The Last Forever

by Deb Caletti

  “Wonder if he ever got invited back,” Jenny says.

  “Well, I’m speechless,” Margaret says, but she sticks one finger in the soil, then pulls it out. “Soil seems fine enough. What’s happened to the poor dear?”

  “ ‘Mary’ overwatered it in Portland before Vito tore it apart.”

  “ ‘Mary’?” Margaret says. She even puts the sarcastic quotation marks where they should be.

  “Don’t ask. And then there’s all the moving around we’ve been doing. It’s been riding in Dad’s hot truck and ending up all kinds of weird places. . . .”

  “Hmm.” Margaret clucks. “A plant needs stability. Let’s keep it in one location for a while. Somewhere sunny, where it can recover. Water judiciously. Look, these leaves are yellowing.” She puts her crinkled finger to them.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Lack of nutrients, most likely. I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure?” Jenny asks. She looks worried.

  “I grow roses.”

  “Maybe someone else in the Garden Society might know?” Jenny suggests.

  “Well, our president, Ginny Samuelsson, also grows roses. You know Ginny. She and Frank live out near Little Cranberry Farm?”

  “Maybe one of the other members?” I say.

  “There’s just Ginny and me, dear. Now that Miss Poe has passed on, there are only the two of us. Wait a minute. Stay right here.” She scoots back her chair and heads out the front door again. Jenny looks at me from over the table.

  “My confidence is lagging,” she says.

  “Mine too,” I admit. It’s not just lagging; it’s become like those sorry blocks of wood our neighbor Bennie Milstone used to tie to the back of his bike, pretending they were hydroplanes. They’d bump along nicely for a while until they busted. We wait. And wait. “She’s been gone a really long time,” I finally say.

  “Maybe I should check on her,” Jenny says. “She might have . . .” This starts us giggling. We’re both having the same wrong thought.

  But Margaret comes back alive and well and singing, “Here I am!” as she returns. Vito barks up a storm again as if he’s never seen her before, which unfortunately speaks to his intelligence level. “I walked out to my car, and when I got there, I forgot why I went.”

  “That happens to me all the time,” I lie.

  She plunks a box on the table. “Well, this should do the trick.”

  Rose and Flower Food. Jenny and I lock eyes. I roll mine. Of course, Pix is neither rose nor flower.

  “That’s it?” Jenny says. “Water, light, soil, a box of food?”

  “It’s not rocket science,” Margaret says, pretty snippily too.

  It’s become abundantly clear. This is up to me. If I don’t do something, and fast, the last pixiebell will be gone for good.

  * * *

  Jenny’s Internet connection is from the caveman days. “I think I’ll go and make lunch and eat it and then take a drive in the country and then come back and then maybe this page will have loaded,” I say.

  “Technology.” She shrugs, as if she could take it or leave it.

  Well, I could use some cyberpower right now. I need knowledge and information at high speeds. There’s got to be more I can do for Pix than the plant equivalent of unplugging your computer and plugging it back in again. Less water, more light. That plant is going to die. “I’m heading out,” I say.

  “I’m heading out,” Jenny says. “I’m meeting with the gallery owner where I show my work.”

  “Oh.” I forgot for a minute that Jenny has her own life.

  “I can drop you off or you can take the bike.”

  “Bike,” I say.

  “In the garage. See you for dinner?”

  “Not sure,” I say. Jenny raises her eyebrows, but says nothing more. I shut Pix away in my room, safe from Vito. I say the simplest, CliffsNotes version of a prayer: Please.

  * * *

  Jenny’s garage has that dusty-musty smell, and there’s all kinds of weird stuff inside—old wood chairs and a tin drum and a store mannequin that makes me startle before I realize it is not a psycho killer. The bike is in a spiderwebby corner. It shouldn’t even be called a bike, which is something one associates with a mode of transportation used by Lycra-clad athletes, a sleek object that zips and speeds a person to their destination. No, this is a bicycle with a half-flat tire and a basket. I think I saw this thing in The Wizard of Oz. I roll it outside.

  Vito is sitting on the front step, waiting for his life to get more exciting. “Forget it, Toto,” I say to him.

