The Last Forever

by Deb Caletti

  But there is no blizzard, no snow even, just wind so loud it’s a driving blast around my head, and I’ve never been so cold in my life, nor in such a dreamlike place. We drive along a flat plane of ice, and there are more of us, more of these black insect scooters with their single glowing headlights, so many black speeding insects that it looks like we are being chased in a spy movie, surrounded by bad guys.

  The speeding scooters thin out in the great space. There are only a few now, and off to our side, we see a long line of sled dogs. It is actually many sleds, four dogs per sled, maybe eight sleds in all. The dogs are shaking off the cold, ready to be on the move again, with their packed crews behind them. We see reindeer, four of them together. We see a red sailing ship frozen in ice, an eerie double-masted ship with many lines rising in the pink-purple sky, and I would be sure I was imagining it, but there is the name of the frozen boat, the Noorderlicht, painted on its side. It is the Dawn Treader caught by the White Witch and frozen until spring.

  We are climbing high up the switchbacks now, and there is only mountain and more mountain and we are going slower, moving forward in bursts and starts, and it feels precarious. I don’t stop to imagine the film version of this moment because this is the film version. I don’t stop to imagine home and the people in it, because this is so far from home, I am another person entirely.

  We are at the top of this road now, and it seems we’ve reached our destination, because Lars and Gunther slide us to a stop, and there is a man in a red and black polar suit waiting for us. We unfold ourselves, numb from cold, and lift up our visors. Then we take off our helmets and we meet Anders Thorstad from NordGen, the organization that operates and maintains the vault. Anders tells us that they’ve spent the morning chiseling ice off the door after it had warmed up yesterday, causing water to drip and then freeze after temperatures dropped in the evening.

  From where we are, I can’t see the vault; we leave Lars and Gunther behind, and we walk, making conversation impossible. My father and Anders Thorstad are in front of me. I am concentrating on the slick ground, and when they stop, I do too, and then there it is. My God, it’s so much larger than I thought, so much more oddly magnificent, this rising triangle of iron and concrete set in this pink-purple land of ice; from the front, a narrow rectangle with prisms and mirrors reflects a beam of blue-purple.

  It’s our destination, and I feel choked up, and I just stop for a moment to feel this: an arrival, an ending.

  * * *

  Anders is able to open the door quickly after all that previous chipping, and we hurry inside, into the first section of the vault. The door clangs shut behind us. This area isn’t sealed off completely from the outside, and you can tell. The floor is sloped concrete, and there is a fluorescent light above us, and there is frost on the walls, and Anders, a to-the-point man with a thin red face and burst of yellow bangs under his hat, tells us to watch our step because the floor itself is icy.

  I look around at the concrete walls, while trying to watch my boots on the slippery floor. Soon there is another door, another mighty, echoey clang as it closes behind us, and now we are in a tunnel made of ridged metal, and the floor is no longer treacherous. Anders and my father are talking, but their words turn to muddled reverberations, and I can’t make them out. And now here is another chamber, and we are in a hallway with rough rock walls and silver pipes overhead. We are inside a mountain. It is a rock cave, Batman’s lair.

  The hallway ends at a large concrete wall with a door to a rock-walled room, with a table and a guest book and some shelves with seeds. Anders gestures to the guest book, indicating I should sign, and as I write my name, I see what they have done for me. I see how large this is. Because there is a president’s name, and the British prime minister’s. And now there is mine, and now there is my father’s.

  I think we’re finished. I’m sure this is as far as we’ll go. But then Anders Thorstad says, “Ready?” His voice echoes.

  “Ready.”

  “Every packet that arrives is scanned through x-ray. We’ll assume yours is free of terrorist devices.” I am glad my father only chuckles. He is keeping his mouth mostly shut. This is a good thing. He is the sort of person who needs the reminder not to joke about guns or explosives in the airport security line.

  We follow Anders into another rock hallway, deeper inside the mountain, where there are frost-covered walls again, and then Anders stands before a single ice-covered door. Of course, this is the door. You can feel it. It is the way he stops with import and reverence, but it is also the way that this particular door stands guard. “Come close,” he says. “We need to let as little cold air out as possible.”

