The Last Forever (25 page)

This is what I imagine now: Grandfather Leopold, walking home in his overcoat after that party, his breath puffing clouds into the cold night air, his leather-gloved hands in his pockets, one finger tapping the seed case now deep in the satin lining of
his pocket. He is whistling. His mustache is white with frost. Snow begins to fall, landing on his wide shoulders and the brim of his hat. That night, he can barely sleep, and in the morning he rises and putters with his coffee and scrambled eggs, prolonging the excitement of what is going to happen next. The seed sits on his bureau like a jewel in a box. The snow, which has blanketed the city, is no obstacle to what he has in mind today. Because his kitchen windowsill is warm. It is near his large stove and the curved, accordion iron of the room’s radiator.

He washes his cup and plate and fork and lays them out to dry on a kitchen towel. He can’t bear the anticipation any longer. He climbs the stairs and carries the case with the seed back to the kitchen. He has already placed a pot in the sink, filled with scoops of the good soil from the large palm in the living room. He holds the seed between his thumb and forefinger.
One and only,
he thinks. Rare.

These seeds—the ones I am now gazing at on the outside of this singular strawberry that Pix has grown, are the progeny of that one tiny speck that Grandfather Leopold gently placed in the soil of that blue terra-cotta pot. There are hundreds of seeds on this fruit. The way life goes on, it seems like a miracle, even if a devastating one.

We have been waiting for it to ripen, and now that it has, Henry and I have debated when it should be picked. After it is picked, Pix will die. Henry has been saying,
Now,
and I have been saying,
Not now,
but I know it’s time. We can’t wait
too long. Jenny has suggested that we celebrate the night we pick the berry. It sounds corny, like one of those things people do—a Celebration of Life when someone dies: doves set free, sappy music, bad poems, and school project-ish posters with sad photos of happy times set on easels.

Still. What is there to do in the face of it?

I call Henry. “Now,” I say.

*  *  *

Pix is in the center of Jenny’s dining room table, which I’ve told you before is made out of a huge old door. The door of some barn, my father has told me. Pix looks like the guest at the party, the honoree, the Plant of the Hour. Jenny has cut flowers from the garden and placed them around the house, which is perhaps a wrong way to honor a plant, akin to eating bacon at a pig party. My father has put on some music. Jenny still has records and a record player. He plays Jenny’s old hippie stuff—Blood, Sweat & Tears; Three Dog Night; Simon & Garfunkel—shouting out the names of each just before it plays. He is dancing to “Cecilia,” a song about this guy finding his girlfriend in bed with another guy. Dad knows the words and is singing along. I don’t care how old you are; watching your parent dance makes you cringe inside a little. Or, after that pelvis swivel he just did,
a lot
.

“Jesus, Dad,” I say.

“What?”

I show a great deal of restraint and keep my mouth shut and my eyes averted. Jenny is making chicken and dumplings
and I leave to help her in the kitchen. But then the doorbell rings, and Vito, well, you know what Vito does when the doorbell rings, and Dad rushes to get it before me. He’s ridiculously excited when Henry comes over—Dad, not Vito, though Vito is too. Dad loves Henry. Maybe he even loves him more than I do. Now that Dad is not stoned half the time, I realize he’s enthusiastic about practically everything. Not just old TV shows and politics and mammoth craters made in the earth a jillion years ago, but about ancient composers and Roman philosophers. Planetary orbits and hieroglyphics. The northern lights of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, and seed formation. He and Henry are a match made in heaven. I am beginning to understand what my mother saw in him when they first met. The world opens up with someone like that.

My father actually flings the door wide. There is a great deal of back patting. My father finally releases Henry from his manly grasp, and Henry kisses my cheek. He is holding a present. It is a box with a red bow. My father gestures him inside and shows him where to set it—on the coffee table in front of the big white couch with the enormous painting of trees behind it. On it is something I hadn’t seen yet. Another box. A smaller one, another bow. You wouldn’t think someone was dying here. The party atmosphere feels wrong.

“Almost like it’s my birthday,” I say. I’ve been dropping birthday references to Henry ever since Elijah told me about the surprise party a few days ago. I pointed out cakes at the Front Street Market when we went in to get a soda. I told him
I had the same birthday as President Kennedy and Mother Teresa, which isn’t even true. I asked him if he ever read his horoscope.