  * * *

  The bike has only one speed, and so by the time I get to the library, my calves are burning like I’ve just climbed to base camp carrying the yak. I set the bike down on the steps. I suppose I should chain it up, but this town seems to be the type of place where you could walk around dressed in hundred-dollar bills and people would only nod and smile. The bike isn’t exactly screaming Steal Me, anyway. It’s missing a kickstand. The last time Jenny rode it was obviously before the invention of helmets.

  “Henry will be here in ten,” Sasha says. I didn’t see her over there, huddled by the Dumpster. She tosses down her cigarette stump, twists the toe of her boot back and forth to put it out.

  “I’m not here to see Henry,” I say.

  She snorts. She has a pinch of her T-shirt and is fanning it back and forth. “This”—she taps the cigarette butt with her toe—“is between us, right?”

  “Right.” I’m on Henry’s side about the cigarettes, but it’s none of my business. She’s not going to be able to hide her crime, anyway. No matter where a person smokes, they stink like they’ve been sitting in a tavern, listening to Kenny Rogers music and waiting for their turn at the dartboard.

  Inside, the guy I saw with the cart last time is behind the desk. “Larry,” Sasha calls to him. “Jenny’s granddaughter.”

  “Hey, Jenny’s granddaughter,” he says. His T-shirt says SAVE THE MALES, and he’s got scruffy chin hair that may one day, with hard work and dedication, grow up to be a real beard.

  “Tess,” I clarify. “I’m looking for stuff on plants.”

  “Cool,” Larry says. He steps from behind the counter, motions me to follow.

  “Plant care?” I say. “I’ve got a sick plant.”

  “Righto.” He’s a man of few words. I can tell we’re getting close, though, because we pass books on volcanoes and the universe and forests, and now the spines have all turned shades of green.

  “I don’t know anything about it, and I really need to know.”

  Larry is flicking out volumes expertly with the tip of his finger. They are stacking up in my arms. The Big Book of Plant Care. The Houseplant Survival Manual. The A to Z of Plants.

  He stops. “Wait. What kind of plant?”

  “I don’t know exactly. A rare kind.”

  He thinks. He tosses How to Keep Almost Any Plant Alive onto the pile. “Ba-da boom,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  “You oughta ask Henry.” He gestures to the desk, where I am thrilled to see that Henry has arrived, just as Sasha promised. My heart starts thrashing around. He’s just as beautiful as I remembered. Those cheekbones! Sweet, vulnerable cheekbones! He is poking Sasha in the chest with one finger. He knows a bad tavern when he smells one. “The excellent Mr. Lark has a mind like an encyclopedia.”

  “Okay. Thanks again.”

  I settle myself at the table where I saw Henry for the first time. I keep peeking over at the desk. Henry, in his thin-framed, elegant, odd way—he’s got an unusual charisma. I open the first book, but I’m not concentrating very well. I forgot to bring paper and pen to take notes, and the print in the book is small, and the words in the table of contents might as well be written in a foreign language for all they sink in to my poor, overcome brain. I turn the page anyway. I’m such a faker. The words on the page say something like Henry, Henry, Henry.

  He doesn’t see me, or if he does,
he doesn’t come over. He’s sipping from a coffee cup, his hair falling over his forehead when he leans in. He’s laughing at something Sasha says. It’s one of those full laughs, not a heh-heh laugh, but a soul laugh, a spirit laugh. It makes me laugh too, as I sit there reading “Make the most of compost” again and again. The line sings.

  He’ll be coming over. I’m sure of it. How can he not notice me? But there are library manners at work, the unspoken agreements that happen here—having your nose in a book conveys a request for privacy, and in this place, it’s a request that will always be respected. I will have to catch his eye, give the visual cue that lets him know it’s okay to interrupt.

  I’m plotting and scheming as passively as a heroine in a Victorian novel when the library is overtaken. It’s like a SWAT team invasion of mothers and toddlers and babies and strollers and commotion. I think about getting under the desk like we used to do for the earthquake drills in California. Okay, maybe there are only six or so mothers, but all that struggle with doors and equipment and squirming bodies and bags slung over shoulders and bits of conversation and one kid falling and crying and suddenly it’s like you might as well surrender with your arms up.

