The Last Forever (17 page)

“Throw that bottle away,” she whispers fiercely. “Cora Lee once gave me a ‘tincture’ and I had gastrointestinal distress for a week.”

There is definitely something in the water here.

*  *  *

When I arrive, they are making fun of each other with the library puppets. Sasha’s got a princess. It’s wearing a pink shiny dress and has gold ringlet hair and a sparkly crown. It’s holding a wand, which is mixing metaphors, but oh well. “I’m lying there, asleep!” Sasha says in a squeaky princess voice. “And the jerk comes and kisses me! Slips me some tongue! Do I
know
you? Hands off me, buddy! You’re busting my REMs!”

“Do you know I’m one of the most deadly animals around?” Librarian Larry flaps the wide mouth of his hippo, showing off two stuffed teeth.

“Doesn’t anyone actually work around here?” I say.

“Watch what you say, lady.” Larry points his hippo in my direction. “Just ’cause I wallow, don’t think I ain’t lethal.”

“Henry’s working,” the princess puppet says. “But royalty is above the lowly masses. Let them eat cake! Or cookies!”

I hear the rustle of little people, and I also hear Henry reading aloud. A second later, he storms over and snatches the puppet off of Larry’s hand and then goes for Sasha’s. He’s got the princess around the neck, and she is squealing as if being strangled until Henry grabs her, and Sasha sighs in defeat.

“Really, people,” Henry snaps. “Hey, Tess.” He shakes his
head to convey his parental-like frustration, and then hurries back to his audience.

Sasha removes her glasses. She huffs hot air onto one lens and wipes it with the tail of her shirt and then does the same with the other. It’s the eyewear equivalent of Clark Kent dressing in the phone booth, because now Sasha turns all business.

“Imponerus,”
she says. “No wonder we couldn’t find it.”

“Don’t tell me he called you at four thirty too.”

“Six,” Sasha says.

“So that’s why Henry’s cranky,” Larry says. “Up all night. The kid’s obsessed.”

“No biggie. I was awake anyway,” Sasha says. “I haven’t slept in weeks.”

“ ‘Heartbreak overlo-oad . . . ,’ ” Larry sings, then rubs his mangy beard thoughtfully. “You should try yoga. Help you relax.”

“Anything called Downward Dog should be done in private.” Sasha comes around to my side of the counter. “We have a plan.”

“We do?” I ask.

“I’m going to call a doctor.”

Not again. “Cora Lee from the Theosophical Society already gave me medicine.”

“Not that kind of a doctor. A PhD doctor. A dean I know. We’re going to call Dr. Abby Sidhu.”

“We are?” Larry says. “You made us promise that if you tried
to call her, we’d lock you in the Franciscan Sisters Memorial Reading Room.”

“This is business.”

Larry makes that scoffing noise in the back of his throat, the one I make whenever I see those pictures girls take of themselves holding out their phones. “She’s in the math department!”

“She’s
friends
with the guy in Botany and Plant Pathology.”

“Fine. But if you end up at my place crying and clutching another box of Twinkies, don’t say I didn’t tell you so.”

*  *  *

“She’s been in there a long time,” I say to Henry. He is sitting across the table from me. Nathan’s little boy, Max, has placed an open copy of
Frog and Toad Are Friends
on Henry’s head. Henry is balancing it there with perfect posture, like a debutante.

“Read,” Max demands. “Read from your head.” He thinks this is hilarious. He starts laughing like it’s the best five-year-old joke ever.

Nathan appears now, holding his baby daughter under one arm as if she’s a bundle of firewood. He’s got a bunch of stuff under the other arm. Man, parents come with a lot of baggage. The sleeve of somebody’s jacket drags on the ground. “Max! Come on! We gotta go! Bye, guys. Bye, Tess.”

There are people I know here. It feels good. I haven’t thought of Meg or my other friends or Dillon or my old house in days.

Henry leans forward, catches
Frog and Toad
in one hand. “Here she comes.”

Yep, Sasha is heading our way, all right. She’s got her hands jammed in her front pockets. She’s beaming.

“We’re going on a little trip.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Henry asks. “You told us to chain you to the book drop if you went anywhere with Abby.”

