“Well—”
“Adeleine—I want you to talk to me about what happened. It’s better if you give it to someone else. Let me take it, sweetheart.”
She shrunk at the term of endearment, brought her knees up into the tent of fabric. A silken bow, perilously attached halfway across the chest, seemed as though it would give way any moment.
“You know how badly I wish I had been there. Don’t you see all this was for you, as much as for Edith or anyone else?”
“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.