The Last Forever

by Deb Caletti

  I’m embarrassed to answer. Henry sets his hand on my back. Dr. Johansson’s office is pretty much a big mess. There are rectangular plastic tubs full of dirt and plant samples covering various surfaces, and there’s an old Mr. Coffee, with a pot so brown tinged you might think twice if the good doctor offered you a cup. And there are books everywhere—books on his desk, on shelves, and stacked on the floor. His desk also sports a softbound volume called The Seeds Inc. Yearbook. I imagine individual seeds posed in class photo images, Most Likely to Suc-seed, ha-ha. I am so hilarious in my own head.

  Dr. Johansson is still waiting for me to answer. He’s as patient as an elm.

  “Tumor,” Henry says.

  Dr. Johansson does not laugh as I feared he would. He only makes a hmm sound. Obviously, Sasha has told Abby my story, and Abby has told Dr. Johansson, or else he’s used to the idea of similarities between plants and people.

  “I see,” he says, and nods. Sasha is minding her manners. She’s standing next to Abby Sidhu, doctor of mathematics, who we met after making our way across the campus of Gothic libraries and red brick buildings. Abby is tiny and has delicate features and a smile that’s bright against her dark skin. She seems as soft-spoken as Sasha is loud, but in the back of the room, they stand together, shoulders slightly touching.

  “It’s never bloomed before,” I say. I want to let Dr. Johansson know that my tumor idea has not just come from some misguided grief response. I have my reasons.

  “You said you didn’t know what kind of plant it is, right? That it’s been growing for more than fifty years since your grandfather planted the stolen seed?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, it’s most likely a type of plant with a reproductive strategy called ‘monocarpic.’ That is, they flower and produce fruit only once in their lifetime, and then they die. Some live ninety years before this point arrives.”

  “So it is dying.”

  “I believe so.”

  “What can we do?” There is something about hearing this news spoken so directly—a wave of imminent loss hits. My voice is rising. I feel desperate. I know it’s crazy to feel this strongly about a plant, but this is Pix we’re talking about. “What if we stop it from flowering? What if we, I don’t know, cut it off. That bud.” This sounds oddly gruesome, but I’ll try anything if it keeps Pix alive. I don’t want this flower or fruit or whatever Pix will leave behind. I want Pix, my mother’s plant, which lived in her college dorm room and then in that house she shared with her girlfriends and then in that apartment my parents had when they first married and then on the windowsill in our kitchen.

  “That won’t work, I’m afraid. The plant is just completing its natural life cycle.”

  “There’s got to be a way. I need to keep it here.”

  The doctor’s face is grave. “I’m sorry.” He sounds like those other doctors, and well, for a second I almost hate him.

  “Flowering, fruit . . . ,” Henry says. “What kind of fruit?”

  “I have my suspicions,” Dr. Johansson says. “But I need to do a little research.”

  “A rare fruit?” I try.

  “Not exactly. This may be the most usual of unusual plants.”

  He’s probably just trying to make me feel better. I think of the most common, mundane fruits I can, whether they grow on plants or trees. Apples, oranges, bananas, pears . . .

  “I think it’s a strawberry,” Dr. Johansson says.

  Great. Forgot that one.

  “A strawberry?” Even Henry can’t believe it.

  “The leaves, see? They’re a miniature version of the notched leaves of a strawberry, but gathered together in a clover shape.”

  “It’s tall, though. Strawberries are low to the ground.” Leave it to Sasha to argue with the head of the University of Washington Department of Botany and Plant Pathology.

  “Tall and monocarpic. If it’s what I think . . . This may be a great research specimen. May I keep it?”

  He is so friendly in his red sweatshirt, and I like this warm office with all these books. But I am quite clear on this.

  “No,” I say. “It stays with me.”

  “Can I get a leaf sample?”

  “There aren’t many left.”

  “Photographs, then.”

  Photographs I can do. “Okay.”

  He opens his office door and calls out. “Alex!”

