I raise my head a little. He’s staring at me with an expression I’ve never seen before. I watch his eyes study my face.
“And you’re so beautiful,” he says. I duck my head back down and try to hide my face. My cheeks are warm. Finny laughs. “Now, I know you already knew that.”
“It’s different when you say it.” He laughs again.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re so beautiful.” Finny puts his hand under my chin and turns me to face him. He looks me in the eye. “Last night was the best thing that ever happened to me and I would never think it was a mistake unless you said it was.”
“I would never say that.”
Finny leans his forehead against mine. “Then everything is going to be okay. We’re together now. Right?”
“Of course.”
Again, Finny laughs at me. I pull my face away from his and look at him.
“I never, ever thought this would happen,” he says. “And then you say ‘of course’ like it’s the most natural thing in the world.”
“Doesn’t it feel like it?”
He laughs again, quietly this time, and the tone is different. “How did we ever get here?” he says. I don’t know what to say to that. So I just look at him. And then he smiles at me and pulls me toward him again and I sit on his lap with his arms around me and it is the most natural thing in the world.
83
Finny is supposed to leave in a few minutes. He’s in the shower, and I’m in his room, dressed and waiting. I made his bed and tried to cover up the blood stain, and now I’m sitting in the middle of it with my knees curled to my chest. The sky has clouded over, and even though it is still early evening, it looks almost dark out.
I hear the shower stop; I rest my chin on my knees. It takes forever for me to hear him in the hall. He comes in fully dressed and rubbing his wet hair with a towel. He looks at me.
“It’s going to be okay,” he says.
“Can’t you wait until tomorrow?”
“I want it to be over,” he says. “I want it to be just us.” He drops his towel on the floor. He takes a baseball cap off his dresser and covers up his wet head, then takes it off and runs his fingers through his hair. He turns back to me.
“Walk me out?” he says. I nod, and he holds out his hand to me.
I follow him to his car, and then we stand looking at each other.
“I promise you,” he says, “I’ll come back as soon as I can. It may take a while though.”
“Please don’t go,” I say. He puts his hands on my shoulders and pulls me to his chest. “I have to do this,” he says. “You know that, Autumn.”
I can’t answer him because I know he is right. He lays his cheek on the top of my head.
“Here is what we’ll do,” he says. His voice is soft and light, as if we are making the sort of mischievous plan we made as children. “When The Mothers get home, you go to bed early, and when I get back I’ll sneak in your back door and come to your room. And then I’ll hold you all night.”
I raise my head to look at him.
“Okay,” I say. He smiles and leans down to kiss me. He kisses me once, and then I lean in for another. We kiss for a long time after that. I lean back against his car and he presses into me. Both of us are breathing harder. If I can just keep kissing him, then he’ll never leave.
A car door slams. We both look up but we don’t separate. The Mothers are in the other driveway, unpacking cases of wine from the trunk. They are pointedly not looking at us.
“Do you think they saw?” I ask.
“Definitely,” he says.
“Oh God,” I say.
“I think my mother has a special bottle of champagne hidden away for just this occasion,” Finny says.
“Oh God,” I say again. Finny looks down at me and smiles.
“I’ll be back to help you fend them off.”
“Okay,” I say. This time I resist the urge to tell him not to go. His smile slowly fades and he takes a deep breath. My arms drop from his neck reluctantly. He kisses my mouth quickly and takes a step back. He turns to open the car door and I take a step back too. He looks at me again, and just before he gets inside, he smiles again.
“After this,” he says, “things are going to be the way they were always supposed to be.” Then he climbs inside and closes the door.
He starts the engine without looking up at me again. I stand in the yard and watch his car until it is gone.
It begins to rain.
84
Late in the night, I hear footsteps in the hallway. I roll over and look at the door. It opens slowly.
“Finny?” I say. There is silence.
“Oh, Autumn,” my mother says.
85
On August 8th, Phineas Smith died, and I can imagine every detail of that night. I can see his face and the curl of his fingers around the steering wheel. I can hear his breathing and I feel the race of his pulse.
I know what he was thinking about as he took that turn too fast.
I know what they had been arguing about before the little red car spun out.
I know that Sylvie’s face was already streaked with tears when she crashed through the windshield.
It’d be wrong to say Sylvie killed Phineas. She was the instrument of his death, but not the cause. If he had been with me, Finny would still be alive. If he had been with me, everything would have been different. But whose fault is it that he wasn’t?
I see Finny sitting in the red car, perfect and untouched. Rain falls through the hole in the windshield but he does not feel it. He feels nothing. He thinks nothing. He is alive.
Stay. I whisper to him. Stay in the car. Stay in this moment. Stay with me.
But of course he never does.
Suddenly, as if he has been punched, his senses come back to him. He feels the warm leather seat beneath his jeans, and the steering wheel clutched in his fingers so tight that his knuckles are white. He sees the glass glittering around him and the gaping hole in front of him. And through that hole where the windshield once was, he sees her. Through the blackness and the rain he sees Sylvie lying in the road, still and quiet.
Stay, I whisper.
Just as suddenly, his hands unclench from the wheel and he is taking off the seat belt that spared his life, opening the door and running down the road toward her.