When my family started filtering into the kitchen in the morning, I was already sitting there, a confusing perfect storm of emotions. Except George Clooney was nowhere to be found.
“Good reference,” Abe said. I turned to find him on the stairs, arms folded, looking at me suspiciously.
“Oh, great,” I said. My internal monologue had momentarily escaped me.
“I always thought they should have sent Diane Lane out with the ship. She’s a legitimate badass. Diane Lane does not get lost at sea.”
“How much did I say?”
“Hmm? Oh, no. I was reading your mind.” Abe made squiggles in the air with his fingers. My phone buzzed. A message from Sam.
Want to get together this weekend? I have a few ideas.
Do you? Do you have a few ideas, Sam? Was one of those ideas explaining to me how you came about your apparent eternal youth?
“You’re doing it again, but you’re whispering this time, so I can’t hear you,” Abe said. “If you’re going to narrate your subconscious, you might be kind enough to do it a little louder.”
“Did you want something?” I asked, spinning around, dropping my phone dramatically in the process. I watched it skid across the kitchen floor, heard that massive shattering and splintering sound as it clearly broke into a thousand pieces. “Shit!”
“I have twenty-seven missed calls from you,” Abe said, crossing the kitchen to pick up the broken bits of my life. “Ouch.” He held it out to me. The entire screen was shattered. It felt like some metaphor I couldn’t quite put into words.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“You couldn’t sleep so you called me twenty-seven times at five in the morning?”
I took the phone from him and pressed the home button. The screen turned on feebly, but the touch screen was broken. I tossed it onto the counter.
“Perfect,” I said.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“What’s the point?” I thought. Or I guess I said it. Things were getting muddy; words were forming without me seeming to have much say over them.
“The point is, I’m your brother, and I care about you a lot, and you can tell me things. I thought we had established that three years ago when you were getting bullied by that guy, that Jeremy guy, and I confronted him, and then he was like, ‘I just have crazy feelings for her, man!’ and I was like, ‘At no age—but especially not at your age—is it acceptable to show a girl you have feelings for her by bullying her. That contributes to a patriarchal society and reinforces archaic gender roles that nobody has time for anymore.’ And then he was like, ‘What does patriarchal mean?’ and I realized I had overestimated my audience. But remember how I had your back then? And I have your back now. So what the hell is going on?”
Two voices battled for position in my brain.
Tell him! yelled one.
Don’t tell him! whispered the other.
The other had a point. My mom hadn’t believed me, so why did I think Abe would be any different? Did I really want to go through the whole thing again, the whole explanation, only to be shot down with Maybe he just looks a lot like his dad? I knew the difference between two people looking like each other and two people actually being the same person who never aged.
I mean, didn’t I?
“Wow,” Abe said.
“What?”
“It’s just that when you think so hard, I can actually see the smoke coming out of your ears.”
“Shut up.”
“Seriously. Like an actual cartoon. With the train noises and everything.”
“Whatever.”
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Okay, fine.” Deep breath. Another deep breath. And one more, for good measure. “I think Sam is immortal.”
Abe’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. He took a tiny sidestep to his left and leaned his elbow on the counter, but other than that he didn’t even act like he’d heard me. Now I could see his brain working, something spinning behind his eyes.
“Huh,” he said. “Is that why Aunt Helen wanted you to have that book?” he said finally.
I almost didn’t remember what he was talking about, but then something clicked in my brain, and I bolted past him for the stairs. I ran into my room, breathless, and grabbed the weird history book my aunt had sent me to pick up from Leonard at Magic Grooves.
The Search for Eternity: A History of Juan Ponce de León.
I opened it, flipping through the pages until I found what she’d written, which hadn’t even really registered with me until now—
The words Fountain of Youth were circled, with a line leading to where she’d written S.W.!!!
This whole time her letters had been spelling it out for me. I’d missed every single hint.
I heard Abe walk into my room behind me. I held the book out to him, and he took it and read what Aunt Helen had written.
“What’s Sam’s last name?” he asked.
“Williams. Sam Williams.”
“And you think he’s . . . I mean, Aunt Helen told you he was immortal?”
