Opal superstitiously began to roam the days when Ronan and Adam were gone. If she was not home to see it, she thought, no strange ladies would come back, and she would not have to decide whether or not to intervene. As soon as the car doors closed and the sound of the engine died, she would take off exploring. Sometimes she would go roaming even if Ronan was home, if he was locked up in the long barn where she could not see him.
She roamed at first to the gasoline-scented place, but after awhile, she discovered that the appeal wore off as she learned the rules of it. All of the sameness became boring and so she explored farther along the edge of the woods. There she found a new favorite thing to watch, which was a bench by a creek. It was a good creek, sharp-edged and black-watered and busy-flowing, with grass and moss growing right up to the lip of it and sometimes a fish or a plastic bag picturesquely floating in it, and the bench had been placed at a turn in it where the water sometimes turned over white and frothy. The bench was occupied by different people at different times and they were all right. But really her favorite was a person who returned again and again, always at the same time of day, except if it was raining. She was a fluffy, cloud-shaped lady with fluffy, cloud-colored hair, and she always came to the bench with a book and a food. The books were never the same book. They were fat and brick-shaped and the fronts always bore images of men who didn’t seem to have any shirts or other possessions. Sometimes all they seemed to have was another man or sometimes a lady or sometimes both, who they held tightly. The foods were also never the same food. Sometimes they were things that made crunching sounds, short and fast, and sometimes they were things that made soft clucking sounds, and sometimes they were things that made no sound at all except for the cloud lady’s satisfied “ahh” after she finished them. Opal enjoyed watching the foods and the books and the cloud lady’s enjoyment of both. It felt a little bit like a dream, in the way that her happiness was so large that the feeling made it all the way across the creek to where Opal was hiding. It was agreeable. It was a scene that she liked to return to often. Plus, the bench was close enough that she could return to the Barns each night without having to make a nest, which was convenient as it was raining nearly every evening.
On one of her trips back from watching the cloud lady, Opal encountered Adam. Shockingly, brilliantly, he seemed to be arriving at the Barns on foot. People did not come to the Barns on foot. They came by cars that would smash her flat and not feel bad about it so stay out of their way, according to Ronan. But here was Adam on just his legs, slowly coming into view through the mist rolling down the dark tunnel of trees out to the road. Opal was delighted to discover him traveling in the same way she did. She met him halfway down the long driveway and frolicked all around him as he put one foot in front of the other while the last of the late afternoon’s light dappled over both of them. He said nothing as she grabbed his hand and then danced around to grab his other hand.
Ronan was less thrilled to discover Adam’s inventive way of travel. “What the hell, Parrish? I was just about to leave to get you. Who dropped you off?”
“I walked.”
“Ha ha.” Ronan’s real laugh did not sound like ha ha, but this was not Ronan’s real laugh. When Adam didn’t explain the joke, he said, “Walked. From where?”
“Work.” Adam had ceased frolicking and instead removed his shoes and then his socks before sitting at the round table in the kitchen.
“Work. What. The. Hell. I told you I was going to pick you up.”
“I needed to walk.” Adam put his head on the table.
While Ronan ran tap water into a glass and set it on the table like he might be able to smash a hole through the wood with it, Opal climbed beneath the table to prod at Adam’s bare feet. Legs that ended in feet were strange and interesting to her. Adam’s feet were long and hairless and vulnerable looking. His anklebone protruded like his wristbones did, as if his feet were just very strange hands. He had little bits of dark sock lint stuck to his skin, and it came off in a stripe when Opal rubbed at it.
“It’s not the only place you applied,” Ronan said, continuing an earlier conversation.
“But it was what I wanted the most. Opal, stop.”
Ronan ducked his head under the table and caught her eye. “For God’s sake. Get a jar and go outside and catch twenty fireflies. Don’t come back in until you’ve caught twenty fireflies.”
She went outside. There were a lot of fireflies in the waning light, but she was not good at keeping them in the jar while catching new ones, so it took her quite awhile. She did not go back inside when she was done, because by this time Adam and Ronan had come outside — Adam first, head down, walking fast, hands stuffed in pockets, feet still bare, not looking back, and then Ronan, pausing to jerk on his jacket before following Adam. Ronan called Adam’s name twice, but Adam didn’t turn or respond, even when Ronan caught up to him.
The two of them walked in silence up the dirt road to one of the barns in the upper fields, barely visible against the dark. The trees that surrounded the valley were already blacker than black.
“I might not get into any of them,” Adam said. “It might have been for nothing.”
“Whatever. Then you make a new list.”
“You don’t understand. I’d miss a semester unless I went for rolling admissions and that completely screws up the financial aid. Look, I don’t expect you to care about this.” Right after saying this, Adam said, in a different voice, “I’m being a shithead.”
“You are. And a shitfoot. Where are your shoes?”
“Still under the table.”
“Opal, could you get them for him?”
Opal could not, because it was too boring to go back to the house when they were out here being exciting in the dark. What she could get them was that jar of twenty fireflies, which she released in Adam’s face as she scampered by him. He reared back while Ronan enjoyed the scenery.
“She’s so useful,” Adam said. Opal preened.