“Yes. She told me I have an accelerated rate of coagulation.”
“That sounds like her.”
I sat down on the floor. I breathed as deeply and as slowly as I could. I thought I felt Sam’s fingers in my hair, but I might have been imagining it; when I looked up, he was ten feet away from me.
“How old are you?” I asked him.
“Three hundred. Give or take.”
Three hundred years.
“And my aunt?”
“My best friend.”
“But you only knew her for a year. A year out of three hundred.”
“I’d been traveling for a long time. I hadn’t let myself settle down anywhere for more than a few months, a year, and I certainly never made friends. Invisibility—that’s always been the key for me. But with your aunt . . . She didn’t let up, didn’t take no for an answer. Three hundred years, yeah, but she was the first person who ever really took the time to get to know me. Even when I was doing my best to push her away.”
I tried to picture Sam and my aunt—Sam the same as he was now and my aunt only a teenager, almost my age. I had seen the pictures of them together, but it wasn’t the same as trying to imagine it, as trying to really believe it. Twenty-five years ago. But to Sam’s elongated timeline, that would feel like just a few minutes. Just like how humans feel like they own the universe, but really, we’re nothing more than the tiniest of blips on the evolutionary scale.
“Lottie?”
“Three hundred years,” I said. Had I already said that? Had I just thought it? “What do you even do for three hundred years?”
Sam laughed. “You just found out I’m immortal, and you want to know what I’ve been doing?”
“It seems relevant.”
“Well, mostly I just travel around. You can’t stay in one place for too long—maybe six or seven years, depending on where you are, what you’re doing. I try to keep a low profile. I work small jobs, easy to get. A bookstore clerk or a local tour guide. Basically every tourist city has those ghost tours, you know? I’ve done thousands of ghost tours. Something that won’t ask for a lot of qualifications or references. And I don’t really own that much. Just one suitcase holds everything. A few changes of clothes. A toothbrush. I get a library card wherever I go, that’s important.”
“And you make enough money that way?”
“Usually,” he said.
“Are there others?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Did you know, when you drank it?”
“There were rumors. It was a different time back then; people thought an eternal spring could really exist. When I found it . . . I think a part of me just knew. But I was young and stupid. And who doesn’t want to live forever? If you give that choice to the majority of people . . .”
“What about now? Do you regret it?”
The air around Sam’s head turned blue, then black, then back to normal.
“Almost every day,” he said.
“And she wouldn’t drink it.”
“I shouldn’t have asked her. I just wanted a friend. Someone to share the world with. It had been so long already, and I was so lonely. Just running from one place to the next.”
He was crying, silent tears running down a face already wet with salt water. They were friends, my aunt and Sam. He must have read about her wherever he went; he must have read the Hatter books and known he was her inspiration. He must have known how successful she was, how she had done just fine without him. Without the water.
“Do you come back here often?” I asked.
“Every once in a while,” he said. “Just to see it. I was born here. I miss it.”
“How did you meet my aunt?”
Sam smiled, suddenly a million years away from me. I wished I could step into his brain and remember what he was remembering. I wished it was twenty-five years ago and I was hiding behind a tree watching Sam and my aunt as teenagers.
“She was walking home from school, cutting through a graveyard. She saw me reading with my back against a tombstone and stopped to ask me what kind of person was creepy enough to read in a graveyard.”
I wasn’t surprised. Aunt Helen was exactly the type of person who would interrogate a total stranger to deduce how creepy he was.
“Friends immediately,” Sam continued.
“And me?” I asked.
“What about you?”
“You asked her if she’d drink the water. What about me?”
“I’d never ask you.”
“Would you want to?”
He faltered, and I tried to imagine what it must be like to grow older than anyone you ever met. To watch everyone around you age and change and die. Nobody escaped death. You came to peace with it, maybe, but you didn’t sneak past it.
“It’s different with you,” he said finally.
“How come?”
“With your aunt, I was selfish. It’s easy to be selfish with our friends. We just want them to do what we want, be what we need. You’re different.”
“Are you saying we’re not friends?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” he said.
Of all the places I’d imagined this moment happening, an under-the-sea cave was not one of them.
His lips tasted like salt.
From tears or ocean water or both, I didn’t know.
We came back to earth.
I put my clothes back on over my still-wet skin, and placed the wooden box in Sam’s hands, making sure he kept it while half-wanting to snatch it back, run away with it, find somewhere quiet and faraway to drink it. I made my feet back away and my hands stay put by their sides. I made him promise that he wouldn’t disappear.
My parents were both home when I walked in the front door, sitting in the living room watching a movie. Dad paused it when he saw me, his eyes widening, and I realized my clothes were still damp, my hair was half dried and frizzed to all hell around my face. My shoes squeaked and tracked small puddles across the hardwood floor.
“Lottie?” he said cautiously.
I got a towel from the guest bathroom and spread it on the ottoman, then I sat down and faced them both.
“I have something I need to talk to you about,” I said.
I watched them age a hundred years in front of me as all the possibilities that followed a statement like that ran through their minds. (Pregnant? Arrested? Addicted to drugs? Murdered someone?) “You can tell us anything,” my mom said, leaning forward, putting her hand on my father’s knee to either give him strength or borrow strength from him or some combination of both.
“It’s about me. I think I need help.”
An eternity had passed between now and when Alvin Hatter had pushed open the door to the house in the middle of the woods, to when Margo had drunk the potion, to when the Overcoat Man had pushed her off a cliff, to when Alvin, in solidarity, had drunk the Everlife Formula so she wouldn’t have to be immortal alone.
An eternity, and yet, for Alvin and Margo, what was an eternity?
Time was endless, still, and meaningless.