I knew what he meant. Aunt Helen had called herself selfish in one of her letters, had expressed a hope that she’d grown out of it, but it wasn’t really that simple to explain. It was more complicated; it wasn’t selfishness so much as it was an inability to understand how someone could not be available to her every whim.
Like once she showed up on a Friday night to surprise me with tickets to a musical. But I had a massive essay due on Monday and knew I had to spend all weekend working on it. She wasn’t mad, exactly, but she sulked around for ten minutes, kind of whining, letting it be known that my unavailability was really putting a damper on her night.
But that was silly stuff, that was nothing. She was dead, and the least I could do now was read her letters like she wanted me to.
For the rest of your life, my father had said. But hadn’t Aunt Helen proved that for the rest of my life might not be that long after all?
I said as much and watched his eyes darken.
“I don’t like that,” he said. “I don’t like that at all.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“I hope not.”
“I didn’t.”
“Because it’s not a very nice thing to think about. You’re not thinking about it, are you?”
“No, Dad—it was a joke. A stupid joke.”
“Okay. I don’t like things like that. You’re going to live forever. I’m going to live for just under forever.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything.”
“Okay, Lottie-da.”
“Okay, Dad.”
He left the room as a growing knot of unease bloomed in my stomach. You didn’t make dying jokes to someone who’d just lost their sister. I tried—and immediately couldn’t—think of what my life might be like if Abe died before me. I didn’t care if it was next week or eighty years from now, it could never happen. He needed to outlast me by at least two years, fair was fair.
I touched the package, tried hard to get my breathing to return to normal.
Now that it was done, there was only the question of where to leave it. But I knew that too. I’d known it even before I’d started boxing everything up. I was going back to Aunt Helen’s house.
I made the drive on Friday after school. It took me longer than usual to get to the house. It was almost summer now, and people were leaving early to get to beach homes and weekend getaways. When I finally arrived, I parked on the street, because I didn’t want to pull my car into the driveway. I doubted anybody had moved in that quickly, but I still felt like I should keep my distance. Even though I was about to trespass, as it were.
I kept to the edge of the property, shaded by the trees that offered the house a respectable amount of privacy. I had the package in a tote that I carried on my shoulder. I’d made a card with leftover scraps of wrapping paper. Burn this, it said.
I crossed the backyard and approached the small shed, painted the same white as the house and used, when I was younger, as a playhouse. Aunt Helen had decked it out with a play kitchen and a tiny table and chairs, an old chest filled with crayons and paper and markers and modeling clay. Anything Abe and I might want to disappear with for hours while the adults had cocktail parties or played bocce on the giant lawn.
All those things were gone now. The crayons, the bocce set. The playhouse was unlocked, and I let myself inside. It was empty, but still smelled like Play-Doh and salt and, somehow, chocolate. The floor of the playhouse was slatted wood. I knelt down in the far corner and worked at one of the slats until it came up in my hand. Abe had discovered this, because it was Abe who felt the need to pick at everything, to know everything, to discover everything. I would have been content baking fake cookies in a fake oven forever, but he was over here exploring everything until he found something cool.
The hidden space was small, and its purpose had shifted greatly from when we were kids. We’d hidden everything from Matchbox cars to small bottles of whiskey in here. Now it was empty, and I slipped the brown package inside and closed everything up again the way it was. I stepped back and surveyed; if you didn’t know where to look, you wouldn’t guess anything was out of the ordinary.
I texted Sam from my car, still parked outside Aunt Helen’s house. It looked different already, empty and imposing. The flowerpots were gone from the front steps. There was a For Sale sign on the front lawn that I hadn’t noticed before. So it wasn’t sold quite yet.
Part of me wanted to go inside. I’d kept the key from the last time we were here, slipping it into my wallet for no reason other than I could, and I wanted to. I could go and open the back door and wander through an empty house and see if the movers had left anything behind. But I didn’t see what good that would do.
“How stupid,” Margo said, examining her unbroken body, her skin that had stitched itself back up again, her perfectly unharmed bones and organs and muscles. She looked high above her, where the Overcoat Man had pushed her off the cliff. It had felt like flying, for a beautiful, brief moment. And then it had hurt. A lot. “It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”
“You’re . . . okay!” Alvin said and hugged her, just happy she was still alive.
“Yeah, but I should be dead,” Margo said.
“It’s a miracle!”
“It’s not a miracle, it’s the Everlife Formula. What else did I expect?”
“Right, but, Margo, it saved your life! You’re immortal!”
“Sure, okay, but NOW what?” Margo argued. “I’m all alone now!”
“What are you talking about? I’m right here!”
“But you’ll be gone eventually, and so will Mom and Dad, and so will Grandpa, and so will everyone I’ve ever met! How am I supposed to do this by myself? How am I supposed to be alone?”
—from Alvin Hatter and the House in the Middle of the Woods
18
I got home from Aunt Helen’s house in time to intercept the mailman holding a package on our front porch. I signed for the delivery and took the box from him. It was addressed to Abe and the return address was Angeles Magazine. I shifted the box in my arms and opened the front door, finding Abe and Amy watching The Nightmare Before Christmas in the living room.
“Hi,” I said from the doorway.
“It’s almost Halloween,” Amy answered.
“It’s May.”
“Almost Halloween,” Abe echoed.
“Okay,” I said, grabbing the remote off the coffee table and pausing the movie.
“Hey!” they said in unison.
I flicked the light switch on, and they both covered their eyes in mock pain. It was easy to see how they fit together, how they’d already been together for years. It was easy to see them as eighty-seven-year-old weirdos with matching rocking chairs, Abe on his four hundredth reread of The Fellowship of the Ring, and Amy with oversized headphones, trying to figure out how to turn on whatever new contraption we’ll have to listen to music.
I held up the box. “You got a package, dweeb.”
“Who’s it from?”
“Angeles Magazine.”
“Really?” he asked, looking up for the first time.