The Last Forever (29 page)

“I can’t believe your dad just let you skip out on school like that for a road trip,” Kelsey says.

“Oh, so you heard.”

“Where’d you go again?”

“Mostly the San Juans,” I say.

“I looove Puerto Rico,” she says.

From the water, Caitlin squeals. She’s up to her belly button in the lake, and her shoulders are scrunched up, bracing against the cold.

“
I
looove being with four ladies,” Adam says. “You’re my
harem, right?” He clicks his thumbs and forefingers together like he’s wearing little cymbals.

“Wrong,” I say.

Meg glares at him. “Quit being a creep,” she says.

“Remember that creep we saw at La Plaza?” Kelsey pokes Meg’s leg.

A lumpy woman in a bathing suit walks past us fast, spitting sand from her heels, yanking a crying girl by the arm. Another kid is standing on the beach holding the crotch of his shorts like he has to pee. Caitlin finally dunks her head. Kelsey holds her bottle of lotion out to Adam and says, “Would you?”

Meg says, “I can’t believe how different you look.”

It’s the longest day of my life.

*  *  *

“I think you’re depressed,” Dad says through my shut door.

“What gives you that idea?” I say. I can barely hear him through the covers over my head.

“You can’t just lie in there all day.”

“Leave me alone.”

“C’mon, Tess . . .”

After a while, he gives up. I hear the truck leave. In three hours and forty-two minutes he will phone. We will chat for approximately two and a half minutes, or one hundred and fifty seconds, enough for him to be reassured that I haven’t stuck my head in the oven since he’s been gone. Four hours and forty minutes after that, he will arrive back home. Every hour feels like it’s a million o’clock. I miss Henry. I miss Jenny.
I miss Sasha and Larry. And, dear God, I miss my mother. It is a permanent ache, a low-grade fever that never leaves. I even miss Pix.

Henry would understand why it feels so strange here. I would tell him how odd it is to see the contents of my dresser sitting all together: the balaclava, which is next to Pix’s pot, which is next to the piggy bank I’ve had since I was six, which is next to a dish of rings I’ve had since junior high. He would know why these things don’t go together.

It has been above one hundred and five degrees every day that we’ve been back. We are having some kind of heat wave. You can’t even breathe outside. I crank the air conditioner. I don’t leave the house. I’m too sad to move. Thanks to my Frigidaire Energy Star five-speed machine, it’s like the Arctic in here.

*  *  *

My father is making Thai chicken salad. At least, this is what he tells me, shouting from the kitchen. He is expanding his horizons beyond Thomas’s Famous Meatballs. I have been watching entirely too much television. I watch
The B&B Gourmet
, where Willa Hapstead creates egg soufflés and apple fritters and French country omelets for the guests at Red Gate Inn. I watch
I Dream of Jeannie
reruns. I watch the news. Sometimes I put on Bob Marley and eat way too much mocha-chip ice cream. If I had my way, Dad would serve me dinner on a tray in the living room, as if I were a sick person.

“Bring it to me,” I shout back.

“No way, Jose. Get your ass in here.”

It smells good, but I’m not that hungry. Dragging myself in there will be like pulling a railroad car with my teeth. I groan. I get off the couch. My pj’s are made of lead, and my feet seem to be too, and I apparently am also carrying lead weights on my back. That’s what it feels like to walk.

When I arrive at the kitchen chair, the lead becomes a cheap, wet washcloth. I flop down. I can barely keep my head up.

“Don’t tell me you wore those all day again,” my father says. “You even got—” He gestures to his chest so that I examine mine.

“Chocolate,” I say. “Some old chocolate chips from the back of the cupboard.”

“You look like hell,” he says. My father actually looks pretty good himself. He’s got his shorts on and a super-loose T-shirt. His hair is in a ponytail, but it’s his face that looks, I don’t know,
healthy
.

“Thanks. Appreciate that self-esteem builder.”

Dad tosses spices around and chops things like he’s a pro. He’s been watching the Food Network at night. He narrates his actions, as if he’s the star of his own cooking show.

“Never cut the lettuce,” he says primly. “Gently
tear
it.” He tears it high up in the air, lets the leaves fall onto the plates like large, green snowflakes. “Now. The dressing. Made from one hundred percent pure peanut butter.” He opens the lid, sticks a spoon in, and has a taste. “De-licious. It has the crunchy, ripe flavor of peanuts.”

“Ripe flavor?” Even my sarcasm feels effortful.

