The Last Forever (9 page)

I hear an odd sound then. It’s a sudden gust of rattling and quaking, like a storm under that clear blue sky. There is
rising rhythm, tribal beats, clattering gourds, a chorus that’s joyful and triumphant and ancient, and it’s coming from that shingled house. I squinch my eyes to read the words on the mailbox.
RUFARO SCHOOL OF MARIMBA
.

If this is my mother’s sign, she’s picked something you can dance to. I smile. Parrish Island, it’s a strange place, all right. Damn, it’s strange and kind of wonderful. And I can’t shake the feeling that it’s coming for me, drawing me in, like it or not.

*  *  *

Deception Loop connects to an inner road, the Horseshoe Highway. I try to map where I’m going on my phone, but this town resists technology. The service is spotty. I like how the big, grand places—forests, oceans, islands, mountains—make it known how they feel about our need to talk, connect, sign on. They say,
Not here.
They’re the wise elders that make you sit still and be quiet.

I have to find where I’m going by getting lost. Someone has made a sign on this street that says
BOBCAT ROAD
. The words are etched into a wooden arrow and painted black. But when I look at the map I find in Jenny’s glove compartment, I can’t find a Bobcat Road anywhere on it. I drive in circles until I recognize an old oil tank with a huge banner on it,
CONGRATULATIONS J & J!
And then I see Point Perpetua Park and a corner where three roads merge. This is the way to town.

And all at once I am on the now-familiar street. There’s the
bookstore and a store called Quill, Sweet Violet’s Chocolates and a tavern called Bud’s. It is only a bit farther to the long, wide stone stairs that lead to the fat columns of the Parrish Island Library.

Outside the building, I recognize the spiky-haired librarian, who’s leaning against a car in the lot and smoking a cigarette, which she tosses to the ground and stubs out with the toe of one black high-top Converse. She looks upset, like maybe she’s been crying. I hate to see people crying. Sometimes I think the invisible barrier between me and other people is too thin. Their emotions come right in and become mine. Maybe I stand right outside my own fortress.

I go inside the library, and she follows, but we don’t speak. Of course, I’ve known all day I’d be coming here. Snippy back-and-forths with Jenny were just an excuse.

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It’s the silence, sure, but it’s also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It’s the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion. But now, even in my most favorite calm place, my heart is like a racehorse thundering down a track, because I’m looking around for a certain slim boy with a swoop of black hair. I’m looking for the owner of those fingers, which have marked my wrist in a way that feels lasting.

It’s stupid to think I’ll see him here again. School is out and it’s a beautiful, warm day. Why would he be here of all
places? Because I saw him here once? Because I’m willing him here now?

I’ve finished my last book, so the reading crisis has turned into a reading emergency, regardless. If I have to be stuck with my father’s mother, I need some books to get me through it. So I wander toward the fiction and meander up and down the aisles. I can hear a mother reading a Babar book to a toddler who keeps asking “Why, Mama? Why?” A man is perusing a newspaper next to the B-through-Ds, where I want to look. A tall, thin guy with a scrappy goatee wheels a cart around and reshelves things, and I snoop on it, because stuff always looks better and more interesting on the cart. For a while, I forget that I’m there to see that boy.

But then, voices. I pop my head out of P-through-S to look, but it’s a guy and a girl about my age, probably here only to make out where no one will find them. I wander back to the Leave Me Alone chair and sit for a while, trying to decide what order I’ll read my new books in. The only person I can see is a very short uniformed policeman in True Crime, holding a book with a cover featuring a knife dripping blood.

This is pointless. This is how lonely I’ve become: ten thousand miles lonely, lonely enough to think some two-second encounter with a guy is going to change my life. I take the whole story I’ve created in my head (and, wow, what a story—you should have seen the fun he and I had, what a fine person he was, and how he made me laugh), and I toss it. I toss the whole thing.

