It Wasn't Always Like This (10 page)

Still, she had never stopped thinking that it really wasn’t.

“PETE,” EMMA HEARD
herself say now, “could you do a background check for me on a guy named Kingsley Lloyd?”

On Pete’s end there was silence. Did he even remember what she’d told him?

“That guy who told your father about the stream?” Pete said it almost indifferently, as though it were just an everyday thing to know someone who had drunk from a Fountain of Youth.

“That’s the one,” Emma said.

The world was getting smaller, had been for a while now. Hard to f ly under the radar when just a click of a mouse could unearth things that people barely remembered doing or saying. Kingsley Lloyd had disappeared long before that horrible last day in Florida. He wasn’t anyone to her, not family, not a friend. Just the man who’d given them the tea and thus someone she held responsible for all that came after that. Thinking about him was therefore not something Emma liked to do.

But now she wondered. What type of man would lead people to a Fountain of Youth and not sip from it himself? She hadn’t seen him drink that day in her family’s kitchen, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t, did it? And if she was pondering this—far too late, but still, she had nothing
but
time—then wasn’t it possible that Glen Walters and his followers and their descendants had pondered it, too?

And Charlie. If Charlie was out there—he
was
out there, alive, not dead, had to be—had
Charlie
wondered about Kingsley Lloyd? “He’s a con man,” Charlie had told her, “a charlatan, like you said. I don’t want you around him.” And she had bristled at him giving her orders because Charlie was not her father. But then they’d drunk that stupid tea from that stupid Fountain of Youth stream, and Lloyd had disappeared, and all of a sudden there were more dangerous things to worry about.

And then the danger came home to roost.

And then she’d been alone. And the years had passed as years do.

But what if—

“Em. Why are you researching a dead guy?”

Just barely, in the background, Emma thought she could hear him pecking in his signature two-f ingered way on his laptop keys. Pete was quite the fan of the Interwebs.

Emma cleared her throat, taking her time about it. Around her, the back end of the IKEA parking lot was f illing up. She blew out a breath. Immortality hadn’t made her brilliant, but she had her moments, few and far between.

“I think Kingsley Lloyd might not be dead,” she said f inally.

Chapter Eight

St. Augustine, Florida

1913–1914

Emma was thinking about kissing Charlie—something she found herself doing most of the time when she wasn’t actually kissing him—the moment everything in the universe changed again.

Shouting awoke her from her daydream—shouting about “purple f lowers.”

She was standing among the tomatoes and green beans and squash she was supposed to be tending. Kingsley Lloyd and Frank Ryan and her own father were running and whooping toward the house. She squinted at them. She knew they’d gone to the island to collect snakes and lizards; Kingsley Lloyd had suggested they start a new exhibit of smaller reptiles. Emma would always remember thinking in that instant,
Something must have happened, something serious.

“Where’s your mother?” her father gasped as the three men clattered through the gate. “Maura! Come outside!”

Emma glanced from one to the other. They’d returned too soon to have captured any new specimens, so why were they all in a tizzy? Even that ugly Mr. Lloyd, whom she tried to avoid as much as possible. She didn’t trust the way his bulging eyes looked past people in conversation, f ixed on some distant place. Or how he always seemed absolutely certain about
everything
he said. Emma liked to know things as much as the next person, but no one knew everything. She suspected that most of Mr. Lloyd’s facts were as true as Frank Ryan’s family stories. Not one bit.

“Look!” Her father waved a clump of purple f lowers in his hand. Mr. Lloyd was clutching a basketful of the stuff in his skinny arms.

“Can you believe it?” Frank Ryan asked. He turned to Kingsley Lloyd. “You’re a genius, sir. Brilliant!”

Emma’s mother emerged from the house. “What in the Sam Hill is going on here?”

“We thought we might f ind some iguanas by the pond in the center of the island,” her father said, talking a mile-a-minute. “You know how they love that pond.”

