Reseda odorata: sweet mignonette. The seed of this plant is sneaky and self-serving. It’s hidden inside a delicious fruit, which mice gather in their little cheeks, and then run off to faraway corners to enjoy it. As soon as the mouse bites into the tasty, sweet fruit, though, the seeds inside release a mustard bomb—literally, they taste like Grey Poupon—causing the mice to spit out the seeds. A dirty trick has been played on the mouse so that the seeds can have a new home.
That vault. The seed vault in the frozen archipelago of Svalbard . . . The nearest town is Longyearbyen. Do you know what’s even more perfect than the fact that Longyearbyen is home to a vault where everything in it is meant to last forever? Death is forbidden there. It’s against the law. Yes, in that protective place, you’re not allowed to die. This came about during the influenza pandemic of 1917 to 1920. Since the victims’ bodies did not decompose in those freezing temperatures, the virus inside them stayed alive. So the officials there made a bold move. They simply declared that dying was not permitted in town. It still isn’t. The cemetery has banned funerals, and anyone who is deathly ill must be shipped to the mainland.
This vault, buried in the side of a frozen mountain, is not only the protected location of what may one day be 2.25 billion seeds; it is a place where the town’s leaders have said the one thing that’s needed saying for years: Dying is wrong.
I love that. I love that so much. That place is—well, I know because I’ve seen it—a mystical place.
But we’re not at that part of the story yet. I am not huffing air so cold it burns my lungs and freezes my own tears to my cheeks. No, we’re at the part of the story where my grandmother, Jenny Sedgewick, comes outside to greet us as we arrive. She is carrying a small dog under one arm. She doesn’t look how grandmas are supposed to look. Meg’s grandma is the round, white-haired kind who sends Christmas pajamas every year, and so is Caitlin’s, who I see at every orchestra concert. Still, my grandmotherly knowledge is on the slim side. My mother’s mother died before I was born (long before even Grandfather Sully passed away), and Jenny wasn’t in the picture. It was never clear why there was this thing between my parents and Jenny. The few times I asked, my mother’s mouth would get tight, and she’d say something like, I did all I could or No one would be good enough for your dad. Of course, you stop asking. If I ever pictured Grandma Jenny, I probably thought she had fangs by how the mood would shift whenever her name came up. But today she’s smiling, completely fangless. She has gray hair cut short and stylish, and she’s wearing jeans that have paint on them, a big white shirt, and silver earrings. She’s at the car even before my father turns off the engine.
“Vito,” my father says. “You’re still alive.”
The stupid thought that crosses my mind is that it’s a funny nickname for your mother. But then the little dog starts squirming with excitement. He’s wagging his tail so hard at the sight of Dad, you’d think they were twins separated at birth.
“He remembers you,” Jenny says. I decide to call her Jenny, not Grandma, Gram, Nana, whatever, out of some kind of loyalty to my mom. If she had some kind of bad feelings toward this woman, it is my duty to have them too, same as I have her wedding ring and her photos and the pixiebell. Jenny looks harmless enough, but I know and trust my mother. She had good judgment about people.
Well, she could also hold a grudge. Even years later, Mom never had a nice thing to say about Jessica Sims after she stole the jump rope I bought with my own money in the second grade. When Jessica and I started hanging out in high school, Mom still brought up the Jump Rope Incident as a reason to Just Be Careful.
My father scruffs Vito’s little head. “The little bastard stole that chicken I bought, remember? He sees me and thinks ‘meat.’ No wonder he’s happy to see me.”
Jenny heads over to me, arms outstretched. But I am doing the math. I thought the last time we were here was when I was two, so either this is the oldest living dog, or there’s even more about my father that I don’t know.
“And look!” Jenny is beaming, as if my father has brought her an unexpected gift. “My God, you’re a young woman! You look just like your mother.”
I smile, because I don’t know what to say to this. I want to say thank you, because my mother is (was) really pretty, with her brown hair and blue eyes and her pointed chin and the kind of nose popular girls have. I always thought I had my father’s nose. When I look at Jenny, I see that she has it too.
