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.