I wait for her to finish her thought. When she doesn’t, I say, “What do you think your moms—I mean, your mom and Angelina will think?”
Autumn shakes her head, and she looks down at the table between us. “They’re going to be happy. But they’re going to be worried about me.”
“I can see that,” I say.
“Ten minutes!” The nurse shouts from across the room, making us both jump.
We both laugh and fall into silence. She’s looking more alive than at the start of my visit.
“So, uh—” I’m not sure if I should say this, but something is telling me that Finn would want her to know. “Sylvie wanted me to tell you something.”
Autumn looks uncomfortable. She bites her lip, and I hurry my words so she doesn’t think I came here to yell at her for Sylvie.
“She’s glad you’re okay. Or going to be okay.”
Autumn’s face turns from uneasy to skeptical.
“She wanted me to come see you,” I insist. “She wants you to get better.”
Autumn gives me a withering look. If I were lying or exaggerating, I would squirm under her glare. But I’m not.
“I don’t think you get it.” I’m angry, because she should get it. “Just like you need my memories of Finn? The part of him that loved you is still alive as long as you are, Autumn. You almost took another part of Finn away from all of us. So yeah, Sylvie gives enough of a shit to ask me to make sure you’re not determined to take yourself and all your memories of Finn to an early grave. And now that you’re pregnant—” I stop. I’m practically yelling at a pregnant suicidal woman.
“I’m not going to do it again,” she whispers. Her voice quavers.
“Oh shit,” I say. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay. I’m mad at me too.”
“I shouldn’t make you cry though,” I say. I glance nervously over at the nurse, but he hasn’t noticed. Yet.
Autumn surprises me by laughing instead of crying.
“Are you sure Sylvie will still want me alive when she finds out I’m having Finny’s baby?”
“I mean, I don’t think she’s going to throw you a baby shower or anything, but she isn’t a monster. So yeah, when Sylvie eventually finds out, she’s going to want you to be healthy, happy.” I shrug. “Just know that you have a lot of people who care for you. And everyone, fucking everyone, who loved Finn wants you to be okay too, okay? Even if something happens to this baby. Stay alive.”
“Okay,” she whispers.
“Time!” the nurse booms.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
When she hugs me goodbye, it doesn’t feel like goodbye. It feels like hugging Finn. I know now that she’s going to be part of my life for a long time.
It isn’t until I’m driving home that it dawns on me: I’ve been thinking about Finn, and for the first time since Alexis’s call that morning, it doesn’t hurt.
I’m so, so grateful that Finn was once alive and that I got to love him. That he got to love and be loved.
And be loved still.
autumn
one
Not wanting to be dead isn’t quite the same as wanting to be alive. There’s a gray space in between where one knows the desire to keep breathing should lie but is coolly absent. This is the space I occupy.
There is a piece of Finny inside me to keep alive, so the rest, like breathing, must be endured.
Ever since I was released from the hospital six days ago, I’ve gotten out of bed, showered, and eaten three square meals that I sometimes don’t throw up. Every day! I thought this was enough.
After nearly a month in the hospital, I thought that once I was back at home, I could coast on not actively trying to kill myself. But no. Apparently, gestating a future human does not prove my will to live.
Which is why I’m at this awful, garish baby boutique.
I can tell Aunt Angelina thinks this place is awful too, but we can’t back out now. She and Mom came to me this morning and told me that showering and getting dressed were all well and good, but they were worried I wasn’t showing much enthusiasm about the future.
“The baby still doesn’t feel that real to me,” I protested. “I’ll probably get more excited later.”
“We weren’t even talking about the baby,” Mom said. She was standing in the middle of my room with her hands clasped in front of her, looking oddly childlike for a pending grandmother. Angelina was leaning against my dresser in a manner that reminded me of him so much that I can’t even articulate it.
“You need to show enthusiasm for something, kiddo,” Aunt Angelina said. “You haven’t touched a book since you got home.”
“Is this because I didn’t want to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters last night?” I was sitting on my bed (not in my bed!). I’d gagged down my prenatal vitamin. Perhaps they wanted me to be enthused about that.
Mom sat down next to me. “This is a lot, for all of us. We need to try to focus on the good. If it doesn’t feel real yet, let’s make it feel real.”
So I mustered a smile and said, “Okay.”
And now here we are, in a baby store of my mother’s choosing.
When we arrived, a saleswoman eyed the three of us: Aunt Angelina in her hippie clothes, me in my faded T-shirt and ripped jeans, and Mom in her Chanel suit and expensive handbag. Rather than trying to figure out which one of us was pregnant, she focused on Mom, a smart move on her part. Still, we were all handed a glossy booklet, like the store is an event we are attending.
Apparently there’re different kinds of babies one can have. There’re the modern babies who are surrounded by smooth Danish surfaces and only wear beige, gray, or white; the funny babies who wear bright shirts with ironic slogans and have pacifiers that look like vampire fangs or mustaches; and the hippie babies with their wooden toys who only eat or wear natural fibers, also in beige, gray, or white.
Perhaps there’re other types of babies, but this store seems to only cater to those three.
“We’re just having fun today,” Mom chirps. “Picking up a few things to get us excited.”
The saleslady reads the room. We’re not in the mood for her full pitch, and she returns to hanging Christmas decorations that it should be too early to put up.
Mom confidently leads Aunt Angelina and I to the newborn section and begins to page through the tiny hangers, so I mimic her.
There’s no way babies are actually this small. I’ve seen babies before, and they’ve never been this little.
I remember holding Angie’s daughter at the hospital. Had she been this size? I close my eyes and try to remember the feel of her, the weight, not heavy but so solid, and I turned to Finn and I—
Oh God.
Everything stops. There’s no boutique. There’s no onesie in my hand. I’m sitting on that hospital bed with him, and he loves me, but I don’t know it.
How could I not know it? It’s so stupidly obvious now, and I want to scream at us, but I can’t. We say the things we said that day, and even though every word was “I love you,” it also wasn’t. And I can’t change that. I can’t change that. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t… Oh God.
“They really are that small,” Aunt Angelina says, and I’m back in the store. Finny is dead. He was always dead. It was only briefly in my mind that he was alive again.
I look down at the onesie with blue polka dots I am holding.
“I was just thinking that a newborn couldn’t really be this size.”
“They grow fast,” my mother says. “You don’t need too many newborn outfits. A few weeks later, they’re a whole different baby.”
There’s a pause. Mom, Angelina, and I are assessing each other. If Finny was alive, this is when The Mothers would begin to reminisce about the two of us as babies.
Is it safe? We are asking each other, ourselves. Mostly, they are asking me, but Mom and Aunt Angelina have their moments too.
“You’ll still need more than you think,” Aunt Angelina says, moving the conversation forward. “It’s amazing how many outfit changes babies need.”
Babies. Not Finny as a baby.