The Last Forever

For John, always

acknowledgments

Pages upon pages of appreciation to my longtime agent and cherished sidekick, Ben Camardi, and to Annette Pollert, for her kindness, care, and thoughtful editing of this book. Big hugs as well to Jen Klonsky and Shauna Summers, my treasured editors and dear friends. So lucky to have you all.

My most heartfelt thanks as well go to my S&S team: Jon Anderson, Bethany Buck, Mara Anastas, Paul Crichton, Lydia Finn, Lucille Rettino, Michelle Fadlalla, Venessa Carson, Anthony Parisi (and Ginger), Ebony Ladelle, Jessica Handelman, Regina Flath, Katherine Devendorf, Julie Doebler, Carolyn Swerdloff, Emma Sector, Matt Pantoliano (and sons), and my sales force, most especially my dear Leah Hays and Victor Iannone. Your years of support and hard work on behalf of our books means more than I can say.

Oh, family—thank you, as always. Mom and Dad, Jan, Sue, Mitch, Ty, and Hunter, smooches of appreciation. Renata, here’s to another thirty-eight years. And to my daughter, Sam, and my son, Nick—you two sweeties have my last-forever love.

chapter one

Silene steophylla
: narrow-leafed campion. Seeds from this delicate, white-flowered plant were found in a prehistoric rodent burrow in the Siberian permafrost. Scientists were able to successfully grow them, making these twenty-three-thousand-year-old seeds the oldest living ones ever discovered.

In those early months, when the beautiful and mysterious Henry Lark and I began to do all that reading, I often skimmed over the name.
Svalbard.
I’d see all those consonants shoved together and my brain would shut off. I thought it sounded like a Tolkien bad guy, or a word that might cast a spell. Here’s what I suggest—don’t even try to pronounce it. Just imagine it. I love to imagine it: a hidden building, a narrow wedge of black steel jutting from the ice. When I close my eyes, I see its long, rectangular windows—one on the roof, one at the entrance—a beacon of prisms glowing green in the deep twilight of the polar night. Fenced in and guarded, with steel airlock doors and motion detectors, it is
the most protected place on earth. Outside, polar bears stomp and huff in the frigid air.

Or imagine this: that first monumental day of excavation, when the mayor of Longyearbyen, Kjell Mork, stood on the chosen spot with a fuse in his hand, ready to blast open the side of a frozen mountain.
Longyearbyen, Kjell Mork
—more Tolkien words, and Kjell Mork himself looks like a Tolkien king, with his snowy white hair and full blizzard of beard, the ceremonial chain of silver discs around his neck, representing his people and his place. Okay, he’s also wearing a blue hard hat and an orange construction vest, which would never work in the film version. But that fuse burning down, it would. He looks grim but determined in the pictures.

It all sounds like a fantasy novel, but it’s real. As I write this right now, as you read this, that place is there, tucked inside that mountain. As I pour my cereal or shove my books into my backpack, as you pay the cashier at the drive-through window or stare at the moon, it’s there. And it’s all—the guards, the buried chambers, the subzero temperatures—in service of the most simple, regular thing: a seed. Actually, a lot of seeds. Three million seeds. That’s what it’s for. To protect seeds in the event of a global catastrophe. To make sure that, even if there’s a nuclear war or an epidemic or a natural disaster, even if the cooling systems within Svalbard itself are destroyed, the seeds will survive for thousands upon thousands of years.

What should never be forgotten is this: Even when times are dark, the darkest, even when you are sure that life as you
know it is over, there are still things that last. I learned that. Henry Lark and I both did. You may not be able to see those things. They may be hidden deep under the ground, or they may be tucked even deeper into your heart, but they are there.

And how did I, a regular person, as regular as those seeds themselves, become connected to a frozen vault 3,585.1 miles from home? (5,769.7 kilometers and seven hours and twenty-seven minutes away by plane, to be exact.) You never know what life will bring; you never do. It’s something my mother always said. In good times and in the worst times she said that, and she was right. We—that vault and me—we’re an unlikely pair. There is that land of wintry wildness and midnight sun and the eerie blue of polar nights and then there’s me, a person who chops her bangs and reads too much. But I am now forever connected to this most brave and defiant place.