“Yeah,” I said to Abe. “She did. Yeah. Wait—do you believe me, then? Or do you believe that he is . . . you know.”
“Do I believe that the Fountain of Youth actually exists and that your boyfriend drank from it and is now immortal?”
“He’s not my boyfriend. But yeah to all the other stuff.”
“Well, not really, no,” Abe said. “But I guess it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing in the world. Have you ever googled a blobfish?”
“No.”
“Well, you should. Just not before bed.”
“You don’t seem that freaked out.”
“Because I don’t really believe it. What’s your proof? Besides Aunt Helen leaving you a book about Ponce de León, I mean. Because that doesn’t mean anything. Aunt Helen did weird stuff all the time.”
“What’s my proof?” I said, grabbing the book back from him, poking the circled word with my forefinger. I took the red journal from my bed and opened it and thrust it into Abe’s hand, showing him picture after picture of Aunt Helen and Sam, turning the pages and jabbing at each one.
And the letters.
All the letters were stacked on my desk; I picked them up and started going through them, reading any relevant passages I found:
“I’ve kept a secret for a very, very long time. And now (in death, as it were) it seems like the perfect time to loosen my grip on it a little bit.”
“But I think if even one immortal boy could identify with Alvin’s struggles, it will have all been worth it.”
“Is Alvin based on a real person? Oh, of course . . .”
“Some nights I can imagine I am in high school again or living in your father’s garage or running after an immortal boy.”
“AN IMMORTAL BOY, Abe!” I said, breathing too hard, fully understanding now the secret my aunt had been leading me toward. “And she left him something in her will!”
“What was it? Did he tell you?” Abe asked, still holding the journal, still flipping slowly through the pages, studying every picture.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think he’s even gone to get it yet.”
“Really? So that means Harry still has it?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Interesting.”
“You don’t think I should—”
“Why not? If you’re really going down this path, don’t you want to know what it is?”
I didn’t waste any time.
I got Harry’s cell phone number from Aunt Helen’s computer and called him from Abe’s phone. He answered on the second ring and sounded genuinely pleased to hear from me.
“Lottie Reaves! To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I figured out who Mr. Williams is, the person from my aunt’s will. I know him.”
“Really? That’s wonderful. Do you have his contact information?”
Yeah, sitting useless in my shattered cell phone.
“He’s kind of hard to reach,” I said, improvising. “Off the grid, you know? I thought I could bring it to him? If it’s small enough to fit in my car, I guess?”
Had Aunt Helen left Sam a piano? A boat? I didn’t know.
“No, it’s quite small enough, but . . . Well, I don’t love that idea, to be honest,” Harry said. “There’s paperwork, you know.”
“I could take that too, and then bring it back to you?”
“If it was anyone else, I’d have to say no. But since it’s you, and I knew your aunt so well . . . I’m inclined to make an exception.”
“Great! I can come by now? If that’s okay with you. I can meet you at your office or I can come to your house, whatever you’d like.”
“I guess we’d better meet at the office then, that’s where the last of your aunt’s things are. I can be there in a half hour or so; I have some work to do anyway. Thanks for calling, Lottie.”
“Thank you.” I hung up the phone and handed it back to Abe, who’d been listening so close to me that our cheeks were almost touching. He pulled back, thoughtful.
“You don’t think it’s . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head slightly.
“I’ll keep you posted.”
“Please do. Especially if you find what Ponce never could.” He winked and left the room.
I went upstairs and opened my computer, finding my synced contact list and copying important numbers down on a piece of paper: Sam, Mom, Dad, Abe, Em.
I could text from my computer too, so I sent a message to Sam:
Later today? I’ll keep you posted.
The anxiety from the night before was gone. Now I had a clear sense of what I needed to do. I needed to talk to Sam.
I got to Harry’s office an hour or so later, after stopping at the store and paying an absurd insurance deductible for a new phone. It was currently wrapped in one of the most expensive cases I could find. The salesperson had personally thrown his phone (same case) against the wall as hard as he could to demonstrate its durability.
Worked for me.
