It Wasn't Always Like This (11 page)

“Do you know that lobsters don’t age?” he asked.

Emma stared at him. “Pardon me?”

“Well, technically, we can’t f igure out their age. They just seem to, um, get bigger. But not any older.”

Emma managed a polite nod. Where was he going with this? There weren’t any lobsters in the swamp. She knew what lobsters looked like, but she had never eaten one. She had never thought about them in any particular way. But she was not a stupid girl. She knew he was trying to tell her something, maybe teach her some sort of lesson. But what?

Kingsley Lloyd’s broad mouth stretched in a lopsided smile. He shifted his gaze to the window. Simon was lumbering around outside in his white sailor suit, clinging to his mother’s hand, mouth red and probably sticky from peppermint candy.

“People can be like that, I think,” Lloyd said, looking back at Emma.

People.
She tensed. For the f irst time ever, someone had spoken of . . .
it
. This thing that Emma kept feeling, this
thing
she feared was somehow keeping Simon from growing. This thing that neither her parents nor Charlie’s would talk about. Emma’s heart skipped a beat. She lowered her voice. “Are you saying we’re like lobsters, Mr. Lloyd?”

He gave a brief laugh. “Perhaps I am. You’re a clever girl, Emma.”

Goosef lesh rose on Emma’s arms, and the hairs on the back of her neck prickled.

Every day she looked into the mirror, and every day, the same girl stared back at her. But what, exactly, was she seeing? It was easier to pretend it wasn’t happening. Or
not
happening.

“Have you ever heard of the Fountain of Youth?” Lloyd asked her suddenly.

Now it was Emma’s turn to laugh. She almost answered, “Of course I’ve heard of it—every time Charlie’s dad has too much whiskey.” Lloyd had never joined them (thank goodness) for family dinners—not yet, at least. So she said instead, “You know Juan Ponce de León didn’t ever f ind it.”

She hoped that might send him on his way. She wanted to end this conversation. Kingsley Lloyd didn’t want lemonade, so what
did
he want? Emma wished Charlie would walk in, but he was putting the hawks and other birds through their paces for the tourists. For business. For family. For their families’ survival.

“I know,” said Lloyd. “In fact, I know that he never
wanted
to f ind it. He was a noble sort. But think, Miss O’Neill. Eternal life. An endless rebirth. Renders conception almost obsolete, no?”

Emma blushed at the word “conception.” The heat on her skin made her think of Charlie and the way he . . . What would Charlie think about this man and whatever it was he was talking about? Did Charlie think that his own
face was exactly the same? They hadn’t talked about it, not ever. As though giving the fear words would break the spell of this wonderful thing between them. But sometimes when she looked at him, when she watched his brows pucker as
he
looked at her . . .

“We’re mostly made of water, we humans,” Lloyd went on. “Did you know that? That’s the key.” His voice rose. “The Knights Templar thought to drink from the Savior’s chalice. The Druids saw eternal life in the Evergreen tree. Our Indian friends here . . . they’ve got their own ideas.”

He leaned closer. His breath smelled herbal and strong, something oddly unpleasant. There was a splatter of something greasy on the collar of his white shirt. “Everyone wants to get back into the Garden,” he said in a quiet rasp. “Make it last forever, you know. There’s power in that. Big power. And we modern folk don’t even believe the fountain exists.”

Emma frowned. “Because it doesn’t,” she said.

Kingsley Lloyd withdrew and straightened himself. “You know better, my dear,” he said. “But be careful. No one else knows. Not a single soul. Not even the ones who keep searching.”

Emma’s heart gave a sharp stutter.

“I needed to be sure. We scientists, that’s how we work.”

“Sure of what?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he f inally took the hint and left.

Grown-ups are crazy
, Emma told herself. But the explanation felt as false as her mother’s words about Simon.

THAT NIGHT OUT
by the docks, Charlie whispered, “Emma, do you feel different?”

She was dizzy from his kisses, holding on to him as he stepped back. She’d been expecting him to say, “I love you.” Or maybe, “I want you.” Or possibly just take her hand and walk with her to the private little arbor a few feet away and lie in the grass, and she would let him slip his hands anywhere they wanted to go.

Emma had not yet contemplated the possibility of actually making love with him. But she sensed that someday she would like very much to be seduced by Charlie Ryan. She knew nice girls shouldn’t think things like this. But secretly, Emma also sensed she wasn’t all that nice.

“Yes,” she said. Because at that moment, she thought he meant because of the kissing. She leaned into him, but he backed off again.

“I know how
that
makes you feel,” he teased. Then his grin clouded over. He took her hands in his, pressing warmth into her. “I mean . . . something’s happened, Em. Don’t you feel . . . an energy?”

She
did
feel it. She closed her eyes. The thick, warm, salty air swirled around her. It was a perfume of the wildlife and the swamp and the ocean. When she opened her eyes, she knew exactly what Charlie meant, because she’d felt it, too. Not just an energy; she felt like energy
itself
, like she was a furnace or an engine or the sun.

Of course it was the immortality kicking in, not that she fully comprehended that yet, but still, she
knew.
It was spreading its magic through every vein, singing in her blood. The original Emma was being burned out, a new and permanent Emma rising from her own ashes.

On the other hand, girls who are kissed by boys who know how to kiss them always felt like that. She knew that by then.

Emma started to tell Charlie yes, she understood, that she sensed it, too.

But he let her go then and spread his arms wide, f ingers reaching like he wanted to lift off the earth and f ly. “I don’t know what it is, exactly.” She could see him searching for the right words. “It’s like the earth is racing inside me. Like I could do anything. Be anything. Invincible.” His gaze tipped again to the sky. “We’ll go up there someday, Emma. You and me. We’ll go everywhere.”

