The Last Forever (31 page)
Authors: Deb Caletti
It is so, so cold, and this happens so, so fast, but I shut my eyes and I imagine her face before I hand over Pix’s seeds. Her hair is in a ponytail, and she is in shorts and a tank top, her shoulders bare. She is laughing. Her eyes dance, and she is happy.
“Forever?” I say. I can barely speak, from frigid air and because my heart is in my throat.
Even to-the-point Anders’s face softens. “As close as you can get,” he says.
We hurry out. Doors and hallways and doors and tunnels.
We are quickly back on the icy floor leading outside. It feels nearly warm out there after the vault. Anders is busy shutting and locking and closing things up. My father turns to me. He has ice crystals on his cheeks, and when I raise my hand to my own, there is ice on my glove.
“It’s done,” I say.
And then he takes me in his puffy, layered arms. He says the only thing that matters. “She would be so proud of you.”
chapter twenty-five
Anastatica hierochuntica
: rose of Jericho. This is the most famous of the plants known as Resurrection Plants. After the rainy season, this plant dries up and curls into a tight ball. It looks dead. Within the ball, though, the fruits remain attached and closed, protecting the seeds within. With a little rain, even months or years and years later, the ball uncurls and the plant wakes up. The fruits open, the seeds drop to the ground near the parent, and the plant appears to come back to life. The seeds can begin to grow within hours.
Back home in San Bernardino, February turns to March and March to April. I stand at our kitchen counter, looking out the window where Pix used to sit. The lemon tree is flowering again. Still.
“I feel like this life is over,” I say to my father. He is leaning in the doorway. It hurts me to say it. It feels like something is ripping when I do. But all through these months, we keep bumping into the truth of it.
“I know. Me too.”
“We should just—”
We’ve had this conversation a few times already. “You know that’s not an option. You’re graduating in a few months. We can’t just pick up and leave.”
“We can’t?”
“No.”
“Why?”
He sets his own face in a frame using his index fingers and thumbs. “Thomas Was Finally Tired of Fucked-Up Choices.”
* * *
Jenny sends me a package with an application for the University of Washington. Sasha calls to tell me that the Parrish Island Library expects a photo-filled talk about our trip to the vault and that Larry has already started the sign-up sheet. And Henry sends me another postcard. It’s got a picture of some old composer on it, a guy with wavy white hair and a hooked nose. On the back, Henry has written,
Hope you’ll be Bach soon. Your LLS* (*Long-Lost Sibling).
I send him a postcard with a different old composer on it.
Making a Liszt of all the reasons to return. Love, Sis. PS, Mom likes me best.
April turns to May. May turns to June. Finally, I take the seed from Pix that I saved and I plant it. I follow the germination directions in Chapter One: “Prevention Is a Good Start” in
How to Keep Almost Any Plant Alive
by Dr. Lester Frank. I use the best soil. I give only the right amount of water after I tap it into the dirt. It means something to me to have this new
plant begin its life here, where we will end our old one. The pot, Grandfather Leopold’s pot, my mother’s pot, mine, sits on our old windowsill where there is plenty of light. A new green shoot rises from the ground.
My father packs my mother’s clothes into boxes. We pack our dishes and the contents of our cupboards and closets. I toss out my old project, Fort San Bernardino, where three feet equals one and a quarter inches. Dad and I don’t have long conversations about any of this. We just put on old
I Dream of Jeannie
shows and wrap cups in newspaper, both heading in the same direction.
And then June arrives. It is the day of graduation. There are purple gowns everywhere, and hugs, and tears, and bad band music and sappy speeches. I say good-bye to Caitlin and C.J., and even Dillon, but most especially Meg. We hug and cry a little and I thank her for being there for me, always. The minute I am back home, I toss my mortarboard on the kitchen table, which will head to storage with the rest of our furniture. There are roots, and then there are all the new directions they grow.
I look at my father. He barely has his dress-up jacket off. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. “Want to do it? Want to just fucking do it?” I say.