How
and
why
is what this story is about.
Here
to
there
.
Here
to
there
is where all the stories are.
Here
to
there
is the sometimes barren land you must cross to find the way to begin again.

chapter two

Mucuna pruriens
: velvet bean. One of the most irritating, confusing, multifaceted, and helpful seeds ever. The velvet bean can be deadly if eaten, but it’s often used as a food source for animals and a coffee substitute for humans. It causes terrible itching upon contact, but it’s also medicinal—supposedly curing sexual dysfunction, snakebites, Parkinson’s disease, and depression. Sometimes it’s smoked for its psychedelic effects. As a whole, if this seed were a person, it’d feed you, cure you, kill you, or drive you crazy.

Let’s start here. The papers my father uses. They come in an orange envelope, and they’re called Zig-Zag. There’s a picture of a man on the package—he looks like Jesus if Jesus got a good haircut and trimmed his beard. Step one: Take out a paper and lay it on the table, sticky side up. Step two: Curl a tiny piece of cardboard into a cylinder. Step three: Lay the “weed” onto the paper in a line. (“Weed,” which is what he calls it, makes it sound unplanned. Like it just happened to appear in his yard,
so what’s a person to do?) Step four: Pinch, roll, and then lick the end down.

Dad pats his jeans, then the chest of his T-shirt, where the pockets would be if it had pockets. “Okay, where’d you go?” he says, as if his lighter is prone to practical jokes. Dad hunts around in the Folgers can by the telephone, which has a bunch of spare change in it, and then he fishes through the junk drawer—out comes masking tape and loose batteries. Now out comes a screwdriver, a key chain that says
I SHOWER NAKED
, a mini Magic 8 Ball, and farther back, the manual to an Osterizer blender we don’t have anymore. You get the picture of Mom and Dad right there in that drawer. Mom, the fixer of things, the saver of instructions, part-time office manager for Dr. Ned Kelly, DDS, and Dad, the guy who’ll take a glowy green triangle at its word.
It is certain.
Shake again.
My sources say no.

Dad’s black-gray hair is in a ponytail, and, hey, that’s one of my elastic bands. He’s been wearing that same shirt for days. My father would say he’s been adrift since my mother died, but she and I would both argue that point. He’s always been adrift. I think my mom blamed Dad’s own mother, Grandma Jenny. Something about how Grandma Jenny used to do his homework for him, which saved him from “the consequences of his actions.”

“O-kay,” Dad says. He’s found another lighter. It’s a fast-food yellow, the shade of one of those plastic lemons with the juice inside. He holds it in the air in triumph, then
flick-flick-flicks the metal wheel with his thumb a few times before a flame appears. “Man make fire,” he says in a caveman voice. “Man make fire, hunt bear, smoke joint.”

I know what he’ll do next, and sure enough, he goes into the living room and the rocking chair begins to creak. Sometimes he just sits there, and sometimes he puts Bob Marley on the stereo (a cliché, dear Dad), and sometimes he just stares at the news or old reruns of
I Dream of Jeannie
, which he says he loved as a kid, with Major Healey and the jeweled bottle with the pink smoke, from the time when people knew the names of astronauts.

I think he’s depressed. Depressed and trying to hide it. He doesn’t hide it well. He watches entirely too much television, for one thing. I hear him flip through channels—
A fifty-dollar value for . . . After severe weather pounded these parts . . . The island is a stop along an ocean-wide migra . . . Difficult or painful swallowing, headaches, stomachaches . . .
I put everything he’s left on the counter back in the drawer; then I start dinner. Mac and cheese, hot dogs. Fill both pans with two-thirds of a cup of water, and when the noodles are done, it’s one-quarter cup of margarine and one-quarter cup of milk and the package of cheese dust.