Mother shrugged. Emma had been there only once, so brief ly and so long ago now that she barely remembered. The island was not deemed safe for a girl. Charlie had been a few times, but he preferred the birds to the gators, mostly because his father preferred the opposite.

“Damn reptiles were hiding,” Mr. Ryan cut in. “Couldn’t f ind a single one. I told myself maybe we could capture a new gator instead, just so the trip wasn’t a waste. And then we saw the stream. I swear I’d never noticed it before.”

Here he rambled a bit—of course he did—about alligators and their territory and habits, and thankfully Emma’s father stopped him before he launched into some tale of his Montoya ancestors and their gator-hunting abilities.

“It was growing right at the edge,” Art O’Neill cried, sounding triumphant. “Normally they only grow in the Caribbean. But here they were. Right here in Florida!”

He turned to Mr. Lloyd.

Turned out that when given his turn, Kingsley Lloyd was as long-winded as Charlie’s father. More. Emma’s attention drifted during most of it, but she caught the essence: Lloyd’s grandmother was a natural healer. “Born poor,” he said. “When you’re born poor, you learn to make do. You pay attention to what’s around you. ‘Nature has everything we need,’ she always told me. You just need to know where to look and what you’re seeing.’”

It was a pretty neat trick, Emma realized: Like Mr. Ryan, Kingsley Lloyd swore by the advice of a woman long dead. That way no one could argue with him. Once you molded your long dead relatives’ stories into fact, you could make anything sound true.

“Science is proving her right,” Mr. Lloyd went on, his raspy voice booming with enthusiasm. “And if she was here, she would tell us that the quickest and best way to avoid contracting polio is to drink a brew made from these plants.”

Emma rolled her eyes, but she could feel the fear of polio just the same as everyone else around here, feel it like you could feel the St. Augustine heat or smell the salt. And not just in Florida. The newspapers regularly reported cases all over, even back in Brooklyn. Epidemics they called it. There was no cure.

“So you see,” Emma’s father f inished, “we’re going to steep a tea from the ground leaves of the plant and drink it, and all of you—all of
us
—will be immune to getting sick. It’s a miracle, I tell you.”

By this time Charlie’s mother had joined them. She exchanged a wary glance with Emma’s mother. But Mr. Lloyd was grinning like he’d won a pot of gold. Did he think he could make money from this potion or whatever it was? She bet he did. How could her parents be so naïve?

“You’re a good man, O’Neill,” he said. Lloyd clapped his hands together, then gave them a little shake. “You, too, Ryan. Protecting your families.”

Emma wondered what Charlie would have to say about this. She already knew what he thought of Mr. Kingsley Lloyd. The man was a con artist. A charlatan.

THE TEA SMELLED
like f lowers. Well, f lowers mixed with mud and salt and something that left a sharp, dark bitterness in her throat just from sniff ing the cup. She wouldn’t have even called it “tea.” It was more like the same homegrown medicine everyone else drank to save themselves from polio and other diseases. That’s
exactly
what it was, in fact.

“Drink it all,” her father told them. “Every drop.”

Emma wrinkled her nose. At the stove, bow-legged Kingsley Lloyd stirred the muddy liquid before ladling it into each of the other cups with his squat, stubby-f ingered hand. On the other side of the O’Neill’s kitchen, clutching his own cup, Charlie waggled a brow at her. Then he cast his gaze swiftly toward Mr. Lloyd. He made a deep “er, er” sound in the back of his throat.

A
frog
sound. Emma giggled.

“Es verdad,”
Charlie said in a low voice. She laughed, so hard she almost spilled her portion of the smelly stuff.

“What did you say?” Frank Ryan asked with a sour scowl.

“I was thinking of Great-Grandma Ester,” Charlie said. “Did she have a family story about magical tea?”

At the stove, Kingsley Lloyd’s mottled-looking face turned a dark shade of red. “It’s not magic, boy,” he said. “It’s science.” But there was something in his tone that made Emma sure he was lying. Except what kind of lie was that?

