The Last Forever

by Deb Caletti

  “And it hasn’t been a shock to me? Was this his plan all along? We’d come here, and he’d ditch me?” Maybe he didn’t even care about the Grand Canyon.

  “I don’t think he’s planning anything. I think he’s falling apart.”

  “Well, someone needs to not fall apart,” I say. “He couldn’t tell me he was leaving?”

  And it’s that thought, that he fled me, that he was too much of a coward to even face me, that causes me to shove my chair back, scaring the innocent Vito so that he scurries backward. I run upstairs. I have never been more furious in my life. I grab my purse. My phone is in there, and that’s all I really need. I leave the pixiebell, too. Screw it. I don’t owe anybody anything.

  I slam that front door. The logistical problems haven’t hit me yet. For one, that I don’t even know where I am. I run down that driveway, the rage filling me, spilling over, propelling me forward even though I don’t know where forward is. The weather has changed. The fading summer day is leaving us, and dark clouds are rolling in fast, coming in over the water, covering the bittersweet twilight and turning the night purplish and dark.

  At the end of the road, I look over my shoulder. She’s probably going to run out after me and break a hip or something. I don’t care. I run past tall evergreens, the enchanted-forest kind of trees that loom ominous in the dark, the kind of trees that talk and scare small children who are alone in the woods in fairy tales. I run and run until my chest burns, past the curve of the waters of the sound; I follow the road into town, my sandals slapping on asphalt, until I have to walk. The air feels heavy with imminent rain. I don’t have a plan. My only plan is away.

  The town is only a few streets wide. There’s a closed gift shop with a wind sock in the shape of a whale, whipping back and forth in the gust. There’s a restaurant with cars out front and a door that swings open, letting out a couple clutching each other’s arms, running to their car because it is going to pour. I feel it. A fat drop splats on my bare shoulder.

  I stand under the awning of a Realtor’s office with pictures of charming beach houses for sale posted on the windows. I call my father’s phone, but it only rings and rings. I call again and leave him a message. I try not to cry, because I want to cry and beg and plead. I only say, “How could you?” I don’t know where to go or what to do. I don’t even know Jenny’s address or phone number. I think about calling Dillon. I think about calling Meg or Meg’s mom. I think about calling my mother’s brothers, Uncle Mike and Uncle Ted. One lives with Aunt Sue and their kids in Boston, and the other lives with Aunt Rebecca and their kids in Phoenix. I think about how few people I really have—at least the kind of people who are a fortress, a vault, the kind of people who will be there, always. The kind of people you can count on to keep you from falling miles and miles.

  And that’s when I see the glowing lights of the Parrish Island Library. I see the wide set of steps up to the door. The door is propped open. Relief washes over me. I love the library. I have always felt safe in a library. It’s like seeing the entrance of a church. I want to set myself down there like an abandoned baby in a basket.

  It is a block away. Another drop of rain lands on my cheek, and then there’s another on my arm, and then another and another. The drops, they come faster and harder and then they aren’t drops at all, but a pounding sheet of rain, and it is raining so hard I can barely see. I run up those stairs. I am dripping wet, and rain runs down my face.

  Inside, the library is beautiful, with large windows and warm wood and a domed ceiling with the sky painted on it. I look up at that painted blue sky with the puffy white clouds, and suddenly my throat closes up tight. I feel a wide vista of emotion, and anything could make those tears come, anything. I could weep at an overturned chair or a torn page, or maybe I won’t weep at all. I’ll cut off my hair or get in someone’s car and drive fast, fast, fast. I am translucent. I could break against rocks. I am ten thousand miles down and ten thousand miles across and around and it’s too far and too long and too deep. And when I step forward then and my foot slips on the wet marble floor, I can feel the lurch, the imminent loss, the propelling forward, and that’s when the hand grips my wrist.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  I nod, but he keeps a firm hold on my arm. I can smell his soap, a smell like evergreen boughs, a smell that asks a question in a way that maybe you’d want to answer. He’s wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a loose tie, and there is another boy with him, that same boy with the bike, whose name I can’t remember right then, because the black-haired boy with the wide, soft brown eyes is looking right at me. He looks deep into my eyes and he can see me, right into me, I can tell. And then, gently as a passing thought, or even as gently as a memory, his thumb moves across the soft flesh of the underside of my wrist. He is holding his breath, I realize, because he exhales and then lets me go, and when he does I can sense his fingers still there, their heat, where he touched me.

