“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.
