If Only I Had Told Her

“This is awesome,” Angie says, glancing up from Guinevere to smile at me. Her face is luminous and shadowed with exhaustion.

I hadn’t planned to tell her so immediately. We’ve hardly spoken in months, but the moment I saw her round face and short figure, my heart leapt, and a feeling of safety came over me.

I suppose it has been a while since I was with a friend.

The tiny basement apartment is cluttered with the lives of three humans and their shoes. I’m perched on the edge of the secondhand plaid couch, which is covered in unfolded laundry. Angie is on the floor changing Guinevere into a “First Christmas” onesie, even though it’s the first week of November. She snaps the last button and looks up at me.

“It is awesome that you’re pregnant, right?” She sits back on her heels.

“It’s good.” I sound like I’m talking about a meal at a restaurant that wasn’t quite what I expected. “It’s scary,” I add, and I still sound like I’m talking about mayonnaise.

“It’s terrifying!” Angie sings as she tickles Guinevere’s chin. She rolls the baby onto her stomach in a square of sunshine cast through the small window. “And it doesn’t stop. Sorry.”

“What doesn’t stop?”

“Motherhood never stops being scary.”

She laughs. I don’t.

Angie stretches her arms above her blond head and groans. She yawns and blinks at me.

“Stand up and let me look at you,” she says.

I oblige, and she nods sagely.

“I can tell,” she says. “I totally see it.”

“No, I can barely feel it, Ang.” The button on my jeans is undone, but my zipper zips.

“I see it,” she says. “When are you due?”

“May Day,” I reply, and then, “May first. Not the distress call.”

Angie smiles and yawns again. “Yes, I can see Auntie Aut’s bump, can you, Guinnie?” She lies down on the floor with a groan. “Sorry, Autumn. I am just so tired.”

“It’s okay. I’m tired too.” I sit back on the couch and watch her coax a smile from her child. The Mothers were thrilled when I said I had reached out to Angie and needed a ride to her place. It’s nice seeing her. It’s weird seeing her as a mother.

There’s this confidence about Angie that startles me. I’d first noticed it at the hospital last summer, but it’s more pronounced now. When she answered the door, she was holding the baby on her hip, and after hugging me and inviting me inside, Angie said, “Sorry. I felt her head, and I need to change her into something warmer,” so she had.

“Is that a trick or hack or something?” I ask her. “What you said a minute ago about feeling her head?”

“No, her head just didn’t feel warm enough.”

“What’s warm enough?”

“How she normally feels.” She yawns again. “Sorry. She sleeps through the night most of the time. But when she doesn’t…”

I wait, but she says nothing more. I gaze around the room, at the crib and queen-size bed. It felt like a lot more space when I visited a year ago, when we were all still in high school.

“Isn’t it weird,” Angie says, “to think about the last time you were here?” She stares up at the ceiling.

“So much has changed since then,” we say at the same time, then laugh.

“I know I sent a text,” Angie says, “but I want to say in person I’m sorry about Finn.”

“It’s his baby,” I say.

Angie laughs so loud she covers her mouth. I’m startled enough that the pain of thinking about Finny is stunted.

“Yeah, of course it is,” she says and giggles. “I mean, who else?” She sits up and looks at me.

I raise my eyebrows. “Some people would have guessed Jamie.”

Angie shakes her head. “You were never going to do it with Jamie. Anyone could see that.”

“I would have,” I say. “If he hadn’t cheated on me.”

“Nope.” Angie’s voice has a finality like her certainty while talking about her daughter. “It wasn’t there with you guys.”

I can’t disagree, but I don’t like her seeing something in me that I didn’t know about myself. If it was obvious to her that our relationship wasn’t meant to last, how dense was I to have missed it?

“How did you know it was Finny’s though?” I ask. “We haven’t seen each other in months. I could have met someone new.”

“No way.”

“I don’t see why that’s an impossibility,” though I don’t know why I’m protesting.

Angie gets off the floor and comes to sit next to me on the couch.