  “Yo!” a voice from the hall replies. And then there is Alex himself. He’s a younger version of Dr. Johansson. He’s got a beard and short hair, but his hair is brown. He’s wearing a sweatshirt too. Either this is the way botanists look, or Alex is taking on Dr. Johansson’s qualities, same as people start looking like their pets.

  “A monocarpic Fragaria,” Dr. Johansson says, as if he’s handing Alex a surprise gift.

  “Cool.”

  “Let’s get some images.”

  “Usual but unusual,” Sasha says.

  “Regular and one of a kind,” Abby Sidhu says, and elbows Sasha with private meaning.

  Henry takes my hand and squeezes. Alex is taking photos and Pix is having its ten minutes of fame on the scientific celebrity red carpet. If it didn’t look so sickly, I’d be happy for it. But I’ve got a really important question for Dr. Johansson.

  “The dying. It wasn’t because of too much water or from being moved or from not being taken care of in the right way, was it?”

  Dr. Johansson stops the media madness and straightens up. He looks me firmly in the eyes. “This was going to happen. No matter what you did or didn’t do. It was just plain going to happen.”

  My stupid eyes start to water. I could practically drop to the floor and cry like a big baby. My chest aches with grief. Something terrible and cruel is squeezing and squeezing my heart.

  Dr. Harv Johansson, head of the University of Washington Department of Botany and Plant Pathology and director of the Shaw Mountain Field Station, does something unexpected then. He puts his arms right around me and gives me a hug. I am smooshed right up against that wet wood smell of his red sweatshirt. It’s not the smell of a cellar, I realize. It’s the smell of a forest after a hard rain.

  And that’s when Henry says it. “Wow. Wow.”

  Dr. Johansson lets me out of his big bear grip, and we stand apart again. We both look at Henry, who is staring, transfixed, at a framed photo on Dr. Johansson’s wall. Now I am staring too. It’s a photo of a building, a narrow wedge of a green glowing triangle set deep into ice. All around it is the eerie blue-black of a polar sky. The image gives me the shivers. The building looks like a half-buried sci-fi mystery, something dropped from space.

  “Svalbard,” Dr. Johansson says.

  * * *

  We stay to have dinner with Abby at the Northlake Tavern, a pizza place with slices piled so high with sausage and cheese and pepperoni and mushrooms that you can barely get your big fat mouth around it. That’s what Henry says to Sasha, anyway.

  “You can barely get your big, fat mouth around it, Sash.”

  “Sha wup, Hewy,” she answers with stuffed cheeks.

  We give Abby and Sasha some time alone. Henry and I take a walk in this weird park across the street from the pizza place. Set next to a lake, the park also has a huge, rusting industrial plant on it. It sounds awful, but it’s kind of beautiful. People are flying kites on a high hill, and children are rolling down it. I remember how much I used to love doing that, and so it makes me happy to watch. There are all kinds of boats out on the water. Little chubby boats chug around, and sailboats slip by gracefully, and kayaks cut through the waves. There are people standing on paddleboards, rowing with long oars, like they’re off on a voyage to Polynesia.

  Henry and I sit on the grass next to each other. Around us, couples are stretched out or entwined on blankets, having picnic dinners, drinking wine out of plastic cups, kissing.

  “Tess?” Henry says. “I’m really sorry. I feel bad. I know how much you need the pixiebell to be okay.”

  A seaplane la
nds like a dragonfly on a leaf. I don’t want to talk about this now. It hurts my heart to think of Pix in my mother’s shoe back in Sasha’s car. “Kiss me, Henry,” I say.

  And so he does.

  We drive home. At the ferry terminal, Henry’s fingertips touch mine in the backseat. It’s dark. The ferry is lit up like a grand ship from the olden days. Looking at it from afar, you picture an orchestra and ladies in ball gowns dancing with men in tuxedos. Inside, though, there are only vinyl bench seats and slumped travelers and tired hot dogs spinning under heat lamps. The trip back over the sound is a different one at night. You know those lumps of islands are out there somewhere, but you can only see blackness and more blackness and your own reflection looking back from the windows.

