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 piña 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?”
“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.
And besides, now it’s time to let a little bit of me go.
Throw my ashes, Lottie. Into the ocean—from the cliff we used to go to together. Have a picnic, have some fun, try not to let it be so heavy. (I’ve written some foods down on the back; living vicariously through this image while I can’t stomach anything much stronger than bread.)
I hope I was an okay aunt. I hope you knew that from the very first time I held your little baby body in my arms, I was hooked.
A whole lifetime of loving you feels like more than a fair exchange for immortality. Don’t you think?
—H.
I put the letter down on my desk.
My aunt could be a million things.
A little selfish.
A little bossy.
A little presumptuous.
But she was also right; it was about time I started figuring things out for myself.
I went back downstairs to the living room. Sam was winning by a mile in what Amy kept referring to as beginner’s luck.
I imagined this night stretching on for all infinity, lasting forever.
I imagined that somewhere, in another universe, it did.
Next to me, Sam bought his fourth railroad.
On the TV, Alvin and Margo sat in the dusty foyer of the house in the middle of the woods and wondered if they would ever see their parents again.
Don’t worry, you two. I’ve read the last book. You do.