“Horrorscope,” he replied, but didn’t say more. Coming out and asking might give away the surprise of the party, but I was getting more and more annoyed. Most likely, knowing Henry, he just didn’t want to draw attention to himself. But I
know
him. I wouldn’t go buy some
Happy 18th, Henry Lark
message to play on the JumboTron during a Mariners’ game. He should
trust
me.

“Pix party!” my father says. He likes the sound of this, apparently, because he’s said it about five times now.

“Homage,” Henry says, giving me reason number infinity to love him.

“Henry Lark,” Jenny says, coming out of the kitchen. She kisses him on the cheek, which is the warmest she’s been to him yet. Whatever grudge she held against him seems to be fading. He probably picked some apples from her tree when he was six.

“You married your mother,” I say to Dad, but no one is following along with my thoughts again, and so the comment floats away amid shoulder shrugs of incomprehension and
Oh wells
.

“You guys can set the table,” Jenny says. The music stops suddenly, and Dad leaves to turn the record over. There are songs on both sides of those things, set down in thin, lined ridges, which seems even more incredible than music playing on computers.

“Too bad there’s no piano,” I say to Henry.

He thinks. “Tchaikovsky. Symphony no. 6.
Pathétique.
Requiem; impending death. Plus he lost his mother when he was fourteen. Plus—”

My father interrupts. He’s listening in. “Rock ’n’ roll’s got us covered.” There is the scratchy sound of needle hitting vinyl. And then, “Let It Be,” by the Beatles.

Stupid song. I hate that song. I could be at the happiest carnival, riding the happiest elephant ride and eating the happiest, tallest pink cotton candy, and one note of that song could choke me up.

“Silverware, people,” Jenny commands. But I catch her. She is wiping her eyes with the corner of a paper towel.

*  *  *

Henry sets his napkin by his plate. I push my own away. I’m stuffed. I can barely move.

“Gifts,” my father announces. He’s got a biscuit crumb by his mouth.

“Dad,” I say. “Biscuit mouth.”

He brushes it away distractedly, practically tips his chair hurrying to retrieve his box. When he returns, I notice that his eyes are gleaming.

Uh-oh.

I take it from him; I slowly undo the bow. Under the lid, there is tissue paper that I carefully unfold. I take out the item, made of blue wool. I don’t understand.

“It’s a baklava!” he says excitedly.

“Balaclava,” Jenny says.

“You don’t want to freeze your face off when you and Henry go to Svalbard,” my father says.

“That’s really sweet, Dad. But we want to be realistic here, right?” These big dreamers, they can really be a pain. Big dreamers come with a stubborn streak. They are a dog with a knotted sock. They just don’t let go. “Um, money? Plane tickets.” I count off obstacles on my fingers.

“We covered that,” Henry and my dad say at the same time. My mother’s estate had money, apparently. Quite a lot of it from her own parents, which she’d kept for my education. Dad says there’s more than enough, and Henry says Cancún Pops has a pen in hand ready to pay away his guilt.

“We haven’t exactly been invited.”

Now it’s Henry who pushes his chair back. He’s more careful. His eyes, though, they are gleaming too when he hands me his box.

“It’s not an invitation,” he says as I untie this bow and lift this lid. “Not yet.” It is not an invitation, but what’s in this box leaves me speechless. A large stack of paper. Pages, pages, pages, and more pages of signatures. Signatures in black ink and blue and green, narrow loops and fat ones, tiny ones and large, statement-making ones. There’s a Robert and a Janine and two Elizabeths and a Che; there’s a Yankovitch and a Vazqueze and a Brown and a Navaro. Some of the pages are crinkled, as if they’d been in the rain. Some have coffee cup rings. On one of my photos, someone has drawn a party hat and a mustache. It makes me look both evil and festive as I
sleep there with
How to Keep Almost Any Plant Alive
open on my chest.

“This is only one box. We’ve got at least twenty of them.”

I don’t even know if I heard him correctly. It is . . .
astonishing
.

“You’ll have to give it back. Sasha wants to mail them all to the consulate with her letter.”

I imagine this now too. A beefy Norwegian with his white hair and thick hands, sitting behind his desk, which is piled with an unusual arrival in the mail. Box after box after box from Parrish Island, Washington, USA. And a letter from the same. He opens it and reads. He smiles.

