“I don’t want to feel like I’m selling my child to you,” I finally say.
He closes his blue eyes and nods. “The more I think about it, the more I see how it was a desperate and manipulative move, Autumn. To dangle money that by rights should belong to your child anyway. That’s why I brought the papers today. The money is yours and the baby’s, even if you choose to never see me after this.” He takes a briefcase from under the table and pulls out a manila envelope and sets it on the corner of the table.
“Thank you,” I say. I’m still unsure whether I can trust him. Perhaps this is still a manipulation.
“Whatever you can give me,” he says, “I’ll take it. And if you never want me to know your child, I’ll accept that. All I ask is that today, you stay for this lunch and tell me about my son.”
“Tell you about Finny?”
He swallows, and his eyes are beginning to look wet.
“I’ve been meeting with different people who knew him. I’ve been taking notes and even recording some of the conversations. I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with his soccer coach and a couple of his teammates.” He reaches back into the briefcase and pulls out a much larger file that he opens and flips through. “I’ve met with teachers, some from all the way back to elementary school, who’ve given me insights into his character. There’ve even been classmates and parents who’ve started reaching out to me with stories, and then Sylvia Whitehouse and I—” He glances up at me.
“How is she?” I ask.
“Healing,” he says. “I hope you know she hopes the same for you.”
“I’m honestly surprised that she doesn’t hate me,” I say. “It seems like she should.”
“She is incredibly mature beyond her years,” John says. “She told me that she understood what I meant about looking back and knowing I was lying to myself about Phineas, because when she looked back, she always knew she was standing in the way of you two.”
“If you see her again, tell her that we were standing in our own way. And I’m glad to know that she’s healing.”
He nods, and I can see that he’s wondering whether he’ll ever see me again.
“I’m going to need those stories that you’re collecting,” I tell him. “And Jack’s been working to get all sorts of pictures from people. Maybe we could put them together as a book for the baby.”
“Phineas always said that you were an amazing writer.”
“Well, for authenticity, we should try to keep the original voices as much as possible, but I can edit for clarity, maybe help with the timelines,” I say. “I think your insight into how the mythology of a good father can help shape a child will be very helpful to this project.”
When the waitress comes with our entrées, John doesn’t order another martini. There isn’t space at the table anyway with all the documents spread out. Together we build another inheritance for Phineas’s child.
fourteen
“Autumn, your lips are blue,” Mom says to me. “You’re going to alarm the technician when they arrive.”
We’re waiting for the ultrasound to begin. Mom has already grabbed a white towel and is running water on it.
“Claire, that’s to wipe the gel off her afterward,” Aunt Angelina says.
“You need to let me finish this first.” I hold up the precious candy packet that Finny bought me those few long months ago.
At first, I had planned on hoarding them forever, running my hands through them like a miser with gold coins. But one day, the craving hit me. My body was demanding the colored sugar powder. My body needed it for the baby; that’s what it was telling me. Perhaps it was the baby telling me it needed it. And even though I knew what Finny, the almost premed student, would have said （“The flaw in that theory is the lack of nutritional value, Autumn.”）， I also knew that if he were alive, he would have been reading up on the topic, and he would have learned that what the mother eats can influence the flavor of the amniotic fluid in the womb. He would have to concede that maybe, on some level, my body was telling me to give the baby a treat.
Imagining that conversation made me cry, and as I wept and ate the candy powder, I went through and counted the rest of the packets. To affect the fluid, I’d probably need to eat a whole strip of the packets at a time, and I had enough to do that once a week.
That’s why it’s important that I finish this last blue packet before the technician comes; it’s my way of sharing Finny’s gift with our baby.