“Us-we. The three-of-us-we.”

“We-we?” Henry and I say at the same time. This is pretty hilarious, so insert a couple of minutes of laughing and elbowing each other here.

“We and the plant formerly known as the pixiebell, people. To Seattle. To the University of Washington. You will meet with Professor Harv Johansson.
Dr.
Johansson.
Plant doctor
Johansson. This Friday? Maybe we should take two cars. I might be staying.”

She smiles.

“
I
wanna go,” Larry whines from somewhere over in Fiction.

“You stay, we leave,” she says, too loudly for the library.

“Okay.” I shrug. “Why not?”

“Timing couldn’t be better,” Henry says.

Sasha is positively strutting around. Her chest is out. “Well, well, well,” she says, and then says it again.

“Friday,” Henry says.

“Friday,” I reply.

“At least we’ll have an answer,” he says. He rubs his face, tired. “Answers are good.”

“I should let you get back to work.”

“Yeah, look how the place is hopping.” He
is
cranky. “Let me walk you out. The boss won’t care. I could shelve all the red-covered sex books in YA, and I doubt she’d even notice. Look at her.”

It’s true. Sasha is acting like she just won a prizefight. She might as well pump her fists in the air.

Outside, Henry gives me a quick kiss and hugs me good-bye. It isn’t quite the kiss I’m looking for, but no matter. I walk down Friday steps and into the Friday street and get into Jenny’s Friday car. My heart sings Friday joy all the way home.

It is still singing when I turn by the mailbox, but then it stops. It stops abruptly, abruptly enough to qualify as a
screeching halt
because my father’s truck is in the driveway, and my father himself is leaning against it.

I park Jenny’s van. I sit in there for a while. I don’t want to get out. Finally, I do.

“Time to go,” he says.

chapter fourteen

Ecballium elaterium
: squirting cucumber. The seedpod of this plant bursts open and shoots its seeds up to twenty-seven feet away from the parent plant. The seeds can zoom off as fast as sixty-two miles per hour in order to get away. Let’s just say that some people see the logic in this.

It’s where we also begin, every single one of us: a seed. It is our beginning before our beginning. We become an embryo, an immature plant, in our own enclosed case, and we, too, will grow under the right conditions, seeking the sun and light.

Of course, some of us come from a bad seed.

And there is mine, leaning against his truck.

Can we just start with what he’s wearing? Because remember when he said he never bought his clothes himself? He’s wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt with an ironed-on image of the Road Runner on it. I forgot about that one. Let me make this clear: There is no way in hell my mother would have bought
that
.

I walk past him as if he isn’t there and he hasn’t just said what he just said.

“Where are you going?” he asks. “Aren’t you going to even give me a hug?”

I spin around. I’m furious. I didn’t even know how furious I’ve been. My anger erupts from its own hard case and begins to grow at a manic pace, the beanstalk I will use to climb my way out of here. I just stare at him with narrowed eyes.

“You got shit—” I flick my shirt to indicate he should do the same. Silvery cat hair. He also smells of mildew, the faint odor of old basement. I turn away, stomp up the porch steps.

“If you hurry, we can make the last ferry,” he calls out after me. I slam the screen door. He slams the screen door. He’s following me. “Tess,
please
.” Oh, look, he’s pleading. I rather like how the tables have turned.

Now I slam the door to my room. I lock it. He’s jiggling the knob. I sit on the floor with my back against the door. I smell something. What the heck? Baking bread? Jenny did not have her day of painting after all. I am beginning to understand that her cooking is a nervous reaction. She probably makes brownies just to swirl her finger around in the batter when she’s having a bad day. It’s a miracle she doesn’t weigh a thousand pounds. Then again, her life was probably pretty calm before we came along.

“I’m sorry, Tessie Tess! I had myself a little breakdown,” my father says through the door. “You know, I’m okay. I got it
together. I apologize. We were standing at that canyon, right? And then at the crypt . . .”

I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of a response, but I can’t help myself. “A pyramid
hotel
. In
Las Vegas
, Dad. Land of all-you-can-eat buffet, Father. Cocktail waitresses with cleavage as deep as the
Colorado River
, Pops.”