He smiles.
I imagine it: the drive across two states, the trip onto the ferry, the arrival on Parrish Island, our new home. Jenny will open the door wearing her paint-stained tennis shoes, holding
out her old arms to greet us, as Vito jumps and jumps and barks so happily, you’d think we were made of bacon.
The first chance I get, I will set
How to Keep Almost Any Plant Alive
by Dr. Lester Frank in the basket of Jenny’s bike and return it to the Parrish Island Library. I will have the compass in my pocket, the compass that has made the trip to Svalbard. I will hold it out to Henry in my palm, because I love Henry Lark. Oh, I do, and I always will.
True love, the good, beautiful, one-and-only kind, the kind between loving friends and family and partners who are mostly just trying hard to do their best, it manages to overlook some pieces of its story. It overlooks what he can’t give you or how she failed you or what mistakes he made when he was struggling. It stays steady at its center. It evolves, through drought and storm. It grows. It
survives
. There
are
things that last. Seeds in vaults in frozen mountains at the edge of the earth, but love, too. Real love does. It lasts beyond death, and it lasts beyond disappointment and misguided expectations and mutual shame and mistakes.
I will hold out the compass and Henry will take it, and then we will begin a friendship where he is there for me and I am there for him through joy and pain, and fullness and emptiness, and highs and lows, tide in, tide out, for years and years to come.
But we are not at that part of the story yet. We are at the part where my father has the map in his teeth, even though the trip we are taking now is too large and long to ever measure the distance of. We are at the part where my father is now
wearing his lucky Grateful Dead shirt as he puts the last of the boxes into the pickup and where I take my mother’s shoe from the empty closet and tie the new pixiebell plant into it snugly.
In a few moments, I’m in the passenger side of Dad’s truck, and just like that, we’re heading out of the gravel driveway, away from our house and everything around it, our scratchy tan lawn, the neighbor’s dog, Bob, who always stands at the corner and watches traffic.
“Adios, Bob,” I say out the open window.
“Bob, may this good life bring you everything you deserve,” my father says.
DEB
CALETTI
is the award-winning author of
The Queen of Everything; Honey, Baby, Sweetheart;
and
The Nature of Jade,
among others, as well as the adult novel
He’s Gone.
In addition to being a National Book Award finalist, Deb’s work has gained other distinguished recognition, including the PNBA Best Book Award, the Washington State Book Award, and
School Library Journal’s
Best Book award, as well as finalist citations for the California Young Reader Medal and the PEN USA Literary Award. She lives with her family in Seattle. You can visit her at
debcaletti.com
and become a fan on Facebook.
SIMON
PULSE
Simon & Schuster, New York
authors.simonandschuster.com/Deb-Caletti
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Also by Deb Caletti
The Queen of Everything
Honey, Baby, Sweetheart
Wild Roses
The Nature of Jade
The Fortunes of Indigo Skye
The Secret Life of Prince Charming
The Six Rules of Maybe
Stay
The Story of Us
And don’t miss
He’s Gone
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Simon Pulse hardcover edition April 2014
Text copyright © 2014 by Deb Caletti
Jacket designed by Regina Flath
Author photograph copyright © 2012 by Jason Teeples
Jacket photograph copyright © 2014 by Diane Kerpan/Arcangel Images
Book design by Regina Flath
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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The text of this book was set in Adobe Caslon Pro.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Caletti, Deb.
The last forever / Deb Caletti. — First Simon Pulse hardcover edition.
p. cm.
Summary: After her mother’s death, it’s all Tessa can do to keep her friends, her boyfriend, her happiness from slipping away. Even the rare plant her mother entrusted to her care starts to wilt. Then she meets Henry. Though secrets stand between them, each has a chance at healing . . . if first, Tessa can find the courage to believe in forever.
ISBN 978-1-4424-5000-4
[1. Grief—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Love—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.C127437Las 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013031010
ISBN 978-1-4424-5001-1 (eBook)
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