But my father—he’s energetic, I realize. His eyes dance now that he’s not stoned anymore. He’s
here
.

“Any questions from the audience? Yes, you in the pajamas.”

Of course I haven’t raised my hand. That would require lifting five thousand pounds of dead weight.

“Phone,” my father announces.

“Nooooo,” I say. It’s ringing somewhere in my room, which is hundreds of miles away. I don’t care. Whoever it is, or whatever it is, I don’t care.

“Phone!” he insists.

I sit there. I rest my head on my arms. I don’t even see that he’s left the room. I only hear him answer my phone as he heads back to the kitchen: “Tess’s House of Hell,” he says cheerfully. “What? Can you say that again? I can’t hear you with all that noise.” I lift my head. He makes his eyes large for my benefit. He drops his jaw dramatically. He’s acting like it’s the California Lottery calling to tell me I’ve won the Triple Million. “Let me get her.” He hands me the phone. “You gotta hear this, I promise.”

Uhh. Damn him. “Hello?”

I don’t know what to expect. I have no idea who it is. Certainly I don’t expect
this.
It’s Sasha. It’s Sasha, and she’s shouting. She’s talking a million miles an hour. I can barely hear what she’s saying, though, because there’s all this noise in the background. A party, music.

“Where are you, Sash?” I ask. “Jeez, it sounds crazy.”

“Bud’s. We’re all at Bud’s. The whole damn island is here. Wait! Nathan is waving! He says hi! Oh my God. Margaret is drinking a beer the size of a toddler!”

“Margaret?”

“I told you, the whole town is here. We did it, Tess! We did it! Wait. Larry wants to say something.”

Here is Larry now. “Mission Impossible is Mission Possible!” Larry screams. “Whoo-hoo!” He sounds a little tipsy. Actually, a lot tipsy. Now Sasha’s back.

“We got the letter, Tess. You’re invited! We did it! The Norwegian government! The letter even has a seal on it! It’s silver! You, child, are bringing your seeds to that vault!”

“Sasha . . .” I don’t know what to say. My father is standing really close to me, breathing his peanut butter breath on me, trying to listen in.

“Nicky says hi,” Sasha says. “He’s flashing me two thumbs-up!”

“Nicky?”

“Talbott. Java Java Java? He says he knows you!”

“Right! Of course.”

“You should see how happy everyone is here, Tess. And drunk. Okay, that too. But happy! This is incredible! I got the letter right here. I faxed it to Dr. Harv and Abby—”

She hasn’t mentioned him. Not a single word. “Henry?” I ask. None of this would have been possible without him.

“Of course he’s here. He’s actually standing right next to me, trying hard not to say a word.”

“Sash!” It’s Henry all right. My heart goes thumping around. It’s going to have to stop that.

“You probably don’t want to talk to him.”

Yes. No. I don’t respond.

“Okay. Just for a second, then,” Sasha says.

And then there he is. “It’s yours, Tess.” His voice is sad and thrilled and triumphant and a little broken. Full and empty, high and low, tide in, tide out. “It’s all yours.”

*  *  *

“So? What do you think?” My father asks. We are sitting at the kitchen table. We haven’t eaten a meal in the living room even once since we got back. We are in our old spots, me in my chair, him in his, my mother’s empty chair across from us. My father’s Thai chicken salad is arranged artfully on the plate. Points for presentation.

“I think it’s surprisingly delicious.”

“Not about
that
, you monkey butt.”

I just shake my head. I mean, the whole idea is crazy.

“You and me,” he says.

“Me and you?” The only thing crazier than me going to Svalbard is me and my father going to Svalbard. I mean, he’d have to really pile on the old concert T-shirts to stay warm.

“You don’t say no to something like this.” He’s shoveling in his dinner. Someone—Jenny—should have taught him not to talk with his mouth full.

“You don’t?”

“Hell no!”

I shake my head. Maybe I grin ever so slightly. Just picturing it.

“Right now, the difference between going and not going is
going
.”

“Very philosophical, Father.”

“Fucking awesome road trip?” He wiggles his eyebrows up and down, in a How Could You Resist manner.

There are things I’ve learned by then about Longyearbyen, the tiny, remote capital of Svalbard, that settlement built on stilts on permafrost, the town nearest to the vault. Polar bears wander into its streets, hungry and curious. You must wear a rifle outdoors. Reindeer wander through too. Transportation is by snow scooter. It is home to the northernmost church, the northernmost post office, and the northernmost airport.