Unfortunately, this leaves me with only my real life and the sorry facts of it. True love, even if just in your head, can make you forget how badly things actually suck. Now that Henry and I aren’t running off into the sunset together, I am stuck here on this island with a grandmother I’m not sure I like or trust and a father who ditched me and a dead mother and a need to get home, wherever that is. I’d click my ruby slippers together if I weren’t wearing these flip-flops.

*  *  *

The stages of grieving . . . It’s possible I’m stuck in Anger. Or maybe it’s a different stage altogether, one they don’t mention. A sixth, along with Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. This one is called Wild Mood Swings.

I place my books on the counter. In the San Bernardino library, everything is electronic, but once again, Parrish has turned its back on technology and put a real person behind a real counter. A real spiky-haired person, who is twenty-six, twenty-seven, I’m guessing, with red eyes and a small snowy mountain of wadded-up Kleenex beside her.

“I don’t have a card,” I say. I probably won’t even be able to check out the books. I expect her to hand me some long, impossible form I can’t fill out because I don’t know my grandmother’s address, but instead she just waves her hand in front of her, brushing away any concern.

“Take them,” she says. “Just bring them back when you’re done.”

Of course I have to ask. “Are you all right?”

Her eyes brim and then spill over. She takes another Kleenex from a box underneath the counter and blows her nose. Honestly, it’s messy and loud.

“Love”—she sniffs—“stinks.”

I don’t know what to say. I can’t exactly disagree. While it’s always true that you have three relationships with any person—the real one, the one you have in your head, and the one they have in theirs—this time my true love and I met, had a perfect life, and have now broken up, entirely in my imagination, over the last twenty-four hours.

“Stinks,” I agree.

“Henry,” she says with relief. I think she is reading my mind. But she isn’t. No.

It is a film version moment. It is, it is, it is, oh joy, because Henry is walking in. He is. This is not the sort of thing that happens to me, but it did. There he is, from imagined to real. He’s a flesh-and-blood person, as beautiful as I was remembering him, and he’s got this enormous stack of books, which he spills down onto the counter.

“Thank God you didn’t put your head in the oven yet, Sash,” he says to the librarian. “I came as soon as I could. Well, I also needed to return these.”

He sees me. “Oh,” he says. “It’s you.”

In the film version, our heroine does not have her mouth gaping open, gasping for air like a caught fish, but never mind. Forget that part. Imagine my hair glossy and my teeth white.

“It’s
you
,” I say.

He looks at the librarian, hard. And I realize this magical, fateful appearance is not because of our shared destiny playing itself out. This is why he’s come. Not for me, but in a convergence of events both lucky and unlucky, for her. “So, she didn’t . . . ,” he asks the librarian.

“She didn’t.”

“You smell like cigarettes. I can tell from here. Sasha, Jesus. Thirty days without, and now you’ve got to start all over.”

“Just one. For God’s sake. I deserve just one.”

“You can’t give up,” Henry says. But he is looking at me when he says it. His sweet, large brown eyes are staring into mine. “You can’t.”

A book slips and drops from the counter. There must be fifteen of them, and I’m trying to take in the titles to find a common theme. There is one about Rome, with the half circle of the Coliseum on it, one called
Man’s Search for Meaning
, and something about the Arctic. . . .

“Did you
read
all these?” I ask.

“Well, this one was boring.” He holds up
The Roots of Latin Roots
. And I read the whole first chapter of this”—he picks
The Secret Life of Oceans
up off the floor
—
“before I realized I’d already read it.”

“Henry reads more than anyone I’ve ever met in my life, including me,” the librarian says. “He can’t stay away from here, even on his days off. You miss pushing the cart, don’t you? You love the cart. Admit it.”

Visions of destiny and happenstance meetings evaporate fast. He
works
here.

“She’s going to think I’m a geek.”

“I don’t think you’re a geek,” I say.

“He’s not a geek.” The librarian wipes her nose with the back of her hand.

If he is, he’s the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen. His hair is short, but a swoop of bangs almost drops into his eyes. His face is narrow, breakable, but strong, and I am watching his mouth move, I realize. It’s a lush mouth, with perfect lips. He’s wearing plaid shorts with a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled up, and his hands are now shoved into his pockets. I’m staring. He is maybe staring too, but it’s hard to tell if it’s all-on-his-own-staring or staring-because-I’m-staring staring.

