I stayed up all night, without changing my clothes or brushing my teeth or washing my face.
I hadn’t been able to read anything else in the red journal, but I had read the others, pored over them with an intensity that did not wane, not even at three in the morning, not even at four.
Sam’s name wasn’t mentioned in any of them. And they were filled with pictures, but he wasn’t in any of those either.
They were fascinating, despite that. My aunt grew up in front of my eyes. My aunt got the first sparks of inspiration for the Alvin books. My aunt wrote about Margo’s hair color, eye color.
But she hadn’t mentioned Sam at all.
Which was nice. I’d almost managed to convince myself that I’d made the entire thing up.
But then eventually there was nothing left to read except the red journal. It was lying innocently on the floor, just a few feet away from me.
Something in there would explain everything. It had to.
Something in there would tell me what I needed to know, would reassure me of the impossibility of a boy who didn’t age, not a single day in twenty-five years.
I opened the journal on my lap, holding my breath, holding my guts inside me even though they were trying their best to wiggle free of their tethers.
My father and Aunt Helen, teenagers, friends. They looked so similar and at the same time like completely foreign strangers. Would I be friends with these people if they walked into my life now? Aunt Helen said yes, but I wasn’t so sure. My father’s face had a smugness that wasn’t there anymore; Aunt Helen looked perpetually bored and entitled, qualities I had never once seen on her grown-up face. There were pages after pages of the two of them, in swimsuits at a backyard pool I didn’t recognize, surrounded by friends I’d never known, watching a movie on a floral couch, playing catch in the middle of an empty, twilight street. They looked like pages from a magazine, a story on what it was like to grow up on another planet, in another time.
I flipped page after page, and then: him.
Sam and Aunt Helen eating Popsicles on a wooden bench. Sam and Aunt Helen holding a small turtle. Sam and Aunt Helen sharing a milk shake, one tall glass and two straws, exactly like in a movie.
It was much, much too early, but I took the journal and crept across the hallway to Abe’s room and tapped on his door with just my index finger while I called him over and over, hearing his phone buzz on the nightstand within, worrying it would vibrate right off the edge and onto the carpet without him waking up.
I didn’t want to just go in because my brother was known to sometimes sleep naked, and with everything else I was dealing with now, I certainly didn’t want to deal with getting that particular image out of my head. It would be stuck there for all eternity, right alongside the time I saw my parents half undressed in their bedroom (I didn’t know they were home; they didn’t know I was home) and the time I accidentally found naked photos of Jackie on Em’s phone (she told me to look up a number for her, forgetting that she’d left the screen on photos of her girlfriend’s most naked bits).
So I kept calling, and the phone kept buzzing, and I kept knocking as loudly as I dared to, hoping more than anything that I wouldn’t wake my parents and have to answer their many questions, including Why aren’t you in bed? and Why are you holding that photo album like you’re scared it’s going to come to life? and Why are you trying to wake your brother up? You know how he gets in the morning.
In a perfect world I would have been able to wake up Abe, but this was not a perfect world, and I’d forgotten that my mother was working yet another overnight, and so when I fell backward in the hallway, landing on my butt and cradling the journal like a misbehaving baby, she was there, standing over me, dressed in scrubs and crossing her arms over her chest like she wasn’t quite sure what she was seeing.
“Lottie?” she asked, and I nodded slowly in the dim light (I hadn’t even noticed she’d turned it on) as she leaned against a wall and studied me. “I’m sensing a crisis. Do you want to come downstairs?”
I followed her without saying anything, making my way down the stairs with both hands gripping the banister, the journal tucked under one of my arms in a complicated death grip. We went into the kitchen, and she wordlessly dished out two bowls of ice cream, putting one in front of me as she sat next to me at the kitchen table. She took a bite of hers first, made a comically funny ahhh face, then leaned back in her chair.
“Okay. What’s going on, my love?”
I think Sam is immortal?
I think I’m losing my mind?
I get so anxious at night, all the thoughts of death piling one on top of the other, that sometimes I can’t sleep, and I’m exhausted until I try closing my eyes and then I am one hundred percent resolutely awake, drowning under the certainty that I will one day be brutally murdered in the midst of some random home invasion.
“I think something really weird is happening,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Ninety-nine percent of my words had left me, and here I was with only the vaguest of answers.
“Weird how?” she asked. Then, “Just to get the Mom stuff out the way: Are you in trouble? Are you hurt? Is someone you know in trouble?”
“No. No. I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
I put the journal on the table and pushed it toward her. She opened it, and her expression softened immediately as she recognized my father and Aunt Helen as teens. She flipped through page after page until she reached the end, and then she looked up at me, confused. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“You don’t see anything weird?”
“This was before I knew your father,” she said. “Weird how?”
I reached across the table and started flipping pages until I found one filled with Sam. It sent a tingle down my spine, a warning signal: this isn’t right.