Harry gave me a folder of paperwork (“Have him sign here and here, initial here, and thank you so much, Lottie, you’re the best.”) and a small wooden box, about the size of a hardcover book. I brought everything out to my car and opened it, sitting in the parking lot, after looking around me like a truly paranoid creature to make sure nobody was watching.
I opened the box slowly. If my life were a movie, there would be very dramatic music playing in the background, a slow buildup to a swelling of instruments as the wooden case creaked open (it didn’t creak in real life, and there was regrettably no music playing).
The inside of the box was a mess of tissue paper, and resting on top was a piece of paper. I recognized my aunt’s handwriting like it was my own.
S.—
I wish things could have been different.
But not in the way you might expect.
—H.
I set my aunt’s note on the passenger seat carefully, my heart speeding up as I reached into the box and pulled out tissue paper after tissue paper, unearthing a small crystal bottle with a cork stopper in it.
I imagined it said—on a brown-colored tag tied to it with twine—Everlife Formula.
But it didn’t. It was just the glass vial, small and clear and plain in my hands. I held it up to the light and looked at the liquid within. It was completely unremarkable. Like water.
Because it was water, if I believed what my aunt was trying to tell me.
It was a very special kind of water, but it was just water.
A very, very special kind of water, something said in the back of my head. A tiny kind of voice reserved only for the darkest of nights, the loneliest of sleeplessness. The voice you hear right before you fall asleep, the one that whispers suggestions into your ear: Did you leave the door unlocked? Are your car lights on? Did you remember to turn off the stove? What if everyone you love dies? What if YOU die? What if there’s someone under your bed right now? Should you get up and check the closet again?
Years writing down all the anxious thoughts in my head and all the ways I didn’t want to die in a notebook now buried in a floorboard in my aunt’s shed, and here I was, holding something that could (if I suspended all disbelief) take care of all of that.
This could be what we’ve been waiting for, the voice said. It sounded like my voice, a lot like my voice, but twisted and wrong. Just a shadow of who I really was, what I really sounded like. Not me at all. Or—a version of me. One I didn’t like.
I put the bottle back in the box and opened another letter from my aunt. This one was addressed to me, slipped into my purse before I’d left the house.
Dear Lottie,
A long, long time ago, I ran away from home.
I don’t know how much you know. I can’t know, can I, because I didn’t drink it. I didn’t choose the life Sam chose.
Sam and I met when I was a teenager, and he was both considerably older than that and also, at the same time, just a year older than I. We became friends instantly. There’s something about him, isn’t there, like he’s riding on a wave that’s slightly different from all the rest. Like he exists on a plane just a little bit tilted from ours.
We spent one perfect, magical year together. (Wait, let me be clear: not TOGETHER. Never anything more than friends.)
Then he offered me the water. He made me take it even when I refused to drink it. He wanted me to have it in case I changed my mind.
I thought about it.
I packed a bag and hopped on a train and took myself to New York. I spent one week wandering around the city (it was my first time!), imagining what it would be like to pause, to stop, to remain consistent forever. I wondered if I could live alone forever, never see my family again (because I would have to leave them, you know, and so this was like a trial run).
But in the end, I returned to my family.
I wasn’t particularly kind to Sam when I told him my decision. The whole thing had thrown me for a loop, I guess (but I was also younger, more cruel, a little terrified).
We fought; Sam left. He wrote me many postcards over the years. I never attempted to find him.
I thought about him often after that, of course, especially in the past few weeks I’ve found it weighing heavier and heavier on my mind.
But then I figured out what was so different about him, about Sam, and it wasn’t a good thing anymore. It is something dark and sad and eternal.
We aren’t living some make-believe fantasy about immortality, are we? We’re just trying to live our lives and do the best we can in the time we’re given.
Anyway, that’s what I tried to do.
If I know anything, it’s that he wouldn’t have gone to Harry’s office and you would have.
And if that’s true . . . then please, Lottie, give it back to him.
Whatever the little voice is currently telling you . . .
Don’t drink it.
—H.
I put my letter back in my purse just as my new phone buzzed. A message from Sam:
Whenever you want! Let me know.
It would be the first thing my aunt asked me to do that I didn’t do blindly.
I wrote him back:
Can you really live forever?
His response took a long time. But when it came, I started the car and drove.