  We huddle. My father’s gloved hand finds mine. “One of only four keys in the world,” Anders says, and he unlocks the door, and, oh, Henry would love this. We hurry in, and it is even colder there, in the actual room of the vault where the seeds are kept, so cold that my nostrils burn when I breathe in. It’s like breathing ammonia. The exposed skin on my face stings. Inside, there is a metal gate and rows and rows of marked boxes behind it. Rows and rows of seeds, seeds that will last and last, even if the rest of the world doesn’t. Right there is the promise of new life.

  “Here,” Anders says.

  Here. I reach under layers and more layers and unzip the pocket and remove the GORE-TEX bag and hand over the Mylar package.

  It is so, so cold, and this happens so, so fast, but I shut my eyes and I imagine her face before I hand over Pix’s seeds. Her hair is in a ponytail, and she is in shorts and a tank top, her shoulders bare. She is laughing. Her eyes dance, and she is happy.

  “Forever?” I say. I can barely speak, from frigid air and because my heart is in my throat.

  Even to-the-point Anders’s face softens. “As close as you can get,” he says.

  We hurry out. Doors and hallways and doors and tunnels. We are quickly back on the icy floor leading outside. It feels nearly warm out there after the vault. Anders is busy shutting and locking and closing things up. My father turns to me. He has ice crystals on his cheeks, and when I raise my hand to my own, there is ice on my glove.

  “It’s done,” I say.

  And then he takes me in his puffy, layered arms. He says the only thing that matters. “She would be so proud of you.”

  chapter twenty-five

  Anastatica hierochuntica: rose of Jericho. This is the most famous of the plants known as Resurrection Plants. After the rainy season, this plant dries up and curls into a tight ball. It looks dead. Within the ball, though, the fruits remain attached and closed, protecting the seeds within. With a little rain, even months or years and years later, the ball uncurls and the plant wakes up. The fruits open, the seeds drop to the ground near the parent, and the plant appears to come back to life. The seeds can begin to grow within hours.

  Back home in San Bernardino, February turns to March and March to April. I stand at our kitchen counter, looking out the window where Pix used to sit. The lemon tree is flowering again. Still.

  “I feel like this life is over,” I say to my father. He is leaning in the doorway. It hurts me to say it. It feels like something is ripping when I do. But all through these months, we keep bumping into the truth of it.

  “I know. Me too.”

  “We should just—”

  We’ve had this conversation a few times already. “You know that’s not an option. You’re graduating in a few months. We can’t just pick up and leave.”

  “We can’t?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  He sets his own face in a frame using his index fingers and thumbs. “Thomas Was Finally Tired of Fucked-Up Choices.”

  * * *

  Jenny sends me a package with an application for the University of Washington. Sasha calls to tell me that the Parrish Island Library expects a photo-filled talk about our trip to the vault and that Larry has already started the sign-up sheet. And Henry sends me another postcard. It’s got a picture of some old co
mposer on it, a guy with wavy white hair and a hooked nose. On the back, Henry has written, Hope you’ll be Bach soon. Your LLS* (*Long-Lost Sibling). I send him a postcard with a different old composer on it. Making a Liszt of all the reasons to return. Love, Sis. PS, Mom likes me best.

  April turns to May. May turns to June. Finally, I take the seed from Pix that I saved and I plant it. I follow the germination directions in Chapter One: “Prevention Is a Good Start” in How to Keep Almost Any Plant Alive by Dr. Lester Frank. I use the best soil. I give only the right amount of water after I tap it into the dirt. It means something to me to have this new plant begin its life here, where we will end our old one. The pot, Grandfather Leopold’s pot, my mother’s pot, mine, sits on our old windowsill where there is plenty of light. A new green shoot rises from the ground.

  My father packs my mother’s clothes into boxes. We pack our dishes and the contents of our cupboards and closets. I toss out my old project, Fort San Bernardino, where three feet equals one and a quarter inches. Dad and I don’t have long conversations about any of this. We just put on old I Dream of Jeannie shows and wrap cups in newspaper, both heading in the same direction.

