“Yep.”
“Oooh. Can I get in?”
“Sure.”
He stripped off the rest of his clothes and then seemed to hesitate. He perched on the edge of the tub. “It’s not too cold, is it?”
“No, honey, it’s nice and warm.”
“Oh. Okay.” He nodded to himself, as if making a decision, then lowered himself into the tub and began swatting at the bubbles. “When I was Tommy we always did bubbles.”
It never ceased to amaze her when he said things like that.
“Yes. You two boys always made a big old mess.”
He laughed. “We did.”
Focus on the love. You’ll be all right.
She closed her eyes for a moment and remembered Charlie and Tommy going at each other in the tub with the bubbles, the soapy water oozing onto the floor. She held on to that feeling until the whole room seemed to vibrate with the force of her love for them. How much there was.
The water was still pouring down over and through her fingers, changing moment by moment. As a child, she’d seen a movie about Helen Keller, how she had felt water running from a pump and had finally connected the name to the source of the name—but now she was going in the opposite direction, and names were losing their sense. What was Noah or Tommy, and who was she? Her head roared with a bright confusion.
“Hey, look!” He was calling for her. Whatever she was to him, she wasn’t a stranger. There were no strangers.
“Look,” Noah said. “Look at this bubble!”
The shine of the faucet pierced her eyes. Denise looked over, a beat too late.
“Oh! Popped. Sorry,” Noah said.
“Okay.”
“Look! Bubble!” This time she looked over quickly.
“I see it,” Denise said. “That’s a big one.”
It was a big one. It spanned the distance between his knees, growing bigger and bigger as he moved his legs apart, shimmering like crazy for its split second of existence.
“Look!”
The bubble grew larger still. In the ever-changing map of its colors, someone was drowning and someone was being born.
“Oh! Popped.”
“Yes.”
There was nothing to hold on to anymore. Only everything.
Noah looked down, then, and put his whole face in the water. He lifted his head. He had a bubble beard and a bubble mustache and he was grinning away like a demonic baby Santa Claus. “Guess who?” he said.
Denise smiled. “I don’t know,” she said. “Who?”
“Me!”
Forty-Two
It was late by the time they got home from the airport. Charlie sat next to his mom as they pulled into the driveway. Another night on Asheville Road; same old sounds of crickets and the Johnsons’ TV playing an Indians game. Crazy that it seemed the same when what was in his head had changed so much. He guessed that was how life was. Who knew what was in anybody’s mind? And meanwhile people died and had whole new lives, like the fireflies that arrived in June, flashing here, then gone, then here again. It was like some kind of batshit magic trick.
Charlie had spent hours catching fireflies with his brother when they were little. Tommy would run around the yard with a jar, Charlie right at his heels. Once they’d caught a few, they’d put the jar on the steps and sit, watching them buzz and spark. They always pitched a fit when it was time to let them go. They wanted to keep them as pets, even though their mom explained that they’d die that way, that they belonged in the wild. One night Tommy and Charlie couldn’t take it anymore—they lied and hid the jar under Tommy’s bed, and the next morning they had woken up to find themselves the owners of three dead bugs in a jar: dry, ugly, black-winged things that looked like ordinary beetles, as if someone had come in the night and drained the mystery right out of them.
Now Charlie wondered if the kid, Noah, ever saw fireflies in the city. Or if he remembered them. Even though he wasn’t Tommy. Not really.
He looked sideways at his mom. What was she thinking? He knew it was probably about his brother, but sometimes, lately, she surprised him. She’d ask his opinions about things, like what kind of food they should serve at the reception or whether they should ask his dad over for dinner. Why so curious what I think all of a sudden, he wanted to say, when you haven’t given a rat’s ass for the last seven years? And it was a problem, too, because it meant he couldn’t get stoned as much. He’d had a quick toke or two in the garage the day before the burial and she’d noticed in, like, half a second. Not even. She’d looked him right in the eyeballs and he was grounded before he even knew what hit him.
*
Denise stared out the windowshield into the darkness, pondering gradations of loss.