The Last Forever (2 page)

In the end, I don’t call anyone. Instead, I get right to work, finishing up the semester’s final project in state history. Fort San Bernardino, 1851, where early settlers protected themselves against desert Indians, a to-scale model. Three feet equals one and a quarter inches. Honestly, it’s a step above those dioramas we made for book reports in elementary school, but I like doing it anyway. Cardboard, X-Acto knife, glue. Tiny rooms
with thumbnail doorways. It’s a fort, and I sort of even like to imagine I’m inside it. A tiny me in the tiny rooms. After a long while, Dad pops his head in the doorway.

“Tessa Jane?”

“Thomas Quincy?” Imagine having a middle name like Quincy.

“Want to make that road trip to the Grand Canyon? Want to just fucking
do
it?”

San Bernardino to Barstow, Route 66, 70.6 miles. Interstate 40 east to Williams, Arizona, 319.5 miles. From Williams, Arizona Route 64 north, fifty miles to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Seven hours and we’d be there. We’d planned this trip the night our neighbor, Peggy Chadwick, Brianna Chadwick’s mother, brought us over a casserole dish of baked ziti. You want to be bold when people feed you, or else pity makes you restless, or maybe Italian sausage is more energizing than you’d think.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

I laugh. He’s got to be kidding. “Um, your
job
? And school’s not out until next week.”

I’m sure that’s the end of it. But here’s the tricky part. Endings and beginnings sit so close to each other that it’s sometimes impossible to tell which is which.

*  *  *

I bring the fort to school the next day. It’s bigger than I realize, and for a minute I think I’m going to have to strap the thing to
the top of my (Mom’s) old Taurus. After much sweating and maneuvering and hoping no one’s watching, I finally wrestle it into the backseat. Thank God state history is first period, but I’m also sort of sad to see the fort go. It’s one of those projects you really want to get back, but once you do, it sits in your room taking up way too much space until you end up dumping it anyway. I’m not good at throwing stuff out. Well, Henry Lark would be the first to say so, but he’d make it sound like a compliment.

It’s a dusty hot day, and you can feel the school year ending. It’s all flip-flops and skipped classes and the slam of lockers and laughter. Jessa Winters and lots of other girls are wearing their skin-snug shirts that show a stripe of tanned stomach, and everyone’s stressing about AP tests, especially the people who never need to stress. Walter Nguyen, valedictorian, for example, who hunches over a stack of three-by-five cards like he’s trying to solve the global health crisis instead of memorizing orchestra vocab. It’s the end of junior year, the year of acronyms: AP, SAT, ACT, GPA. Everyone wants to be done at this point, to just get out of here, except for maybe little Ben Dunne, who does every sport and after-school activity because his parents are both alcoholics.

I eat lunch with Meg and Caitlin and C.J. and Adam and Hannah. Someone throws a tortilla. Adam is bragging that he came in early to lift weights, but you can tell he didn’t shower after. He starts every sentence with “Being as awesome as I am” until C.J. socks him.

“Being as awesome as I am, I won’t even seriously hurt you for that,” Adam says.

Jacob Newly comes by, bends down, says, “Feel my hair.” He’s just gotten a buzz cut, and everyone takes a turn.

“Ooh,” Caitlin says. “Nice.”

“Very grassy,” Adam says.

“I thought you said ‘very gassy.’ ” C.J. rubs Jacob’s head. Jacob is loving this way too much, in my opinion. “Dude, you look like ROTC.”

“Don’t you think that’s just
wrong
? You don’t hang up on someone. You just don’t,” Meg says to me. “You’re not even listening.”

“You don’t just hang up on someone, you said.” I eat a container of yogurt. Everything feels silly to me. Haircuts and arguments, lockers and flip-flops and yogurt, even. Forts in miniature and the amount of time it takes to memorize
larghetto
versus
allegretto
. Every
etto
in the world feels silly, and so does Mr. White’s striped necktie, as Mr. White paces the cafeteria trolling for bad behavior, and so do plastic, elastic cafeteria-lady hats and Caitlin’s tube of lip gloss, which she is now winding upward.

“You okay?” Meg asks. She knows me so well. She rubs my back. I love her like a sister even though I never had a sister, but right then her touch makes me cringe. Nothing seems right, not concern, not distance, not sandwich bags with zippers. Meg and me—we’ve been friends since the first grade. Our mothers took us trick-or-treating together when we were
both tiny princesses. We know everything about each other. But she can’t know
this,
this grief-land I’m in; she thinks she’s here beside me, but that’s not possible.

I get up. I need to get out of there. I smile. I rub her head. “Very ROTC,” I say.

“Next time, listen when I talk to you,” she says.

*  *  *

Between fourth and fifth period, I meet Dillon at his locker. We kiss, and Señora Oliver sees us. It makes me feel bad. It’s just a kiss. I can feel so guilty for every little thing.

“We haven’t hung out in so long,” he says.

“You always have track,” I say.

“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 circling. 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.