If He Had Been with Me
: Chapter 46

There was a moment, after the campus tour, when Finny and I were alone, standing by the fountain. The sun was bleaching everything around us a painful, bright white. When the wind blew, the spray of the fountain cooled us, so we stayed where we were, waiting for The Mothers to stop taking pictures and head back to the hotel. I was looking around at everything, anything that wasn’t him, when he spoke.

“So what do you think?” he said. I shrugged.

“I like it, but I’m not sure if I would be happy here.”

“You would be,” he said. I looked up at him. He was looking at me.

“Why?” I said. He shrugged.

“There are lots of trees,” he said.

***

We’re heading home now. Finny is driving. It surprised me—though it shouldn’t have—when Aunt Angelina shook the keys and asked him if he wanted to take a turn. She offered me the front seat too, so I could stretch my legs out. In the backseat, The Mothers are feeling sentimental. They want to talk about the Christmas the power went out or Finny’s fifth-grade soccer team or the poem about dead fairies I wrote when I was ten.

“Do you guys remember your first day of school?” my mother says.

“No,” I say.

“I do,” Finny says.

“You ran off without Finny,” Aunt Angelina says. “He was still clinging to my skirts in the door and you shot across the kindergarten to the monkey bars.”

“And then you hung upside down and scared me to death,” my mother says.

I don’t just not remember it; I don’t believe it either. I was terrified of being away from Finny and he was at home wherever we went.

“You guys must have that backward,” I say.

“You were wearing a skirt and everyone could see your underwear,” Mom says.

“You were always the brave one,” Aunt Angelina says.

“It was you,” Finny says. His eyes don’t leave the road. He does not see me glance over.

I don’t remember always being the brave one. I remember being afraid that he would leave me someday. I never would have left him.

***

“What about you?” I had asked him. We were sitting on the edge of the fountain now. The Mothers were still wandering with the camera. I watched them as they walked this way and that.

“I like it too,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said, “and it’s not too far from home.” He paused then, and I looked back up at him. He wasn’t looking at me. “I think maybe I’ll go to New York for med school though.” Finny in New York instead of me. By then, I’ll be married to Jamie and be back in Ferguson. It’s funny how things don’t turn out the way you thought they would.

“Will you wear black turtlenecks and drink coffee for me?” I said.

“I don’t like coffee,” he says. I laugh.

“You know what? Me neither,” I said. We both laughed. The Mothers took a picture of us but we didn’t know. They were far away and we are small, sitting together on the corner of the fountain. I’m looking at the ground; he is looking at me. We look as if we sit there every day, together.

On the way home, I look out the window and watch the trees fly by like road markers telling us how far we have come from where we were.