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.