If Only I Had Told Her

Not wanting to be dead isn’t quite the same as wanting to be alive. There’s a gray space in between where one knows the desire to keep breathing should lie but is coolly absent. This is the space I occupy.

There is a piece of Finny inside me to keep alive, so the rest, like breathing, must be endured.

Ever since I was released from the hospital six days ago, I’ve gotten out of bed, showered, and eaten three square meals that I sometimes don’t throw up. Every day! I thought this was enough.

After nearly a month in the hospital, I thought that once I was back at home, I could coast on not actively trying to kill myself. But no. Apparently, gestating a future human does not prove my will to live.

Which is why I’m at this awful, garish baby boutique.

I can tell Aunt Angelina thinks this place is awful too, but we can’t back out now. She and Mom came to me this morning and told me that showering and getting dressed were all well and good, but they were worried I wasn’t showing much enthusiasm about the future.

“The baby still doesn’t feel that real to me,” I protested. “I’ll probably get more excited later.”

“We weren’t even talking about the baby,” Mom said. She was standing in the middle of my room with her hands clasped in front of her, looking oddly childlike for a pending grandmother. Angelina was leaning against my dresser in a manner that reminded me of him so much that I can’t even articulate it.

“You need to show enthusiasm for something, kiddo,” Aunt Angelina said. “You haven’t touched a book since you got home.”

“Is this because I didn’t want to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters last night?” I was sitting on my bed (not in my bed!). I’d gagged down my prenatal vitamin. Perhaps they wanted me to be enthused about that.

Mom sat down next to me. “This is a lot, for all of us. We need to try to focus on the good. If it doesn’t feel real yet, let’s make it feel real.”

So I mustered a smile and said, “Okay.”

And now here we are, in a baby store of my mother’s choosing.

When we arrived, a saleswoman eyed the three of us: Aunt Angelina in her hippie clothes, me in my faded T-shirt and ripped jeans, and Mom in her Chanel suit and expensive handbag. Rather than trying to figure out which one of us was pregnant, she focused on Mom, a smart move on her part. Still, we were all handed a glossy booklet, like the store is an event we are attending.

Apparently there’re different kinds of babies one can have. There’re the modern babies who are surrounded by smooth Danish surfaces and only wear beige, gray, or white; the funny babies who wear bright shirts with ironic slogans and have pacifiers that look like vampire fangs or mustaches; and the hippie babies with their wooden toys who only eat or wear natural fibers, also in beige, gray, or white.

Perhaps there’re other types of babies, but this store seems to only cater to those three.

“We’re just having fun today,” Mom chirps. “Picking up a few things to get us excited.”

The saleslady reads the room. We’re not in the mood for her full pitch, and she returns to hanging Christmas decorations that it should be too early to put up.

Mom confidently leads Aunt Angelina and I to the newborn section and begins to page through the tiny hangers, so I mimic her.

There’s no way babies are actually this small. I’ve seen babies before, and they’ve never been this little.

I remember holding Angie’s daughter at the hospital. Had she been this size? I close my eyes and try to remember the feel of her, the weight, not heavy but so solid, and I turned to Finn and I—

Oh God.

Everything stops. There’s no boutique. There’s no onesie in my hand. I’m sitting on that hospital bed with him, and he loves me, but I don’t know it.

How could I not know it? It’s so stupidly obvious now, and I want to scream at us, but I can’t. We say the things we said that day, and even though every word was “I love you,” it also wasn’t. And I can’t change that. I can’t change that. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t… Oh God.

“They really are that small,” Aunt Angelina says, and I’m back in the store. Finny is dead. He was always dead. It was only briefly in my mind that he was alive again.

I look down at the onesie with blue polka dots I am holding.

“I was just thinking that a newborn couldn’t really be this size.”

“They grow fast,” my mother says. “You don’t need too many newborn outfits. A few weeks later, they’re a whole different baby.”

There’s a pause. Mom, Angelina, and I are assessing each other. If Finny was alive, this is when The Mothers would begin to reminisce about the two of us as babies.