“I can’t believe you’re here.” She hugs me, kisses my cheek. We have the same blood, shared DNA going back centuries, but I don’t feel a thing. She could be a lady who works at Safeway.
Vito has squirmed his way down and is jumping around on our legs. “He’s a Jack Russell, so you know what that means,” Jenny says.
I don’t know what that means.
“You can’t trust him for two seconds,” Dad explains.
“He looks so sweet,” I say.
“He ate my leather belt,” my father says.
“Your father made that thing in the seventh grade. Thomas, it was time to give it up. It had peace signs on it. Vito was doing you a fashion favor.”
Jenny’s eyes are warm and twinkly. She ushers us in. It’s kind of a grandmotherly cliché, but she actually has some homemade bread sitting on the counter. There’s a nice block of butter sitting on a dish too. It’s my most favorite food on earth—warm bread and butter—and so if Jenny’s a bad person, she’s just lured me in with my own particular poison apple.
Jenny takes more food out of her fridge. Cartons of juice; dishes of fat, red grapes. From the outside, her house looks old, with its white porch and wicker chairs. But inside, it’s actually modern. Large, abstract canvases hang on the walls, and the kitchen table is made out of a wide antique door. There’s even a doorknob. I set my hand on it. It sort of compels you to.
“You working?” My father points to her shirt.
“Not today. I was too excited after you called. Everything I own just has paint . . .” She pinches her shirt, looks apologetic.
She’s an artist. I never knew that. Why I never knew that is another question altogether. Still, grandmothers as artists—it is an innovative grandmotherly image I’d never considered before.
She is foisting food on us, and let’s just say I’m not the kind of toothpick-thin girl who refuses butter in exchange for a lettuce leaf. My father, too, is eating like he’s been stranded at sea for weeks. “Tell me,” she says. She looks at me intently. “Everything.”
It’s hard to know what to say to this. Everything? Well, I was born, and then they dressed me in pink dresses, which is the last time I wore those, and then a panda outfit, same. How to cover the last seventeen years? I’m feeling oddly shy. I look around the kitchen and get a déjà vu feeling at the sight of that cookie jar and at the canisters that look like chefs.
“I am so sorry about Anna.”
Of course, that’s what people say, and there’s no real response to that either. Sorry begs for forgiveness, and death doesn’t deserve it.
“We’re doing okay,” my father says. This is such a lie. His voice even wobbles when he says it. His voice barely ever wobbles, and I’ve seen him do the huge, heaving sobs only twice. That said, you should know in advance that this is not some story where he learns to let out his feelings and we have the film version moment where we cry together in our shared loss. People have their own way of getting through things, and that’s that.
“Tessa, I haven’t seen you since you were this high,” Jenny says, and lets her hand hover near her knees. Vito thinks he’s getting something to eat and sniffs her fingers.
“It’s been a long time,” I say to be polite.
“I bet you don’t even remember,” my father says.
There is an awkward silence where they rehash years of family hurts and dramas in their respective heads, as I feel ashamed for all the wrongdoings I don’t even know about.
“Well,” Jenny says. It’s a little huffy, but ends the silent rehashing. She stands. “Let me show you around.”
She points out various places—her studio, which can be seen out the back window; bathrooms; laundry; and then, upstairs, a small bedroom. This is where she leaves me to “rest up.” I don’t really need to rest up, but okay. I think she probably wants to talk to Dad alone.
There is a towel on the bed, with a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo. It looks like we’re staying, and apparently it has already been discussed. I don’t know how I feel about this. I miss my own room, if not my own life, but I also sort of love this room. It’s a white and blue alcove, and it smells a little like lavender, and the bed has a quilt on it, and the floor has a great, thick white rectangular rug. I get excited for a minute, because there’s a bookshelf. I’m down to the last pages of my last book, which qualifies as a reading crisis, but there are only art books and Emerson and some poetry.
