Thomas felt his resolution gathering, all parts towards a desperate act, remembered the dead man in the photograph and quietly begged his forgiveness. It’s for her own good, he tried to explain to Declan across years, and laced his hand into hers.
“Dear,” he said. “Where is the will?”
—
EDITH NAPPED while Thomas searched, lay facedown on top of the covers as he took apart the many years she had packed away methodically. He had kissed her forehead, damp from summer humidity, and brought a thin cotton sheet over her slowly vanishing body. She dreamt like a dog, kicking often.
On the hunt, in and out of boxes he found on shelves in the highest points of the apartment, he stumbled across various mementos that confirmed the great tenderness he held for her: a photo of her and Declan in one of those two-person horse costumes, the colors warm and soft like baking things rising.
They each wear a cowboy hat and a Western shirt, and stuffed cloth legs dangle beneath their torsos, comically short. Edith, at the head, wears the suspenders that hold up the mare’s comic snout and mane with pride and has a thumb slipped under each strap; she is just about to laugh. Declan, behind her, holds a can of beer in each hand and winks. The people around them, in Halloween costumes much milder and more comfortable, look on at their glow, the obvious volume of affection, with jealousy and apprehension.
Behind this, Thomas found a photo of them applying glue to strips of wallpaper with a solemnity meant for churches. He continued to move through the stack, his thumb light on the upper corner as he flicked, and stopped again on a photo of Edith holding a giggling baby up to the husky afternoon light on an unmade bed. It was the same room, he knew, where she lay now, managing ragged breaths.
When he found it, a stack of duplicates in a beige vinyl box, he passed his fingers through his hair in some wish to appear presentable. The words Last Will and Testament, formal and exclusive, kept him still a moment longer. He fought hesitation with the remembered moments of Owen and Edith, his sharp angles and the flashes of his gold watch as he grabbed at her elbow, then the image of Adeleine, looking out at him through the crack of her door, her eyes wild as though she were being chased by her end. The conjured images lent his fingers some electricity, assisted them in separating a leaf from the pile.
His tongue made a soft sound against the roof of his mouth as he surveyed it, a whole lifetime of days laid out in plans for divestment, as if the physical things weren’t tied to memories or moments, as if they had never quite approved of their human ownership and the bonds attached to them. Her clothes to the Salvation Army, her novels to a literacy foundation, her kitchen things to a homeless shelter.
When his eye reached the page that concerned the property, he saw that she had been correct, had not in her confusion of decades forgotten the legacy she meant to bestow. The address that had housed the last decade of his life was meant to go to Jennifer Whalen of San Francisco, and the date of the document was more than ten years prior, shortly after Declan’s collapse. A vision came to him, of Edith alone for the first time in fifty years, adjusting her hat in the foyer of some lawyer’s office, ready to regulate the details of her own demise, and the heat left his body. He had never so badly wanted to protect someone, and never felt so thoroughly incapable.
~ ~ ~
PAULIE WAS IN FORT GREENE PARK and there were fireflies and he thought possibly they were the same ones that had winked at his mother in Connecticut and brought her outside on so many sunsets. He wondered if maybe each time they lit up they were remembering other places they’d been. Like, fwoosh, light, and here is the meadow that swelled around a little house left behind: fwoosh, and a real broad garden where the flowers reach out however they please just like the people sitting around growing into the grass: fwoosh, and the lake where reeds grew up tall and lived half their life underwater and half out.
Paulie knew the word bioluminescence and wished he could use it more, that it showed up in recipes, on the checks Claudia scrawled for his rent each month, on the change-of-service signs in the subway. How are you doing today? Bioluminescent! He would say this all the time if his body made light you could see. He would blink and blink for Claudia, he would summon all his bioluminescent friends and surround her.
For years Paulie had been begging her to take him to see a natural phenomenon in Elkmont, Tennessee, which he knew from maps was in an area called the Smoky Mountains, which he definitely liked the sound of. Thousands of male fireflies lit up all at once and did a kind of dance for the females, who hid near the ground and flirted with little flashes, and it went on a while, all of them listening to each other, filling the sky with light all at once. It happened only once a year, and in two places in the entire world, and Paulie suspected if he got to see it his whole life would open. But he knew that Claudia became quiet and wet-faced at night, saw in the morning how she slept until the last minute she could. He tried not to mention it.
~ ~ ~
THE INFORMATION SAT with Thomas like a poor meal hardening in the stomach, resisting digestion, as he lay tensed on the couch in his apartment. He couldn’t determine whether his impulse to find Edith’s lost daughter in California was more rooted in his wish to save others or in his desire to see himself as capable, the kind of man who followed an idea down, clearing obstacles to make a path for it. Even with the full agency of his body, Thomas had never known himself to be a man of action. He had spent parties in low armchairs, allowed the conversation to drift to him, charmed people with the opinions he shared minimally and stoically, poured his time into canvases that he manipulated exactly as he wished, and cared little for the work of human relationships. The women he had fallen in with were always those slinking around corners to find him, prodding at his reticence, showing up late at his door without asking. He had given up on his parents, their silent TV dinners and failing bodies and shared misery, discarded an active connection to them as one might some faulty appliance.
A sharp, acrid sentiment bloomed in Thomas. His understanding of himself — that he’d grown cowardly since the stroke, had forsaken some former virility and honor — appeared, finally and absolutely, as a lie he’d told himself for comfort. Knowing this felt like watching the sand at his feet escaping and returning to the ocean, feeling the divots grow deeper and his balance melt, understanding that soon he’d need to move. He looked around his apartment now, at the few things lying around — two mugs left unwashed; a failing row of potted herbs; a box of childhood photos his mother had sent, which he’d never unpacked — and wondered what kind of life they indicated.
He got up and moved to the kitchen table, where his laptop sat open, displaying articles he’d only half read: an economist’s half-baked ideas about what the on-demand consumption of pop culture meant for minor artists, a biographical entry about a middling starlet, the obituary of a childhood acquaintance who had drowned. He brought the computer screen to full brightness and began his search for an airplane ticket, and the immediacy of it, the options rippling open in new windows, moved through him like a chill.