Is it safe? We are asking each other, ourselves. Mostly, they are asking me, but Mom and Aunt Angelina have their moments too.

“You’ll still need more than you think,” Aunt Angelina says, moving the conversation forward. “It’s amazing how many outfit changes babies need.”

Babies. Not Finny as a baby.

Mom takes the polka-dot onesie from me and adds it to the pile in her arms. “They always throw up on the cute ones,” she says.

The Mothers are now unsure about the outing. Mom glances at Aunt Angelina, her concern for her bleeding through her normal poise. But I’m not paying attention anymore.

When Mom mentions throwing up, I start thinking about how I haven’t vomited in a while, which makes my body say, “Wait, yes. That’s a good idea.” Before I can worry about Angelina, I’m needing to find someplace to expel my eggs and sausage.

I can already taste it as I exit the boutique and rush for the trash bin in the main mall.

I thought I was done with this. It had been two days since I’d thrown up.

Twelve hours since I’ve cried.

I barely make it, spewing chunks in an arch as I lean over the trash can.

Finny would be proud of me for that one, I think as I heave again.

“You’re getting really good at aiming your vomit, Autumn.”

I can hear his voice, really hear him say it.

No. I don’t truly think it’s him, though there was a time when I entertained the idea. I’ve accepted this new reality without Finny, yet I can’t stop myself from thinking about him. And when I do? There he is.

My Finny.

“Autumn.”

I gasp for air between heaves. My stomach muscles ache in new mysterious ways, even when I’m not vomiting.

“Autumn?”

“I’m okay!”

“I have a water bottle in my bag,” Aunt Angelina says.

Water sounds amazing, and I hope my body lets me have some soon. I take a shuddering breath but don’t move from the trash can.

“Where’s Mom?”

“Buying the onesie you were holding. Plus another hundred or so other bits of overpriced fabric. Don’t worry, kiddo. I’ll take you to the resale shops and load you up on baby clothes that you don’t have to be fussy about.”

I stand up straight and take another breath, assessing my body. I feel like the captain of a ship amid a squall, telling the old gal to stay steady and ride the waves.

Aunt Angelina hands me the bottle and smiles.

Thank goodness she doesn’t look too much like Finny. Her smile is different, her hair is darker, her chin sharper. I see him in her, but it could be much worse.

Like the way she carries herself, with a constant stoicism.

“Better?” she asks.

“What if I never stop throwing up? I read some women do that.”

She shrugs. “Then you will throw up for another six months and it will suck.”

“I don’t think I could do it.” I swish the water around in my mouth.

“You could and you would, because you’d have to, but you probably won’t,” Aunt Angelina says. “Being a mother is all about losing control and then surviving it.”

I spit into the trash can and take a sip of water, but my throat still feels raw.

“That makes motherhood sound really terrible.”

Aunt Angelina pulls me into a hug. “It’s worth it,” she says.

I feel sick to my stomach in a way that has nothing to do with the baby. I squeeze her tighter.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,” I whisper.

“It’s still worth it, Autumn, even if they die.”

My stomach drops again, but she releases me from the hug and smiles sadly at me.

A security guard approaches and asks if we need help or an ambulance. He’s not thrilled about my use of the trash can and points out a restroom on the other side of the courtyard, as if that would have helped. Mom comes out with her shopping bags. The guard eyes my middle before getting on his walkie-talkie and asking for cleaning services.

Mom describes every outfit she has purchased in great detail so that by the time we’re in the car, I almost don’t need to go through the bags. But I do so that I can thank her for each one as we drive home. Our chatter covers the hole in our day’s adventure, the lack of excitement they’d hoped to inspire.

Everything having to do with this baby reinforces the fact that Finny’s not here.

For all of us.

Yet we want this. I want this.

He would want this.

But that doesn’t make doing this without him any easier.

So this is where I live, in a place where every shade of joy must be painted over in the black of Finny’s death, muted to the gray of willfully existing.