“It was obvious at the hospital after Guinnie was born that something had already happened with you guys,” she says, but I shake my head.

“We were only friends then.”

Angie rolls her eyes so hard that it looks like it hurts.

“You guys were never just friends, Autumn, and you know it.” She studies my face. “You know that everyone knew, right?”

“I didn’t know that there was anything to know,” I say in a daze.

“You didn’t know that Finn Smith was into you?” She says it like I’m telling her I don’t know my middle name.

“You really didn’t know?” he asked me that last night.

“I thought you never talked about it because you were embarrassed,” Angie says.

“Embarrassed by what?”

“Well, for years, I thought you were embarrassed because he was like a brother to you or whatever? But then I started noticing how you both did the animal thing with each other.”

“The what?”

“Like, have you ever seen an animal see another animal?”

“Have I ever seen an—”

Angie puts both hands up to stop me. “You remember my dog, Bowie, at my parents’ house? Whenever I walked him and he saw another dog, he would go real still, and the other dog would too. It was like you could see the million thoughts going on in their brains. And then suddenly, they’d either want to fight or play. Whenever you and Finn Smith would see each other, at school or the mall or whatever, you guys would freeze for a split second. And then you would be moving and talking again, but it was like part of you was still frozen, waiting for the other person to do something.”

Flashes of memories assault me, a montage without music. Finny. My Finny. I cannot speak. Angie doesn’t seem to expect anything from me though.

“After a while, I was like, okay, she’s going to break up with Jamie and be with Finn,” Angie says. “But you never did. I thought maybe your moms didn’t want you dating or something.”

“No,” I whisper. “I just didn’t know it was an option.”

“That’s really sad,” Angie says gently. “But obviously, you had some time together.” She motions with her eyes towards my midsection.

“A day. Or rather a half a night and then a day.”

“Oh, Autumn.” The weight of him, smell of him, of Finn—

“Shit,” Angie says.

“I don’t know if I can talk about it anymore,” I tell her.

She nods, then reaches over and hugs me. I relax into it. Like seeing her, I hadn’t realized how much I needed it until it happened.

When Angie pulls back, she looks over at her baby. “I–I–It’s been kinda lonely, Autumn.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Guinevere is pushing herself up on her elbows. We both watch her.

“What about Dave?” I can’t call him “Preppy Dave” now that he’s a dad. It doesn’t seem right.

“When he’s not at work, he’s at school, and when he’s home, I need him to look after the baby so I can have a minute to myself, because somehow—even though I’m so lonely—I’m also never alone.” She looks from her daughter to me. “Shit, I’m scaring you, aren’t I?”

“It’s not that I wasn’t scared before,” I say, “but I’d kinda thought that you had it made. The perfect teen mom situation.”

“I don’t think such a thing exists,” Angie says. “The whole nature of the job is…” She looks up at the ceiling. “It’s a lot, Autumn. It’s worth it, but it’s a lot. You’ll understand.”

Everyone keeps telling me this. No one will elaborate. I don’t bother asking her what she means. I look at the baby practicing push-ups on the floor, and I count the months. She’s five months old. A year from now, I’ll have a baby a month younger than that.

I’d think that was impossible if it wasn’t for how much has already changed in a year.

“Have you been keeping up with everybody?” I ask.

Angie doesn’t answer at first. I glance over, and her eyes are closed, and for a moment, I think she’s dozed off while sitting up, then she speaks.

“At first, they all emailed or called from school once a week, and I was like, ‘Cool. That seems reasonable.’ But then it stopped.” She pauses again. Her eyes are still closed. “And I tell myself, ‘I’m busy too. We’re all going through stuff. Doing new stuff.’ And I know that we’ll hang out when they’re home for Christmas, but I guess I already know it won’t be the same. Because I’m not the same. And they won’t be the same, but at least they’ll be the same kind of not the same.” She takes a deep breath and opens her eyes.

I nod at her. Everything she has said makes sense, but I’m not sure what to say about it.

