If Only I Had Told Her(48)

“Huh,” I say.

Sylvie looks down the slope. Together we watch the limo drive off.

What a betrayal it is that Alexis told me that stuff about Sylvie and some teacher from her old school. I’d only half been listening, and part of me had wondered why she was telling me all that, but mostly I had been thinking about Alexis’s body and not about whether she was a good friend.

Sylvie starts walking down the hill, away from Finn’s grave, into the older parts of the cemetery, and I follow.

“It’s funny,” I say, simply to say something. “I was thinking about how no one could hate Finn, and you say your doctor at least hypothetically disliked him.”

“Oh, I hate Finn,” Sylvie assures me. She smiles softly at my shock. “Don’t get me wrong. I love him too. If I had the power to stop loving him, I would have long ago. So I love him, and I hate him.”

“I guess.” I want to defend Finn, but this time, I can’t. “I guess that’s fair.”

Sylvie smiles again and shakes her head. She stops walking.

“Jack, if you really are my friend, can you do something for me?”

“I mean,” I say, “if I really am your friend, can you stop questioning it like that?”

“That’s fair,” Sylvie says, and I’m not sure she notices I was joking. “If I stop questioning our friendship, will you stop falling for Alexis’s bullshit?”

“I–I thought Alexis was your friend?”

“Yes,” Sylvie says. “But she has a lot of growing up to do.”

I know Sylvie well enough to know that there’s no point in reminding her that Alexis is two weeks older than her. Besides, she’s right; Alexis hasn’t matured much in the past four years. It’s such a simple thing, but it explains so much about Alexis, not to mention my relationship with her, that I’m too stunned to say more than, “Yeah.”

“I mean,” Sylvie continues, “you’d outgrown her before junior year had even started.”

We’re on a gravel path now, and I’m matching Sylvie’s brisk pace. Apparently, we’re taking a walk together.

“Yeah,” I say again for the same reason.

This time, she must hear it in my tone, because she says, “Didn’t you notice how all your fights were because you’d said something she didn’t want to admit was true?”

“I’m going to be honest with you, Sylv,” I say. “I never knew what any of my fights with Lexy were about.”

“That’s okay,” she laughs. “Lexy never knew either, but she didn’t know that she didn’t know.”

“It sounds like you outgrew her too,” I say.

Sylvie shrugs and keeps striding forward.

I add, “I’m seeing a lot about Alexis clearly. She’s not always been a good friend to you.”

Sylvie looks at me differently than I think she has before.

“Noted,” she says.

The gravel crunches under our feet.

I feel like I should say something profound, something I can quote from Finn that will make her pain less complicated. If this were a movie, there would be a convenient flashback to tell me what memory to share with Sylvie, but nothing comes to mind.

Suddenly we’re not walking anymore. I had noticed Sylvie pausing, and I’d thought she was taking off her jacket. But she pulls out a computer printout of a map and studies it, brow furrowed.

“Are you looking for, uh, William Burroughs’s grave?” I ask.

Sylvie looks at me blankly.

“The writer? He’s buried here.”

“No.” Sylvie says. “He was a junkie who shot his wife.” She folds the map and puts it into her jacket, which she is still wearing in this heat. “I was going to see Sara Teasdale’s grave. She was a poet.” She continues on at the same brisk pace as before.

“You never seemed like a poetry fan. Like, at all?”

We’re walking on the path again, but she veers off to the right.

“I’m not,” Sylvie says. “Generally I find poetry tedious. But I like Teasdale’s poems. Unlike most poets, she knew how to get to the point. And since I was going to be here anyway…” She trails off as we leave the gravel for the grass.

Sylvie counts the headstones we pass under her breath as I follow behind. I think about a hundred years ago, when these graves were new, how they’d been important, how people had come here to weep and remember. I wonder if Finn’s headstone will, one day, be nothing more to anyone than a marker to be counted to find someone else’s final resting place.

“Here it is. Oh.”

At first, I don’t understand, and then I see it.

Sara Teasdale was born on August 8, 1884.

“I didn’t know her birthday,” Sylvie says.

“Just a coincidence,” I say.

She shrugs and stares at the date.

“What’s your favorite poem of hers?” I try.

She smiles in a way that lets me know that I haven’t changed the topic how I’d hoped.

Sylvie closes her eyes before reciting.

“Now while my lips are living,

Their words must stay unsaid,

And will my soul remember

To speak when I am dead?