by Deb Caletti
“San Juan Islands,” I say.
“Parrish,” he says.
At the sound of the word, I know there’s something familiar about it. It’s not just a name I’ve heard before; it’s deeper than that. It’s felt, like a memory. A far in and distant memory. Maybe I’ve spent too many hours in that truck, or maybe the wandering has scrambled my head, but the answer doesn’t come to me at first. It doesn’t come to me when the ferry passes the silent mounds of islands and deep-green bays, or when we disembark, or when we begin making our way through the winding road of evergreens.
But then there is the mailbox, and on it, one name: Sedgewick. My father’s name. My name. And the way the mailbox tilts toward the gravel road, that gate up ahead, that white house with flowers all around, it all tells me one thing.
I’ve been here before.
“Home.” Dad announces it as if it’s a fact. That’s not how it feels to me, though. I’m nervous. Because, of course, Parrish Island is where Grandma Jenny, my father’s mother, who he—we—haven’t seen in years, lives. Why we are here right now I have no idea.
But there are lots of things I don’t know about this place. Not yet, anyway. I don’t know that Parrish Island has always been a corner of the world where lost people go to be found. I don’t know that its warm, red clay soil is said to be magic and its deep waters healing. And I don’t yet know that this expanse of sparkling coves with their slumbering whales is the one and only home of my first true love.
chapter five
Reseda odorata: sweet mignonette. The seed of this plant is sneaky and self-serving. It’s hidden inside a delicious fruit, which mice gather in their little cheeks, and then run off to faraway corners to enjoy it. As soon as the mouse bites into the tasty, sweet fruit, though, the seeds inside release a mustard bomb—literally, they taste like Grey Poupon—causing the mice to spit out the seeds. A dirty trick has been played on the mouse so that the seeds can have a new home.
That vault. The seed vault in the frozen archipelago of Svalbard . . . The nearest town is Longyearbyen. Do you know what’s even more perfect than the fact that Longyearbyen is home to a vault where everything in it is meant to last forever? Death is forbidden there. It’s against the law. Yes, in that protective place, you’re not allowed to die. This came about during the influenza pandemic of 1917 to 1920. Since the victims’ bodies did not decompose in those freezing temperatures, the virus inside them stayed alive. So the officials there made a bold move. They simply declared that dying was not permitted in town. It still isn’t. The cemetery has banned funerals, and anyone who is deathly ill must be shipped to the mainland.
This vault, buried in the side of a frozen mountain, is not only the protected location of what may one day be 2.25 billion seeds; it is a place where the town’s leaders have said the one thing that’s needed saying for years: Dying is wrong.
I love that. I love that so much. That place is—well, I know because I’ve seen it—a mystical place.
But we’re not at that part of the story yet. I am not huffing air so cold it burns my lungs and freezes my own tears to my cheeks. No, we’re at the part of the story where my grandmother, Jenny Sedgewick, comes outside to greet us as we arrive. She is carrying a small dog under one arm. She doesn’t look how grandmas are supposed to look. Meg’s grandma is the round, white-haired kind who sends Christmas pajamas every year, and so is Caitlin’s, who I see at every orchestra concert. Still, my grandmotherly knowledge is on the slim side. My mother’s mother died before I was born (long before even Grandfather Sully passed away), and Jenny wasn’t in the picture. It was never clear why there was this thing between my parents and Jenny. The few times I asked, my mother’s mouth would get tight, and she’d say something like, I did all I could or No one would be good enough for your dad. Of course, you stop asking. If I ever pictured Grandma Jenny, I probably thought she had fangs by how the mood would shift whenever her name came up. But today she’s smiling, completely fangless. She has gray hair cut short and stylish, and she’s wearing jeans that have paint on them, a big white shirt, and silver earrings. She’s at the car even before my father turns off the engine.
“Vito,” my father says. “You’re still alive.”
The stupid thought that crosses my mind is that it’s a funny nickname for your mother. But then the little dog starts squirming with excitement. He’s wagging his tail so hard at the sight of Dad, you’d think they were twins separated at birth.
