The Last Forever

by Deb Caletti

“Since before track.”

  “This weekend,” I say.

  “Tomorrow. Friday night.”

  I kiss him again before we go to class. I wonder—if I knew that was the last time, would I have tried to make it more meaningful? It’s one of those things you think about later.

  * * *

  Dad’s truck is in the driveway. It’s the middle of the day, so this is strange. He’s often at Plum Studio until seven or even later if there are a lot of orders for the handcrafted furniture he makes. But he’s never home after school. Inside, there’s a case of Manny’s Pale Ale and a six-pack of Diet Coke on the kitchen counter. Then the door to the garage flings wide and bangs hard against the doorstop because Dad has kicked it open with one foot. He stands there, hefting the large red cooler in both hands. The sight of him makes my heart leap, and I can’t tell if it’s a good leap or a bad one.

  Dad’s got a map held in his teeth. His hair has those sidetracked wisps around his face, but his grin is huge and he’s wearing his lucky Grateful Dead shirt, the one he had on when he’d bought a lottery ticket that won him twelve hundred bucks. He sets the cooler on the kitchen table and takes the map from his mouth.

  “Get a move on, girlie. Fifteen minutes, we’re outta here.”

  The awareness of an ending beginning or of a beginning starting—it comes from the same place inside that senses when a thunderstorm is imminent, or a snowfall. I drop my backpack and stare at him.

  “Dad, we can’t.”

  “Sure we can.”

  “School’s not even out.”

  He just looks at me like I’m crazy. I think about distance and loneliness and what my life feels like right now and then I think, why not? Why the hell not?

  I throw on some shorts and a tank top. I stuff a bunch of clothes into my duffel; they’re light summer clothes, so I can jam a lot in there. Books to read, mandatory. I have a film version moment and pack my photo album, too, but let’s not linger over that. What am I going to do, leave her behind? I can’t bear that, even for a few days. My mother had never even been to the Grand Canyon. Of course she’s going now.

  And then, wait. The last pixiebell. I don’t know how long we’ll be gone. If I leave it, it might die. I can never, ever let that happen. Never. Grandpa Leopold Sullivan, Mom’s dad, stole the seed of this extinct plant some sixty years ago, pinching it from the home of a professor he knew, an expert on the flora and fauna of the ancient Amazonian rainforest. The theft occurred during a Christmas party, after Grandpa Leopold excused himself to “use the facilities.” Apparently, Sully was a bit of a klepto. What are you going to do? When he died, they found spoons from the Ambassador Hotel and saltshakers from the RMS Queen Elizabeth, and several herringbone overcoats that weren’t even his size.

  After he stole that last, one-of-a-kind seed, he put it in a pot and grew it. It was a kind of miracle. And after Grandpa Leopold was felled by a heart attack one cold New Year’s morning, my mother took care of that plant. She kept it alive all these years, taking it with her every place she moved, from her college dorm room forward. My mother vowed that the last pixiebell would never die on her watch, and now that I have it, it isn’t going to die on mine, either.

  I find a shoe box under my bed, dump out the old boy-band CDs that I loved when I was twelve. But no—it’ll slide around too much in there. I fling open the closet in Mom and Dad’s room and grab one of my mother’s running shoes. I set it in the box, and then wedge the pot of the last pixiebell into the shoe. I tie it up snugly.

  In a few moments, I’m in the passenger side of Dad’s truck, and just like that, we’re heading out of the driveway, away from our house and everything around it: our scratchy tan lawn, the row of mailboxes, the neighbor’s dog, Bob, who always stands at the corner and watches traffic.

  “Adios, Bob,” I say out the open window.

  “For fuck’s sake, Bob, get a life,” Dad says.

  chapter three

  Merremia discoidesperma: Mary’s bean. This tropical seed has long been considered to be good luck. In Central America, the seeds were handed down from mother to daughter as treasured keepsakes. The Mary’s bean is elusive, though. Its thick, woody coat and internal air cavities enable it to drift for thousands and thousands of miles. Sometimes, it can spend years upon aimless years at sea.

