The Last Forever

by Deb Caletti

  There are two major theories about the way life operates. You’ve got your Random Acts of Chaos model, which basically says we’re all just leaves in a windstorm and who knows why we blow one direction or another, why some of us end up on a pleasant rooftop or swept into a yard waste bin. And then there’s its opposite. This theory says life is all planned for us, every channel change or class schedule or stoplight, piece following piece. The way, for example, my father chose the exact same sociology class as my mother and then the way they saw each other again when Sedgewick and Sullivan had appointments with their advisers at the same time. If my mother’s name had been O’Sullivan, I wouldn’t be here. And that happened when Grandfather Leopold’s own father changed his name just before setting foot on Ellis Island.

  But as Jenny and I sit in her living room on her big, squishy couches, looking at the replanted pixiebell on the coffee table, I believe in another theory. This one is more like those horrible obstacle courses we had to run on Field Day in the sixth grade, deliberately laid out by the sadistic Mrs. Plemp, who also made us play flag football at recess. I hated those obstacle courses. You had to weave through the orange cones, which were set in front of the monkey bars, and after the monkey bars came those tires in rows, and after that, the long, narrow beams, and it all happened before crazed and screaming sixth graders, who wanted blood like the audiences at the Roman Coliseum. I ran my heart out as my shoe came untied, racing against Sophie Ekins, Mrs. Plemp’s pet, the best athlete of both the boys and the girls, who once made fun of my Toucan Sam T-shirt, my favorite.

  One hurdle after another. Obstacles both large and small to get past.

  That’s my latest life theory, and I am busy developing it as we sit on that couch with fingernails dirtied by potting soil. We have tucked Pix back in as best we can. But it bothers me, this new, foreign earth, after the old had been Pix’s home for so many years. I can’t shake the feeling that this is just one more terrible thing on top of other terrible things. A sense of doom can become habitual; also the sense that God is like Mrs. Plemp and that there will always be more orange cones.

  I am trying to tell myself otherwise, but the last pixiebell doesn’t look good. It is not a plant that has ever grown much in height, and it’s rather delicate for starters. In all the years that my grandfather had Pix and then my mother and now me, it has stayed about seven inches high, and its delicate leaves have fanned out only an extra inch or two. It isn’t a particularly remarkable-looking plant, but that’s not the point. It’s lasted. Now its one long stem is still intact, but several of its smaller shoots have been bent and broken, and the cloverlike leaves are curved downward.

  Every single thing is not some big death metaphor, but still, I think it. I think about Mom under the quilt, lying on the living room couch. She had caught a cold. You get a billion of those. And, sure, she looked bad from her treatment, with her thin, sucked-in cheeks. She’d lost so much weight—not only due to her burned throat, but because all food tasted like tin after her taste buds had been obliterated. But still, a cold is a pretty regular event. A cold doesn’t kill you. A cold plus her kind of cancer doesn’t kill you. She was tucked in, and the TV was on, and she’d made herself one of those awful chocolate nutrient shakes, but she let it sit there separating, and I had a bad feeling. I did.

  It’s the same feeling I’m having now, with Pix. I’m supposed to have faith that it’ll be fine, but what I see doesn’t look fine. In fact, it looks so un-fine, I almost don’t want to look anymore. I feel bad about this, but I so much did not want to look at my mother on that couch that I volunteered to go to Rite Aid to pick up the codeine-laced medicine that was supposed to help her nasty cough. Outside, there was daylight and motion and the brightness seemed almost surprising. I stayed in that store a long time. I walked up and down all the aisles with the Christmas stuff. I just wanted to be with the boxes of tinsel and shiny round ornaments and lights and tacky decorations, like the Styrofoam snowmen with so much glitter you were permanently marked with it just by strolling past. Weeks later, I saw glitter on the sweatshirt jacket I was wearing that day, and the guilt almost sunk me. That day, I’d wanted to flee. I kept walking around Rite Aid, soaking in the Bic pens and Dr. Scholl’s, because it all seemed so normal. Maybelline mascara was regular life, and it wasn’t so sad.

