“He was — devious. He did the worst things you can do to a person who can’t leave the only place she has.”
For what was possibly the first time since she had arrived, she looked at his face, watched his thoughts toss on it.
“No, he didn’t do that. He demolished the apartment. He destroyed my music and drowned my books. He took what I loved away. Is that enough, Thomas? Or should I tell you about how I tried not to smell or hear him, in order to remember some life of mine that was understandable — should I tell you about how far back I had to go, to find that? Should I tell you that? Would you want me then?”
Thomas knelt beside her, placed a warm hand around her curled toes and gripped them, but she had become silent, unmoved, and would stay that way for the rest of the morning. “I’m just so sorry,” he said, but the apology, blocked by the taut line of her stare and her calcifying posture, wouldn’t reach her, and so he took it, with regret shadowed by relief, for himself.
—
FOR HOURS THOMAS remained two feet behind her, as if he were leashed, while she walked: through the outcropping of slipshod communal buildings, down the crumbling limestone angles that led to the river rumbling, up again and through the vestigial foundations of miner’s houses. She shot him looks from time to time, remorseful winces, and he attempted to mirror them. It felt as though infirm parts of his body were eating away at necessary organs, that soon some internal chasm would open and stop him completely.
In the death of what had seemed a bottomless afternoon, under a sun low and terminal, moving among centuries-old trees, they stumbled upon a view of Edith: dressed in a linen shift the color of milked tea, a quarter of her body already soaked by a bend in the river. Her right hand rested on Song’s shoulder, and both held soft smiles that abraded the age of their faces. The water, considerate of their position, parted gently around the backs of their knees before rejoining the rush.
Later that evening, Adeleine would offer her declaration, present her resignation from whatever it was the two of them had been. “I’m not coming back with you,” she would say, on the porch, the first night that the heat was indomitable, never even interrupted by breeze. But at that moment, from a point fifteen feet above the river, across from the muddled, inverted version of mother and child, she only gave Thomas a hawkish nod and began her descent.
He had never seen her move with such confidence, angling across the rough tops of boulders, her arms spread for balance or flight, her cheeks ripe with that day’s exertion, her body unflinching when it met the hurried green chill, and it was how, for the rest of his quiet life, he would remember her.
~ ~ ~
PAULIE FELT as if his body was a zoo barely containing its wild holdings and they hadn’t seen anything yet and maybe it was the earth getting too hot like Claude and Eddy whispered about. The whole globe getting warmer sounded like a good thing, he thought, like something that could help everybody relax and start listening. But the fireflies weren’t here and they had come all this way and he had even become so worried and upside down that they’d gone to the emergency room where he’d ridden on a stretcher under a flock of hands flying like startled birds.
But now here they were and running with them was the river and watching over them was the covering of sky. It was black so he stayed in between Claude and Eddy and held their hands and kept their lives connected. They had seen only little flashes like the beginnings of lonely ideas but not the crowd of busy angels he had come for. The water was so strong and fast that it stole the sounds of their steps but still Paulie knew and could feel very carefully how they were moving. He gave the hands he held a squeeze each time he saw the flash of a lone firefly and sent what he called mind mentions out into the night: he thought about the Great Smoky Mountains and all the people who had come to see the fireflies light up at once and about Claudia’s way of walking and Eddy’s hair sticking up and silently repeated I love you and I appreciate you, I love you and I appreciate you, I love you and I appreciate you. He thought it until the bugs caught fire hundreds revealing themselves on every side and he couldn’t squeeze their hands fast enough and the whole forest exploded transformed by light.
~ ~ ~
CLAUDIA AND EDWARD had both secretly nurtured such cynicism about the rare firefly display that the actual event left them giggling hungrily, their glee waning only to pick up another wave. The three of them stood on the path that bisected river and forest and watched as tens of thousands of seed-sized lives enjoyed intricate, urgent communication: flashing in sync or in a wave of great scale, their collected bodies casting a violent and vital green that brought all growth around it detail, then fell dark for a slow count of three, obscuring the mountainous arbor again. Each time they sparked anew it felt like the first leg of a dramatic ascent, the roaring of a spectacular motor.
When their laughter had finally settled in their bodies, they sat on the moist earth and continued to watch an algorithm so expertly designed, so decisively executed, that they never felt the nibble of mosquitoes or the swift hints of a rain. Paulie said something about this being like the beginning of the world, and Edward couldn’t even bring his eyes to roll, they were so full, and wet, and open.
~ ~ ~
IT WAS TWO DAYS LATER, as he sat on the concrete and stucco balcony of a nondescript motel in Virginia, overlooking four lanes of highway traffic, during the afternoon of a heat wave they’d decided to wait out, dressed in nothing but a pair of boxers that read Wednesday! that Paulie’s heart failed. Edward and Claudia, enraptured by a talk show — a muscular transvestite and her luminous python — heard only the slight resettling of the plastic legs of the chair as he moved.
When it came, Paulie was considering almost nothing, struck quiet by the weather’s weight on his face, still fed by what they’d seen in the mountains. In the absence of his long-kept wish to see the Smokies alight, he was carved out, weeded of ardor. He stared at a penny dropped on a balcony below, watched the traffic as though it were a complex ballet. He let the sweat from his face find its way down his body. He thought of Claudia and Edward, just behind him through the glass, how they talked to each other like children, making small promises about the next day and the next, what would happen, when, why.
The pressure seemed to knock all at once, a prickling in his fingers, a dullness in his jaw, a force on his sternum, and he felt he could answer it.
This is completely safe, he thought.
~ ~ ~
IN EDITH’S EMPTY APARTMENT, the smell of long-swollen, rotting tea bags pushed against the walls. Shadowed by the mugs left out on the table, partially hidden by a months-old newspaper, an envelope lay slightly curled, Adeleine’s writing on its backside blotted by sweat. She had made her letters tiny, unsure how long Edith’s voice would continue, and blacked out the mistakes in her transcription thoroughly, in solid boxes of ink.
He surprised me with it and I didn’t mind. I wouldn’t have known how to go about judging one building from the next, how to test the windows or floors. He walked a few feet ahead of me most of the blocks from the subway, and then when we turned onto our street he put his hands over my eyes. His fingers always smelled like tobacco and… butter, maybe, oil… and he jingled the keys and told me to look. And I was — scared. We toured every room, opened every door, turned on all the faucets. He ran around pissing a little in every toilet. We got to the top and Declan said, “Well? Well, what do you think?” And I started to cry because, honest to God, I had never had stairs before, I mean never gone up any that belonged to me, never been in a place with another person and not known exactly where they were. I grew up with June’s voice right on top of mine, her wheedly elbows everywhere I was, my mother’s face behind me in the bathroom mirror. He laughed at me a little and held my chin and he said, “Don’t worry, dove. Soon we’ll be renting it out, and you and me will be breathing all over each other again.” But I had never been alone in that way, able to sit someplace for hours knowing no one would come in. The first nights there I had to beg for sleep. I thought I could feel all the space trying to rush in, all those rooms with no living in them yet, begging for light and the tread of people, this infinite home.