It Wasn't Always Like This (16 page)

Confessing felt strange and daring and impossible. And despite what Pete had said, she waited for him to tell her she was insane. Because what else could he think?

But he’d
listened
. So she told him about Eddie Higgins who looked everything and nothing like Charlie Ryan.

By the time she was done, they had left the restaurant and were walking up Candelaria, Sandia Peak looming in the distance. There was snow at the top. She’d ridden the tram up once, a mile into the air, and as the car hung at the halfway point, she’d started crying because being above the world like that felt like f lying, and that reminded her of Charlie.

“You ready to lock me up in some padded room yet?” she asked, only half-joking.

Pete looked pale and confused, but he shook his head. “Seventeen years old since 1913, huh?”

“Yup.”

“From a plant on an island off Florida.”

“That, too.”

“And you’re looking for Charlie and trying to keep one step ahead of whoever the big bad is now, yes?”

She nodded.

“And the PI gigs? I mean; you
are
a real PI I’ve seen you work. Hell, I’ve cribbed from you.”

Emma shrugged. “Kind of goes with the territory, you know? Plus I’ve gotten good at it. The world’s more connected than you think. One thing leads to another.”

“Huh.” Pete stopped walking. Trained his gaze on her. His eyes showed belief. If not in her story, at least in
her.

“The boy you loved back then. Charlie. Was he good to you? Was he worth what you still feel?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes
.
”

As always when Emma talked about Charlie, she wondered what he was like now. What he was doing. What kind of man he was, even if he still wore a boy’s face. And then came the crushing guilt of what was left to tell.

“There’s more,” she said. “From when I f irst moved here a year ago.”

Pete didn’t hesitate. “I’m listening,” he said.

EMMA MET AARON
Tinsley a month after she moved to Albuquerque. She’d dyed her brown hair red back in Portland, chopped off her waves for a close-cropped pixie cut. After all, her hair was the one aspect of her appearance that she could alter both dramatically and at will—and so she did so frequently.

The pixie cut, while not her best of choices, was also not a mistake.

Aaron Tinsley, however, was. He was a student at UNM. Twenty years old, eyes a mossy green and light brown hair that curled at the bottom of his neck. He smelled like soap and coffee and the clothes he’d just learned how to launder himself.

The f irst time Emma spotted him was at the coffee shop on Central, where she’d taken a job to get some quick cash. There was an ink stain on the tiny side callus of his middle f inger, probably from a leaky pen. His boots were scuffed and old, and the collar of his plaid work shirt was frayed a bit on one edge. He sat for a long time at a table by the window, reading John Locke and scribbling notes in the margins. Before he closed the book, Emma saw that he’d highlighted
“Every man has property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.”

Emma didn’t give a f ig about John Locke except for a vague appreciation that at least the man hadn’t considered women property—as solid a start as any to a political philosophy. Men she’d met over the decades, even in the twentieth century, weren’t nearly as enlightened. And it had been many decades since Emma had last kissed Charlie. If she were an ordinary person, she’d be long dead. Instead, she was beautiful. Not even the awful hair dye could change that. Her skin was smooth, and under that red dye, her hair was the same lustrous brown it had always been. Her muscles were strong, her breasts f irm, and her belly f lat. Everything about her, physically, was still seventeen.

His gaze rose to her as she ref illed his coffee. Something about those deep green eyes held her there, coffee pot still clutched in her hand.

It was an hour until closing, but the place was empty except for Emma, this boy, and Elias, the owner. Emma cleaned the tables and ref illed sugar packets and stirrers and helped Elias hang
chile ristras
in the windows—because it was November, and Elias said the long strings of red pepper would make everything look festive.

How many places like this had she worked? How many kindly old men like Elias had she known? Most of them fathers with daughters of their own, shop owners and storekeepers who’d allowed her to scrape together enough cash to move on? Too many to count or try to count. Maybe she was feeling especially wistful that day. Philosophical, rather. Blame it on John Locke . . .

So she ended up talking to Aaron Tinsley, of course—Aaron who carried his cup and saucer to the counter and helped Emma with the last of the bright red
ristras
while Elias emptied the cream and milk pitchers. Outside, the wind had picked up and rattled the windows, but inside this tiny, warm space, everything felt safe.

“I love it when the wind blows,” Emma said impulsively. “It feels like it could take me—”

“Anywhere,” Aaron said, f inishing her sentence.

Her heart squeezed. That hadn’t happened since Charlie. Not once. She had been back and forth across the continent, looking for him wherever she thought he might go. Had even hunted pointlessly for an underground spring said to be somewhere below the Lincoln Center stop of the New York City subway system. (Emma never discounted these types of tales as apocryphal. New York City was just too full of secrets and urban hidey-holes and rats the size of medium-weight dogs to discount anything.) But in all of her searching, she found nothing. No fountain. No Charlie.

Over time, there’d been other boys. Not at f irst, but eventually. Eternity was a lonely thing when your body was seventeen in every way but the chronological years.

EMMA PAUSED HERE
in her story, not sure if she could or wanted to go on. Pete quirked a brief smile. “You think I’m judging you, O’Neill? I can’t, and I won’t. We’re human. We love, and we screw, and we mess up, and we pick ourselves up and start over. If we’re lucky, we do some good in the world along the way.”

“Well, when you put it like that,” Emma said. Then she told him the rest—up to a point. The whys of what she did, as best as she understood it. She didn’t always understand the things she felt. She just felt them and tried to move forward.