  Driving home, we’re quiet. We’re all tired. I watch Henry’s profile light up in flashes as we pass street lamps. When we see the mailbox at Jenny’s driveway, Sasha finally speaks.

  “My butt hurts,” she says.

  “Home again,” Henry says.

  Stupid, emotional me. I’m exhausted and it’s been a long day, and nighttime always splays me open and lays my feelings bare.

  “You know, I can’t believe you guys made this trip.” My voice wobbles. “Thanks so much. For caring about Pix.”

  Sasha is looking over the seat. “Silly girl,” she says. She gives my knee a squeeze. “We care about you.”

  Henry gives me a quick kiss good-bye, and I gather up my bag and my mother’s shoe with Pix inside. It is not difficult to make this particular calculation. Pix has lost three more leaves on this expedition to Seattle. There are only six more sad leaves left.

  I can hardly believe my eyes when I haul my stuff back inside Jenny’s house. The lights are off, and there is only the soft glow and low hum of the television in the living room. Popcorn was popped earlier. The smell is still hanging around, like a guest who doesn’t realize that the party is over. Jenny rarely watches television, so it’s one of those chunky old TVs that weigh a billion pounds. My father—he’s got his feet up on the coffee table, and a newspaper is folded over his stomach like some 1950s dad. He’s in some gray sweatsuit I’ve never seen before; it’s new—the fold lines are visible. There is a cup of tea on the table. I can see the string with the little tag hanging over the edge of the cup. Vito is curled up next to him, and . . . wait. Are those slippers on his feet?

  “Oh hi, honey,” he says. He actually says Oh hi, honey, just like a television dad.

  “What have you people done with my father?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I say. “Did you wait up for me?”

  He sets the newspaper aside, sits up. “I wanted to make sure you got back okay. How was it?”

  “Vito’s not allowed on the couch,” I say. Vito and my father look at each other. I swear, Vito shrugs. “Are those slippers? Where’d you get slippers?”

  “I got ’em at Island Madness. I got you some too and some other things you might need. Snazzy, eh?” He holds one foot in the air and swivels it. Now that I’ve dropped my stuff and I’m a little closer, I see that the slipper is shaped like an orca and that the orca is smiling a large ironed-on smile. I’m relieved. That man actually is my father.

  “You waited up.” I still can’t believe it. Only Mom waited up.

  “Well,” he says. He doesn’t know how to explain it himself.

  “And you bought me slippers.”

  He gives the orca a good look and then gives another to me. “Thomas Believed in the Healing Power of Marine Life Footwear,” he says.

  chapter sixteen

  Prunus persica: peach. While the fruit of this plant is juicy and sweet, the seed—like the seeds of cherries, apples, plums, and apricots—is full of poison. Yes, that pit you throw out is a little woody ball packed with cyanide. The Seed Moral of this story? Be careful of what’s at the center—yours or anyone else’s.

  “Svalbard,” Henry says. He slides the book across the library table for me to see. There it is, the same image from the photo in Dr. Johansson’s office: that wedge jutting from permafrost, that narrow rectangular window in the outermost nowhere. It is otherworldly. That it exists at all makes other unearthly things seem possible.

  “How could I not have known about this? Listen: Two and a quarter billion seeds from the planet’s most important crops will be stored there. It’s a huge seed library. This is monumental. This is how we restart civilization if we ever needed to.”

  “Wow.”

  “There are only four keys.” His beautiful brown eyes shine.

  Four keys, and guards, not to mention the polar bears. Every person on Svalbard is required to own a gun and be trained in its use, for protection from them. In Svalbard, it’s common to see people walking around with rifles slung over their shoulders. But I am not at that part of the story yet. I am at the part where I am sitting across from Henry at the Parrish Island Library, listening to him say “There are only four keys,” and then answering: “Incredible.”

  It is incredible. But I don’t realize what Henry is really trying to tell me. I don’t catch on that Henry has a plan.

  “The seeds of these plants will last for centuries. Maybe even for thousands of years. And, Tess—once you deposit a seed, it’s still yours. You own it always.”