  “It’ll be back to normal before you know it,” Jenny says. She doesn’t look too sure. “Anytime you replant something, it always looks a little . . . unwell. At first. Until it gets going again.”

  It has to. Maybe this isn’t something anyone can understand, but it has to.

  “Try not to worry,” Jenny says. “You worry a lot, don’t you? I see it in here.” She points to her own shoulders.

  I try to imagine letting go of worry, but this feels akin to jumping out of an airplane. Worry lets you hold on so that you, so that no one, falls.

  “I know,” she continues. “Worry makes you feel like you’re doing something, but it eats at you.”

  But then again, worry can propel you to actually do something. Worry can propel you to make a plan for when global catastrophe strikes, a plan that involves our basic, most simple life-giving seeds such as corn, wheat, rice; a plan that unfolds inside the deepest layer of an icy mountain, in a structure constructed of reinforced concrete with rock caverns and doors of steel, situated high enough to allow for major climate changes and a seventy-meter rise in sea level—the equivalent of the simultaneous melting of all the ice in the Antarctic, the Arctic, and Greenland. Worry is not all bad. But we’re not at that part of the story yet.

  “Are you saying that you don’t worry, Jenny? You should see your face.” I don’t particularly like Jenny noticing the way I operate. I don’t want her hands tinkering with my personal machinery. It’s time to switch the focus to her, and quick.

  “Do as I say, not as I do.” She chuckles.

  “Dad obviously doesn’t take after you. He’s all about life in the moment, cha-cha-cha.”

  “It’s all that—” She puts her thumb and two fingers to her lips and inhales.

  “You know about it?”

  “Since he was sixteen.”

  “I hate it,” I say.

  “I hate it too,” she says.

  Our mutual defection makes me feel bad. “He’s not irresponsible about everything. I mean, he’s a good father.”

  Jenny has her bare feet up on the coffee table. She folds her arms, purses her lips, giving her face a bunch of little wrinkles. She’s keeping her mouth shut.

  “He’s consistently inconsistent,” I try, and when she’s still silent, I say, “Fifty-three percent of people ages thirty-nine to fifty have smoked pot. Thirty-six percent of those are chronic users.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “They say it freezes your mental growth at the age you start using it.”

  I think about this. “So, he’s perpetually sixteen?”

  “Well.”

  “I love him no matter what,” I say.

  “I love him no matter what,” she says.

  I may have a lot in common with this stranger after all. I almost feel a bond between us. Female solidarity, all that.

  “What’s that one?” I nod toward the large painting in front of us, four brown smears rising toward blue. “Trees? Earth, life, renewal?”

  “I repeat myself.” She shrugs in apology.

  “Why did I not know you all these years?” I ask.

  “Misunderstandings.”

  I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t. Something is poking my back in that couch. It’s jabbing me. I feel around. Sticking out between the couch cushions is a rawhide bone. I hold it up.

  Jenny shrugs in apology again, and then she smiles. “He loves to bury.”

  It’s kind of funny, but I’m not ready to forgive Vito yet. He’s forgotten all about his crime spree and lies in a doughnut circle by Jenny’s chair, farting something awful every now and then.

  “He is who he is,” Jenny says.

&
nbsp; * * *

  My father calls me that night. Jenny and I are just putting away dinner dishes. I look down at my phone, expecting it to be Meg. She’s left me three messages today, each increasing in panic. Something about Dillon breaking up with me. The messages make me feel like I’m watching a predictable movie. But it isn’t Meg.

  “Speak of the devil,” I answer. Jenny was just telling me about my father in junior high—how he made a chessboard in wood shop and then decided he was going to go pro, studying books like Bobby Fischer’s Master Class. I head for the stairs, plugging one ear as if there’s a racket over here, even though Jenny has stopped rattling dishes in an obvious attempt to listen in. In the blue-white room, I shut the door.

