The Last Forever (8 page)

I laugh a little too loudly in a shameless move to get Elijah’s attention. The plan is, they’ll notice what a great time we—me and Henry and them, of course—could all have together. But they don’t even look up. It’s starting to remind me of those horrible paint-your-own-pottery birthday parties you think are going to be fun until everybody suddenly acts like they’re creating the Sistine Ceiling.

Elijah is wearing white pants—bold move in painting class; let’s give him that—a bright blue T-shirt and leather sandals, and a watch, which is actually kind of cool, because no one wears watches anymore. His blond hair is gelled artfully to one side, and those model cheekbones he has look like a pair of perfect sand dunes rising from a magazine desert. They
both
belong in a perfume ad. And here’s another thing. Elijah’s not painting the wildflowers in the jar. It’s something else. Something new. I can’t quite tell what yet, because right now it’s only a sketch. There are pencil marks and white paint, along with some yellow he’s laying down.

“Max told us he didn’t want to go to sleep because it’s
boring
,” Nathan says. “He obviously doesn’t remember his dreams. Last night, I was in a parade in a mall with Paul McCartney and Snoop Dogg right before a tornado hit.” I like him right
off. He has a rumpled-bed look—old Levi’s, T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, shaggy brown hair. He’s slipped off his shoes, so his bare feet are on the canvas drape below him. He’s pals with Margaret, the old lady with the sweet blue eyes and fluffy hair; they drove in together and sit next to each other. Nathan helped her find a place for her purse and gave her a hand taking off her sweater.

“Dreaming is lovely,” says Cora Lee, who is about a million years old. Her voice sounds like fluttering leaves. Her hand is shaking so hard, she has to hold it with the other one to keep it still. Yet I can see from where I sit that her painting is precise, and each purple petal looks like a purple petal. She’s even put a chip in the neck of the jar exactly where one really is.

“My Eugene used to sleep like the devil,” Margaret says. “A freight train could barrel through the room and he wouldn’t stir.”

“That’s how Jim is,” Joe Nevins says. “Even when we were kids.” He’s got a plaid short-sleeve shirt stretched over a round stomach.

Then everyone is silent again. Jenny walks around and murmurs advice. She points her old finger and says, “Good” or “Balance” or “Fullness” or “Notice how . . .” as I sneak glances at Millicent’s manicure, the kind where the nails are white at the tips, same as candy corn. It has a name, but I can’t remember it. My manicure knowledge is on the slim side.

Wait.
French.

“French?” Elijah says.

Did I speak out loud? Tell me I didn’t speak out loud. Jenny has placed me next to Elijah, which is so helpful, because that allows him to see the extent of my artistic talent that much better.

I think fast. Thinking fast is not something I’m great at. “The flowers,” I say. I am such an idiot.

“Provençal,” Margaret says. “Giverny.”

“
Majolica Jar with Wild Flowers
, Van Gogh,” Nathan says. “French, absolutely.”

I want to kiss them both. I think I love these people.

“Purple is the color of the spirits,” Cora Lee whispers.

“Oui,”
Jenny says, and winks at me, as if we are sharing a joke. I don’t know if we are sharing a joke, though. I don’t really know her. I don’t paint. I’ve never been interested in painting. I am suddenly filled with the most intense longing for home. Home the way it doesn’t exist anymore. Home where Mom would come home from work with a couple of fat bags of groceries and we’d unload them together. She’d say,
I got that yogurt you like.
I’d give anything to just hear that.

I stare at my painting as if pondering my next creative move, but I am really counting up how many minutes my mother lived. Sixty minutes in an hour; one thousand, four hundred, forty minutes in a day; and 525,600 in a year. I dip the brush in the paint and do the math on my canvas. Forty-two years, which is 22,075,200 minutes or so. I write the number 22,075,200 again in purple, the color of the spirits. It looks so large, but it isn’t. It’s not nearly large enough.

Jenny claps her hands together. Everyone is coming out of their trances and shuffling things and standing up. Elijah stretches as if he’s just run a mile, but his painting doesn’t look all that different from when he began. There is the snapping of paint-box clasps, and Millicent has her perfect back toward the room as she stands at the sink and cleans up. “If I have to paint another flower, I’ll scream,” she says. Funny, I didn’t see the armed gunman who was forcing her to use that brush, but maybe I missed him.