“He remembers you,” Jenny says. I decide to call her Jenny, not Grandma, Gram, Nana, whatever, out of some kind of loyalty to my mom. If she had some kind of bad feelings toward this woman, it is my duty to have them too, same as I have her wedding ring and her photos and the pixiebell. Jenny looks harmless enough, but I know and trust my mother. She had good judgment about people.
Well, she could also hold a grudge. Even years later, Mom never had a nice thing to say about Jessica Sims after she stole the jump rope I bought with my own money in the second grade. When Jessica and I started hanging out in high school, Mom still brought up the Jump Rope Incident as a reason to Just Be Careful.
My father scruffs Vito’s little head. “The little bastard stole that chicken I bought, remember? He sees me and thinks ‘meat.’ No wonder he’s happy to see me.”
Jenny heads over to me, arms outstretched. But I am doing the math. I thought the last time we were here was when I was two, so either this is the oldest living dog, or there’s even more about my father that I don’t know.
“And look!” Jenny is beaming, as if my father has brought her an unexpected gift. “My God, you’re a young woman! You look just like your mother.”
I smile, because I don’t know what to say to this. I want to say thank you, because my mother is (was) really pretty, with her brown hair and blue eyes and her pointed chin and the kind of nose popular girls have. I always thought I had my father’s nose. When I look at Jenny, I see that she has it too.
“I can’t believe you’re here.” She hugs me, kisses my cheek. We have the same blood, shared DNA going back centuries, but I don’t feel a thing. She could be a lady who works at Safeway.
Vito has squirmed his way down and is jumping around on our legs. “He’s a Jack Russell, so you know what that means,” Jenny says.
I don’t know what that means.
“You can’t trust him for two seconds,” Dad explains.
“He looks so sweet,” I say.
“He ate my leather belt,” my father says.
“Your father made that thing in the seventh grade. Thomas, it was time to give it up. It had peace signs on it. Vito was doing you a fashion favor.”
Jenny’s eyes are warm and twinkly. She ushers us in. It’s kind of a grandmotherly cliché, but she actually has some homemade bread sitting on the counter. There’s a nice block of butter sitting on a dish too. It’s my most favorite food on earth—warm bread and butter—and so if Jenny’s a bad person, she’s just lured me in with my own particular poison apple.
Jenny takes more food out of her fridge. Cartons of juice; dishes of fat, red grapes. From the outside, her house looks old, with its white porch and wicker chairs. But inside, it’s actually modern. Large, abstract canvases hang on the walls, and the kitchen table is made out of a wide antique door. There’s even a doorknob. I set my hand on it. It sort of compels you to.
“You working?” My father points to her shirt.
“Not today. I was too excited after you called. Everything I own just has paint . . .” She pinches her shirt, looks apologetic.
She’s an artist. I never knew that. Why I never knew that is another question altogether. Still, grandmothers as artists—it is an innovative grandmotherly image I’d never considered before.
She is foisting food on us, and let’s just say I’m not the kind of toothpick-thin girl who refuses butter in exchange for a lettuce leaf. My father, too, is eating like he’s been stranded at sea for weeks. “Tell me,” she says. She looks at me intently.
“Everything.”
It’s hard to know what to say to this. Everything? Well, I was born, and then they dressed me in pink dresses, which is the last time I wore those, and then a panda outfit, same. How to cover the last seventeen years? I’m feeling oddly shy. I look around the kitchen and get a déjà vu feeling at the sight of that cookie jar and at the canisters that look like chefs.
“I am so sorry about Anna.”
Of course, that’s what people say, and there’s no real response to that either. Sorry begs for forgiveness, and death doesn’t deserve it.
“We’re doing okay,” my father says. This is such a lie. His voice even wobbles when he says it. His voice barely ever wobbles, and I’ve seen him do the huge, heaving sobs only twice. That said, you should know in advance that this is not some story where he learns to let out his feelings and we have the film version moment where we cry together in our shared loss. People have their own way of getting through things, and that’s that.