“Did you know they’ve got a gourmet restaurant there?” my father says. “It’s true. And one of the best wine cellars in the world.”

He’s been reading up. I can tell by his eyes and his goofy smile that he’s caught vault fever, same as the rest of them.

I am clearly outnumbered.

I smile just a little.

My father lets out a whoop. He shoves his chair back. He trots down the hall, ponytail bopping up and down. “Where is it?” he yells.

“What?”

“Never mind. I found it!”

He returns, and of course he’s wearing that balaclava. He’s a deranged Arctic burglar.

“Get that thing off. You look scary.”

Henry is right. This—the seeds, Svalbard, this triumph—it is mine. Mine and my mother’s. But it is also Henry’s. And it is also my father’s, and it is Grandfather Leopold’s and Jenny’s. It is Sasha’s and Larry’s, Dr. Harv Johansson’s, and Dr. Abby Sidhu’s. It is Margaret’s and Nathan’s and Cora Lee’s; it is Joe Nevins’s and Nicky the coffee guy’s. It is Bud’s, from the tavern. It belongs to every one of us who makes this trip from here to there. Every one of us who can use some reminding that even after the worst disasters, down deep, the truest things endure.

chapter twenty-four

Salix arctica
: arctic willow. This plant has evolved to survive its unique and extreme Arctic conditions and now can live as long as 264 years. Its roots have developed to withstand permafrost; its leaves have grown fuzzy hairs like its own sweater, and the plant itself has created its own pesticide against insects like the Arctic woolly bear. But the seeds . . . They have changed over time to become sticky, so that when they are dispersed in high winds, they don’t travel too far; they have evolved to stay on the island where they belong.

We take a Lufthansa jet out of San Francisco, 5,871 miles to Munich, eleven hours and twelve minutes, and then Munich to Oslo, 979.6 miles, five hours and fifteen minutes—

“Stop that,” my father says. “No more counting. Just . . . live it.”

He rolls up his coat to use as a pillow and gets his big legs up on the airplane seat. After so many hours in an enclosed space high above (I won’t say how high) the earth, my head
feels full of explosives. I watch movies on the little screen that is on the back of the seat in front of me. I like when the other passengers laugh at the same spots in the film where I laugh, all of us with our headsets sharing a good joke in the otherwise silence of the plane.

We board our SAS flight to Tromsø, a town that sits at the northern tip of Norway. It is a clear day, and outside my window, I can see the fjords in the sea, icy humped lands, which resemble the surfacing back of a San Juan whale. The white fjords, the blue-green sea surrounded by snowy mountains, it doesn’t seem real, except that my father is leaning over me to see too, and he’s squashing me.

Back home, kids are slamming lockers and studying
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
in AP English and buying roses for the stupid student body Valentine’s Day fundraiser. And I am here, getting closer and closer to the vault, landing in Tromsø, in a small blue airport out in what feels like the middle of nowhere, a modern airport of glass and tall, exposed architectural rafters.

This trip, this mission, has brought us through our first Christmas without my mom, which we spent eating a big Indian dinner my father made while we watched
Orion’s Belt
, a Norwegian film set in Svalbard, and then
The Golden Compass
, because the armored bears in it are from there too. We spent the anniversary of her death, ten days before we leave, in REI. My father buys a small GORE-TEX bag for the seeds and two pairs of wool socks.

That day, there is a postcard from Henry Lark in the mail. On the front is an antique drawing of a strawberry plant, with its various parts labeled in Latin. On the back,
Thoughts and love
in the small and geometrically perfect letters I recognize.

In the airport, we take our bags into the bathrooms and do what everyone is doing here, shedding our travel clothes and changing into our carefully planned gear. I am finished before Dad, and I wait out in the lobby in front of the men’s room. I crack up when I see him in his boots and snowsuit. He’s got his largest parka over one arm, but he still looks like he’s about to jet off to the moon.

I point and laugh. “You’re stuffed,” I say.

“If we have to go to the bathroom, we’re screwed,” he says.

We wait for our plane on blue chairs. I shove my hand down into my bag again to check for the seeds, which I’ve done about a hundred times since we’ve left. It’s actually pretty crowded in the airport. You wouldn’t think it’d be anyone but us, but Svalbard is a destination for adventure travel, and so there’s actually a couple on their honeymoon and a group of guys in jackets with patches that say
ANTARCTIC SURVEY 1996
, and even a couple of old ladies in fur-lined GORE-TEX parkas.