And he’s dead now.
I can’t ask Finn what made him certain. I can’t ask him anything anymore. He’s never going to have a thought to share because his brain is no longer thinking.
I was afraid that Autumn would break Finn’s heart. Now I wish she had the chance. I wish he was inside, devastated by Autumn or perhaps severely injured in the accident. No matter how horrible, I wish Finn was able to feel something, anything.
I’m still standing in Finn’s yard staring at the grass he’ll never mow again. I don’t know how long it’s been when a woman’s voice says, “Jack, right?”
It’s Angelina’s friend, Autumn’s mother. Finn always called her Aunt Claire or something?
“Hi. Sorry,” I say, though I’m not sure what for—being here or that Finn’s not. “I was coming to see Angelina. If she needed…if I could do…something.”
I feel like I’m pleading, but I’m not sure why.
She hugs me, and I start to cry in front of his house, in front of this woman I barely know, and she pats my hair like my mother did earlier this morning.
“I know,” she says. “I know. I know. I know.”
I can tell that she does understand in a way my own mother hadn’t. She knows how unfair it is. How Finn is the last person who should be in some freak accident. How everyone loved him.
Then it’s like a valve has shut off. My crying stops. I’m trying to get my breathing under control as she steps away from me.
She says, “Look at me,” so I do. She stares into my eyes like she’s trying to find her way inside my brain. “It’s going to be like that for a while, okay? You’ll be fine one minute and crying the next. You aren’t losing your mind. This is too horrible to take in all at once. Do you understand?”
I nod, even though I only sort of do.
“Okay then.” She pauses and looks me over for a moment before she says, “There is something you can do for Angelina, or rather for the two of us. I need to go to the hospital with Angelina. I can’t let her do that alone. Can you stay with Autumn for us?”
She studies my face, and I slowly realize what Angelina is going to the hospital to do.
The body.
His body.
Finn.
Alexis said Finn had been declared dead on the scene. He hadn’t heard the zipper as the body bag closed over his face. There had been no sirens when the ambulance drove him away, because there was no more rushing, no more worrying over Finn. Unlike Sylvie’s parents, Angelina would have been told to come when she could. I wonder who told her that: a policeman at the door, a phone call from the hospital? Did they explain to her how to find the morgue?
“Yeah,” I say. “Sure.” It sounds easy enough, and I’ll do anything she tells me if she says it’s for Finn’s mom. I follow her around to the back of the house. I’m focused on Finn’s body, his body that used to run next to me across the soccer field, now an item to be claimed like a piece of luggage.
Again, my mind wonders if it won’t really be him. But then there is the problem of where the real Finn is and that Alexis said Sylvie saw him when she regained consciousness.
Finn is dead. I need to stop trying to find a way out of it.
As I walk into his house, a house he’ll never walk into again, I’m overwhelmed by the smell of Finn. Not that he smelled bad but the way that everyone has a smell. It’s part their shampoo or whatever and part them. I can smell Finn here in this house, though I’ll never smell the whole of Finn again.
We ran together a lot, and not only at soccer practice. Because we both liked to run, the smell of his sweat mixed with his old-man deodorant was as familiar as our ribbing each other when we raced. I would give anything in the world for another run, another sniff of sweaty Finn.
I wasn’t prepared for how the air of his home would affect me, let alone the pictures on the wall or the staircase where I slipped once and Finn diagnosed my sprained ankle. I should have expected it to be difficult to be here.
But I remind myself I am here for Angelina, and for the first time, I wonder why Autumn can’t be alone.
I get the answer when I see her.
I guess I don’t have any lingering doubts about Autumn’s feelings for Finn. Her face is so swollen from crying that she almost doesn’t look like herself. She’s curled in a ball on the corner of the couch, chewing on her fingernails, staring at the floor like she’s sleeping with her eyes open.
“Autumn?” her mother says.
Autumn’s head turns robotically in our direction.
“I’m going to take Angelina to the hospital,” her mother says.
Autumn winces.
“Jack’s here. He came to see if we needed anything. Isn’t that sweet?”
“Hi.” Autumn’s voice sounds terrible, so hoarse it’s barely a rasp. Everything about her is flat and emotionless, like a garden statue that decades of rain have left with only the impression of a face.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, but sitting on the opposite end of the couch seems appropriate. Her mother heads upstairs. When I look over at Autumn, she’s staring at me.
“Hi,” I say, since I’d not said it before. She continues to stare, and I start to feel uncomfortable.
“Who told you?” she finally asks. It sounds like it must be painful for her to speak.
“Alexis. Sylvie’s parents called and asked her to come to the hospi—” I stop, but my reference to Sylvie doesn’t seem to have upset her.
“How is she?”
“Alexis?”
Autumn laughs, coughs, and winces. “No,” she chokes out. “Alexis is probably hosting an unofficial wake and making this all about herself.” Her face tightens in a way I can’t read. “I was asking about Sylvie.”
“I don’t know.” I wonder if I should have called Sylvie and seen if she needed anything before coming here.
The stairs behind us creak, and I hear Angelina’s voice from the back of the house.
“Autumn, Jack, I love you both so much, but if I see your faces right now, I’ll cry. I have to go. I have to go. I have to go…” Angelina repeats, and Autumn’s mother mumbles in soothing tones until the back door closes.
Autumn takes a shuddering breath.
I’m not sure why I came here except that it felt more appropriate than going to Alexis’s house, where there’d be people who knew Finn but also hadn’t.
Not like Autumn and I knew Finn.
I look over at her again.
She’s back to staring at the rug and speaks without looking at me. “You can turn on the TV if you want.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Maybe in a minute.”
Autumn returns to chewing on her nails. Her hair is a disheveled mess, and I can faintly smell her sweat. I don’t know if she loved Finn anywhere close to as much as he loved her, but she loved him. I believe it now.
I’m trying to decide if I should say what I’m thinking. Nothing feels real, so it’s hard to think clearly. Finally, I decide it’s what he’d want me to do.
“You know,” I say, “Finn called me last night on his way to pick her up.”
Autumn looks up at me, startled.
“I thought you should know that he was really, really happy.”
For the briefest of moments, joy lights her face, and then it burns out again.
“Yeah?” she whispers.
I clear my throat to get the tremble out. “He was so happy.”
“I was afraid he would change his mind when he saw her,” Autumn says. I can barely hear her.
“That—no—There’s no way.”
I don’t know how to explain this to her. I don’t know Autumn, not really, and this is such an intimate but vital thing that I need her to understand, for Finn’s sake.
I push past the catch in my throat. “Nope. No way. Autumn, he’s been in love with you for as long as I’ve known him.”
Autumn looks at me with interest but not like she believes me.
I try again. “Like, fairy-tale love? Cartoon character with hearts floating all around him? Or a movie montage with the best song? That’s what you were to him.” I’m sniffling, but I need to finish. “You were the biggest, most impossible dream for him.” I press the tears away with my fingers before they can fall.