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. Samand 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, includingWhy aren’t you in bed?andWhy are you holding that photo album like you’re scared it’s going to come to life?andWhy 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 upAbe, 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 funnyahhhface, 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.