“This kid,” I said, pointing. “I know him.”
She leaned closer to the photos, squinted, then shrugged. “Is he one of your aunt’s friends? I don’t think I’ve ever met him.”
“I’ve met him,” I said.
“Okay. I’m not following.”
“I mean I’ve met him, and he’s still this age. He’s my age. Like, I’ve met him, and he’s the same age.”
My mom looked at the picture and then looked at me and then took what I thought was the most obnoxious bite of ice cream in the history of the human race, as her expression changed very clearly to one of: I have no idea how to tell my daughter I think she’s full of shit.
“A lot of people look alike,” she said after a minute, after she’d taken her bite and swallowed and thought about how to answer me in the most diplomatic way.
“Identical,” I said. “And I have her journals. She wrote about a Sam in her journals, and his name is Sam, and the lawyer even said she left something in her will for Mr. Williams, do you remember? Sam’s last name is Williams. And also she dedicated the last Alvin book to S.W., Sam Williams, and Sam said yes, that was him, and yes, they were friends, and this Sam is that Sam,” I said, pointing at the picture again, pointing so hard the tip of my finger turned white.
“Honey, I’m sorry,” Mom said. “I don’t think I understand any of this.”
“This person,” I said, jabbing the photo with every syllable, “is still alive and still a teenager.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I believe you think that, honey, but sometimes children look exactly like their parents. Sometimes they’re even named after them. There is another explanation for this. And I will help you find it after I’ve had some sleep. I promise.”
She finished her ice cream as I dealt with the hole in my stomach, the growing black spot that was eating up all my organs. I hadn’t taken a bite of ice cream yet, so she left the bowl in front of me as she went to the sink and rinsed out hers. When she turned around, she sighed and said, “Will you please stop looking at me like I betrayed you?”
But I couldn’t help it. It felt like she had.
And I didn’t know what else to do. If I couldn’t make my mom believe me, what made me think Abe would believe me, or Em, or anyone? The only person who would believe me was dead, was—
Aunt Helen.
I abandoned the bowl of ice cream and sprinted upstairs, tearing the next letter out of the envelope.
Lottie,
Don’t tell anybody. If you’ve told someone already, that’s fine, because they probably don’t believe you, but don’t tell anybody else.
I’m sorry, Lottie. This is a secret I’ve kept for so long that the act of keeping it became effortless. My lips learned to button themselves up, and my heart learned to forget the fact that I lost one of my very best friends in the world when I told him I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do. All of it will make sense very soon.
I hadn’t seen Sam for almost twenty-five years. He left Mystic when I was still in high school and spent the time between then and now doing God knows what. Traveling, probably. Seeing as much of the world as he could get his hands on. I got postcards every now and then, unsigned postcards with little messages about how he was fine and Paris was beautiful and he wished things could have been different. Always: I wish things could have been different. So you see, unsigned as they were, I always knew who’d sent them.
He came back when I was diagnosed. The news leaked so quickly to the internet (it’s impossible to keep anything a secret nowadays, isn’t it?), and then suddenly he was on my doorstep one day, his face at once changed and yet completely the same. He was the same. Of course I always knew he would be, but it was still a bit of a shock. He rang my doorbell, and I somehow knew who it would be even before I opened the door. Of course I knew it would be him because I had been waiting for him.
You were supposed to come over; you had texted to say you were on your way, so I didn’t let him stay. I watched him disappear into the woods (he’s very good at disappearing, but there’s nothing mystical about that, just a lot of practice) and then I watched your car pull up, not ten seconds later. So of course the next time I saw him he asked me who you were. He’d been watching, I guess.
At first I wouldn’t tell him, but then I did, because I knew he’d figure it out anyway.
Here’s the thing, Lottie. I never believed him. Not when we were younger, not when he’d shown me proof, not even when he begged me to, when he swore up and down on our very best friendship that he would never, ever lie to me. I thought I believed him, but I didn’t, not even when the postcards kept coming, not even when he stuck to his story for twenty-five whole years.
Only when I saw it for my own eyes. Only just a few weeks ago when he resurfaced, and for once, I couldn’t explain it away. Only then.
Trust me, Lottie. Believe what you want from him (because I know he’s found you, I knew he’d find you the second he watched you pull into my driveway), but trust me. I would never lie to you. (Omit, yes. I’ve omitted a lot. But I’ve never lied.)
—H.
I put the letter down and picked up the photograph that I’d peeled out of her journal. I thought about what my mom had said—that sometimes family members looked alike, that maybe this was Sam’s dad—but I knew that wasn’t possible. I knew because Sam had told me himself, he had known my aunt for a long time. I knew because Aunt Helen had told me herself: this is a secret I’ve kept for so long.
I knew because my aunt had asked me to do one thing. Believe her.
And I did.