Elijah holds his canvas carefully between his palms and carries it to the long counter, where he sets it beside the others.

“So weird running into you last night,” I say to him.

“Parrish Island, population three thousand, and a good lot of those don’t live here full-time. You always run into people.”

“Oh,” I say. He’s smashing any image I had of a Meaningful Coincidence. It’s starting to happen again, the vast conversational wasteland. I realize something, though. It’s happening not only because those perfect blue eyes intimidate me, but because he’s not all that friendly. Truthfully, he and Millicent are a pair of icebergs. Still, I can’t forget another set of eyes, ones I’ve been seeing every time I shut my own. I can feel that hand around my wrist right here and now as I stumble for something to say to this boy, who happens to be smiling a billboard smile—large and perfect, but fake. “Your friend Henry seems nice.”

“Henry is weird,” Millicent says without turning around.

“Henry’s not weird,” Elijah says.

“I like weird,” I say.

“Mill, hustle up. I’ve got to be at work in ten.”

I try again. “Where do you work?”

“Hotel Delgado?”

I shrug my shoulders. I’ve been here all of two days.

“He’s a waiter,” Millicent says. She holds her hand in the air as if she is carrying a tray. “Baked potato or fries with that?”

“Fries,” I joke, but they are too involved in their own sibling rivalry to notice.

“At least I have a job, loser,” Elijah says. “I don’t sit around all day reading magazines and slathering on more sunscreen, my hand out to Mommy and Daddy when I need a little cash.”

“Who’s the loser? Summer is for rest and relaxation, not for hot grease and cleaning up gross stuff under high chairs. Stupid brother.” She flicks him with her thumb and forefinger. “Well, see ya,” Millicent says to me.

“See ya,” I say.

“Later, Jenny,” Elijah calls.

So much for hanging out tonight. So much for us all going over to the Hotel Delgado, wherever that is, to share dessert. So much for a chance to see Henry again.

Margaret is struggling to get her sweater back on, the one lone sleeve darting around like a fish on a line. I catch it and help her aim. That old arm has a map of veins on it. Maybe it’s all the turns taken and not taken over a lifetime.

“Thank you, my dear,” she says. She actually says “My dear,” just like you think old people do. “It was a pleasure to meet you.” But then she crooks her finger, and I lean down. “Don’t let it bother you,” she whispers. “Those two think their you-know-what doesn’t stink.”

*  *  *

I’m on a roll. Jenny will get the wrong idea of me now, because I’m trashing her students, whom I just met. Generally, I’m an open-minded person. A benefit-of-the-doubt-giving person. Death has made me easily fed up.

“Would it kill them to be friendly? Could you get your nose higher in the air? I mean, why does she even take the class if she doesn’t like it?”

“I think she likes it a lot. Terminally bored is just her way of being in the world.”

“Her way of being
superior
in the world! And what’s with the two of them, anyway? They seem awfully close. Close-close. Hey, I read my mother’s old copy of
Flowers in the Attic.
”

“It’s nothing personal, Tess,” Jenny says. “You have to remember, hundreds and hundreds of tourists visit during the summer. They go on their whale-watching tours and stay in our B and Bs and then they go home and we all go about our regular lives. You don’t expect to
bond
.”

“ ‘We,’ ‘they,’ ” I say. My voice sounds too sarcastic, even to me. But I don’t like her tone either. Or maybe I don’t like that she’s joining them in “we” and leaving me all alone out here.

She holds up a hand. She actually steps away from me. “I’m not your enemy.”

“Could have fooled me.”

Jenny gives me a long stare, the kind Mr. Shattuck used to give the mouthy potheads in Algebra II. We’re still in her studio, and she heads over to her desk and starts shuffling stuff around, as if she’s done with this conversation. She puts on the glasses she wears on a chain around her neck and studies a small stack of glossy photos of what looks like her own art. Well, sure. Of course she’s loyal to these people. This is her life. She’s known me, her own flesh and blood, all of five minutes.