It hits me. The pixiebell. I left Pix inside the truck. I’m an idiot. I’m as bad as the people who leave their dogs and babies in hot cars with the windows rolled down a crack. I sneak past my father and Jenny in the living room, because they are talking quietly. The long, awkward silence we all were so lucky to share earlier only means that big, hard words are waiting behind temporarily shut doors, and I don’t particularly want to be around when they open.
I turn the doorknob oh so slowly and head outside to get Pix. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but it doesn’t look that great. It looks a little limp. I am on the front porch again, holding the plant in my mother’s shoe, when I hear my father’s voice rise. I can’t make out what he’s saying. I only know that he’s getting loud. This is how he talked to the TV all those years that George Bush was president. I don’t want to go back in now, so I just sit down right there, holding the last pixiebell and trying to listen in.
I hear You can’t just go— and I’m not! You said you’d do—And then, some idiot starts a lawn mower and I can’t hear anything, except You and Go repeated a lot by both of them.
I consider my options. I am seriously thinking about getting his keys and driving myself home. I imagine this in my head, and it’s kind of great. The music is on in the truck, and I’m checking in to one of those places that has a restaurant connected to it, a Denny’s or something, and I’m turning on the motel TV and kicking off my shoes and loving being alone, forgetting that driving Dad’s truck is like trying to drive an office building, and that one night at a motel would practically wipe out my bank account. I’m happily flipping through channels on my Mental Motel’s remote control when this boy rides up on a bike. He’s got white-blond hair, and he’s wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and for some reason, even though it’s sunny, he’s got this scarf around his neck. I’d have made fun of it back home because it looks like he’s a guy in a perfume ad, but honestly, the scarf looks fashionable, and so do the shoes he has, these checked sneakers. He’s got a leather messenger bag worn crossways over his chest, and there’s a long scroll sticking from it.
He’s in a hurry, obviously, because he ditches his bike on Jenny’s lawn and doesn’t even notice me at first. But then he sees my father’s truck, and then me, and he stops.
“I’m just going to drop . . .” He points to the scroll and then to the backyard.
“Fine by me,” I say.
He jogs around to the back. After a few minutes, he reappears.
“Is Jenny . . .” He hasn’t spoken a complete sentence yet.
“Inside.”
“Are you . . . new?”
“I’m her granddaughter.”
“Oh. I didn’t know she had one.” He holds his hand out. It seems like a formal thing to do, private schoolish, but it fits him.
I set the pixiebell on the step and shake. “Tess,” I say.
“Elijah. I’m one of her students,” he says.
“Oh.” I’m taking in his pretty features—the perfect cheekbones and the elegant manners—and I’m obviously unable to do that and speak at the same time. My brain freezes. I search around for something to say, but I’m falling out of a conversational airplane without a parachute, and there’s nothing to do but crash in an ugly splat of silence. “Cool.”
“You going to be around?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Okay.” He waits for something more from me, but I’ve been struck dumb. I’m sure I’ll have a hundred brilliant things to say to him later, when I replay this in my head. “Well, see ya.”
Thank God my father and grandmother don’t seem to get along. We’ll be out of here by morning, and I’ll never have to see that guy again.
* * *
When it seems safe, I actually do go back to the white-blue room to “rest up.” I fall asleep. There’s something about being there that lets me sleep like a rock. I feel like I haven’t slept in ages, maybe not since that day when my mother sat on the edge of my bed and told me that she had a lump in her throat that had to be taken out. When someone tells you they don’t want you to worry, it generally means there’s a lot to worry about.
I wake up to the sound of my father’s truck. I look over at the clock, and it’s after seven, and I smell something wonderful, a greasy, crackly frying chicken smell, and there I am in that white-blue room, and it’s dinnertime. This is no Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner. I’m actually excited. My mother was a great cook, but my father’s got his one meatball recipe and that’s about it. He also makes these black-speckled scrambled eggs because he always cooks them in the bacon grease without washing the pan, and that’s just wrong in my opinion.