  Well, sure, I missed the sign. STORY TIME, 2:00 P.M. Every mother on the island must be here. And, wait, a father too. I recognize Nathan from Jenny’s art class. He’s got a little girl on one hip, as a bigger boy walks behind, dragging his feet as if he is being sent off to camp to do thirty years’ hard labor.

  “Max, my man,” Henry says when he sees him. A smile starts at the corner of the boy’s mouth. “Glad you’re here. Couldn’t manage all these little kids without you.” Nathan looks grateful. A toddler with blond ringlets sees Henry and runs up to hug his leg. He pats the child in a way that’s both shy and game, the way you’d deal with an unfamiliar but affectionate relative at the family reunion.

  This I have to see.

  I keep my nose in How to Keep Almost Any Plant Alive by Dr. Lester Frank for as long as I can: True for every living being in this world, excessive amounts of any one thing is often detrimental, even if that substance is necessary for survival. Plants need the essentials that we do: water, food, light, a good place to be grounded, and loving care, which encompasses the spectrum from attentive tending to leaving alone, based on what the plant most requires. The noise in the library appears to die down; the squirming bodies settle, and the cries and whines are appeased with comfy laps and Baggies of crackers. I push my chair back. I do not look over at Sasha, as I don’t want to catch her catching me. Well, certainly I can browse the plant care shelf myself without it being some big deal, can’t I?

  I give my face what I think is a concentrated, studious look, one that conveys how I need, and will now seek, a particular piece of information. There is a great view of the children’s section over by the plant books. A perfect view. If all of life is designed in advance, piece following piece, then old Mr. Dewey Decimal one day had an idea that would eventually, years later, allow me to see Henry Lark from the perfect vantage point between 570—Life Sciences and 580—Plants.

  Henry Lark sits in a child-sized chair, his knees high. He holds the book in front of him so that his audience can see the pictures, and he is making the sound of a duck if a duck could talk. Nathan’s boy, Max, is in front next to him, legs crisscross applesauced. He wears an expression of importance, Henry’s right-hand man, but this expression quickly fades as Henry reads, and Max twists himself to see the pictures better. Henry’s voice plays all of the big emotions, duck worry and then duck fear and then, finally, duck joy. The whole scene—Henry with those high knees and the toddlers solemnly munching fish crackers and a baby drinking juice out of a bottle while patting her mother’s cheek—well, I reverse my ungenerous feelings about small people. They are earnest and their hands are chubby and, aside from the bottle drinker, are so focused on Henry that even I feel that the duck’s story is the most important thing in the world right then. If that duck doesn’t find his way home, I will be heartbroken.

  The story finishes and there is a smattering of applause. It’s so sweet, you want to cry. And then comes a second book. This reading includes puppets, I hate to say. Henry would kill me for telling that part.

  Story time is over. Henry reaches his hand out to a pregnant woman who can’t quite make it up from her position on the floor. Babies grasp his index finger as he says good-bye. He is ruffling the hair of kiddies, and that’s no exaggeration. He is the sincerest politician, the one-man army of goodwill. He doesn’t gush—he actually is holding a piece of himself for himself, you can tell. It’s self-respecting. The mothers love him. I have given up hiding. I am leaning openly against the outer edge of 500—Natural Sciences and Math. I’ve been wrong not only about toddlers but also about what life itself has to offer, and this is a change of feeling so intense that I understand already that Henry is a force my poor sorry self will now have to reckon with.

  * * *

  Henry slumps in the chair across from me. “The puppets,” he says.

  “What happens in the library stays in the library,” I say.

  “You hold the power to blackmail.”

  “Hmm . . .” I consider. “The photos are valuable, then.”

  “Larry says you have a plant emergency.”

  “Larry says you’re an expert.”

  He laughs. “God, no. I’ve read a few books, is all.”

  “On everything.”

  “Barely scratched the surface,” he says. “What’ve you got?” He leans across the table, and I slide the book in front of him. The leaning—it brings him close to me. I smell evergreen boughs again and something that is just Henry. It shoots me some pheromone arrow and I am felled.

  “Food, water, light. I need more than that.”

