Lottie, Lottie. My little impatient cupcake. I want you to have FUN at this party. (And there are actually cupcakes later, from my favorite bakery. Have one for me.)
Yes, I know you’re still at the party, and no, I’m not omniscient, just a good guesser (although—whatif you’re not at the party? That would be awkward).
I’m not going to make this long because I want you to enjoy yourself. Cut loose a little. Did you try the champagne? Cupcakes are better. Remember: I love you, and I also love parties. Enjoy this one enough for the both of us.
Yours, H.
With a huge, uncontainable smile on my face, I refolded the letter and put it back in my purse.
Now... how to have fun?
“Who’s there?” the old man called gruffly, opening his door just a crack, enough so Alvin and Margo could see the many metal door chains that snaked from door to doorjamb.
“What’s he so afraid of?” Margo mumbled. “We’re the ones who are running for our lives.”
Alvin elbowed her in the ribs to get her to shut up for a minute. He knew their grandfather wasn’t the most welcoming person in the world, and he was trying to make a good impression.
“Grandpa Hatter, it’s us: Alvin and Margo.” He waited a minute and then added hopefully, “Your grandkids.”
“I never asked for grandkids,” Grandpa Hatter snapped. “And I certainly never asked for grandkids who show up at ungodly hours of the night.”
The door slammed shut.
Margo and Alvin looked at each other.
Margo crossed her arms and said, “Any other genius ideas?”
—fromAlvin Hatter and the Mysterious Disappearance
3
Em found white wine and poured it into emptied soda cans, which I thought was kind of ingenious except it made the wine taste a little bit like cola. I drank mine slowly, moving aimlessly from the inside to the outside, trying some of all the food Aunt Helen had picked out.
I used to ask her if it hurt.
Every day I’d call her or go to see her and watch her shrink away a little bit at a time. It terrified me, but I couldn’t stay away. I had to see the cancer’s progress. I kept notes in my head: dramatic notes filled with terrible similes:Day thirty-two. Pale and listless. Like a sailboat with no wind. Spirits seem dampened. Eyes are dull.
“Lottie,” she said one day, a bad day, a day she had no energy and lay on her couch for too long, wrapped in a thick blanket and sipping cold tea. “You can’t keep thinking about things like this. You can’t dwell on it.”
“What, am I supposed to pretend this isn’t happening?” I asked.
“No. But you can’t obsess over it. You can’t let it consume you.”
But it was impossible to watch someone you love die and not let it consume you. It was impossible not to go home from the hospital and look into my own face and wonder if my own body held the same secret disease that Aunt Helen’s had. There were countless types of cancer. There were countless ways your body could go wrong and turn against you and eat itself up from the inside.
I’d been thinking about that a lot lately.
My brain did that: it found things to obsess over, things to panic about. I’d had my first anxiety attack when I was only eleven, and it was Aunt Helen who knew what it was, who knew I wasn’t having a heart attack, who sat me down on her couch and explained to me that she had those feelings as well, those feelings of being overwhelmed, those feelings of being paralyzed.
In her first letter she’d written that she wasn’t worried about Abe and my parents, that she knew things came a little harder for me. She’d writtenthat’s one of the reasons I hate to leave you the most—because I would have loved to stay and try to help you a little more. Help you overcome those old anxieties, those old nervous tics (that we both share, by the way).
They came and went. They had gotten better for a while. But now, right now, I could feel them tugging atthe corners of my brain again.
“Are you okay?” someone asked. Abe, I thought, but I couldn’t turn around to look at him, I couldn’t make my feet work. I held the white wine soda can in one hand and the railing with my other. I didn’t know what time it was, but someone had turned the music up, and people were dancing and laughing inside, but out here it was just me and—turning, finally, jerkily—not Abe.
“I’m fine,” I said quickly, because we are taught as children that automatic response:I’m fine, when we are not.I’m fine, when we are anything but.I’m fine, when we can’t stop thinking about death, about dying, about ceasing to be.
The boy standing next to me was about my age, about my height, and nondescript but somehow familiar. Brown-black hair that fell in waves to just above his shoulders. Brown eyes. A very well-fitting suit (I didn’t think I’d ever noticed something like that about someone before, but it did—it fit him particularly well). He held a glass of something sparkling. Water, I thought.