  “You sure?” he asks. He even sets his bag down. It’s heavy with books, but the setting down means he is willing to wait.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Jenny’s granddaughter,” the other boy says. He’s forgotten my name, and that’s all right, because I’ve forgotten his.

  “Right.”

  “Well, if you’re sure,” the black-haired boy says. He picks up his bag, and they head toward the door. He waves to a woman behind the checkout desk, a woman with short spiky hair and round glasses.

  “Later, Henry,” she calls.

  I watch his profile and then the back of his head, the thick wave of hair, as he descends the stairs, and I feel this energy between us, an awareness that we’re looking at each other, only not looking. He feels it too, I know. He feels it until he must turn around. He smiles. I don’t know exactly what this smile means, only that it means something. Something immense. It curls around me like smoke, or like the arm of true love, and I wonder then if it’s possible to fall ten thousand miles into the Grand Canyon and be held safe at the same time.

  chapter six

  Malus domestica: apple tree. If you plant the seed from the apple you just ate, the tree that will grow will produce fruit that looks and tastes completely unlike your original piece of fruit. Without tree grafting, your favorite kind of apple would have disappeared centuries ago. That’s because—even more so than humans—each apple seed produces an offspring that is an individual quite unlike its parent.

  Here’s what I do next: I sit in one of the leather library chairs, which is as soft as an old baseball mitt. The chairs are in a group like they’re having a little chair party, and there are also several rows of long, dark wood tables with green glass lamps hanging down over them. No one is in there but me and a blond woman in a sundress, who appears and disappears with her fat bag of books. I can hear the rain on the roof.

  I’m in shock. First my father and then that boy. I’m having one of those moments where you wonder who this is, this person whose body you happen to be inhabiting. I let it all—the pounding rain against the windows, the quiet, the soft chair—take me in and give me comfort. I’m surrounded by stories and answers and years and years of volumes of the right words. My heart, which has been beating fast, starts to slow. That great musty smell of the library speaks of solid, timeless things, old and lasting ones, and I know what I have to do, of course. I had wanted to run, but there are reasons to go back to that blue-white room.

  Sometimes you don’t want to go on, but you have to. You absolutely have to, because there are things waiting for you. Good can sit in the distance, just beyond your view, waiting, until you go toward it. You must go toward it. That’s another thing I learned.

  I try to find the number on one of the library computers. This takes forever, and so I give up on that plan. But I’m in a library. If you can’t solve your problem in a library, good luck to you. I know there are old phone books in here somewhere. I could ask the spiky-haired woman behind the desk, who is looking at me over
the top of her round glasses, but I decide not to. Librarians know just about everything, but they especially know how to mind their own business. She leans back in her chair and returns to her magazine. It’s got a pink cover with a vinyl record on it and it’s called Bitch. When she sees me looking her way, she folds it in half so I can’t see the word. I’m a stranger, and so who knows? I could be one of those people who freak out when they hear profanity, as if they’ve just been deflowered by vocabulary. Personally, I think there are more important things to freak out about, like world hunger, for example, or violence, or bad parents, such as the kind who leave a daughter on a strange island far from home after her mother dies.

  I find the phone directory. It’s a slim volume. Not many people live here on old Parrish. I take it way back to a far corner. If I was in any mood to laugh, I would, because there’s a chair with its back turned to everything else. Pinned to it is an official-looking sign, which says LEAVE ME ALONE. Maybe I should steal it and wear it on my back.

  I sit in that chair and dial. I keep my voice low. She answers on the first ring.