  “After the basics are covered, it’s helpful to know exactly what you’re dealing with. What kind of plant. The name. Then we can find out how to care for it specifically, heal its particular issues. Varieties of plants have their own problems, et cetera, et cetera. . . .”

  “I know its name. It’s a pixiebell.”

  He leans back. “Hmm . . .” He runs his hand through his hair, then fixes those eyes on me. I hold back a shiver. “Okay. Well, then. Come on.”

  Lead and I’ll follow. But unfortunately he’s only heading to the two computers that sit on a long counter. It’s funny, because in San Bernardino there are twenty or more. Henry stands, hunching over, and I hunch beside him. Our sleeves meet, have incredible chemistry, and find out that they could live happily together forevermore in a laundry basket or dresser drawer.

  “Pixiebell,” he types and then waits. “Slow,” he apologizes. But I don’t mind the bad Internet connection now. Take your sweet time, oh leisurely loading pages. Let us curl up here as night arrives, while the information makes its way across the web-desert by camel.

  “Damn,” Henry finally says. The results show thousands of possibilities.

  “Children’s clothing, screen names, songs . . . Should we try ‘pixiebell plant’?”

  He does. We wait. He turns his head to look at me, grins, and shrugs. His lips are impossibly lush, pouting without pouting. But it’s the eyes that get me. Brown eyes so sweet, they just melt me at my center.

  “Wait. Here,” he says. “Found it.” He pulls up an article about a trailing plant. Part of it is in French. There’s a photo. The plant has wide, stout leaves and white flowers.

  “That’s not it.”

  “No?”

  “Not even close. Maybe we should try ‘rare.’ Or even ‘extinct.’ ”

  He stands straight. Looks at me full on with new interest. “Really?”

  “The last one of its kind.”

  “Wow,” he says.

  “I can’t let it die.”

  “Yeah,” he says. It’s a yeah with an of course. A yeah that’s final. This yeah tells me that he understands the weight of the situation without me saying more.

  “No results,” I say. “H
ow can that be?”

  “This might be more challenging than we thought,” Henry says. “Let me do some looking. Or come back tomorrow and we both can. We’ve got to be able to find ‘pixiebell’ somewhere.”

  “ ‘If we know who it is, we know how to love it,’ ” I say. And to Henry’s baffled expression, “Dr. Lester Frank.”

  “Right,” Henry says.

  Having made no real progress, I’m worried about Pix, but I’m happy, too. Come back tomorrow, Henry said. It’s good enough for me. It’s more goodness than I’ve come to expect in quite a while. But then he says something else. “I work a half day today. Done in”—he looks at his watch—“three hours and fifteen minutes. There’s this burger place out by Hotel Delgado. The name sucks—Pirate’s Plunder. But the burgers . . . It’s one of the best places on the island. You been out there yet?”

  “No! I haven’t really been anywhere yet. That sounds great.” So great.

  “Burgers okay? I mean, meat?”

  “There’s something you should know about me,” I say. “I’ve never met a beef product I didn’t like.”

  “People around here . . . Tofurky.”

  I pretend-shudder. “After I watched that documentary about cruelty to tofu, I gave it up forever.”

  “Free-range soybeans only for me,” he says. “It’s more of a natural life for them before they’re—” He slices one finger across his throat. We are cracking ourselves up.

  “Six? Here?” he says.

  Six, here. Seven, eight, nine, anywhere.

  chapter ten

  Chamerion angustifolium: fireweed. The seed of this plant uses its lightness and a set of wings to ride the wind to new places. It is also known for its ability to transform the most desperate locations. This seed will choose lands destroyed by fire and oil spills and war, blanketing them in no time with color and life.

  Jenny is not my mother, but still. It seems only polite to call and tell her where I’ll be. After all, she might worry, same as Mom does (did). Since I got my driver’s license, every time I drove two blocks to 7-Eleven, Mom expected to get a call that I was in a fiery crash. I’d always tell her not to wait up when I went out, but she always waited up anyway. She didn’t want me to know she stayed up, though, same as she didn’t want me to know she followed behind me in her car the first time I walked to school alone when I was in the third grade. Still, I’d hear the toilet flush or the porch light would go off not long after I got home.