I made us toast and matching omelets with mushrooms and spinach, bell peppers and tomatoes from our garden, with shredded cheese. We ate on the deck, and I pulled a ceramic figurine of a boy and girl out of my pocket and told him about my plans to destroy it.
“Destroy it!” he said, taking the figurine from me. “Is this a standin for Alvin and Margo? Kind of morbid, no?”
I could think of twenty things more morbid off the top of my head, but I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “It’s not really a standin for them. More like an offering.”
He thought about it, taking a bite of omelet and then picking up his toast thoughtfully, turning it around in his hand. “Where’d you get it?”
“At a tag sale. A long time ago. Because it reminded me of them, yes.”
“An offering,” he said. “I get that. I like that.”
“I think it makes sense. It’s weird to imagine my aunt being so violent.”
“Is it?”
“She wasn’t exactly the confrontational type.”
“Not all violence is about confrontation.”
“I guess.”
“This is a really good omelet, by the way.”
“Thanks.”
“So where do you want to sacrifice these poor souls?”
“I have somewhere in mind. Are you done?”
We cleaned up the plates, rinsing them and stacking them in the dishwasher, then I put my shoes on and grabbed a baseball bat from the garage, and we got into my car.
It wasn’t a far drive to the sacrificial destination, barely fifteen minutes, and we listened to music and Sam held the little ceramic figurine in his lap, making sure the boy and girl were comfortable in their last hours on earth. Then he rolled the window down and made them surf the wind and said, “Isn’t it funny how the air gets thicker the faster you go? That’s how planes fly, you know.”
“You’d better not drop that,” I answered. “No premature sacrificing.”
“Don’t worry; I have them.”
Airplanes were the safest form of travel; wasn’t that what everybody said? But still they were terrifying. Nobody was scared of cars, and they killed thousands of people every year (or every day? I made a mental note to look it up later), but lots of people were scared to fly. My mom. Me. There was something about the takeoff that was enough to take my breath away.
My favorite part was coming down, seeing all the houses and cars and fields below get bigger and bigger, trying to pick the exact moment when we were close enough to the ground so we probably wouldn’t die if we crashed (there was no scientific basis for this, it was all based on feeling), closing my eyes and opening them the moment the wheels touched the tarmac, breathing a deep, deep sigh of relief.
“Hey,” Sam said.
“What?”
“You do this thing sometimes. When you’re thinking about something. Your entire face goes blank, like you’re in another galaxy.”
“Maybe I am in another galaxy,” I said, shrugging.
“Or another universe,” he said.
“There’s only one universe.”
“Says you. I say maybe there’s more.”
I pulled into the entrance to the park and started driving up and up and up. We had arrived at the tallest mountain in our town (a smidge over one thousand feet).
“Like that theory where for every decision you make, another universe splits off where you’ve actually made the exact opposite decision? I like that,” I said.
“The multiverse,” Sam said.
“Yeah. If that’s true, it would mean there’s always a part of you that’s alive somewhere.”
“It would mean we’re all eternal,” Sam said, looking out the window. His voice broke on the word “eternal,” like how my voice sometimes broke into forty million pieces when I tried to talk about something other than dying, but dying was the only thing I could focus on.
“Exactly.”
“Is that something you would want?” he asked, looking at me quickly, looking back out the window, looking at me, looking at his hands.
“Of course. Wouldn’t everybody? Wouldn’t you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You definitely would. Anybody would. That’s why people like vampires so much. We’d all jump at the chance to suck some blood and stay alive forever.”
I pulled into a parking spot and shut the car off. Sam held the figurine in his lap, twirled it once or twice.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Maybe.”
I swiped the figurine and put it in my pocket. “Nobody would say no,” I said. “A vampire comes to you and offers you eternity, nobody would say no.”
I got the baseball bat from the backseat of the car, and Sam followed me to the observatory tower. It was five or six flights of stairs to the top, and we were both panting when we finished. It was breezy up there; I wished I’d brought a sweatshirt.
“Some kids tried to burn it down once.”
“This thing?” Sam asked, stomping his foot on the wood platform.
“There was this little string of arsons a few years ago. An abandoned warehouse, a church. They made a pyre at the base of the tower, but they couldn’t get it to catch.”
Every inch of wood up here was covered in graffiti or etched into with dull pocketknives. I ran my fingers along Don’t jump! and let them settle on Fly instead.
“Ready?” Sam said, suddenly in front of me, just a little too close, enough to make me lose my balance. He reached out and put a hand on my arm to steady me. It felt like . . . how when you walked down stairs in the middle of the night and missed a step and everything in your stomach turned over and flipped upside down before you caught yourself and knew you were safe again. It felt like that.
I took the figurine out of my pocket and held it to out to him again. “Ready.”
“This feels wrong,” he said, taking the boy and girl, tossing them gently once, twice.
He took a few steps back, and I brought the bat up, settling it on my shoulder, holding it like my mom had shown me. Abe hated sports (besides croquet). I had always humored her.
“Hey, batter, batter,” Sam said, but his mouth had settled into something like a frown. I watched his gaze drift over toward the view; it was a perfectly cloudless day, and I could see practically forever. And just the way his face looked, the way his gaze went on but never settled on anything, the way he carried around this enormous invisible weight I couldn’t pinpoint, how he’d found me at my aunt’s party, how his eyes grew so dark every time I said her name.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” I said suddenly, and I didn’t know what made me say it, I didn’t even know where it had come from except here I was, getting ready to go through with another one of Aunt Helen’s weird requests, my knuckles turning white from gripping the bat so hard, my heart beating a jackhammer’s rhythm against my rib cage as it occurred to me that yes, obviously, of course—it was him.
“What?” he said, freezing, pausing, a moment in time.
“What’s your last name? You never told me your last name,” I said, but I already knew it, as clearly as he was standing in front of me I knew that his name was Sam Williams, Mr. Williams, and that my aunt had left something to him in her will and even dedicated her last book to him: S.W.