“Like what? Like should I go crazy and yell that you’re a monster? Should I throw your things in the river and let them rush away? It’s okay, Eddy. We’ve got so much to do. We don’t need to do that. And we love you. Right, Claude?”
“For some reason.” She lifted her dirty feet from the cooler and leaned forward. A can of Miller High Life flew from her hand; Edward watched as his own shot up to receive it. Paulie observed the exchange with curiosity, as he might a documentary about rainforest wildlife, and chuckled brightly.
“Eddy,” he said. “Only two hours till the fireflies!”
—
THE CAMPGROUND, littered now with sound systems and fans and wide vehicles and red-faced regional families, began to hum in the hour after dusk with small, fitful movements: the zipping of mesh tent doors and fanny packs, the on-off, on-off tests of headlamps. The clusters of people, many of them in tight, synthetic clothing that molded their flesh into unnatural lumps, looked generally cagey, as though they had spent the last of their dwindling energy on a shot at wonder and would take any measure to obtain it. The sky accepted night and the campers began their migration to the riverside grove recommended for observation, huffing as they shifted their long-sedentary bodies. Sunburned and drunk, Edward felt both repelled by their needy anticipation and at risk of catching it.
The three of them set out with the rest of the campground, joined the army of flashlights covered in red Saran wrap so as to not spook the bugs, and moved towards an area where a group of rangers spoke to the gathering crowd. Paulie—whose knees almost cleared his navel as he marched, whose taut fingers at his sides seemed liable to snap off—had fallen into a manic feedback loop.
“Eddy do you think we’ll see them? Claude I hope we see them. Claude do you think we’ll see the fireflies? Eddy I hope we see them!”
As they approached the bend in the river that held the desperate hordes, Edward imagined the ineluctable pushing and sweating and yelling once the spectacle actualized—if it actualized at all—and knew he couldn’t be there for it.
“Paulie,” he said. “I’ve heard it’s better firefly watching up the river a mile or so. Let’s go that way.”
Claudia screwed up her face to protest, but Paulie had already begun to follow the confidence in Edward’s voice, and so she fell in behind them, listening only to the sounds of the violent mountain stream, looking towards the winks of light up ahead, single fireflies pulsing, oblivious to expectations of awe.
CALIFORNIA DUSK came and went, and they stayed by the fire, the smoke of it shifting like a bored child’s attention. No one moved, except to feed the flame with gusts of breath, to rearrange the kindling’s structure. All perched on oddly tumbled logs save mother and daughter, who sat several feet higher on a chair designed for two, the community’s decades-old gift to Song and Root. Thomas, leaning on a boulder just below them, watched and listened closely, resisting the mollification of the flames. Whether Edith realized the person next to her was one she’d raised and lost, or Song gave any real thought to the convergence of her two lives, was a question whose import seemed to have passed with the light. They stroked each other’s knees and hands occasionally, sometimes sighing in synchronicity.
Settled on the ground beside him, her back against the warmed rock, Adeleine remained quiet. She absorbed Thomas’s affection without returning it: for most of the night he kept his hand over hers, where the fingers lay flat and never reacted to touch. As it grew darker and more retreated to their homes, his breath caught at the very real possibility that she would decline to retire with him to his modest bed. She didn’t flinch when the wind pushed the smoke in their direction, or a stray ember leapt from the pit towards her.
Finally in the company of family, Edith had fallen asleep. With a loose motion that swept from nose to toe, Song had beckoned the delivery of a blanket, and Thomas observed how carefully she wrapped it around the person who had once been her mother, how she stroked a thumb down the frail cup of Edith’s ear. The roughly hewn greens and browns of the wool, as illuminated by the firelight, looked like land sliding and eroding.
—
ADELEINE HAD, ultimately, fallen limply into sleep with him, but when Thomas awoke from clutching her all night, his arms felt as though they had carried something unwieldy for miles. Her body had left a scent on the linens, sweat that was by turns sweet and putrid, and he found her on the porch, where the mid-morning light wheedled through the uneven planks overhead and fell on her face like a complicated question. Her feet were bare, and a polyester slip of a murky yellow fell halfway down her legs. She had not spoken in any significant way before she fell asleep, had hardly moved to find the right position.
“Good morning. How did you sleep? Where are Edith and Song?”
“Went to the lawyer’s. In town. Edith was mumbling about watching the tightwire walker and Song was just nodding like a secretary. In some ways they’re perfect together.”
“Are you feeling better?”