“We closed up, and I walked out to the parking lot with Aaron,” she said. “I kissed him, and he kissed me.” She shook her head and f ixed her gaze on the mountains. “I should have known better. I did know better. I should have driven back to my apartment and curled up on the couch.”

“You went home with him,” Pete said, and Emma nodded, eyes still safely on the Sandia peaks.

“I . . . it felt easier to just give up, you know? Tell myself that Charlie was dead. After all this time, I mean. Or if he wasn’t then, why the hell not? He was the one who walked away f irst. Anyway, I’d move on soon, right? That’s what I always had to do.”

She paused, a lump forming in her throat, tears stinging her eyes. But she’d gone this far, so she might as well go all the way.

FOUR WEEKS LATER,
just after New Year’s Day, Emma realized she was pregnant.

Outside, the world kept turning. There was a light coating of frost on the ground and heavier snow on the mountaintop. Aaron Tinsley had just moved to Santa Fe for an internship with one of the state senators.

Emma carried her secret around for another two months, hiding it and cradling it like all the rest of her secrets, noticing with detached fear and awe the subtle changes in her belly and breasts. She imagined it was Charlie’s baby. A boy, she decided. He would be dark-haired, with tawny skin and when he got older, the high, etched cheekbones of his Calusa ancestors. Emma would tell him Frank Ryan’s stories. She would make him giggle and teach him to say,
“es verdad
,
”
because of all the ironies, this
was
true.

“I was such an idiot,” she said, and Pete shook his head.

“Not by half.”

“I knew it was Aaron’s, of course. I mean he was the only . . . oh hell, Pete. You know what I thought? I f igured I’d already made up so much of my life as I’d been going along, why not this?”

Already she was pondering contingency plans. Because how to explain things when the child was seventeen, and so was she?

But it seemed a miracle somehow. A thing to conquer the emptiness. A person to love.

Until the miracle was gone.

She told him the rest: Ten weeks into her pregnancy, the living thing inside her simply was reabsorbed into her body. She felt it rather than knew, but an eventual visit to the doctor proved her correct. There was no baby. No sign that there ever had been one. Her stomach f lattened; her breasts went back to normal. She was the same Emma O’Neill again—the same one she’d been and would always be.

That particular def ining truth had never hurt so much as that cold March day, when she left the clinic in Albuquerque.

“I’m positive, miss,” the doctor said on her way out. “The sonogram shows nothing. Is there a parent I can call to take you home?” He was matter-of-fact, cheerful, even. She realized he assumed she was young enough to be relieved.

There were many prices for her specif ic brand of immortality, and this was one of them. For the f irst time in all the years she had been alive, she wondered if Glen Walters and his followers were right in wanting to destroy her.

And now a new thought rose from deep inside Emma, dark and sad, one that changed her.

It was this: if any tiny particle of what kept her alive could bring back the baby that no longer curled inside her, she would gladly die to let it live.

She drove herself home from the doctor’s off ice, alone as always. She cried a little, watching the sea of university students milling on Central, winding in and out of stores and restaurants—all young and vibrant, all smiling and laughing.

Everyone wanted to live forever. Everyone was sure they would.

“THEY HAVE NO
idea,” Emma said to Pete when she was all f inished. “What it’s really like. To live forever.”

“Most people don’t,” Pete gently agreed.

Emma rubbed her hands together, feeling the warmth of the friction. “I keep thinking I should want to be done. But I never am. I’ve stopped trying to understand that part of it. I mean, how self ish is that? To want to stay in the world all these years? Even if I never f ind Charlie. Even when it’s painful. Even if I never get things right.”

Pete shrugged. “It’s human nature. We’re survivalists above all.”

It had not occurred to her.

Emma leaned back in her chair and smiled sadly at him. “Maybe I
am
just like everyone else.”

It was the most honest thing she’d said in a very long time—before or since.

Chapter Fifteen

Dallas, Texas

Present

The building management allowed Emma back into the apartment to get some clothes and whatever else she needed for the short term. Everything smelled vaguely like burned toast. Including her. The f ire had started in the kitchen of a recently vacated unit down the hall, so it was very lucky that someone—Emma had yet to learn who—had smelled the smoke. It could have been a lot worse.

Management also informed the residents that it would be best if everyone found somewhere else to stay for the night until the smoke and water damage could be dealt with.

“Nice digs, by the way,” Pete remarked. He elbowed open the glass doors in the lobby after collecting Emma’s things. “Other than the barbecue vibe.”

Emma harrumphed at him. It
was
a nice place. If you were here for eternity, you might as well be comfortable.

Pete didn’t know, but she’d kept her promise to her father in those last days and looked into the trust fund he’d set up through his lawyer, Abner Dunn. And although it had taken Emma a while to give in, eventually the practicality of eating and living had gotten the better of her. Besides, Abner Dunn was the model of discretion. As had been the lawyers who had taken over his practice upon his retirement, and the lawyers who’d taken over after
their
retirement—generations of quiet, plainspoken, intelligent men and women, all of a type. Lawyers who believed she was her own daughter and then her own granddaughter and on like that. The current one was named Thatcher Elliott. He’d asked Emma to call him Thatch.

Human beings
were
survivalists.
Es verdad
.

And along the way, the sheer act of survival had woken in Emma an ingenuity she never could have imagined back in St. Augustine. It had also hardened her and made her a girl that the old Emma would have barely recognized, appearances aside.