The Last Forever

by Deb Caletti

  “You’re mad,” Henry says when we’re alone. At least, it’s just the two of us and Vito, who’s watching Henry and me like we’re an episode of his favorite show.

  “What gives you that idea?” I ask, my voice giving him that idea.

  Henry rolls his eyes. It’s another thing to love about him, really. The way he’ll always be someone to call me on my bullshit. “Why haven’t you been answering your phone?”

  “Oh, have you been calling?”

  “Are you mad at what Elijah said? Because you might want to remember that he said it. I didn’t.”

  “I’m not a damsel in distress.” I give up on the remote control.

  “I know that.”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “I know that. I want to help.”

  “Because you go around helping girls who are sad. That’s your thing.” Oh, I am being childish. Even my words are pouting. I hate myself for it.

  “Millicent used to call me a lot when she was having trouble with her mom. That’s what he meant. Their mom—she’s always on them, you know, Mill especially, to be more of this or better at that. So much so that Mill can barely try anything new without feeling like she’ll fail. Sometimes she’d call when we were in the middle of something, and he’d get pissed. But she doesn’t have a lot of people to talk to.”

  Yeah, I wonder why. Poor “Mill.” I feel terrible for her. My heart is so not breaking.

  “Elijah—he’s . . . He forgets there are other people in the world besides him.”

  “I don’t know why you’re friends with him, then.” I’m on dangerous territory. He’s only known these people his whole life.

  “It’s not like San Bernardino here. Someone gets under your skin, you can’t just forget they’re there. Elijah and me, I don’t know. He knows me better than practically anyone.” Great. Terrific. This means Elijah is a permanent fixture, like it or not.

  “He was being an idiot,” Henry says. I say nothing. He tries my trick. He knocks my shoulder with his. “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” I say back. It’s a Hey of Almost Forgiveness.

  “I’ve got something I want to show you. Will you come somewhere with me?”

  Oh, all right. As long as it’s anywhere.

  “Okay.”

  Henry takes my hand and pulls me up. I call up to Jenny and let her know I’m going out. Outside, it’s dark. Really dark. Way more dark than San Bernardino, and the stars are brighter, seemingly closer, close enough to touch, close enough to hold one in your hand. Crickets are making a racket. You think night is quiet, but it’s as noisy as day if you really listen.

  “What’s that?” I ask. I freeze, with my hand on the door. It’s a shivery howl.

  “Coyotes,” Henry says. “We’ve got a lot of rabbits here, so, you know, coyotes are happy with the menu.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Come on, damsel. That’s what I’m going to start calling you.”

  “I’m going to start calling you smart-ass.”

  Henry drives like an old man out toward Deception Loop. “You drive like an old man,” I tell him.

  “You backseat drive like an old woman,” he tells me.

  Henry’s profile is so sweet in the dark car that my heart lifts. He’s got the windows rolled down, and summer falls in; it’s all night meadow smells—dry grass and fruit ripening. “I really like you, Henry.”

  “I really like you. Do you recognize where we are?”

  “Not a clue.”

  Henry was distracting me again, and I forgot to watch where we were going, but it’s also so dark out there that you can’t quite make out this dark from that dark. But then we turn into the desolate parking lot of Point Perpetua Park.

  “Now?” he asks.

  “Yes.” It’s the whale-watching park, though I doubt he’s going to try to show me whales. Those beasts are hard enough to spot in the daylight. Whales mind their own business. I have no idea why we’re here. “Man, I hope you can find a parking space,” I say.

  “Parking gods be with me.” Henry shakes his crossed fingers in the air. Of course, there’s not a soul in sight. Wait, no. There’s a Volkswagen Beetle with a big kid in a puffy coat sitting on the hood. Parrish Island must be where all the old VWs in the world go to die.

  “I’m blind at night,” I say, and Henry takes my hand again. We walk down the forested path toward the beach. The trees loom, their branch arms outstretched. It’s dark and shadowy, one of those places where you try not to think about bad guys and evil fairy tale beasts and wild animals leaping out, but of course you think of those things. “This is spooky.”