I hate it when he’s hazy; I hate the unfocused eyes. It makes me get that middle-of-the-night feeling, when you wake up and lie there in bed, sure you hear a sound when you probably don’t hear a sound.

“Ah, excellent! Thanks, babe,” he says, when I bring him dinner.

“Catch,” I say, and toss him his lost lighter, his favorite, the one with the picture of the two dolphins leaping from the sea, which I found in the silverware drawer.

“There it is!” He tucks it into the pocket of his jeans. “Hey, I just remembered. I heard something about dolphins today. Some scientist discovered that they give each other
names
.”

“Wow.” That is so cool. I love that idea. “How did they figure that out?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t hear the whole thing. What do you think they call each other?”

“Bart?” I suggest. I chuckle. Sometimes I crack myself up.

“Gino the Nose. Jimmy ‘Big Fin’ Balducci.”

We laugh. I should also say how much I love this guy, my father. I love him to bursting. My mom did too. “And Flipper is the common name, like John,” I say.

“You gonna eat with me?” He’s already shoveling it in.

“I’ve got homework. All the stuff they pile on at the end of the year.”

“You work too hard; you know that? Life is short.”

He realizes what he says. We catch eyes for a second, and there’s this awkwardness in the room. I wade through it to get to the doorway. I feel guilty leaving. My whole back, now turned to him, is crawling with guilt. You’d think that someone dying would draw people closer, but it doesn’t work like that. Or else, it didn’t work that way for us. What happened over the last six months is too intimate and important, and now neither of us knows what to do with it all. What
is unspoken between people—it has a life of its own, I’ll tell you that much. It’s like some wild animal cub you find orphaned in the woods. The mistake is bringing it home at all, because of course it’s going to grow. Of course it’s going to get bigger and fiercer than you first think, looking at its harmless little face.

*  *  *

My bowl of mac and cheese is on my desk, and so is my laptop, and of course, the last pixiebell, with its delicate, clover-shaped leaves and its sturdy stalk rising from its terra-cotta pot glazed blue. Right away, I think of doing what I would have always done in the past (something I was excellent at: procrastination), calling Meg, my oldest best friend, talking for twenty minutes about nothing, her new shoes, what she heard Jessie say in the bathroom.
Next year when we’re seniors we’re gonna . . .
Or I could call Caitlin, who recently went on one of those trips to Costa Rica, the tree-planting/shelter-building-type trip everyone goes on now, to some country with bad water and patchy Wi-Fi that makes all of them, including Caitlin, come home changed and with a new worldview. At least, they stop dyeing their hair and getting pedicures for a couple of months before everything goes back to being exactly as it was before. Sorry. I’m so negative sometimes. Planting trees is a good thing.

I also think of calling Dillon Moore, who I am sort of seeing. We kiss a lot, anyway, which is interesting, but truthfully, a kiss needs something more important than curiosity. A kiss
needs desire. A kiss should rocket past the excitement level of eating lettuce. I’m terrible. I am. I care about Dillon.

I don’t call anyone, though, because a loved person dying can make you feel distant from everyone, not just the person who’s gone. There’s grief and then there’s the loneliness of grief. The way it’s just yours and yours alone. After six months, the excitement of it is over for everyone else. They’re ready to move on from being the supportive, understanding friends, which is fine—God, more-more-more than fine—but nothing about it is over for you. It’s just getting started. You have gone on a long trip, the longest, and the water is very, very bad, but when you come back, the change is permanent.

I can hear Dad in the living room. It’s not old
I Dream of Jeannie
reruns, but
Gilligan’s Island
. There’s the disgusted voice of Skipper:
Gilligan, you idiot!
and the capable tones of the professor, who after all these years is still trying to make a phone from a coconut. “Fuck, man,” Dad says, and laughs. In this story—well, pardon my father’s bad mouth. I sincerely apologize. I’m not responsible for him. He’s not responsible for him either, but I believe we’ve covered this already.