This is not going the way I expected. Jenny is obviously not the fountain of grandmotherly love and understanding I thought she might be. And she is not bowing at the altar of my grief like she’s supposed to either. Her jaw is a granite slab, immoveable and almost defiant. It’s Dad’s look. It’s my own; I hate to admit it. We’re a generally optimistic lot, but we’re fond of our own views, let’s just say. Sure of our own position. “Stubborn” is another word for it.

Well, my mother was too. She and my father could face off like a pair of boulders.

“I’d like to get out of here, if I’m allowed,” I say.

She opens her desk drawer, grabs her keys, and tosses them to me. In the film version, I catch them neatly and stride off, with my hair flowing out behind me and my shoes
clip-clip
ping their displeasure. In real life, she makes a bad throw, and I
make a worse catch, and the keys go sliding across the floor and I have to retrieve them from under Cora Lee’s abandoned chair.

“There you go, Rapunzel,” she says. “First gear sticks.”

It’s official: I hate it here.

chapter seven

Sesamum indicum
: sesame. The sesame seed is one of the oldest spices known to man. The most famous reference to sesame seeds came in the tale of Ali Baba and his forty thieves. “Open sesame” was the magic password, which unlocked the door to the robbers’ den. The phrase was used because ripe sesame pods are so delicate that they can burst open and scatter their seeds at the slightest touch. Call them overly sensitive.

Inside the house, I grab my purse. I swipe the piece of paper with my father’s number on it and tuck it into my pocket. I want to go home. Vito hears the keys jingle and thinks we’re going somewhere.

“See you later, alligator,” I say to him.

But I say this sort of meanly. Sorry, Vito, but I feel the sort of pissed that makes you want to step down hard on the accelerator, and when I do, the old Volkswagen van sputters and dies. Apparently, it’s one of those days when even objects—stuck closet doors and cold showers and old cars—have lessons
of philosophical importance to impart upon you. Thanks, got it. I try again with less road rage and make it down the driveway and out onto what seems like a major street. I spot a sign:
DECEPTION LOOP
. Roads named after lies, very comforting.

But it
is
comforting, because it’s beautiful. The road curves high and winding around the outer edge of the island, so it’s good that I’m basically driving a sluggish tin can. The car rattles as it inches along, but it somehow fits this road. Cliffs drop down into the sound, and those waters are wide and sparkly, and I get that great Nature Feeling, that great and
important
Nature Feeling, where you understand your smallness and you sense God, even. I’m glad for that feeling. God is such a relief.

I roll down the window of the van, which you do manually with this tiny, round handle I can barely get my fingers around. It smells like the ocean out there, and I suck in a big lungful of that air. The sound sneaks out of view, and then it is back, and then I find myself beside a wide meadow that dips down to the sea. There’s a Victorian house in the distance and another small, shingled house next to it. I pull over by a row of mailboxes, because it’s one of those places that make you imagine living another life. You picture yourself there, with a bowl of lemons on the table and a golden dog who follows you wherever you go, and for a minute, you’re so happy. All of life stretches before you then, all the possibilities, the thrilling power of your own future, which means it’s a good place to try to phone my father.

I spread the piece of paper on the dash. My heart is thrumming.
I hear the trill of the phone, and I wait, but it just rings and rings and rings. And then there is “Mary’s” voice, the traitorous, cat-hair-covered Mary, the “Mary” of spaghetti-sauce-stained Tupperware and cobwebby ceiling corners, asking me to leave a message.

“Dad,” I say. I don’t want my voice to sound pleading. “Dad. You need to call me. I don’t want to be stuck here with your mother. This is wrong. I want to go home. You need to come back and get me out of here.”

I hang up and am instantly filled with regret, with the sense that I’ve played this very wrong. It’s the same regret of the e-mail that can’t be unsent, the button that can’t be unpushed—events that spool out in ways that can never be different now.

The butter-colored grass in that meadow sways in the breeze, and a girl bicycles up the road to the house. It’s stupid, but I wish for some kind of sign from my mother.
Please,
I say. I just want to know she hasn’t forgotten about me. We didn’t have time to discuss a plan. You know, like, I’ll send you rainbows or butterflies or shooting stars. She wouldn’t have gone for those clichés, anyway. Everyone who’s lost someone starts seeing butterflies. My father says it’s the same thing as when you don’t notice mattress sales until you need a mattress and then they’re everywhere. I say take your comfort where you can get it.