It is not an invitation, but for the first time, this crazy idea, the idea that was set in motion that first day I walked into the Parrish Island Library, searching for Pix’s identity, seems maybe, possibly, actually, within reach.

“You guys,” I say. Well, there are no words.

“Try on the baklava,” my father says.

I do. “Stick ’em up,” I say.

He takes a picture of me with his phone. I pull off the hat, and my hair rises in a static standing ovation.

Tink, tink, tink.
Jenny taps her knife against the globe of her wineglass. “I think it’s time for a speech.”

We wait. She is looking at Pix, that now thin, yellowing stalk with its single berry. We
all
look. I am thinking she’s got a plan here, some big emotional speech that puts meaning to this unusual, unspeakably sad situation. We wait some more.
But apparently this speech was an impulsive, unplanned idea, now suddenly proved impossible, or else the words she carefully chose earlier are somehow in the moment all wrong.

“To . . .” Her voice is cracking. I swallow hard. This good-bye mirrors another good-bye. This thank-you does.

Henry takes my hand under the table, holds it tight.

“To life,” she says.

And then it’s time, and so I stand up. My chest caves in. My heart squeezes. I am crying. I want to do this in some dignified way, but I am crying hard. I set my fingers around that perfect berry, and I pull. It’s a beautiful berry. It’s a singular plant. Now it looks so bare, just its thin, empty stalk. Just a simple collection of cells and flesh, which has completed its life’s work.

Tears roll down my face. I’m a big mess. Jenny’s eyes are wet, and so are Henry’s, and my dad honks a loud nose blow into his napkin.

I hold out the berry in my palm for us all to admire. A million seeds, or even a single one—we continue.

*  *  *

Henry and I follow the instructions. We take the ripe fruit and crush it in a glass mixing bowl. We add water to the bowl, and the seeds sink, and the skin and pulp float. We separate seed from skin and wash the tiny, tiny seeds in a piece of cheesecloth. We will dry the seeds before putting them inside the Mylar envelope. And I will choose one to plant, just as Grandfather Leopold did. I will place it in Pix’s pot. I will
keep that plant with me wherever I go, dorm room to apartment to house, and I will put it on my own kitchen windowsill one day, as my mother had.

Henry is about to leave. My father hears the sounds of a departure and he comes bolting out of the living room, practically accosting Henry. There is more back slapping. He even says “You’re a good boy,” which sounds like he’s talking to the dog. It’s all rather embarrassing. I’m surprised he doesn’t jump up and lick his face. Actually, I’m surprised he doesn’t follow us to Henry’s car when I walk him out.

But no. We’re alone. The moon is full and low and large. I smell the cool deepness of night and the insistent drift of salt water. Henry is leaning against his car, and I am leaning against Henry.

“You okay?” he asks.

“I’m okay,” I say.

“Did you know that in Longyearbyen, the sun sets each year for the very last time on October twenty-fifth, and that it will not rise above the horizon again for four months?” His eyes look soft in the light of the moon. They look a little sleepy now too. It’s been a big night.

“It officially returns on March eighth, when it is finally high enough above the horizon to shine down on the steps of the old hospital, where the entire town gathers to await its arrival.”

“Tess.” He smiles. “You know, I really love you.”

Oh, beautiful words. Oh, joy and pain, fullness and emptiness, highs and lows, tide in, tide out. Right then, our future
together and all its unknowns sit like a fragile puff of a dandelion, waiting for a wish. I close my eyes and blow. “I really love you too, Henry.”

When his car is all the way down the drive, when it has turned at the tilting mailbox, I go in. My father scares the crap out of me. He’s got that ski mask on. Of course he couldn’t resist. He’s probably been wanting to try it out all night.

“Thomas Has Always Harbored a Secret Desire to Wear Baklava on His Head,” I say, when my heart stops beating wildly in fear.

“How late is the bank open?” he says. He chuckles in a sinister manner.

“Take that off and give me a hug good night,” I say.

He does. And then I look at him, and he looks at me.

As I said, there will be no momentous, earth-shattering, father-daughter talk in this story, no big crying scene and sobbing reunion. Right then, we do not have some revealing, climactic conversation about that night we left her alone in the hospital to die.