  “It’s about time,” I say. But there’s no response. I think maybe he’s hung up. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “What the hell, Dad? I mean, how could you do this? When are you coming back? This was supposed to be a short trip to the Grand Canyon! I don’t even know where I am!” I hope Jenny doesn’t hear this. I need to lower my voice. I sit on the edge of the bed, run my fingers along the lines between the quilted squares.

  “Remember when we were in the Luxor? In Vegas? The place with the pyramid?”

  “Of course I remember. What, I’ve been suddenly struck with amnesia?”

  “Tess, something happened there. Surrounded by all those big sarcophagi, King Tut, whatever.”

  “King Tut in a hotel.”

  “A pyramid is a burial place.”

  “I know that.”

  “It hit me. I was standing there, and the whole year, it caught up with me. We’re in this burial place, and I’m thinking life, death, the fucking timeless shitty deal of it, and I’m lost. Suddenly fucking lost.”

  “It was a casino, Dad. You had a crisis in a casino.”

  “I tried to be okay, you know? We went on that roller coaster after? But it all felt pointless. I met your mom when I was twenty-one. I don’t have a shirt in my closet she hasn’t picked out.”

  “You’ve got that Bob Dylan T-shirt you bought at the concert. You’ve got Goofy playing golf from when we took that trip to Disneyland. You totally picked it out yourself. Mom would never buy Goofy. We weren’t even in the store with you.”

  I don’t have the patience for his dramatics. Couldn’t he have told me any of this at the time? Couldn’t we have discussed it over a slab of prime rib? Because, I’m sorry, he had both hands in the air on that roller coaster. He was shouting Yeah, baby! He bought the picture they took of the two of us in the front car, me clutching the bar looking like I might puke and him with his raised arms and wild-eyed joy.

  Now I pace the floor; I trace the perimeter of the rug with my steps, heel to toe, heel to toe, all around the rug and back again. I don’t understand where he’s going with this, honestly.

  But then he tells me.

  “I realize . . . It’s nothing. It’s all pointless and meaningless without love.”

  I think of Cat-Hair Mary. Life’s pointless and meaningless without someone to take care of you, more like it. In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe this is about a crisis of faith or love or loss. I think it’s about other things, like being a man, things I don’t understand, needing sex, or some kind of physical comfort in the moment, even. “I want you to tell me the truth. Was this the plan all along? You’d get me to go away for a few days, and then we’d keep going until you got to Portland? How long have you been having the Classmates Reunion with old Mary? Because this is disgusting.”

  “No,” he says.

  “No, what?”

  “No, this wasn’t the plan all along.”

  I don’t press for an answer about how long he and Mary have been communicating. I’m afraid to know.

  “When are you coming back? I can’t stay here forever. Meg has a job waiting for me at the day care where she works.” This isn’t exactly true. Meg has mentioned it only once, and I have no intention of taking that job. Meg is great with those kids. She loves every sticky, grape juice minute there, but I’d hate it. That sounds bad. Who hates being with toddlers? But I wouldn’t be able to keep up the cutesy, high-pitched persona they require. Ten minutes would drive me to drink, and beer and graham crackers would get me fired for sure.

  “Just give me a few weeks. I need to sort some things out.”

  “A few weeks? Now it’s a few weeks?”

  “Tess, come on.”

  “Come on, what? You can’t just ditch me like this! You’re supposed to be here for me, Dad. You’re the parent. Even if you’re confused and hurting, you’re supposed to be here for me when I’m confused and hurting.”

  “It’s the airplane thing, Tess. You know the airplane thing? I can’t put the oxygen mask on you unless I put the oxygen mask on me first.”

  “That is such bullshit, Dad.” I’m not the swearing sort, but my fury is rising up. It is one of Jenny’s huge trees, a brown smear in a black paint storm, branches whipping and cracking. “That’s just bullshit. I hate psychobabble bullshit like that.”

  He’s silent. I can hear him breathing. My heart is pounding. I’m too furious to speak. We’re both silent for a long while.

  “I may never forgive you,” I finally say. I feel like this might be true.

  And then I remember that the pixiebell is still downstairs, and so is Vito. “I gotta go.”

