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.