  I know you are just waiting to hear about Henry Lark, and you are right to want to get to that part, even if only for the way Henry’s black hair falls over his eyes when he is thinking hard. But we are not at that part of the story yet. No, we are at the part where my father and I are on Route 66, which is a two-lane road Dad says we have to take because that’s what you do on a road trip. The two-lane road is slow and traffic is all jammed up, but Dad isn’t bothered in the least. He drives with one elbow out the window, his T-shirt sleeve flapping when the semis rattle past. The afternoon is hot, and by the time we stop, the backs of my legs are slick with sweat against the vinyl seats and my hair’s a big mess from the wind whipping through the open windows. We get into Barstow about an hour and a half later, a half hour behind schedule. Dad says there shouldn’t be a schedule, but let’s just say we’re different that way.

  We fill up with gas at the Rip Griffin truck stop and stop for a cheeseburger at Art’s El Rancho Coffee Shop, a place with plastic menus and a ketchup bottle next to the sugar packets and a stickiness from the last people at the table who had pancakes. We drink root beer floats and Dad raises his. He says, “Here’s to . . .” But, I don’t know, there’s something dangerous about finishing that sentence. All this newness and celebration feels sort of disloyal. He stops there. We just clink glasses, nothing more. We slurp to the brown-white swirly liquid bottom. Dad pays the check at the cash register and snags two rectangular mints wrapped in green foil.

  “ ‘We were somewhere in Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,’ ” Dad says, and hands me a mint.

  I scrunch my eyebrows together to form a question.

  “Hunter Thompson,” he says.

  Suicidal stoner and gonzo journalist, our road-trip role model. God help us.

  * * *

  It’s still light out, barely. We drive beside a train on I-40, the rail cars coursing over the flat, yellow ground. “Wanna race?” Dad shouts to the train. He steps on the accelerator, and his old truck roars and rattles and the compass that Dad has on his dashboard shimmies in its plastic ball.

  I grip the armrest. “Dad!”

  He slows, but not much. “We could have beat that bastard,” Dad says.

  He thinks he’s hilarious, but it’s not funny. Death-defying acts are stupid and insulting when you think about all the people in those waiting rooms, reading magazines or knitting or sitting silently before it’s time for their treatment. Praying, maybe. Talk about a whole other world going on while you just eat your TacoTime and text your little heart out and gossip about Simona’s Spray Tan Incident. It’s like Armageddon down there, except for the knitting. Down there, because that’s where you go. You ride the elevator into the basement, another kind of vault, where the doors all have big yellow radiation signs, three triangles set around a circle. That place isn’t hidden inside an icy mountain, but it may as well be.

  * * *

  It’s dark by the time we get to the Shady Dell Motel in Williams, Arizona. It’s darker here than the dark in San Bernardino. It’s desert dark, the sky wide and the stars so bright and close you can almost breathe them in. We get out, slam the truck doors. I expect the night to be more silent out here, but there’s the rush of cars whipping past on the freeway and crickets chirping and the sound of canned sitcom laughter from a television in the motel office.

  “You coming in?” Dad asks.

  “I’ll wait here.”

  I lean against the truck and gather my hair into a ponytail, let the night air cool my neck. VA NCY, the sign reads. ROOMS WITH ZENITH CHROMACOLOR TV. I count thirteen rooms, eleven with little yellow lights glowing outside, moths circ
ling. Someone, somewhere, lights a cigarette—I smell the nicotine as it wanders over. I hold my nose, just in case. I know what they say about secondhand smoke.

  Dad comes back with the key and a credit card slip, which he crumples up and tosses in the back of the truck.

  “You made sixteen miles to the gallon,” I tell him as we walk to our room.

  “I’ll remember that next time I’m on Jeopardy!” he says.

  * * *

  We hurry out of there in the morning, which is fine by me. The Shady Dell is a place where you want to wear your shoes in the bathroom. Even the dresser tells too many stories—cigarette burns, permanent three-quarter rings of coffee, mysterious gouges that make you think someone got hurt.

  It’s bright on the other side of those heavy plastic motel curtains. I squint. The air smells like bacon cooking. I love that smell so much. Right there—the hope of bacon is a reason to love life. But Dad edges coins into the vending machine outside the motel office and down clunks a Reese’s and a Butterfinger and a Baby Ruth and M&M’s and a package of those orange crackers with something resembling peanut butter between them. He tosses them to me one at a time and I catch. “Breakfast,” he says. “Just call me the B&B Gourmet.” The B&B Gourmet is a cooking show my mother loved to watch, hosted by Willa Hapstead, plump proprietress of Red Gate Inn.