“Tessa, I haven’t seen you since you were this high,” Jenny says, and lets her hand hover near her knees. Vito thinks he’s getting something to eat and sniffs her fingers.
“It’s been a long time,” I say to be polite.
“I bet you don’t even remember,” my father says.
There is an awkward silence where they rehash years of family hurts and dramas in their respective heads, as I feel ashamed for all the wrongdoings I don’t even know about.
“Well,” Jenny says. It’s a little huffy, but ends the silent rehashing. She stands. “Let me show you around.”
She points out various places—her studio, which can be seen out the back window; bathrooms; laundry; and then, upstairs, a small bedroom. This is where she leaves me to “rest up.” I don’t really need to rest up, but okay. I think she probably wants to talk to Dad alone.
There is a towel on the bed, with a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo. It looks like we’re staying, and apparently it has already been discussed. I don’t know how I feel about this. I miss my own room, if not my own life, but I also sort of love this room. It’s a white and blue alcove, and it smells a little like lavender, and the bed has a quilt on it, and the floor has a great, thick white rectangular rug. I get excited for a minute, because there’s a bookshelf. I’m down to the last pages of my last book, which qualifies as a reading crisis, but there are only art books and Emerson and some poetry.
It hits me. The pixiebell. I left Pix inside the truck. I’m an idiot. I’m as bad as the people who leave their dogs and babies in hot cars with the windows rolled down a crack. I sneak past my father and Jenny in the living room, because they are talking quietly. The long, awkward silence we all were so lucky to share earlier only means that big, hard words are waiting behind temporarily shut doors, and I don’t particularly want to be around when they open.
I turn the doorknob oh so slowly and head outside to get Pix. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but it doesn’t look that great. It looks a little limp. I am on the front porch again, holding the plant in my mother’s shoe, when I hear my father’s voice rise. I can’t make out what he’s saying. I only know that he’s getting loud. This is how he talked to the TV all those years that George Bush was president. I don’t want to go back in now, so I just sit down right there, holding the last pixiebell and trying to listen in.
I hear You can’t just go— and I’m not! You said you’d do—And then, some idiot starts a lawn mower and I can’t hear anything, except You and Go repeated a lot by both of them.
I consider my options. I am seriously thinking about getting his keys and driving myself home. I imagine this in my head, and it’s kind of great. The music is on in the truck, and I’m checking in to one of those places that has a restaurant connected to it, a Denny’s or something, and I’m turning on the motel TV and kicking off my shoes and loving being alone, forgetting that driving Dad’s truck is like trying to drive an office building, and that one night at a motel would practically wipe out my bank account. I’m happily flipping through channels on my Mental Motel’s remote control when this boy rides up on a bike. He’s got white-blond hair, and he’s wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and for some reason, even though it’s sunny, he’s got this scarf around his neck. I’d have made fun of it back home because it looks like he’s a guy in a perfume ad, but honestly, the scarf looks fashionable, and so do the shoes he has, these checked sneakers. He’s got a leather messenger bag worn crossways over his chest, and there’s a long scroll sticking from it.
He’s in a hurry, obviously, because he ditches his bike on Jenny’s lawn and doesn’t even notice me at first. But then he sees my father’s truck, and then me, and he stops.
“I’m just going to drop . . .” He points to the scroll and then to the backyard.
“Fine by me,” I say.
He jogs around to the back. After a few minutes, he reappears.
“Is Jenny . . .” He hasn’t spoken a complete sentence yet.
“Inside.”
“Are you . . . new?”
“I’m her granddaughter.”
“Oh. I didn’t know she had one.” He holds his hand out. It seems like a formal thing to do, private schoolish, but it fits him.
I set the pixiebell on the step and shake. “Tess,” I say.
“Elijah. I’m one of her students,” he says.