  “Where are you?” she says. And not three minutes later, my grandmother, Jenny Sedgewick, drives up in her old Volkswagen van and opens the door.

  “Get in,” she says. “You must be starving.”

  He might have been right after all, my father. Home, he’d said. And when we drive back to that gravel road with the tilting mailbox, I realize it. This is the closest thing to a home I’ve got.

  * * *

  That next morning, I am awoken by the sound of a ringing bell. A ringing bell that reminds me of another ringing bell. Do you know what they used to do when someone was done with radiation treatment? The nurses would have the patient ring this big metal bell on a stand that they kept on the front counter. It was a forced rite of passage. The poor, emaciated person would receive a certificate, too, like the ones you used to get in elementary school, with scrolly writing: This certifies that (name) is a math fact champion! But this one said has completed radiation! A lousy xeroxed piece of paper.

  What if I don’t want to ring it? my mom asked me after we’d just heard it again.

  I wouldn’t ring it.

  Isn’t it sort of . . . dark? There’s something twisted about it.

  Cancer meets rodeo ranch dinner bell or something, I said.

  We started to snicker in that way where you’re trying not to laugh but can’t help but laugh. She actually snorted, which made us laugh harder. We elbowed each other to shut up so all the sad people in the waiting room didn’t see us. And then the bell ringer and certificate holder who’d just finished his treatment left the office. His cheeks were sunken in and his clothes hung on him like there was barely a body underneath. He looked like the people you see in the concentration camp movies. And he was carrying a white, plaster bust molded into the shape of a head and shoulders. It shut us up fast, because that cast looked creepy, like the death him, the ghost him, the absent-bodied him. I didn’t know what it was, or why he had it. I must have looked worried, because Mom leaned over and said, It’s okay. It’s just . . . They make this mold of you, and you wear it. They fit it—she demonstrated putting it on—to make sure you stay still. It doesn’t hurt. It’s just really . . . confining. But for the record, I’m not ringing the bell. And I’m not taking that thing home.

  Good, I’d said.

  Unless maybe I can put it in the passenger seat so I can fake a ride in the carpool lane, she said.

  To be honest, I never really believed in death. I knew in my logical mind that it existed, but it seemed more like an idea than something real. I still sometimes feel that way. Because it’s unfathomable that she’s actually gone-gone. The sheets she folded are still in the linen closet, and her writing is in our address book, and she’s the one I talk to when something goes wrong or right. A half-eaten pack of her mints is in the ashtray of her (my) car. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that she’s just away and will be back. I’m even sort of calmly sure about the whole thing. And then it hits me—the forever of it—and each and every time that happens, there’s a gut-sinking twist of shock. I am felled all over again. Where did she go? That’s what I don’t understand. I have no idea. I just want her back.

  The bell I hear now—it’s actually a phone. It’s funny, but a ringing phone doesn’t usually sound like a ringing phone anymore. Phones sound like jazz riffs or steel drums or chirping birds, but not bells. I can hear Jenny downstairs talking. I leap up, because I know it’s my father.

  I throw on my robe, and I rush downstairs, and I’m rude to Vito, who’s excited to see me. I ignore his wagging and jumping. Jenny’s wearing this great floaty robe with huge dragonflies on it. The phone has been hung up. It hangs on the wall. It has one of those curly wires. Grandma Jenny hasn’t yet discovered the freedom of not having to talk while being attached to the wall by an electrical umbilical cord. But look. She’s got a package of bacon in her hands. Someone’s told her all my favorite foods.

  “Someone’s told you all my favorite foods,” I say. “Bread, bacon, fried chicken.”

  “They’re all my favorite foods,” she says. “Thank God I’ve got a good metabolism.”

  “What did he have to say for himself?” I ask.

  “Do you want coffee?”

  I shake my head. I don’t drink coffee. But I like that she asks.

  “He said his phone died. He called with a number to reach him.”