  “Wooo-hoo . . .” Henry wiggles his fingers in a ghostly fashion.

  There’s a lighthouse on the beach, and its high, intense beam swivels slowly around until we are momentarily blinded. Henry leads us in the other direction. We pick our way over the rocks. The moon is barely out, but its sliver of light colors the breaking waves a yellow-white against the endless black. The beam of the lighthouse swoops across the sky. I take off my shoes when we reach the sand, and so does Henry. This night and this place are both eerie and romantic. I am aware of how alone we are and what that might mean. If it were Dillon, well, Dillon liked to make out anywhere—under the bright fluorescent lights in the school hallway, dark movie theaters, the empty school bleachers after practice, and once, in a car in the Mario’s Pizza parking lot.

  But Henry has other things on his mind. He is heading us toward a curve of the beach, a cove, a pitch-black cove, where the beam of the lighthouse falls away. As soon as we are in the cove’s generous half circle, I can see why Henry has brought me here.

  I can’t speak because it’s so beautiful. The beach—it is glowing with endless blue dots, a spilled curve of them, along the water’s edge. They’re in the water too. It’s magic. It’s a glow-in-the-dark painting, not possibly real. I close my eyes and open them again, and it’s all still there before me—a cast spell, blue-glowing fairy dust.

  “What is this?”

  “Plankton, basically,” Henry says. “A plant. A bioluminescent plankton called dinoflagellates.”

  Oh, Henry. He’s so romantic.

  “Did you know that eighty percent of all creatures known to produce their own light live in the ocean?” he asks. “And did you ever stop to think that all along this part of the sea, this muddy ground we call beach, it’s all planted with seeds?”

  “Kiss me, Henry.” I want to be in the moment of beautiful, glowing blue. There’s science, and then there’s the wonder of science. Henry has things to teach me, but maybe I have a thing or two to teach him.

  He leans in. It’s a distracted kiss. When we stop, he says, “Seeds. Everywhere. They can lie dormant for years. And then, with the right set of circumstances, a seed rises from the ground and floats into the ocean. It can germinate and reproduce and from there it can drift and drift until it plants itself into new, far-off waters.”

  “Sit,” I say, and pull him down beside me. This is a nice, big flat rock I’ve found. I lean my head on Henry’s narrow shoulder. He puts his arm around me. The waves crash and sigh, crash and sigh. The sheer number of things I don’t know sets me awestruck. Life is large, large, large. Knowledge is so comforting, but so is mystery.

  “Seeds,” Henry says.

  “Henry, enough about seeds.”

  I didn’t know Henry well enough yet to know how fixed he can get on a topic and how determined. Don’t even try to budge him, is my advice.

  “I’ve been trying to call you all day to tell you something important. About Svalbard. And about our very own Dr. Harv Johansson,” he says.

  The sky is all white sparkles above us, and below, on the sand, are those glowing speckles of blue. The night smells briny and deep, and a lone seagull makes his way across the sand as if contemplating where it all went wrong.

  “Okay, I give up,” I say.

  “Dr. Harv Johansson is a”—here, Henry crooks his fingers to make q
uote marks in the night air—“Notable adviser to Seeds Inc. And what, you may ask, is Seeds Inc.? It’s an organization that preserves heirloom plant varieties. They regenerate them and then distribute them. Their aim is to preserve all these diverse and endangered plants for future generations. They have their own seed bank, but more important? They were one of the three.”

  “Three.”

  “The Svalbard Three.”

  “Sounds like a band of criminals.”

  “Listen.” Henry whacks my leg. “Only three groups from the United States have deposited seeds into Svalbard, right? Well, Seeds Inc. was the only citizen-led group. They put five hundred varieties in there when it first opened. And now? They’re planning to contribute another nine thousand varieties this winter.”

  “Wow.”

  “And old Dr. Harv is a ‘notable adviser.’ And his wife is an agriculturist and plant conservationist, also a ‘notable adviser.’ ”

  “Wait. I remember. He had this book on his desk. The Seeds Inc. Yearbook. I thought it was kind of funny.”

