It would take a court-ordered DNA test a few weeks after Phineas’s birth to get his father to do the honorable thing-buy Aunt Angelina the house next door to my mother, and after writing each monthly check, pretend that she and the baby did not exist for the next thirty days. He also refused to believe that it was his child. He was married and rich and far too old for her. My father was-is-never around because of his work at The Office but Mother did not mind she had Angelina. She hits the pavement with a loud smack and is knocked unconscious. All I can see is the moment afterward, the moment of her weightless suspension in the air, her arms flailing in slow motion, her hair, a bit bloody and now wet with rain, streaming behind her like a mermaid’s, her mouth a round O in a scream of panic, the dark wet night surrounding her in perfect silhouette. Though true, it is hard to imagine, so hard that even I cannot achieve the image. When the impact occurs, she sails through the windshield and out into the night, improbably, miraculously, only suffering minor cuts on her arms and face. I imagine that Sylvie screams, and then he overcompensates by turning the wheel too far. He is thinking of the cause of the argument, and the car swerves suddenly to the right, startling him out of his thoughts. He is thinking of this argument with Sylvie. He is not thinking of the rain or the car or the wet road beneath it. They glide through the night, regrettably together, and they argue.įinny is frowning. I can see them in the car before the accident-the heavy rain, the world and the pavement as wet and slick as if it had been oiled down for their arrival.

If he had been with me, everything would have been different.

I cannot hear her, but I see Sylvie tell them the cause of the argument, and I know, I know, I know, I know.

I see Sylvie sitting sideways out of the back of the policeman’s car, her feet drumming on the wet pavement as she talks. I can see it-the rain-slicked road and the flashing lights of ambulance and police cars cutting through the darkness of night, warning those passing by: catastrophe has struck here, please drive slowly. What they do not know, the cause of the argument, is crucial to the story of me. The story lurking underneath and in between the facts of the one they can see. What they do not know is that there is another story. It is, in other people’s opinions, not important to the story. No one ever says what they were arguing about. In a few weeks, Finny would be turning nineteen. It was raining, of course, and with his girlfriend, Sylvie Whitehouse, he glided through the rain in the red car his father had given him on his sixteenth birthday. I wasn’t with Finny on that August night, but my imagination has burned the scene in my mind so that it feels like a memory.

If had been with me book