Rhizophora mangle: red mangrove. The red mangrove grows in the tropics, in brackish water and swampy salt marshes. Because of the harsh environment they live in, these mangroves have evolved a special mechanism to help their offspring survive. Unlike most plants, whose seeds germinate in soil, the mangrove seeds germinate while still attached to the parent tree. The seeds become fully mature plants with the help of their parent before dropping off of the tree and into their own ground. In tough times, even seeds need their parents.
The waters of the sound are wide and shimmering, and I now know that they are rumored to have healing powers. I know that whales slumber beneath them. I know that on the shore, in the dead of night, in a cove not far from a lighthouse, the sands and water glow a mystical blue.
Joe Nevins, in his orange vest, is gesturing the row of cars up the ferry ramp with one ever-circling arm. But he stops our truck with an upraised hand. He’s got a tattoo I’ve never noticed before—a heart with wings. My father rolls down the window, and Joe ducks his head to meet my eyes. “Take your sketch pad to the vault.”
“Very funny,” I say. His eyes are twinkling at his own joke. He’s well aware of my artistic talent.
“Camera would probably be better.” His arm goes back to circling. I’ve barely gotten to know Joe, or Margaret, or the others, but now I’m leaving them behind. We ba-bamp our way up the ferry ramp and settle in our own tight space between cars. I will not cry when that ferry pushes off from the dock and begins to make its slow journey to the mainland. Instead, I keep my eyes on the map. It is a twenty-seven-mile ferry ride to Anacortes. It is 80.2 miles from Anacortes to Seattle. And it is 1,188.2 miles from Seattle to San Bernardino.
* * *
“Want to stop and see Mary in Portland?” my father asks. We have been driving a long while, long enough that my legs are stiff and the wind through the windows has gone from cool to warm to hot and back to cool again. I roll mine up, hunt around in the back for my sweatshirt jacket.
“I find you less than humorous,” I say.
“I’m sorry I got crazy. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was lost. I just loved your mother so fucking much.”
“I know,” I say. I do know.
The signs to Portland pass us by. My finger, which follows along the red route of I-5, indicates we are approaching McMinnville.
“We need to eat,” my father says.
“Again?” Jenny has packed us enough food and snacks for a month-long expedition.
“Not just Red Vines and tuna salad. Something involving beef. Or bacon. A sit-down eat. With menus.”
“With bathrooms.”
“Right.”
He pulls off the next freeway exit. It is getting dark. We spot our kind of place. The Walk Inn. Plastic-covered menus. Breakfast anytime.
We, well, walk in. We wait behind the sign that says PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED. There is a bar off to our right. It’s dim and small, and maybe that’s why it’s called the Vault.
“Thomas Knows a Sign When He Sees One,” my father says.
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t even.”
He scratches his chin. His whiskers are already growing a road-trip forest. “No?”
“No.”
* * *
We stay overnight at the Riverside Motel, somewhere just after Salem. We get up early and head out, Jenny’s scones and bad motel coffee for breakfast. I sleep and stare out the window and complain about it being hot. It’s the middle of August. I haven’t been home in almost two and a half months.
After driving all day, things begin to look familiar—the terrain of California, bad traffic, the dry brown hills and new, packed-together condos along the freeway advertising their low, low prices on big banners. The smog, the palm trees. Dread begins to inch in. No. Dread isn’t one of those subtle emotions. It moves in and takes over, and then it drips and hangs, like Spanish moss.
We’re almost there. I don’t say it: home. Home shouldn’t make you feel like this. The sky turns dusky. We begin to pass the outlying cities around our town, the places we had to drive to for games during my one unsuccessful year of volleyball, or when the movie we wanted to see wasn’t playing anywhere closer. My father begins to whistle. He has one arm out the window, and this might all seem to be a casual display of homecoming happiness, but my father whistles only when he’s nervous. It’s a habit he pulls out of the arsenal during awkward moments or while attempting to do something he actually knows nothing about, like changing the oil in his truck. You can hear him under there, lying beneath the car and whistling away, surrounded by tools he barely can name.
