Margo was still eleven and Alvin would be thirteen forever, until he was the last thirteen-year-old on the entire planet, until it was only him and Margo and whatever future-world was left to them.
They would not find their parents here, on this faraway island, just like they hadn’t found their parents in the countless other places they had looked.
Their parents were gone forever. Alvin wanted to give up. He was tired. For a forever boy, he could really do with some sleep.
But Margo was with him, and Margo showed no signs of slowing down.
Margo took his hand and led him off the ferry.
“Funny little place,” she said brightly.
And that was all it took to wake him up.
They kept looking.
—from Margo Hatter Lives Forever
24
I had one letter left from Aunt Helen.
It was Sunday, graduation was tomorrow, and I felt adrift, lost, with no direction and no way to manage the grief that was bubbling up inside me. Like she had just died. Like I was only now figuring it out.
Once I read this letter, she would be gone completely.
No, not gone. She would never really be gone; in her own way, she would live on forever.
But I still couldn’t bring myself to read it right away.
There was something else I could do, though, something I’d been avoiding, putting off, stepping carefully around whenever I walked into my room.
My aunt’s things.
They were still there, waiting for me, still covered up with the blanket I’d thrown on them when I couldn’t bear to see them so brazenly holding my aunt’s possessions, both the things she’d left for me and the things I had taken from her house.
I removed the blanket now, folding it and setting it in its proper place at the foot of my bed. I sat on the floor and pulled the smallest box toward me. It was her jewelry, packed carefully in tissue and surrounded by thin bubble wrap. I freed piece after piece. A small handwritten note was attached to every single piece. I picked up a slightly misshapen silver bangle and read its description: sterling silver, England, 1973.
I removed the note carefully and set it aside where I wouldn’t lose it, and then I slipped the bangle on my wrist.
Did I want to be immortal? I asked the bangle and Aunt Helen and myself.
Every old fear, every old anxiety seemed to rear up in my brain at once. Death! Illness! Loss! Pain!
It was like one of those marquees, recycling the same information in bright LED letters.
The answer seemed obvious: yes, I want to be immortal.
But an obvious answer wasn’t necessarily the right answer.
Sometimes you had to be even more careful of the obvious answers; they snuck up on you while you weren’t looking. They were effortless.
And they were so tempting. It could be so tiring, feeling scared of everything. It could be so nice not having to carry that weight around anymore. Like a journal filled with anxiety-ridden thoughts, an exercise from a past therapist (“Write out the demons every night before you go to bed, and that way they’ll have a harder time following you into your dreams.”).
The talk last night with my parents had gone better than expected. Maybe they were just happy it wasn’t anything as serious as they’d knee-jerkingly been expecting.
They talked among themselves, listing doctors they knew, therapists they knew. We would call someone on Tuesday.
“There is never, ever a reason to be ashamed to ask for help,” Mom said later, sneaking into my bedroom after everyone had gone to sleep. “You could have come to us sooner. I’m happy you came to us now, of course. But in the future, okay? There’s no shame between us.”
Did I feel shame? I don’t know. I guess I must have, a little, or else I wouldn’t have waited so long to tell them.
My mother sat on the edge of my bed and rested her hand on my forehead (always cool, her hands).
“What was your one big cry?” I asked her.
“Oh my,” she said. “I’ll tell you sometime soon, okay? It’s not a story for just before bed.”
She kissed my cheek, and I fell asleep without thinking of anything scary, without thinking of any of the ways I could die before morning.
I had only one dream, but it wasn’t so much a dream as a sort of prophecy. Sometimes our subconscious figured things out before us. Sometimes we had to just wait to catch up.
I texted Sam in the morning, holding the letter from Aunt Helen that I wasn’t quite ready to read.
Can you meet me today? Are you busy? Noon?
I sent him a pin with an address.
I’ll be there.
I didn’t tell him to bring the box, because now that he had it back, I didn’t think he’d be letting it out of his sight anytime soon.
I was worried my parents would look at me differently in the morning, having had time to really think about it and get used to the idea that their daughter was so out of control of her own emotions that she was having panic attacks.
But they were completely normal.
Dad made eggs and pancakes, and we ate at the table on the deck, Mom already dressed for gardening with her big floppy hat taking up its own chair, Abe carrying his plate around with him while he played a one-person game of croquet.
“I think we should take a vacation,” she said. “We haven’t had a nice vacation in a long time.”
“I’ve been doing research on Scandinavia!” Dad said hopefully.
She gave him a long, funny look. “A beach, Sal. I want to go to a beach. I want to sit in the sand and drink pi?a coladas out of coconuts.”
“Oh, that kind of vacation,” Dad said, slightly crestfallen but still on board.
“Next year we can go to Scandinavia,” she promised. “This year: Hawaii.”
“I’d go to Hawaii,” I offered.
“Well, if Lottie will tag along, then it’s settled,” Dad said, smiling, winking, collecting our dirty plates and bringing them inside.
“I’m coming too!” Abe shouted from the yard.
“Do you have plans today? Do you want to help me pick beans? So many beans. I thought I’d make a casserole,” Mom said.
“I have a thing, yeah. I’m meeting someone.”
“The forever boy?” she asked.
“Yeah. I mean, obviously he isn’t really immortal,” I said. Covering my tracks. Aunt Helen would have been proud.
“Well, no. I didn’t think so,” Mom said.
Before I left to meet Sam, I took a photo from her journal: him and Aunt Helen, laughing, arms slung around each other’s shoulders.
He was there when I got there, already parked in the lot, leaning against the hood of his car and staring out at the ocean. The wooden box was on the passenger’s seat.
I handed him the picture, and he took it, hands shaking, face lighting up in a smile.
“Wow,” he said. “This feels like so long ago.”
“Eternalism,” I said.
“What?”
“Eternalism. It’s a philosophical theory of time. It means . . . We have these limited brains, right? We can only understand so much at one time. So we experience life in a very specific way, in a linear, chronological way. Each moment leads to the next, and once one moment has passed, it’s gone forever. Right?”