  And then June arrives. It is the day of graduation. There are purple gowns everywhere, and hugs, and tears, and bad band music and sappy speeches. I say good-bye to Caitlin and C.J., and even Dillon, but most especially Meg. We hug and cry a little and I thank her for being there for me, always. The minute I am back home, I toss my mortarboard on the kitchen table, which will head to storage with the rest of our furniture. There are roots, and then there are all the new directions they grow.

  I look at my father. He barely has his dress-up jacket off. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. “Want to do it? Want to just fucking do it?” I say.

  He smiles.

  I imagine it: the drive across two states, the trip onto the ferry, the arrival on Parrish Island, our new home. Jenny will open the door wearing her paint-stained tennis shoes, holding out her old arms to greet us, as Vito jumps and jumps and barks so happily, you’d think we were made of bacon.

  The first chance I get, I will set How to Keep Almost Any Plant Alive by Dr. Lester Frank in the basket of Jenny’s bike and return it to the Parrish Island Library. I will have the compass in my pocket, the compass that has made the trip to Svalbard. I will hold it out to Henry in my palm, because I love Henry Lark. Oh, I do, and I always will.

  True love, the good, beautiful, one-and-only kind, the kind between loving friends and family and partners who are mostly just trying hard to do their best, it manages to overlook some pieces of its story. It overlooks what he can’t give you or how she failed you or what mistakes he made when he was struggling. It stays steady at its center. It evolves, through drought and storm. It grows. It survives. There are things that last. Seeds in vaults in frozen mountains at the edge of the earth, but love, too. Real love does. It lasts beyond death, and it lasts beyond disappointment and misguided expectations and mutual shame and mistakes.

  I will hold out the compass and Henry will take it, and then we will begin a friendship where he is there for me and I am there for him through joy and pain, and fullness and emptiness, and highs and lows, tide in, tide out, for years and years to come.

  But we are not at that part of the story yet. We are at the part where my father has the map in his teeth, even though the trip we are taking now is too large and long to ever measure the distance of. We are at the part where my father is now wearing his lucky Grateful Dead shirt as he puts the last of the boxes into the pickup and where I take my mother’s shoe from the empty closet and tie the new pixiebell plant into it 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 gravel driveway, away from our house and everything around it, our scratchy tan lawn, the neighbor’s dog, Bob, who always stands at the corner and watches traffic.

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

  “Bob, may this good life bring you everything you deserve,” my father says.

  DEB CALETTI is the award-winning author of The Queen of Everything; Honey, Baby, Sweetheart; and The Nature of Jade, among others, as well as the adult novel He’s Gone. In addition to being a National Book Award finalist, Deb’s work has gained other distinguished recognition, including the PNBA Best Book Award, the Washington State Book Award, and School Library Journal’s Best Book award, as well as finalist citations for the California Young Reader Medal and the PEN USA Literary Award. She lives with her family in Seattle. You can visit her at debcaletti.com and become a fan on Facebook.

  SIMONPULSE

  Simon & Schuster, New York

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  Also by Deb Caletti

  The Queen of Everything

  Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

  Wild Roses

  The Nature of Jade

  The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

  The Secret Life of Prince Charming

  The Six Rules of Maybe

  Stay

  The Story of Us

  And don’t miss

  He’s Gone

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

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  First Simon Pulse hardcover edition April 2014

  Text copyright © 2014 by Deb Caletti

  Jacket designed by Regina Flath

  Author photograph copyright © 2012 by Jason Teeples

  Jacket photograph copyright © 2014 by Diane Kerpan/Arcangel Images

  Book design by Regina Flath

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  The text of this book was set in Adobe Caslon Pro.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Caletti, Deb.

  The last forever / Deb Caletti. — First Simon Pulse hardcover edition.

  p. cm.

  Summary: After her mother’s death, it’s all Tessa can do to keep her friends, her boyfriend, her happiness from slipping away. Even the rare plant her mother entrusted to her care starts to wilt. Then she meets Henry. Though secrets stand between them, each has a chance at healing . . . if first, Tessa can find the courage to believe in forever.

  ISBN 978-1-4424-5000-4

  [1. Grief—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Love—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C127437Las 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013031010

  ISBN 978-1-4424-5001-1 (eBook)