“Oh.” I’m taking in his pretty features—the perfect cheekbones and the elegant manners—and I’m obviously unable to do that and speak at the same time. My brain freezes. I search around for something to say, but I’m falling out of a conversational airplane without a parachute, and there’s nothing to do but crash in an ugly splat of silence. “Cool.”
“You going to be around?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Okay.” He waits for something more from me, but I’ve been struck dumb. I’m sure I’ll have a hundred brilliant things to say to him later, when I replay this in my head. “Well, see ya.”
“See ya,” I say.
Thank God my father and grandmother don’t seem to get along. We’ll be out of here by morning, and I’ll never have to see that guy again.
* * *
When it seems safe, I actually do go back to the white-blue room to “rest up.” I fall asleep. There’s something about being there that lets me sleep like a rock. I feel like I haven’t slept in ages, maybe not since that day when my mother sat on the edge of my bed and told me that she had a lump in her throat that had to be taken out. When someone tells you they don’t want you to worry, it generally means there’s a lot to worry about.
I wake up to the sound of my father’s truck. I look over at the clock, and it’s after seven, and I smell something wonderful, a greasy, crackly frying chicken smell, and there I am in that white-blue room, and it’s dinnertime. This is no Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner. I’m actually excited. My mother was a great cook, but my father’s got his one meatball recipe and that’s about it. He also makes these black-speckled scrambled eggs because he always cooks them in the bacon grease without washing the pan, and that’s just wrong in my opinion.
I don’t think too hard about where Dad’s going. I figure he’s off to buy a bottle of wine or something, an ingredient we need for the feast. I could really use a wake-up shower, but I don’t want to miss dinner. Jenny might even have a little plate of crackers and salami circles and squares of cheese to eat beforehand. You’d think I’d weigh two hundred pounds with the way I eat, but I got my mother’s “good metabolism.” I don’t know if anyone actually knows what a “good metabolism” is. It’s probably one of those unprovable myths like being lucky or having a green thumb.
I wash my face and brush my teeth, and I’m feeling really good all of a sudden. A nap, a minty mouth, fried chicken, and life feels hopeful. As if maybe we can go on and the future really is out there. You get flashes like that—like you can go on after all—or else the opposite, a flash where it hits you that she’s actually gone forever.
&n
bsp; Downstairs, Jenny’s back is to me. She clatters the lid back on the frying pan.
“Can I help?” I ask.
She startles. She turns around, and her face has an expression I can’t read. It’s sadness and sympathy and something else. It’s frozen almost, as if there is too much to say that she has no words for.
“Are you okay?”
That’s what it is. She looks like she might cry. She holds a large fork aloft. Vito is watching intently, as if he’s in the orchestra and that fork is the conductor’s baton. “I’m . . .” She struggles. “Maybe we should sit down.”
The happy hopefulness I was feeling has fled the scene with the goods, and my stomach drops. I try to reassure myself. Maybe she’s just going to spill their whole story now; maybe that’s what this is about. But inside I know better. Inside, you always know better.
She sits. I sit. So does Vito, but he’s got other motivations. She takes my hands. Her own are soft and warm, and that softness almost makes me cry. She doesn’t have to say it. I can’t believe it, my God, but I know it.
“He left?” I say.
“Tessa,” Jenny says. She looks about a hundred years old suddenly.
“For how long?” For a night, let her say. To meet friends for dinner, maybe. To get a beer. To take a drive. There are a hundred possibilities.
“A few days.”
“A few days? He just dropped me here with someone I don’t even know for a few days?”
She winces. I know I’m being hurtful, but I don’t care. They’ve both let me down. They’ve all let me down. You don’t just leave. You don’t just let someone leave. You don’t just die, for that matter. “What did you say to him?”
“I told him he was an idiot. I told him you need him right now.”
“Before he left. What did you say to make him leave? You two were fighting.”
Jenny’s silent. I need this to be her fault, but it isn’t.
Finally she says, “He just needs a few days, I think, sweetie. To be alone. This has all been such a shock.”