“Ah,” he said, nodding slowly. “She was a huge inspiration to me. She was a really amazing teacher.” I waited for him to say more about her, but he didn’t. Instead he checked his watch and said, “We should get back; our pizza is probably done.”
It was indeed—we split the bill and started walking back to the little green where I’d left my car. There were plenty of benches there, and we sat on one behind a toy store. The sun was hot, but the breeze coming off the water was enough to keep us cool.
We were quiet as we dug into the pizza for a minute, and then Sam said, “You know, you kind of ditched me at the party.”
“Oh,” I replied, because I couldn’t think of anything better to say.
“Dancing one minute, Cinderella the next. If I didn’t see you guys leaving a little while later, I probably would have thought you’d turned into a pumpkin.”
“Ha! No. I’m sorry. That was pretty lame. I’m just not the best at parties. Big groups. And then you factor in—”
“The fact that some stranger kept asking you to dance?”
“No, that was fine,” I said, smiling. “It was a lot of things. My aunt, you know . . . It hasn’t been easy.”
“I know,” he said. “I mean, I guessed. I’m sorry I called you Cinderella.”
“Please don’t ever apologize for calling someone Cinderella.”
“I know how much it . . .” He took a breath. That sad smile again. “How hard it is. To lose someone you love.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago. But I still remember, of course. You don’t ever really forget.”
I’d had so many people trying to comfort me lately, but it occurred to me that I didn’t really know how to comfort someone else. I wondered who Sam had lost, but I didn’t think I should ask—if he wanted to tell me, he would. Instead I found myself wanting to share the letters with him, or at least a piece of them, maybe because he’d known Aunt Helen and mourned her too. And because all of that made me feel like I could trust him.
So I said, “There’s more. The night of the party—she left me all these letters. Little things I’m supposed to do now that she’s gone. And it’s been nice, but at the same time . . . I worry that I’m not doing exactly what she wanted me to do. That I’m not doing a good enough job.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Well, the next one is . . . I’m supposed to lose track of time.”
Sam thought about it for a minute. It felt a little silly to say out loud, but he looked like he was taking it completely seriously. He folded up the empty pizza box and said, “Do you have any ideas?”
“Not really. I think I know what she means, though. I have a tendency to get kind of . . . caught up with everything. Kind of hyperaware of time and place and all that.”
“So maybe she’s trying to push you out of your comfort zone a little?”
“Yeah. I think it’s something like that.”
“All right. I know what we’ll do,” he said, and that is how I ended up, ten minutes later, on the handlebars of Sam’s bike. He gave me his helmet (then rapped his knuckles on it to prove its durability) and wouldn’t tell me where we were going. Halfway there I had to get down because, although nice in theory, riding on handlebars over the age of seven is not comfortable at all. I walked around the back of the bike and stood on the spokes, hesitating for a second before I put my hands on his shoulders.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Okay!”
We were off again. He pedaled us past the train station and around a bend and down a road I’d never been on before. I saw a small sign that said Mason’s Island and remembered this is where he lived.
He kept going, seemingly tireless. The ocean was to our left; it was low tide and it smelled stronger than by the bridge. Like brine, like salt, like sand.
We kept going until we reached a second bridge that connected Mason’s Island to another smaller island. Sam brought the bike to a stop at the end of the bridge, and we both hopped off.
“Enders Island,” he said, gesturing in front of us. It was small, and I could see just a few tiny buildings arranged in a loose circle in the middle. “I do yard maintenance here. St. Edmund’s Retreat.”
“St. Edmund’s?”
“I’m not religious,” he said. “But they’re okay here. They’re nice. It’s quiet.”
He left his bike by the side of the road, and we walked over the bridge. There were perfectly manicured lawns, religious statues and shrines, a gazebo, a small reflecting pool, benches, stone buildings, and stone arches . . .
We walked to the very tip of the island, the Atlantic spreading out in front of us like a dark-blue blanket.
“Sometimes I come here to think,” Sam said.
I could understand why—it was so peaceful, being almost completely surrounded by water. I could see other small islands dotting the coast and countless sailboats and powerboats. It made me wish I lived closer to the ocean. It made me think of my aunt’s big house by the sea, a house I would probably never see again.
Anger again, but just a tiny flare in the pit of my stomach. It was manageable, and I mentally swatted it away and sat next to Sam on the grass.
“What’s your nicest memory of her?” he asked.
A hundred things popped into my head at once. Breakfasts on the front lawn, books read in blanket forts, day trips to the city. It was hard to pick one.
And then I remembered her letter, the bluebells in Brooklyn, the late dinner, the timelessness she spoke of.
Aunt Helen was a fan of the many intricacies of time—its inconsistencies, its betrayals (how a perfect day could slip by in the blink of an eye and a terrible one could last forever—like the day she died, stretching out to reach infinity). And she was a fan of the ocean, and of being still, and of getting swept up in a normal afternoon. And she was a fan of changing her mind. . . . Jumping off cliffs one minute and slowing down the next. I think that was exactly what she was trying to show me. All the options of a day.
Sam lay back and rested his arm over his face to shield himself from the sun.
I looked out at the water and tried to imagine a field of bluebells.
I glanced down at Sam; he’d closed his eyes.
It was so rare to find someone you could be quiet with.
I lay back next to him, our arms an inch apart, and suddenly the entire world was sky. Just sky forever, blue and white and bright and never ending.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that.
“What’s that?” Margo asked, pointing to the old book in Alvin’s hands.
“Dad’s journal,” he responded, not taking his eyes off the page.
Margo stepped closer. The journal was stuffed with newspaper clippings, old photographs, pages and pages of tiny, cramped writing that she recognized immediately as her father’s.
“You need to get some sleep,” Margo said.
“I just know there’s something in here,” Alvin said, still not looking at her. “Something about the Overcoat Man, about how to find him. If we find him, we find our parents. It’s like the answer’s right in front of me, and I just can’t put the pieces together.”