“I hope this doesn’t come off as ‘misery loves company,’” Angie says, “but I’m glad that I’m going to have a friend who knows what it’s like to be a mom.”

It has come off that way, but I know that if I voice it, Angie will only assure me that motherhood is worth it, that I’ll understand later.

Angie yawns again, rubs her face, and glances over at her daughter. The baby has fallen asleep on the play mat, and Angie brightens. She puts a finger to her lips.

“Should I leave?” I whisper.

“No, and you can talk in a normal voice as long as you’re quiet. She’s a deep sleeper. I’m lucky.”

“Okay.”

“So kinda like with the Finn thing,” Angie says as she picks at the upholstery. “I know I said it in my email back in July, but I had no idea about Jamie and Sasha.”

“I believe you,” I say. I have no reason not to, and I want it to be true.

“When they told me they were a couple, I was really pissed. I tried to tell them how shitty it was, but they kept saying ‘We know! We know!’ and talking about how terrible they felt about it.”

“They should have felt terrible,” I say.

“That’s what I said!” We both look at the baby who gives a little snore. “That’s what I said,” Angie says in a stage whisper. “That they should feel bad. It was a couple of weeks before Guinevere was due, so it was easy to avoid them. But then at the hospital—well, you said you didn’t want to talk about that stuff anymore.” She glances at me. “When I saw you at the hospital, you seemed great, and then I went home with the baby, and, well…” Angie bites her lip.

“What?”

“I feel bad that I let us go this long without talking,” she says. “I should have called you first.”

“It’s okay.” I haven’t told her about my hospital stay, but something tells me she knows. I’m not ready to talk about that yet. “So when you were hearing from everyone,” I say in my best casual voice, “how were they doing?”

Angie tells me that Brooke and Noah had a harder time with their planned breakup than expected, but last Angie heard, they were both glad they went through with it. We laugh about Noah joining a frat. Brooke had a big date for Halloween, but Angie never heard how it went.

“Sasha told me that you never answered her or Jamie’s emails or texts or anything,” Angie says. “So I don’t know if you want to know how they’re doing?”

“Oh.” I shrug. “I kinda want to hear. Not wanting to hear from them isn’t the same as not wanting to hear about them. When I say that I don’t forgive them, I mean I don’t want them in my life anymore, not that I wish them ill.”

“Last I heard, they were fine, still together.” She adds, “But that’s easy in a new place where you only know each other.”

I prod deep for any hurt, and there is none.

Except for the memories of the time after they cheated, that final spring in high school.

If I had known.

If I had only known.

Things would have been different.

That place still hurts.

That place can’t forgive.

For a long time, I imagined a scenario where I found out Jamie had cheated on me with Sasha, and we broke up and Finny and I got together, and the whole trajectory of our lives would have been different. I can’t even predict where we would be now if we had known we were in love last spring.

“Autumn?” Angie asks. “Are you okay?”

“Sorry,” I say. “I was in my head.”

“You looked sad.”

“I was wishing I had known they slept together when it happened instead of weeks later, because maybe Finn and I…” I shrug once more. “It’s pointless to think about, but it’s hard not to.”

Angie nods. “I know that feeling.” She looks at Guinevere asleep on the floor. The sun has moved, and the room is darker. “I’m glad to have you here, Autumn. Please don’t—”

And then I know that she knows I was in the hospital, because she struggles to find the right thing to say.

“—go anywhere?” she finishes.

“I won’t,” I say. “For a little while, I thought being dead might be better, but that was before the baby.”

Angie keeps staring at her daughter. “You’ll need more than that,” she murmurs.

“What?”

“I—sorry.” She looks back at me. “It’s better to be alive, Autumn. Please don’t forget that again, okay?”

“I won’t,” I say, and then to distract her, I add, “You should tell me your birth story again.”

“I don’t want to scare you,” she says but then launches into the tale.

When Mom picks me up forty minutes later, I know a lot about episiotomies. I wish I didn’t know what one was, to be honest, but now that I do, it seems important to be well informed. I’m going to need to make a trip to the library.