  I am so relieved that I could laugh and cry at the same time. Maybe Dad wasn’t ignoring my calls. Maybe he just couldn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t even know I’d been trying to reach him all night. I think all those crazy maybes. When someone ditches you—ditches you, leaves you, dies, whatever—you’re always stuck with the crazy maybes. That’s another thing I learned. All those maybes are just hope looking for a place to land. Every maybe is Maybe They Love Me After All. Oh, it’s pathetic, that mind game of misplaced faith that you play when you’ve been left.

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “He said a week.”

  “Wait, what? A week now? I thought you said a few days.”

  “Tess.”

  I can’t help it. I start pacing again. I want to throw something. She’s getting the wrong idea about me, because I’m not the run-off-mad type or the throw-something type. I get upset when I see strangers arguing. I can’t handle aggressive talk radio, or TV talent shows where someone gets told how bad they are, or animal programs where the tiger is about to overtake the injured okapi.

  I’m furious. But fury and devastation are fraternal twins. They may not look alike, but they’re made up of exactly the same stuff. I want to cry.

  “What can I do?” Jenny says. “Do you want to go back home? Stay with a friend? I’ll take you. I’ll do whatever you think is best. But I’d really like to have you here. I would, Tess. We have lost years to make up for. We can use this. As a chance to get to know each other, right? Yes? A few days? A week? And, you know, maybe you need a rest too.”

  The word “rest” is so beautiful that I want to fall down on my knees and lay my head right on it.

  “He . . .” My voice is hoarse. Her eyes are kind, and she’s got bacon, and she said the word “rest.” I almost want to tell her everything. I want to tell her I hadn’t slept in weeks. I want to tell her how sad things are at home. I want to tell her what keeps going around and around in my head, even the thing I am most guilty of. But I can’t. And I can’t manage to speak the worst thing: He didn’t even say good-bye.

  The He just floats around in the air until Jenny finishes my sentence for me. “He’s an ass,” she says. It’s not quite where I was headed, but I like her direction better. “He’s my son, and I love him, but sometimes he’s as selfish as a dog. Wait. My apologies to you, Vito. That was unfair.”

  I look at Vito, with his white whiskers and sincere brown eyes. “Vito has better morals,” I say.

  “I don’t know about that,” Jenny says. “You can’t trus
t him for five minutes.”

  Vito keeps looking at me with those sweet eyes. “Vito has a soul,” I try instead.

  “Indeed he does,” Jenny says.

  * * *

  “I have absolutely no artistic ability,” I tell her.

  “Well, so be it. You can watch if you want, but it’d be nice to have you join in.”

  I’ve declined Jenny’s offer of her car keys, which she dangled from her index finger, in favor of staying around while she gives her art lesson. I’m not uninterested in exploring this island. It’s just that the little inner manipulator that is in all of us (I hope it is in all of us) is moving the pieces around in my head, plotting and scheming like an evil queen. Elijah—I’ve remembered his name now—might come to this lesson, and if he comes, maybe his friend Henry will too.

  If there’s an inner manipulator in all of us, though, there’s also his or her greatest enemy, the practical teacher’s pet, the sensible doubter, who’s generally a pain in the neck and ruins everything. I’m here for a week—it’s stupid to think I’ll have some monumental connection with a guy I saw for two minutes. I mean, get real. They all have their own lives here, and I’m just passing through to buy the I HEART WHALES T-shirt.

  Still. Those eyes.

  Fate shouts.

  “Who’s in your class?” Oh, innocent me.

  “Well, there’s Cora Lee, from the Theosophical Society . . .”

  “The what?”

  “Don’t ask. We’ve got a lot of woo-woo mystical stuff around here. Just be warned.”

  “Hey, I can shake my chakras with the best of them.” I barely know the difference between Reiki and Rumi, but oh well. And if you gave me the choice between an organic carrot and a Big Mac, I’m going for three thousand calories of fat and salt all the way.

  “Margaret MacKenzie, she’s a widow. President of the Parrish Island Garden Society. Joe Nevins. He and his brother, Jim, run the ferry terminal now that the Franciscan nuns have all retired or died. Are you sure you want to stick around? You should see your face.”