“Henry,”
the librarian says. The word is a reprimand. “This isn’t about
you
.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. Sasha needs the love doctor,” he says. “Oh God. That sounds bad. I’m just joking! I’m the farthest thing from a love doctor. I’m not even a love nurse. I’m not even a love, what, the ones that empty the bedpans.” He turns his gaze toward the librarian. “She’s going to think I’m a creep.”

“I don’t think you’re a creep.”

“He’s not a creep,” Sasha the librarian says.

I smile. But it’s clear they have things to talk about, because Henry moves behind the desk and retrieves what I gather is his own coffee cup. “I’d better get going,” I say. I
think I’ll just fly on out of here on wings of joy and happiness.

“Happy reading, Tess,” he says.

I head out, look over my shoulder, and wave. He’s watching me. I feel it. I catch this quickly too: He knows my name, so he and Elijah have discussed me. Now I’m sure. I don’t know
how
I’m going to see this boy again; I only know that I
will
see this boy again.

They think I’m gone, but I hear her say it. I hear it just as I push open the heavy, important door of that library.

“Goddamn it, Henry. You can’t go falling for someone right in front of me after I got my heart broken. It’s just plain rude.”

*  *  *

At the librarian’s words, well, now I am also sure that the VW van is a van of goodness and that the waters of Puget Sound that I can see from these steps are twinkling a million diamonds that are mine for the taking. My emotions are rising, ready to overflow. The sun is smiling just for me. I am sure of this all the way back to Jenny’s house. I word my apology to her nicely in my head. It’s easy to give with my heart soaring with generosity. I watch it all: She accepts my apology. She cooks something great and we eat it together. Wow, look—Jenny and I are bonding. She’s showing me the old family photo album. She’s writing me into the will. Now I am in her next painting class and, man, I’ve improved. You should see my jar of flowers. It could go in a museum.

Thanks, Mom,
I think, which I know is stupid. Talk about having a relationship with someone in your head. But it helps
me to think she’s Up There, supporting me like she always has. That even
dead
doesn’t change some things.

It’s a confusing game, though, because if I give her credit for Henry, do I blame her for what happens next, when I arrive home?

No. Mom would never destroy something she had handled so gently and cared for so dutifully and
loved
. It meant so much to her. It means even more to me.

I shriek when I see it. I can’t even believe I’m seeing what I’m seeing. Someone has destroyed the most important thing I own right now. That someone is about twelve inches tall. He’s wearing a guilty expression, and darts under the desk when he sees me.

“Vito! What did you
do
?”

The last pixiebell has been pulled off the windowsill, and there is dirt everywhere, and a small sausagelike dog treat that Vito’s likely tried to bury in the only real dirt in the house lays near the empty pot. The plant itself has been flung or dragged to the other side of the room. It looks like a crime scene, with Pix’s poor mangled body limp and dying.

“Goddamn you!” I scream. Vito makes a run for it. There’s the sound of heavy footsteps dashing up stairs and Jenny calling my name.

I kneel down and try to scoop up the spilled dirt and shove it into the pot. I pick up the damaged plant. I’ve never seen its roots, and now that they are lying here exposed, it is hard to believe how delicate and insubstantial they are.

“Tess,” Jenny says from the doorway. Her voice is distraught, and she looks confused. She has no idea what this plant means to me.

I start to cry. She crouches beside me. I was at the library. I was driving. I was happy. I was not here when this terrible thing was happening.

“It’s okay,” she says. “We’ll replant it, Tess. It’ll be fine.”

She cannot understand this. I may not fully understand it myself. It’s just something I feel. The importance of it, the way this plant matters. It has been entrusted to me. Grandfather Leopold planted that stolen seed more than sixty years ago, and it has stayed alive because of my mother. She watered this plant and she stroked its leaves, and she moved it toward the sun when it needed sun and toward the shade when it needed shade. And now it is my job to keep it alive. It’s the living link between us.