  “Tess,” Henry says. He sets those brown eyes on mine. He holds me there with them. “It’s more than funny. It’s fate.”

  “Fate.”

  “Fate. We’re going to get the pixiebell seeds in that vault.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  “I have no idea. We have to get them accepted, from what I know so far. And after that, we’re going to bring them there.”

  I laugh. I mean, I saw the pictures. It is the most far-off place in the world. I am a regular girl, in a real place, with a regular (sort of regular) boy.

  “Ouch,” he says. “Why’d you pinch me?”

  “I was thinking about you being real and regular.” Henry pinches me back. “Ouch! It’s the Arctic, Henry. Come on. We don’t go places like that,” I say.

  “We do.”

  “We do?”

  “Yes.”

  And as I sit on that real and regular rock, looking at that unreal and mystical glowing blue, I almost think it’s possible.

  chapter eighteen

  Beta vulgaris: beet. The seeds of this plant are impossibly hard and inflexible. They resemble a knucklebone, and to even get one to germinate, it’s advised that you soften it up first, soaking it in water for hours or even days. The seed obstinately grows in the most hostile environments, and has a history that dates back to the second millennium BC. Remains of the plant itself have been excavated in the Third Dynasty Saqqara pyramid at Thebes, Egypt. But don’t plant different varieties too close together. The seeds need at least a quarter of a mile between each other, lest they intermingle and try and take each other over. In other words, the beet seed is wildly stubborn.

  “I told you he wouldn’t be back in two days,” I say to Jenny.

  “I can’t concentrate when you keep talking.” Jenny’s back is to me. She is facing a large canvas, now tacked up on the far wall of her studio. She has a brush in her hand, and the tip is glossy with an orangey brown paint.

  “Naples Yellow Deep. Raw Sienna.” I read the tubes. I like the names of paint colors. “One week.”

  “And you know why, Tess. He told you. He told me. He is settling some financial matters of your mother’s. Several accounts she had . . .”

  “She probably hid her own inheritance money so he wouldn’t buy a bunch of pot plants and start a business. I can’t blame her.”

  Jenny lowers her eyebrows at me in warning.

  “Is this why you and my mother didn’t get along? You defend him no matter what? Two days, my butt.”

  “Okay, fine.” Jenny sets her brush down with a snap. Little bits of Naples Yellow Deep and Raw Sienna fleck the table. She scoots a stool over, one her students use in art class, and it screeches against the floor in protest. She straddles it, sets her fists on her hips. “Go for it. Let it out. Sock it to me.”

  Now that I’ve been given permission to say whatever I want, I suddenly have no inclination to speak.

  “Your mother and I are both stubborn people.” I love Jenny for using the present tense, even though she’s scowling at me. “Do you know how your parents met?”

  “Of course I know how my parents met. Chamber music concert their first year of college. Held in a room in the music building. A whole six people in the audience. Love at first sight.”

  “I never understood why Thomas went to that concert. He was a rock ’n’ roll boy. Never met a cello he didn’t dislike. That’s a double negative for you.”

  “He saw her shiny hair across the quad. Followed her in.”

  “Ah. I never heard that part.”

  I feel a little superior about having more information about my parents than she does. I also feel sort of superior about my mother’s beautiful hair, which had the power to draw the rock ’n’ roll boy into a whole damn room of cellos.

  “He told me they were getting married after only three months.”

  “A year,” I say.

  “Three months. I was there, remember?” My superiority vanishes. “Three months, and I told them both that I thought it was a hasty decision. Well, neither of them liked that. I told Anna that I thought Thomas had some growing up to do. She disputed this fiercely. Of course, his playful, free spirit is what she loved best about him, and whatever you love best in a person is what’ll likely drive you craziest later. Naturally, they got married anyway.”

  “And then you wrote them out of the will,” I said.