  The wrappers litter the floor of the truck. It’s a fifty-mile drive to the south rim, but the way Dad’s driving, we’ll be there in thirty-five minutes. “ ‘The length of the Grand Canyon is two hundred seventy-seven miles,’ ” I read from a pamphlet I found in the motel’s dresser drawer. “ ‘The average rim-to-rim distance is ten miles. The average depth is one mile.’ ”

  Dad isn’t listening. “I wonder how many people have fallen in.”

  * * *

  Neither of us cares about the visitors center. Who wants to see an IMAX movie of the Grand Canyon when you’re at the Grand Canyon? The walk to the rim lookout is surprisingly cool. It’s dusty, though—my feet already feel gritty in my sandals. When we finally stand on the overhang of Mather Point—our first good view—I forget about the dust. All I can think is how it looks just like the pictures you see of the Grand Canyon. Then I try to remember to be awestruck. Dinosaurs walked there once. Once, the rock formed the bottom of a shallow sea.

  “That is some big hole,” Dad says. He has his camera around his neck, same as everyone else, and he leans far over the top of the fence. Looking down makes my stomach flop. It’s crowded at the lookout. There are little kids and strollers and tourists.

  “Tessie? Let’s get out of here, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s drive over to the trail. I can’t get the I’m-so-small-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things feeling when someone’s elbow is in my back.”

  * * *

  It’s fine at first, the trail along the rim. The beginning is paved, and there are waterspouts in case you get too hot or thirsty. There’s just the trail, though. No fence. I walk right up against the canyon wall because it’s scary. Dad’s happy. His camera is bouncing against his chest as he walks.

  “Tessa Bessa, look at that!”

  He stops, heads to the edge of the pavement, and steps down onto a jagged ridge of rock. “Dad! It says to stay on the path.”

  “Yeah? And who’s listening?”

  He’s right, really. People dot the cliffs. They crawl their way down stone ledges. One guy lays on a narrow, stone strip, his shirt off, hands cradling his head. “Dad, come on.” I hate seeing him there, at the edge of that rock.

  He turns sideways, eases farther down. I can hear the skid of dirt under his shoe.

  “God, Dad, what are you doing!”

  “This is gonna be a kick-ass photo,” he says. He snaps a picture, uses a hand to balance himself on his way back up. We hike farther, and after a while, the pavement ends. There’s only the curve of dirt path, down, up, around, until it disappears. The well is so deep, you can’t even see to the bottom. The trail is all earth and loose pebbles now. And narrow. Narrow enough to feel that plunge right there in your stomach. Narrow enough to feel yourself going down even though you aren’t. It does not seem a mile down, or two, or three. It’s ten thousand miles down, easy. More.

  “Dad?”

  He’s up ahead, but I’m ready to go back. I’m not good at this kind of thing. This is all seeming like a very, very bad idea. I should be in biology right now, watching some stupid movie because school’s almost out and there’s nothing else to do. It’s hard to see the beauty here; it’s hard to take in the red rock, the pink and brown layers, the magnitude, when I’m suddenly aware that all the other hikers have backpacks and water bottles and hiking boots.

  “This is fucking majestic! This is life!” Dad shouts. His voice bounces around. He holds his arms out, as if to embrace every bit of it.

  My feet are slipping on the loose rocks of the path. I try to grab at a clump of green brush on the cliff beside me.

  “Look at that hawk!” Dad says.

  I can’t take my eyes off of my own feet. “Can we go back?” I hear the panic in my voice.

  “Here we are!” Dad says. “The perfect spot. Wait till you see. Your mother would love this.”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. I can’t even think about what he’s saying right then. My mother wouldn’t love any of this. She wasn’t a hiking, outdoorsy person. She’d been camping only once. She’d be worried about us on this frightening path. This is how far apart my father and I are, right here. This is how we’re struggling. It’s hot, and my shoulders feel like they’re getting burnt. My mouth is dry, and the gravel is so loose, and there is only down, down, down. I see a flash of yellow, Dad’s T-shirt. He’s climbing the craggy notches of the wall again, to another boulder perch, farther out.

