It Wasn't Always Like This - Joy Preble Page 0,31

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,