  “Ha. No. But your mother never forgave me for my disapproval, and I never forgave her for not forgiving me. And then, for many years to come, we proceeded to love and defend the same person, your father. They brought you to visit once. You were maybe two. Toddling around. He took you to the beach. Let you climb rocks. You fell and cut your chin.” Jenny motions to her own, rubs two fingers there. “Old Dr. Marshall Fey had to give you stitches. Your mother was furious with him. Your dad, not Dr. Fey. She was furious with me. Probably in part because, by this time, she saw I was right about some things. But she also thought I never held him accountable when he was younger, and therefore . . . Well. He was a boy with two hardheaded mothers fighting over him. He stayed with me once, when he ran away from home for a weekend. Five or six years ago, maybe. Do you remember? Some argument over . . . I don’t even know. Money, perhaps.”

  I don’t remember him ever leaving, except for that camping trip he took with his old friends from high school, Johnny Frank and Matt Pattowski. So this was the camping trip? His mother’s house on Parrish? Mom and I ate pizza in bed and watched movies. We had a mass cleaning that even involved the fluff and stuff under our beds. It was the weekend she let me get my ears pierced.

  “Mostly, though, I think your mother and I were just a lot alike. Too alike.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. What were you expecting?”

  “I don’t know. Something more, at least. Some big, dramatic story. Some buried secret that makes it all make sense.”

  “That’s part of what’s so damn sad. It was pettiness. Mere pettiness. The shameful secret was how little it all mattered. Your mother and I—we made a fatal error—we let hurt feelings get in the way of love. And I made another one. The first one. I didn’t keep my big damn mouth shut.”

  “You’re right. It is sad,” I say.

  “We thought we had all the time in the world. And now, well . . . You do things that you can’t undo, and that’s just a rotten fact about life.”

  I look at Jenny in her big denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up and her wrinkly tan face and her blue, blue eyes. If she and my mother were alike, then I am also like both of them. The three of us are all stubborn and loving and petty; we’re guilty and easily hurt and big-hearted. And we all love the equally mixed bag that is our own Thomas Quincy Sedgewick.

  “Why do you always paint trees, Jenny?” I can see them now in that canvas in front of me, more clearly than I did when I first saw the large painting in her living room. There are three
trees, in Naples Yellow Deep and Raw Sienna and Cadmium Lemon and Gold Ochre. They are set against a sky of Davy’s Gray and Titanium and Silver Number Two.

  “I guess I like how calm they are. The way they do keep their big damn mouths shut. And they are settled to their fate, right? To the story? They rise from the ground. They spend their life growing and giving, and then they die. Such a simple story. But such a majestic one.”

  “Hey, I’m going to go write a poem now,” I joke.

  “You asked.”

  “I did. And I love your trees.”

  “And I”—Jenny stands, swings the stool out of the way to get back to work—“love you.”

  * * *

  A paperback Roget’s Thesaurus props open the front door. Henry Lark is worried he might not hear me knock because he is playing the piano. The music filling that room is dramatic and sad, and I watch Henry’s narrow shoulders play passionately. His fingers fly until he somehow realizes I am there, and then he stops.

  “Don’t stop,” I say.

  “You’re here.” He pushes the bench back and stands to greet me.

  “What was that?”

  “Schubert. Winterreise. It’s a series of poems, actually. That one’s called ‘Rückblick.’ ‘Retrospect.’ Usually there’s a singer.”

  “La-laaaa.” I try my best opera.

  “Hmm. Or something,” Henry says.

  “Is your mom home?”

  “Nah. She’s at work. We’re alone.” But he doesn’t say it like a lot of boys would, like Dillon would have. There’s no eyebrow-raising opportunism in it. Too bad. He’s just stating a fact, without expectations. One thing about Henry Lark, he’s a gentleman.

  “I came right over.”

  “Good. You’re going to love this.”

  Henry is taking the stairs two at a time with those long legs of his. I follow. “Is he back yet?” he asks.

  We know enough about each other now that our conversation unrolls with its own shorthand.

  “No. Legal stuff of my mom’s is taking a while, supposedly. It doesn’t even hurt me anymore. He and Cat-Hair Mary are probably in Hawaii.”