“I’m not a boy,” Charlie said. The teasing was gone from his voice.

“Charlie,” his mother began.

Mr. Ryan cast a long, hard look at his oldest son. “No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re a man. Start acting like one.”

“I will,” Charlie replied, strong and f irm. “I’ll make my own choices, too.”

Emma held her breath. The laughter threatening to bubble inside her died down. She could feel her own father’s eyes on her, probably her mother’s too, but Emma kept her gaze on Charlie. His eyes locked on hers, and then he raised his cup to his lips.

Emma felt a smile creep across her own. She realized that he was not giving in. He was doing what he promised his father he would do. He was making a choice.

Charlie drank, downing the whole cup at once. She watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.
Charlie
. Her Charlie. That kiss had reimagined her, reimagined both of them. She was his and he was hers, and she wanted him in ways she hadn’t understood she could want. Every day there was some new revelation: He had a tiny freckle on the tip of his left earlobe she had never noticed before. If he hadn’t shaved, if the sun hit his jaw just right, some of his dark stubble turned auburn. He was ticklish at his ankles, and if she wrapped her hand around one, he shivered and laughed.

Emma lifted her cup and drank the liquid to the dregs—not because her father had commanded, not because her parents had been walking about with pinched faces for days talking about sickness, more intensely since they’d heard that ridiculous message of doom from Preacher Walters—but because Charlie Ryan had shown her that she, too, could still own the choice to obey.

MUCH LATER, AFTER
everything had changed forever and there was nothing Emma could do but keep living, it occurred to her that Kingsley Lloyd had been the only of them she hadn’t seen swallow the drink. Maybe he never thought the tea would work. Or maybe he was afraid it
would.
Maybe he waited for them to drink f irst because he already suspected what the plant was, what it could do to those who consumed it. Maybe he was in shock that he might have actually found the thing of legends.

On the other hand, it was entirely possible that Kingsley Lloyd did not have a clue what he’d actually found until after it was all done and they were stuck with it.

Either way, he was right about one thing. None of them contracted polio.

SIMON WAS THE
f irst to catch their eyes.

1913 turned to 1914, but nobody understood yet that they were no longer aging, not any O’Neill or Ryan. The problem was that Simon O’Neill was two. He was a chubby little thing, toddling around in diapers, still waiting for his second molars to come in. And he’d been that same chubby little thing for almost a year, even though he was soon to turn three. He should
have been growing. Maturing from toddler to little boy. Instead, he was
exactly, precisely
a two-year-old. Endlessly asking “why.” Banging on his toy drum. Crying when he didn’t get his way. Frozen in some perpetual state of miniature-drunk-man neediness.

“Every baby is different,” Emma’s mother said over and over.

Emma knew enough about authenticity at this point to know that Mother didn’t believe her own words. Mother knew something was
very wrong.

But no one would admit it.

Not until the day that Kingsley Lloyd, having just returned from the swamps on one of his herpetology expeditions, shambled into the Alligator Farm and Museum gift shop. Emma had been looking at Charlie’s watch, but when she saw Lloyd staring at it, she snapped the case shut and jammed the heavy thing in her pocket. The pocket watch with its birds was between Charlie and her. Kingsley Lloyd did not need to know about it.

He leaned against the counter, studying Emma with his bug eyes. She couldn’t put her f inger on it, but he didn’t look quite as sick as he’d looked before. He wasn’t shaky or sweaty, although his skin was still pasty and his eyes rheumy. But looking almost imperceptibly healthier didn’t make him any less peculiar. If anything, his gaze was more intense.

Was he going to ask for lemonade? He usually did, though why he insisted on drinking it here, which inevitably cleared the shop of costumers, was as much a mystery as anything else about him. There was just something about the careful, exacting way he stared at her—at everything and everyone, even more, she thought, since he convinced them to drink that tea—that made her skin crawl.