“Yeah . . .”
“But what if time doesn’t actually work like that? What if that’s only the way our brains process it? What if time really exists, like—everything all at once, all at the same moment, every single moment happening at the same time, over and over, for all eternity. Simultaneously.”
“That would mean . . .”
I pointed at the picture. “That you and my aunt are still in this moment. Forever. She’s still alive. No one ever dies. You’re not that special after all,” I said, bumping my hand against his knee. He caught it and kissed my knuckles. I didn’t think I’d ever been kissed there before. I liked to think that there was a version of me that would be kissed like that forever, for always, eternally.
“I like that,” he said.
“It’s just a theory. But I like it too. It helps me.”
“Where are we?” he asked.
“I’ll show you. Grab the box.”
I’d hiked this trail once already in the past month and a half. I went before Sam, leading him, checking every once in a while that he was still behind me. He held the box like it was the most fragile thing in the world. I guess it was. It was all that was left.
When we reached the top, we sat down in the dirt. Sam put the box on the ground in front of us.
“This is where we’ll spread her ashes,” I said. “The funeral parlor called, and the urn will be ready this week.”
Sam didn’t answer right away. He looked out over the water, and I noticed that his eyes were red and wet.
He still held the photograph in his hand. My aunt and him: best friends. I wondered how many other people he’d lost. A real-life Alvin Hatter. A real-life forever boy with no Margo to share it with.
Sam opened the wooden box. He removed the glass vial and then placed the photograph carefully in its place. In the sunlight the liquid looked completely unremarkable. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“The Everlife Formula,” he said, laughing suddenly. “That was clever.”
“She wrote all those books for you,” I said. “Like a secret message. I think she was sorry.”
“For what?”
“That she couldn’t drink it. And that she couldn’t help you.”
He held it up to eye level, looked at it for a minute. “I want to get rid of it,” he said, stretching his hand back and over his shoulder, ready to throw.
“Wait!” I scrambled to my feet, put my hand on his arm. “So dramatic,” I said, panting. “Just hold on a second.”
“Okay,” he said, pulling his hand away from me, keeping the bottle as far from me as he could.
“I already told you I didn’t want it.” I rolled my eyes and sighed. “I want you to drink it.”
“Me? Why?”
“Think about this scenario, right: you throw it out to sea in this grand, poetic gesture. But the bottle doesn’t break; it floats on the waves until it gets to some faraway, uncharted island. There’s been a plane crash, and someone who looks a lot like Tom Hanks is stranded on the island. He finds the bottle. He’s really, really thirsty. So he’s basically the only person on earth who would pull a strange glass bottle of water out of the ocean and actually drink it. And he does drink it, so now he has to spend eternity on that island, alone.”
“That is . . . very specific,” Sam said. “But I see your point. I guess I could just dump the water out?”
“I think you need to drink it.”
“I already drank it, remember?”
“Has anyone ever drunk the water twice, though?”
“No, there’s not really a point, is there?”
“Well, what’s the harm? You can’t get doubly immortal. Oh, or maybe you’d become a god? Like Zeus? That would be cool.”
“I don’t think it would make me a god.”
“So just drink it. I dare you.”
“You dare me to drink the water that I have already drunk again?”
“Yes.”
He thought about it for just a minute, lowering the glass to eye level, studying the liquid within. Then he relaxed, shrugged, unstopped the cork, and raised it to his lips. He drank deeply, and when he was finished, he replaced the cork and let the bottle fall to the ground.
And I watched the air around him change, just so, so subtly, nothing anyone would see unless they knew exactly what they were looking for. A slight shift, the most gentle of breezes. Something crooked tilting into place. A crack in the laws of the universe filled up with putty and made whole again.
I smiled.
“Come on, let’s get out of here. I’m hungry.”
That night Em came over with Jackie, and together with Abe and Amy and Sam, we set up Monopoly on the coffee table.
“Can I play?” Dad asked hopefully, sticking his head into the room.
“No!” Abe and I shouted at the same time.
Defeated, he retreated to the kitchen.
We put an Alvin movie on in the background but muted the TV. I glanced at it every now and then but tried not to get caught up; the Alvin movies always made me cry.
Sam had never played Monopoly. In three hundred years, he’d just never gotten around to it.
After an hour or so, I went into the kitchen to refill our supply of snacks. Abe followed me. When I turned around from the fridge, he was leaning against the counter, arms crossed, expectant.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“Was Ponce de León right?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “There was a perfectly reasonable explanation.”
“Are you okay?” he said.
“I don’t know. I think so. Are you?”
“I don’t know either.”
“Maybe we could talk about it sometime? So, you know, I don’t have to get the insight to your feelings via an essay in a literary magazine?”
“I’ll think about it,” he said, winking, grabbing a bag of pretzels from the counter.
I hung back a minute. I went upstairs to my room and took the last of Aunt Helen’s letters from my desk. I thought I was finally ready to read what she had to say, what she’d chosen to leave me with. The last letter. But not the last of Aunt Helen.
Lottie,
You’re on your own.
Thank you for tying up my loose ends, putting the final pieces of my puzzle together. I wish I could thank you in person, but alas, one thing life has taught me: you rarely get what you want.
(Something here about getting what you need, naturally.)
I have no grand last bit of wisdom to impart. I write this with a hand shaking and weak from chemotherapy and lack of sleep.
The other night I started reading the red journal over again, and I thought: My goodness. My little Lottie is this age now.
Write as much of it down as you can. It’s sometimes nice to remember.
We are so alike in some ways. I know you have the same voice that follows you around, that you can’t seem to get away from. The edge-of-sleep voice. The dark-and-quiet voice.
But you will learn to silence it, Lottie.
You will learn to push it to the side.
Even this, me being gone, will get easier.