  “Tess.” He is asking something of me. Whatever he wants, I can’t give.

  “I’ve really got to go.”

  I hang up and run so fast down the stairs, it’s lucky I don’t break my neck. But the pixiebell is right there where I left it, slouched but undisturbed.

  Jenny and I wait for a peach pie to cool. She wants me to stay with her as long as I want to stay. I don’t exactly have a lot of other options, but I think that’d be hurtful to say. She cuts that pie, finally, and my phone bleeps. Dad has sent me a photo. It’s a picture of a tall guy outside what looks to be a Mexican restaurant. The guy is leaning against a concrete wall, which is painted to look like a desert. The guy has tall hair. Really tall hair.

  Jarvis Believed That Even Hair Could Get to Heaven, Dad’s text reads.

  But I don’t respond. I don’t respond because all I can see is Dad and Mary sharing a basket of tortilla chips as they drip salsa on plastic-covered menus and wait for their margaritas to arrive. And I don’t respond because I know that if I were on a plane and the yellow masks popped out from the ceiling, I’d put the oxygen on my kid first. I would. I don’t care what they say.

  chapter nine

  Amaranthus caudatus: love-lies-bleeding. The seeds of the amaranth, the most important Aztec grain, are ancient. At one time, they were so critical to the culture that each year, a month-long festival celebrated the blue hummingbird god that alighted upon the plant. A huge statue of the god was made from the seeds, and at the end of the festival, everyone was given a piece of the god to eat. In Victorian times, though, the flowers from the love-lies-bleeding plant meant only one thing: hopeless love. Giving them was a declaration that your heart was in over your head.

  The pixiebell has not recovered from Vito’s mauling. Two days later, I think it looks worse. It makes it hard to concentrate on what Meg is saying.

  “—his house. What’s she doing at his house?”

  “Whose house?”

  “For God’s sake, Tess! Dillon’s! Who have we been talking about for the last fifteen minutes!”

  “So, he’s moved on. Good for him.”

  “Don’t you even care?”

  “Remember when we used to wear pajama bottoms to school? We liked it at the time, but looking back, you realize how stupid it looked.”

  “Okay, okay. Fine. I shouldn’t care about this more than you do.”

  “When he kissed me, I’d be planning my outfit for the next day. I’d be writing my thesis statement for a paper. Dillon and I had the kind of relationship that’s more like trying out a relationship.” I think I hear a car comi
ng down the road. “Hey, can we talk later? I’ve got to go.”

  Jenny made an emergency call to Margaret MacKenzie from her class, who is also one of the leading members of the Parrish Island Garden Society. If anyone will know what to do about Pix, it’s her.

  “Okay, but it’s weird having you gone,” Meg says. “I miss you! And what your dad is doing . . . My mom won’t stop talking about it. You know how she can get. She loves you. She’s worried. You heard me, right? You can stay with us? For as long as you need.”

  Vito is barking up a storm. I can hear Margaret’s voice. “Kiss you and hug you,” I tell Meg. “Hug your mom. I love your mom.”

  “She never even uses her sewing room.”

  “I’m fine. See you soon,” I say.

  * * *

  “I’ve never heard of a pixiebell,” Margaret says. She is sitting close to me. Her perfume is flowery sweet, and her sweater is purple like a lilac, and her tennis shoes are buttercup yellow, and her eyes are blue as a forget-me-not. She’s a walking flower. She’s a walking flower, and she’s old, and she’s the vice president of the Parrish Island Garden Society. I feel a rise of hope. Pix is going to be all right.

  “This may be the only one.” The pixiebell is on the kitchen table in front of us, like a patient in the doctor’s office. “The last one,” I say.

  “Really?” Jenny says. I’ve never told her that part—how rare this plant is. How one of a kind and important.

  “Oh my,” Margaret says. “That’s remarkable. How did you come to possess it?”

  “My grandfather had a friend who was a professor of botany. He stole the seed from the professor’s rare collection during a Christmas party. The plant was extinct, but my grandfather grew the seed, and now we have the last pixiebell.”