Charlie wasn’t normally this talkative. She’d always known this was what he wanted, to leave this place that was their parents’ idea and embark on his own mad adventure. Emma wanted that, too, but mostly she wanted Charlie.

He edged his f ingers slowly up her bare leg under her skirt.

“Oh,” she said. “That tickles.”

And then as his hand slid higher, she forgot what they were talking about at all.

Chapter Nine

St. Augustine, Florida

1914–1916

By the end of 1914, well over a year since they had sipped from the stream, the difference she and Charlie had felt and shared became impossible to forget.

On New Year’s Eve, Emma found her mother staring into the mirror and sobbing. They had f inished scrubbing and sweeping, her mother’s ritual. “You start the new year with a clean house,” her mother always said at this time of year. “Then good luck will come your way.”

Not this New Year’s Eve. On December 31, 1914, her mother couldn’t speak at all.

“It’s going to be f ine, Mama,” Emma said. The words felt fraudulent even as they left her mouth. How absurd of her mother to shine things up as though it made a bit of difference.

Glen Walters and his Church of Light were hosting a New Year’s Eve prayer meeting and celebration. Posters had been hung all over town.

F IGHT THE EVIL AMONG US

BRING BACK LIGHT IN THE NEW YEAR

Of course, the Church of Light had never approved of their families. They’d been unequivocal in their judgment. In their eyes—and words—the Alligator Farm and Museum gift shop was another symptom of general human decay in the form of silly pleasures and thrills. And their congregation was growing each day. Converts had taken solid root in this little part of St. Augustine. Maybe it was the heat that set their apocalyptic drums beating. Or just their inclination to f ind the devil in anything that felt different. The rumors had begun slowly and then with increasing speed and venom. Whatever was going on with the O’Neills and the Ryans went against the laws of nature.

Emma had never even been so much as disliked. Now she felt hatred, the same as she’d felt fear of polio, the same way she felt the heat of the sun. Hatred from the people who’d once been their neighbors, who’d spent time at the museum and the aviary.

THE FAMILIES HUDDLED
together that night at the O’Neill’s carefully cleaned house, toasting to 1915. The cheer was forced, the toasts were empty.

“They won’t calm down, will they?” Emma’s mother whispered.

“It can only last so long,” her father soothed. “Things like this, they have a way of burning themselves out.”

As for Frank Ryan, he used the word “immortal” for the f irst time. He said it apropos of nothing, during a long silence, but they all knew what he meant. He was referring to their collective condition, his voice awed and terrif ied at once. He wasn’t even drunk.

Emma’s mother—who no longer laughed at Frank’s stories or hung on his every word—clutched at baby Simon.

“No,” she keened, sobbing. “No.”

“He won’t ever catch polio,” Emma’s father said. (He
was
drunk.) As though this made up for Simon staying forever two. Emma’s mother slapped him, hard, across the face.

“Mama!” Emma cried, shocked.

“Let her be,” Charlie said, and he led her outside. They sat on the front steps. It was the f irst time Emma thought about running away. But where would they go?

“Are we?” she asked Charlie, barely believing what she was saying. “Are we really . . .
immortal
? Is that possible?”

Charlie was silent for a long time. Through the open window, she could hear her father and his arguing about what to do.

“They won’t leave,” she said. “You know they won’t. The business . . . it’s all they think about.”

He didn’t respond to that, but said instead, “I think we are. Em, I think something changed inside us. When I look in the mirror, I just . . . will it last, do you think? Maybe it’s only—”

“Temporary,” she f inished for him. Neither of them smiled.

Emma studied Charlie’s face. Did he feel exactly as she did? Because the truth was this: When Emma looked in the mirror, she saw that her eyes were wide and bright and clear. Her black hair fell in long waves. She was scared, but she was also thrilled, alive.

“We’ll talk to Lloyd once the year turns,” she heard her father say back inside the house. “We’ll f igure this thing out.”

But 1914 turned to 1915, and Kingsley Lloyd didn’t return to work. When Emma’s father went looking for him at the rooming house where he lived, his landlady announced that he had “sneaked out like a damn thief” in the middle of the night. His room was empty. He’d left no note, no forwarding address, no real trace that he’d ever been there at all.

Emma thought,
He wanted to escape, too.

ONE YEAR TURNED
to two. And then two turned to three.

It was 1916 now. Three years since the Ryans and the O’Neills had drunk the tea brewed from the purple-f lowered plant that grew on the island, at the edge of the stream Emma had never seen with her own eyes. Three years since the f irst time Emma and Charlie had turned seventeen.

They should have left. They should have run like Kingsley Lloyd.

“Talk’ll die down,” Art O’Neill promised his family again and again and again. Of course he did. Everything they had was tied into the business, into this place.

Early in January of 1916, a year after Kingsley Lloyd disappeared, Emma found herself hurrying down Main Street with Simon—headed to McClanahan’s because Emma had promised her brother some candy and Mr. McClanahan always stocked sweets.

Simon still loved peppermints. He always would. She knew that now.

“Be careful,” her mother warned.

But what could happen in broad daylight? Emma couldn’t spend her life hiding, could she? The energy that burned inside her felt invulnerable, eternal. If what they thought was true, and it def initely hadn’t been proven otherwise, then who could hurt them? She knew what she saw in the mirror every day. No, fear wasn’t her problem. It was anger.

Preacher Glen Walters stood on the wooden porch of the mercantile, his silver hair shining in the sun—his
receding
hair. She saw it now: even in the few years since he’d arrived, he’d aged far more than her parents. His skin was perpetually red, lined, weathered from the sun. And the dark circles under his icy blue eyes had deepened.