
So now I have to go for a run.
The reason I hadn’t gone for a run yet was because I knew I was going to have to find a place. It’s not like I only went running with Finn. We went running together a few times a month. Finn liked to go to different places to run, for scenery or whatever. I always thought it was stupid to drive somewhere to run, so he’d invite
Sylvie when he wanted to go running at a sculpture park or a nature reserve.
But sometimes, he’d call or text me and say he wanted to go running right that moment, and I wanted to be running already, and we would meet at the halfway point between our houses and just go.
We would run all over Ferguson. There isn’t a street within running distance of my home that isn’t painted in memories of trash-talking with Finn, pushing myself to go harder because of him, or giving myself a break because he said it was okay.
So that’s why I was putting this off. Now I have to drive somewhere to go running, which is stupid. But here I am putting on my running clothes and getting into my car as if there isn’t a perfectly good sidewalk outside. I went with Alexis to her cousin’s birthday party last May at this gazebo in a park, and I’m pretty sure it had a path around a lake or something, so I drive in the direction I remember the park being in until, to my surprise, I find it.
So fine. I’ll go running.
I’m not going to stretch any more than I normally would, though Finn was always saying I didn’t stretch enough. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean everything he ever said has to be right.
After a normal amount of stretching, I’m off and it’s fine.
But obviously I’m thinking about Finn since it’s the first run.
Because he won’t run again.
I feel like Finn’s death has rattled my brain. How many times am I going to remember that being dead means you’re never going to do shit again?
I should have checked how many times around this lake makes a mile. The gravel spread over the dirt path is ground down and causing more slippage than absorbing impact. This will be a stamina run, not a speed run. And that’s fine. I didn’t check the time before I started, and I’ll have no idea when I’ve hit my first mile.
“Let’s run and not worry about why,” Finn would say, and we would just go.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Why couldn’t he have stayed in the car? What did he think he was going to do? Save Sylvie with his bare hands? I mean, fine, this one time, we were watching a TV show, and he was all like, “That’s not how you do CPR.”
I said I figured somebody had looked it up before filming, but Finn started going on about how she’d never break through his sternum in that position. I said they probably wouldn’t have gotten the cleavage shot in the position he was describing. He glanced at the screen and said, “Oh right,” in this disappointed tone, as if the show had failed him by choosing boobs over accurate first aid. Which was weird, because I knew for a fact that he liked that actress’s boobs.
So maybe Finn could have done CPR on Sylvie if she had needed it.
I’m starting my second time around the lake. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been running for even a quarter of a mile.
Still, Finn should have been more careful.
That’s the other thing that pisses me off. He was an annoyingly safe driver. What the fuck happened? Being in his car when it was raining was torture. He was so paranoid about it.
Suddenly, I realize who I should be angry at.
Finn once made us wait forty minutes because Kyle wouldn’t put on his seat belt. Admittedly, Kyle is a bigger asshole than normal when he’s drunk, and it was funny seeing him lose it when Finn said, “I’ll just text my mom that a jerk in my back seat wouldn’t put on his seat belt. She won’t be mad if we sit here all night. Let’s do it.”
But my point is why didn’t Sylvie have on her seat belt?
Until now, the whole “and Sylvie went through the windshield but is fine” thing has kinda run through my brain without being examined.