  “Dad!”

  I need so much from him, I do. I need him to hear me calling his name, for starters. But this is apparently what he needs. He drops to his knees and sits. He fishes around in one of the side pockets of his cargo shorts. I creep down, grabbing at branches. “Tessa Bessa, check it out!”

  He is holding something to his mouth. I say a prayer, even if God is apparently on a coffee break. If that something Dad is holding is a joint, I don’t know what I’ll do. But it isn’t a joint—it’s something bright. A pink bottle? And then there is a sudden release of bubbles as he blows, the luminescent blue-green-pink globes that lift and float and crash against the rocks.

  I feel the roll of gravel beneath the slick surface of my shoe, and I scream as I fall. I grab for a branch, for a handful of desert scrub, but there is nothing. My feet skitter out from under me, and there is the tick-ping of pebbles tumbling down. I land hard on my knees, my palms, and my heart is thudding. I open my eyes and see the red ground beneath me, and just beyond, the drop-off, the endless layers of rock to the bottom. Gravel burns under my skin, and there’s the warmth of blood. I want to sob, but no sound comes out. My chest just heaves, and I won’t turn my head to look. No, I grip the ground and keep my eyes fixed, because if I look, I will see a space so vast and immeasurable you could be lost within it forever. I want so much to feel as if I’m not falling. I need this most of all.

  “Tess! What are you doing down there?” my father says. “Christ, you missed it. You missed the best part.”

  * * *

  By the time evening arrives, there are ten messages on my phone, split evenly between Meg and Dillon. They begin somewhere around lunchtime. Meg has gone over to my house. They are both sure something is terribly wrong. This speaks either to my usual reliability or to my current fragile state, I have no idea which.

  In the film version, I am an outlaw on the run. I am riding a satiny black horse that gallops away, and I have no ties to anyone. In real life, though, horses kind of scare me. Those big teeth. Meg sounds near tears—that’s how worried she is—and Dillon has taken on the firm, no-nonsense voice of his father. I text them both. Sorry to worry you. Dad decided we needed
a road trip. I’m fine. More soon! The exclamation point seems overly cheery. Sorry, I type again.

  Sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, you can pile on as many as you want, but the guilt is still there, like that pea under all those mattresses.

  We stay at the Piney Woods Lodge. The name makes you think of stone fireplaces and stuffed elk heads and downy beds, but it is actually one of those two-level motels you see in movies where someone always OD’s. No one ever OD’s in a La Quinta in the movies. It’s always these places with windows looking out onto a parking lot and gold room numbers on the doors.

  Well, of course it smells like cigarettes in there. Not a recent cigarette, but one that was smoked sometime in the 1970s. I think about sleeping in my clothes. I once read an article that said the bedspreads in motels harbor more disgusting stuff than just about any other object on earth, and my mind is now unraveling all of the sordid possibilities.

  This can’t get any worse. (Be careful saying stuff like that.)

  “We’ve got to go to Las Vegas since we’re so close,” my father says. “Don’t you think?” He is flipping channels on the television, which doesn’t take long, because there are maybe three whole stations.

  “I’m not really a Las Vegas kind of person.” I’m still pissed at him for what happened on the trail. And he’s still clueless about it.

  “What kind of person is a Las Vegas kind of person?”

  This is too obvious to deserve an answer. The pixiebell is a little limp from all that time in the hot car, so I water it and set it on the laminated table by the window. It looks so innocent there. It’s as out of place as a virgin on the Las Vegas Strip.

  “Don’t jump to conclusions before you’ve even been there.”

  This doesn’t deserve a response either.

  “Come on, Tess. Don’t be like this.”

  “Like what?” I say, but of course I know.

  “This is supposed to be . . .”

  “Supposed to be what?”

  I swear, we’re an old married couple. The sound of our toothbrushing contains barely suppressed rage. I keep on with my high-pitched, cool I’m fine-ness, and Dad keeps on with his pissed-but-not-pissed, ignoring-me-but-not-ignoring-me act until the next morning, when we are back in the truck. Then I just go for the silent treatment—always a classic—and stare out the window on the way to Las Vegas.