  I am running out of superlatives, so I just shake my head in appreciative wonder. He leans forward and takes my hands. Why Henry is so nice to me, I’ll never know.

  “Hey, I’ve got something to show you.” I open my phone. I find the picture I took this morning, just before I left.

  “It’s flowering,” he says.

  It’s a delicate-looking flower, the one Pix has made. White and lovely, with four thin petals and a yellow center. “It’s so sad, Henry.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s dying.”

  “You should show Sash.”

  I look around. “She here?” I don’t see her. There’s only Larry, helping a little boy fill out a library card application. His mother watches proudly, as if he’s just been let through the gates of the city, which in a way, he has.

  “Sasha’s always here. You should see her apartment. There’s nothing in it. Books and a bed. Fridge with old takeout containers and bottles of Snapple. Her fridge is a single woman cliché. Come on.” I follow him. He heads to the desk. “Joseph, my man,” Henry says to the little boy, and gives him a high five. “Larry’s the only sucker here actually doing anything today.” Larry swats Henry as we pass, and then he swats me, too.

  “Hey!” I protest. “I’m a customer.” Oh, the dear sweet pleasure of belonging. I love it more and more and more.

  In the back room, Sasha is sitting on a pair of unopened cartons, leaning against the wall, talking on the phone and laughing. She makes big, annoyed eyes and waves us away, but Henry ignores her. “You gotta see this,” he says.

  “Just a sec,” she says into the phone. And then to us: “All right. Hand it over.” She examines the photo, holding it up near her nose. “Oh, Tess. I don’t know what to say. It’s blooming.” She looks sincerely stricken. A tiny cartoon clown voice comes from the phone. “Abby gives her condolences.”

  “We should send that picture to Dr. Johansson,” Henry says.

  The tiny clown is talking again. “Abby says she just saw him. He’s got some news for you.”

  What astounds me, what I just can’t seem to believe, is that all these good people are helping me. I don’t understand it. And in a way, it makes me feel bad. They look at me and see a girl who’s lost one of the most important people a girl could lose. But it makes me want to hand them back their gifts. They don’t know the truest thing, which is that I don’t deserve this. Their kindness—I want it so much. It is almost a forgiveness. But it makes me feel ashamed.

  “Did you hear that, Tess? He’s got news!” Henry gives me a second look. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  But I am trying not to see it, my father a
nd me there that night, in my mother’s room. My father yawns. I gather up our coats. It is the last time, but we don’t know it is the last time.

  Here is the bad, bad thing: I wanted out of there. Desperately. It was sad and scary in that place. When I walked down the hall, I was afraid I might accidentally see something I didn’t want to see. I was tired of sitting on that metal air conditioner over by the window while Dad perched in the green vinyl chair, all of us watching Wheel of Fortune on the TV up high on the wall, when we never ever watched Wheel of Fortune before.

  The neighbor lady on the other side of the sliding curtain scared me too. She moaned every once in a while in her sleep. My mother breathed wheezy breaths. Her hand was all bruised at the top where the IV went in. That blue gown tied in the back smelled like some kind of antiseptic bleach, and it accidentally revealed parts of my mother’s body that seemed pale and vulnerable. I was glad to be in the car with my father. We escaped.

  I was so ungenerous. I was such a coward.

  If I’d been giving and brave, the least my mother deserved, I might be able to accept Henry and Sasha’s compassion. If I hadn’t been guilty. But this—this is like a nice couple picking up an injured hitchhiker, not knowing he was stabbed by his own knife while he attempted to rob a bank. If my father and I had stayed, we might have seen it happen. Aspiration. We might have saved her. My chest caves in with regret each time I run it over again in my mind. All night long, I play it. My coat stays where it is. I sit in the green vinyl chair. I hold her hand. I am listening. I am there.

  * * *

  “As I suspected, it’s a Fragaria singularis,” Dr. Johansson says. Henry and I are hunched over the phone so we both can hear. “Singular strawberry.” I make wide eyes to Henry, and he nods his head back as if he suspected Pix of greatness all along. “It is not extinct, and not even particularly rare, but it is remarkable.”