“Always, Dad. Duh. I’m always in the mood for ice cream.”
He walked around the side of the cart and hugged me tightly, kissing the top of my head. Then he grabbed the flamingo and shuffled away with it, and I picked up the book again, flipping open to the dedication page.
To my brother. For everything, everything, everything.
I followed my dad down the aisles, and we set free all of our finds.
Alvin burst into the house in the middle of the woods, the door slamming loudly against the wall as he stormed into the foyer and saw the place the Overcoat Man had lain, dying, just a short hour ago.
“No,” he said.
“He’s gone,” Margo said, entering the house, careful to close the door behind her so no one could follow them. “Alvin, he’s gone.”
“I see that, Margo,” he said, snapping, so unlike him. He began to pace in the foyer, a grand circle that kicked up the dust on the floor, a minitornado of dirt. “He was right here. I gave him that potion. ‘Terrible Pain & Suffering’! What’s the use of a potion called Terrible Pain & Suffering if it doesn’t even kill you!”
His voice grew louder and louder, echoing through the house. Margo had never seen her brother like this; for the first time in her memory, she was frightened of him. He had saved her from the Overcoat Man, but now he was really, truly losing it. Their parents were gone and the Overcoat Man was gone and Alvin was losing it, throwing over lamps and ripping pictures off the wall, slamming them against the floor.
“Alvin!” Margo screamed, backing away until she was pressed against the door.
He continued to rage, screaming nonsense into the foyer, crying, breaking everything he could get his hands on.
Finally he stopped. He was shaking. He saw Margo as if he just remembered she was there.
“Alvin, you saved me,” she reminded him.
“Yes,” he said, “but I lost them.”
—from Alvin Hatter and the Mysterious Disappearance
19
In the way that people can look completely wrong and different in settings you aren’t used to seeing them in (teachers in coffee shops, doctors in grocery stores), I hardly recognized Sam when I opened my front door. I had texted him, asked him to meet me here, given him my address, and still when I heard the doorbell ring I had no idea who it would be.
I had read Aunt Helen’s next letter that morning and texted Sam shortly after, to help me carry out her next wish.
Dear Lottie,
The stages of dying are obnoxious and worse than they tell you. Denial, bargaining, acceptance, a hundred more they don’t put on the chart. I have to say, I never bargained. That seems important sometimes, but not important just now, when I wrote it. Who cares if I had bargained? It’s my life, isn’t it? That seems like a pretty important thing to bargain for. I’ve bargained for lesser things in my life: persimmons at the farmers’ market or a vintage vanity at a flea market. Why not bargain for my life? Why didn’t I try that?
Anyway, I’ve been stuck at anger for a while. This is a tough one to get past because it’s sticky. It traps you in and hugs you tight and confuses you. It’s nice to be passionate about something, and it’s easy to be passionate about anger, you see? It’s a nice and easy thing to get worked up about.
I will tell you the lowest of the low, the angriest of the angry: I smashed a priceless, beautiful family heirloom against my bedroom wall and regretted it immediately, regretted it before it even left my hand, at the exact millisecond it was too late to change my mind if I had wanted to. And I DID want to. But I couldn’t. A little ceramic devil my father had painted for his mother: I threw it against the wall, and it shattered into a hundred pieces, and I cried for every single one of them.
But here is the worst part of it: it felt good.
In a dark and evil way, it felt good.
I hated myself for being such an evil person (doubly evil: the devil was supposed to have gone to your father when our father died, but I lied and said I lost it because I wanted it for myself) but I couldn’t deny the feeling of power (over breaking a freaking tchotchke, gimme a break).
I’m still in that anger stage, Lottie. It creeps over me when I least expect it. I take it to bed with me and tuck it in tight. I eat it for breakfast and stir it into my coffee and let it out at night when I don’t think anyone in the neighborhood will see it.
Oh, more and more these letters I’ve left you digress and become a place for me to write all the things I don’t think I’ll be brave enough to say until after I’ve died. That’s one good thing about all of this, maybe: death is so freeing. All your secrets spilled to the world; all your wounds open and bleeding. Maybe I should have mailed these into the ground, stamped them in dirt, buried them, and left them to flower into the saddest plants the world has ever seen. Maybe I shouldn’t be giving you these things at all. I don’t know, Lottie. There’s a lot I don’t know, and the right answer to this question is one of them.
Find some little anger inside you. Break it; destroy it. Sweep up the pieces and throw them into the trash. I love you forever.
—H.
I considered Sam in my living room now. This was an entirely different version of Sam than Sam in a bookstore or Sam in a driftwood fort on a beach. Every single person had infinite versions of themselves, and they doled them out as needed. He even looked completely different. I shut the door and shrugged.
“So this is my house.”
“That explains why you’re inside it.”
“You might be wondering why I invited you here.”
“I just thought you missed me,” he said easily, swinging past me into the kitchen, walking around and touching things with one finger.
I followed him, sometimes touching what he had touched, sometimes not. He had his hair down today, and it was wavy and messy and it looked like he had dunked it in the ocean and let it dry while riding a motorcycle along some coastal road.
I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before.
Now my thoughts were confused, scrambling together, and I had texted him from bed, after I’d read the letter, before I’d even looked to see what time it was.
Are you busy today?
What did you have in mind?
Want to come over?
My parents were at a ball game in Boston, something my father pretended to like because my mother’s father had been in the minor leagues for six years and she’d grown up with dugout dirt in her hair, baseline chalk underneath her fingernails.
“Do you want something to eat?” I asked. “I could make you an omelet.”
“What kind of omelet?”
“We have vegetables and stuff. Whatever you want.”
“Are you going to have one?”
“I’ll have one, sure.”
“I’ll have whatever you have.”