The Last Forever (12 page)

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. “How 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.

My instinct is on target about Jenny, because she answers the phone with, “Is everything all right?”

“I’ve been abducted,” I say.

“Aliens, I hope,” she says. “We can make some money when you sell your story to the media.”

“I’m going to hang out down here and then have dinner with a friend.”

“What friend?” she asks. I’ve forgotten that she knows everyone on this island.

“Bud, who owns Bud’s Tavern,” I say. “I know he’s fifty and has a little problem with the bottle, but love conquers all.”

“Bud wouldn’t touch anything stronger than an Orange Crush. They hold the Beer and Book Club there, and he has an iced tea.”

“Henry Lark,” I say.

“Henry Lark?”

“You sound surprised.”

She doesn’t respond to this. “Is it a date-date?”

“We just met. At the library. But yeah. I mean, he isn’t coming over in his suit and tie to talk to my father about his ‘intentions,’ but we’re getting a burger.”

“Oh,” she says.

“What? What does that mean?”

“I said, ‘Oh.’ It means ‘oh.’ ”

“It was the
way
you said ‘oh.’ ”

“I just thought Henry was . . .”

“You just thought Henry was
what
?”

“Um . . . busy with other things. People. People and things.”

“Not as busy as you thought, I guess.” I sound smug, even
to me. I rather love feeling smug. Smug is kind of terrific, which is why it gets us into so much trouble.

“Can Henry give you a ride home? I hate to have you bike in the dark. Deception Loop is pitch-black at night.”

“Glad to see you’re making friends, Tess,” I say in a Jenny voice.

“Glad to see you’re making friends, Tess,” Jenny says.

*  *  *

Three and a half hours sounds like no time to kill, but it ends up feeling like three and a half days. I keep checking the time, and five more minutes have passed. Of all objects, clocks are the cruelest. Beds, second.

I stay in Randall and Stein Booksellers for a long while, and then I head to this chocolate shop, Sweet Violet’s. I have the great idea to buy some caramels for Henry and me tonight, but I end up spending a ridiculous amount of money. I could have practically bought a used car for the price. They pack them in this box with a big, fancy bow, too, and it looks like more of a gift than I intend. Then I sit on this hill in a park that overlooks the water, and I read
How to Keep Almost Any Plant Alive
by Dr. Lester Frank.
Like all living things, plants require you to understand their personal language. Misunderstandings can have dire consequences. You must listen hard to what a plant is silently saying.
Dr. Lester Frank sounds a little crazy. I look for his photo in the back of the book. No luck.
Plants, animals, and children are the only beings who deserve unconditional love and the only ones you can trust to return it.
He sounds crazy
and
bitter. I
can picture Dr. Lester Frank, lovelorn and alone, in his greenhouse loft, surrounded by spider plants and violets and delicate orchids that only he understands.

The park I’m in is a little creepy—one of those dark, foresty sorts, with tall trees and grills set in concrete squares and empty picnic tables. The film version shifts: Now Dr. Lester Frank is burying a rejecting lover in his backyard with a gardening trowel. It’s time to get the heck out of here.

I am wishing for a shower and a toothbrush. At the thought of my date with Henry, my heart is back on the Las Vegas roller coaster, alternatingly plunging to the pit of my stomach and then rising high with victorious hands in the air. The old me thinks about calling Meg and telling her about my upcoming date, but the new me decides not to. Instead, I ride my bike a block over and find a pharmacy. By the back counter, I see a familiar violet sweater and white head. It’s Margaret, filling a prescription. I dart around, trying to avoid her, and buy a small fortune’s worth of travel-sized products: deodorant, toothpaste, lotion. My purse is bulging with tiny boxes.

The little toothbrush actually unfolds. Cool. I was never this nervous for a date with Dillon. I freshen up back at the creepy park’s creepier bathroom. I confess I even shave my legs, which is an awkward and disturbing thing to do in there. I hope I’m not murdered before my date with Henry. It’d be easy to do me in with a gardening fork when I’ve got one foot propped up on the park bathroom’s metal sink.

Finally, it’s time. I walk my bike back to the library instead
of riding it, so that the wind whooshing past doesn’t mess up my hair. I am waiting for Henry on the library steps when he puts his hands on my shoulders from behind. I didn’t even hear him coming. He gives me a little shake. It is the second time he’s touched me, and I want a third and fourth and fifth time, more times, until I stop counting.