I don’t think too hard about where Dad’s going. I figure he’s off to buy a bottle of wine or something, an ingredient we need for the feast. I could really use a wake-up shower, but I don’t want to miss dinner. Jenny might even have a little plate of crackers and salami circles and squares of cheese to eat beforehand. You’d think I’d weigh two hundred pounds with the way I eat, but I got my mother’s “good metabolism.” I don’t know if anyone actually knows what a “good metabolism” is. It’s probably one of those unprovable myths like being lucky or having a green thumb.
I wash my face and brush my teeth, and I’m feeling really good all of a sudden. A nap, a minty mouth, fried chicken, and life feels hopeful. As if maybe we can go on and the future really is out there. You get flashes like that—like you can go on after all—or else the opposite, a flash where it hits you that she’s actually gone forever.
Downstairs, Jenny’s back is to me. She clatters the lid back on the frying pan.
“Can I help?” I ask.
She startles. She turns around, and her face has an expression I can’t read. It’s sadness and sympathy and something else. It’s frozen almost, as if there is too much to say that she has no words for.
“Are you okay?”
That’s what it is. She looks like she might cry. She holds a large fork aloft. Vito is watching intently, as if he’s in the orchestra and that fork is the conductor’s baton. “I’m . . .” She struggles. “Maybe we should sit down.”
The happy hopefulness I was feeling has fled the scene with the goods, and my stomach drops. I try to reassure myself. Maybe she’s just going to spill their whole story now; maybe that’s what this is about. But inside I know better. Inside, you always know better.
She sits. I sit. So does Vito, but he’s got other motivations. She takes my hands. Her own are soft and warm, and that softness almost makes me cry. She doesn’t have to say it. I can’t believe it, my God, but I know it.
“He left?” I say.
“Tessa,” Jenny says. She looks about a hundred years old suddenly.
“For how long?” For a night, let her say. To meet friends for dinner, maybe. To get a beer. To take a drive. There are a hundred possibilities.
“A few days.”
“A few days? He just dropped me here with someone I don’t even know for a few days?”
She winces. I know I’m being hurtful, but I don’t care. They’ve both let me down. They’ve all let me down. You don’t just leave. You don’t just let someone leave. You don’t just die, for that matter. “What did you say to him?”
“I told him he was an idiot. I told him you need him right now.”
“Before he left. What did you say to make him leave? You two were fighting.”
Jenny’s silent. I need this to be her fault, but it isn’t.
Finally she says, “He just needs a few days, I think, sweetie. To be alone. This has all been such a shock.”
“And it hasn’t been a shock to me? Was this his plan all along? We’d come here, and he’d ditch me?” Maybe he didn’t even care about the Grand Canyon.
“I don’t think he’s planning anything. I think he’s falling apart.”
“Well, someone needs to not fall apart,” I say. “He couldn’t tell me he was leaving?”
And it’s that thought, that he fled me, that he was too much of a coward to even face me, that causes me to shove my chair back, scaring the innocent Vito so that he scurries backward. I run upstairs. I have never been more furious in my life. I grab my purse. My phone is in there, and that’s all I really need. I leave the pixiebell, too. Screw it. I don’t owe anybody anything.
I slam that front door. The logistical problems haven’t hit me yet. For one, that I don’t even know where I am. I run down that driveway, the rage filling me, spilling over, propelling me forward even though I don’t know where forward is. The weather has changed. The fading summer day is leaving us, and dark clouds are rolling in fast, coming in over the water, covering the bittersweet twilight and turning the night purplish and dark.
At the end of the road, I look over my shoulder. She’s probably going to run out after me and break a hip or something. I don’t care. I run past tall evergreens, the enchanted-forest kind of trees that loom ominous in the dark, the kind of trees that talk and scare small children who are alone in the woods in fairy tales. I run and run until my chest burns, past the curve of the waters of the sound; I follow the road into town, my sandals slapping on asphalt, until I have to walk. The air feels heavy with imminent rain. I don’t have a plan. My only plan is away.