“Come on, Tess.” He tries out a stern approach. “I gotta get back to work. The guys have been great, but their patience is wearing thin.”

“
Their
patience?
You’ve
got to get back? We went on a three-day trip, Dad. It’s been a month. I had to buy
clothes
. You
ditched
me.”

“I was crazy. I just needed to know who I
am
. Without her.” His voice catches. It jabs me. Jabs my heart at that place where truth resides. And I should never have opened my mouth, because all the desperation was bound to spill out. I’m losing the power of my anger. Sometimes when the fury blows through, only a small person is left sitting there. I go silent.

I am eye level with the pixiebell across the room. We’ve both been through a lot. We lost the main person who cared for us, and we’ve been left with another who’s doing a crappy job in her place. Poor Pix. It looks so pathetic with its few yellow leaves.

Wait. What is
that
? Something’s strange with Pix. Oh, no—what
now
? I crawl over toward it on hands and knees, not sure I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing. There’s some kind of growth at the top of the stem. I feel awful, because my first sickening thought is that it’s a tumor. Is it a
tumor
?

I can’t look. Another shameful fact: Even when you love someone more than anything, disease can be so revolting that you want to turn away.

Am I horrible?
she asked. A pizza was on the coffee table, and we’d been sitting on the couch together eating it (trying to eat it in her case, trying to eat the tiniest mushed-up tasteless bits of it), and that’s when it happened. A chunk of hair dropped out of her head. It landed on the table when she leaned forward.
Horrible,
horridus
, the adjective form of the verb
horrere,
meaning
“hair.”
Standing on end,
Henry would tell me much later.

I left her alone in it. It was another wrongdoing. When my face showed that shock and repulsion, when we both looked upon that hair with
horror
, when I answered her question with
No, no, of course not!,
with obvious dishonesty in my voice, I abandoned her. She was in it all by herself.

My father makes a few lame pounds on the door. But then he gives up. I hear him walk down the stairs. I expect that his truck will start up any second, but this doesn’t happen. The only thing I hear is Vito sniffing under the door. I hear his hot little breath through his nostrils, in out, in out; in the oldest animal parts of him, he is probably getting the whole sorry story of weakness and defeat.

*  *  *

Taking a stand for any length of time is not easy. I have to pee. I’m starving. But I will not leave this room, at least not until the ferry and/or my father has left. I find one of the old caramels I bought a few weeks ago in my purse. I sit on the bed and
chew. I find a linty Altoid and eat that too. That’ll earn me a few more hours of survival.

A gentle tap. “Tess?” It’s Jenny. A paper towel comes inching under the door. Some paper-thin wheat crackers are laid out in a checkerboard on it, sporting slender pieces of cheese. “No liquids will fit under there, Sweetie.”

“I’ve got three to five days without water if the temperature stays below seventy degrees Fahrenheit.”

She’s quiet, but I know she’s still standing there. Finally, she says, “Would you like me to be the mediator? Between the two of you?”

“Are you a good mediator?”

“Not really.”

“Okay.” I open the door. “But only because you were so convincing.”

Jenny sighs. I look at her old face. Her wrinkles are hills and valleys. Her eyes are bright. They’ve seen a lot of winters and disappointments and new mornings. My mind plays the evil pinball machine game—bam, Jenny’s eyes, bam, my mother’s eyes, bam, her actual
body
in that urn right this minute, bam, forever
gone
. The realization socks me in the stomach anew. This is how it always goes.

“I don’t want to go home.”

I realize it’s true. At home I can’t get away from me, all that’s gone wrong and all that I didn’t do that I should have done and now can never, ever do. But here I am separated from that girl and that father and that gone-forever mother and every sad
thing that happened in that house and that town. Even from that body in that urn in that wall of Sunset Hills Cemetery, 13.5 miles, nineteen minutes, outside of San Bernardino.

“You don’t have to go,” Jenny says. “My home is yours for as long as you want it to be. But are you running, Tess?”

“Running
away
can also be running
to
.”

“Valid point.”

*  *  *

It is a short while later. We sit on the couch together, double-teaming Dad, who is in the big cushy chair across from us.

“First things first,” I say. “The sixties are over. You should ditch that shirt. No more tie-dye.”