“How was it?” Mom asks as I buckle my seatbelt.

“Good” I say. “It was nice to see her and Guinevere.”

“Were you able to catch up?”

“Sort of. So much has happened. It was almost more than we could talk about.” I pause. “She seems different. Not in a bad way, but it’s like—” I struggle to find the words and am not fully happy with the ones I find. “It’s like she’s confident and resigned at the same time.”

My mother surprises me by nodding. “It sounds like she’s adjusting.”

When the car stops at an intersection, I catch her looking at me.

“Did it make it feel more real?” she asks. “Seeing the baby?”

“A little,” I say. “In an overwhelming way.”

She nods. There’s nothing to say or do to make this situation less overwhelming. I’m surprised then that Mom continues.

“You know, Autumn, if Finny were alive, I would tell you to think about what you wanted more than what he wanted. And I should tell you to do that now too.” She takes a deep breath, and I’m glad we’re pulling into the driveway in case she starts crying.

“Do you not want me to have it?” I ask.

She puts the car in park. “I want you to have this baby more than anything,” she says. “But you must want it, Autumn. You have to want it more than anything. Especially as a single mother.” She takes off her seat belt and turns to me. “Angelina and I will give you all the support in the world, I can’t overstate that. But you still have to want this and want it for yourself. Not for me, not for Angelina or for Finny, but for you.”

I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure how to answer her question or if she’s really asking me a question.

“I want to have Finny’s baby for me,” I finally say. I look at my hands in my lap and pick at my thumbnail. “But I probably wouldn’t want to if he were alive,” I admit. “And I don’t know how to love this child without Finn.”

My mother sits back in her seat and faces the windshield like me. She sighs.

“All we can do is live in the reality we’re in. Maybe you would have still had the baby if Finny were alive, maybe not. But he’s not alive, and…” She pauses. “If you think having this baby is the right thing for you, then you should know that I’m not worried about you loving this baby. That will come.”

“But what if I can’t?” My voice sounds hoarse. “What if something is broken inside me?” I wrap my arms around my middle. “The baby deserves a mother who can love it properly.” I close my eyes and grit my teeth. Finny’s baby deserves better than me.

“The first step to being a good mother is questioning whether you can be a good mother. And it’s okay if you’re feeling broken, Autumn, because becoming a parent breaks you in a new way. It’s the most joyful and heartbreaking thing you’ll ever do.” She shakes her head. “Losing Finny was a tragedy, but you’re strong, Autumn, even if you can’t see it now, and you’ll be a good parent.”

“I think I’d be a better parent if Finny were here.”

“But we’ll never know,” my mother says. “Especially since you think you wouldn’t decide to be a parent if he were here.”

I shrug and look away from her. Briefly I see Finny and I as college students trying to decide what we’re going to do with the pregnancy. She’s right; I don’t know what we would have decided together. I’m not used to having deep conversations with my mother.

“Would you marry Dad again if you had the chance to do it over?” I ask. It’s been on my mind since before everything that happened.

Mom sighs. “I wouldn’t change having you, that’s all I know. If it was just about your father? If I was to time travel back to age nineteen when I got engaged? I wouldn’t want to have a different child with him or do things over again with him a different way. Time travel isn’t real, so it’s not a problem to solve.” She reaches for my hand, her foray into tangential speculations done. “Look at me.”

Her tone is urgent, and I turn to meet her eyes.

“When this child is alive and breathing in front of you,” my mother says, “I promise you will love it. And you won’t care about what you would have done under different circumstances. Children have a way of making you live in the present.”

Her face is solemn, familiar, and tired. Losing Finny hurt her too, and then she almost lost me, yet she’s carried Angelina and I through these last few weeks without complaint.

“I suppose that’s another thing I won’t understand until it happens?”

“Parenthood has a lot of those,” she says.

“I want this,” I say. “Thank you for asking.”

“All right,” she says. “Let’s go.” She means into the house, but it feels like so much more.