The town is only a few streets wide. There’s a closed gift shop with a wind sock in the shape of a whale, whipping back and forth in the gust. There’s a restaurant with cars out front and a door that swings open, letting out a couple clutching each other’s arms, running to their car because it is going to pour. I feel it. A fat drop splats on my bare shoulder.
I stand under the awning of a Realtor’s office with pictures of charming beach houses for sale posted on the windows. I call my father’s phone, but it only rings and rings. I call again and leave him a message. I try not to cry, because I want to cry and beg and plead. I only say, “How could you?” I don’t know where to go or what to do. I don’t even know Jenny’s address or phone number. I think about calling Dillon. I think about calling Meg or Meg’s mom. I think about calling my mother’s brothers, Uncle Mike and Uncle Ted. One lives with Aunt Sue and their kids in Boston, and the other lives with Aunt Rebecca and their kids in Phoenix. I think about how few people I really have—at least the kind of people who are a fortress, a vault, the kind of people who will be there, always. The kind of people you can count on to keep you from falling miles and miles.
And that’s when I see the glowing lights of the Parrish Island Library. I see the wide set of steps up to the door. The door is propped open. Relief washes over me. I love the library. I have always felt safe in a library. It’s like seeing the entrance of a church. I want to set myself down there like an abandoned baby in a basket.
It is a block away. Another drop of rain lands on my cheek, and then there’s another on my arm, and then another and another. The drops, they come faster and harder and then they aren’t drops at all, but a pounding sheet of rain, and it is raining so hard I can barely see. I run up those stairs. I am dripping wet, and rain runs down my face.
Inside, the library is beautiful, with large windows and warm wood and a domed ceiling with the sky painted on it. I look up at that painted blue sky with the puffy white clouds, and suddenly my throat closes up tight. I feel a wide vista of emotion, and anything could make those tears come, anything. I could weep at an overturned chair or a torn page, or maybe I won’t weep at all. I’ll cut off my hair or get in someone’s car and drive fast, fast, fast. I am translucent. I could break against rocks. I am ten thousand miles down and ten thousand miles across and around and it’s too far and too long and too deep. And when I step forward then and my foot slips on the wet marble floor, I can feel the lurch, the imminent loss, the propelling forward, and that’s when the hand grips my wrist.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
I nod, but he keeps a firm hold on my arm. I can smell his soap, a smell like evergreen boughs, a smell that asks a question in a way that maybe you’d want to answer. He’s wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a loose tie, and there is another boy with him, that same boy with the bike, whose name I can’t remember right then, because the black-haired boy with the wide, soft brown eyes is looking right at me. He looks deep into my eyes and he can see me, right into me, I can tell. And then, gently as a passing thought, or even as gently as a memory, his thumb moves across the soft flesh of the underside of my wrist. He is holding his breath, I realize, because he exhales and then lets me go, and when he does I can sense his fingers still there, their heat, where he touched me.
“You sure?” he asks. He even sets his bag down. It’s heavy with books, but the setting down means he is willing to wait.
“Yes,” I say.
“Jenny’s granddaughter,” the other boy says. He’s forgotten my name, and that’s all right, because I’ve forgotten his.
“Right.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” the black-haired boy says. He picks up his bag, and they head toward the door. He waves to a woman behind the checkout desk, a woman with short spiky hair and round glasses.
“Later, Henry,” she calls.
I watch his profile and then the back of his head, the thick wave of hair, as he descends the stairs, and I feel this energy between us, an awareness that we’re looking at each other, only not looking. He feels it too, I know. He feels it until he must turn around. He smiles. I don’t know exactly what this smile means, only that it means something. Something immense. It curls around me like smoke, or like the arm of true love, and I wonder then if it’s possible to fall ten thousand miles into the Grand Canyon and be held safe at the same time.