“It’s freezing in here,” I say.
“You cold?”
“It’s practically dark.”
Dad rolls up the window. He sighs. “Well.” That’s all he says.
“Do you even have a job anymore?” I ask.
“The guys have been very understanding.”
And then there is the Santa Ana River and the massive white wedding cake building that is the old Arrowhead Resort. Dad takes the exit before downtown, and soon we pass my school, and then we are nearing the streets named for trees—Elm, Alder, Orange—and then our own street, definitely dark now. The streetlights are on, illuminating circles of asphalt and bits of driveways. The tick-tock, tick-tock of Dad’s turn signal says we’ve arrived. I know this place and don’t know it. It seems like somewhere I had been a hundred years ago.
“Let’s just get what we need for tonight out of the truck. I’ll unpack tomorrow. My fucking eyes are ready to fall out of my head.” Dad jams the gearshift lever to park, sets the brake.
I feel almost sick. That house, walking through that door, it seems like a wall to climb over. A mountain. An icy, treacherous, mountain range. But Dad is already hauling his bag out of the back. There’s nothing to do but follow him.
It’s oddly the same in there. Our leather couch, the Navajo blanket on the wall, the rocking chair, the green glass lamp my mother loved. Her Better Homes and Gardens magazines are still in the basket under the coffee table, and the lemon tree’s shadowy self is right out there in the back window. Even the smell inside is the same—some mix of coffee and vanilla. It feels preserved; I am trying to have a connection with this place as mine, my own home, where I belong. Instead, it has become the place where Mom once was.
* * *
I dream of trees, and Henry, and paint splashed on large canvases. I dream I can play the piano. I dream of my mother, and it is one of those horrible dreams I keep having, where we were wrong about her dying. She is alive after all, and she’s been trying to reach us and wondering where we’ve been. We are so happy to see her, it’s like the actual her, and we’re so relieved she’s not dead after all, and then I wake up. I have a moment where I don’t know where I am. I’m actually disoriented in my own room. It scares me. My ceiling feels lower (than Jenny’s), the table by my bed is farther away (than Jenny’s), the window smaller (than Jenny’s), and it feels like I’m in an entirely foreign place.
In the morning, I call Meg. She’s still miffed at me, but gets over it after I apologize a thousand times for not calling. It’s been above a hundred degrees here all week, she says, so Meg and Caitlin and Adam and this new girl, Kelsey, who just moved into a house on Meg’s street, are all going to Lake Gregory, which is this lake in the mountains that’s only fourteen miles away. You can swim there. You can get a little boat, or ride down a couple of water slides. Mostly, it’s cooler there than in the city.
They pick me up, and soon we are all stretched out on beach towels on the one bit of sand that’s free of other bodies. The place is packed. Screaming kids are running around with goggles on their heads, people are floating on air mattresses, guys are rubbing lotion onto the shoulders of already tan girlfriends. Meg’s hair is different. She’s wearing it in two braids, and she got a little carried away with the spray-on lightener when I was gone.
“You look so different,” I keep saying.
“You look so different,” Meg says.
“I don’t know what it is.”
Caitlin is standing by the edge of the water. She slips one finger under the elastic leg of her swimsuit bottom and tugs, maximizing coverage. Adam is standing over us, wet after his swim. He shakes like a dog, sprinkling us.
“That actually feels good,” Kelsey, the new girl, says. She’s got long, flat shiny hair that reminds me of Millicent, but she has none of Millicent’s icy confidence. She’s hanging on Meg like Meg’s the last bottle of water on a deserted island, capable of saving her life, or at least her social life. She’s doing that thing girls do sometimes, competing in a little triangle of rivalry. She keeps bringing up all of the fun and hilarious and amazing things they’ve done together since I’ve been gone. She’s used the phrase Remember when we . . . so many times, I think it’s time for their wedding album, or at least a scrapbook.
“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?”
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.