Kathleen Alcott: Infinite Home

The three of them set out with the rest of the campground, joined the army of flashlights covered in red Saran wrap so as to not spook the bugs, and moved towards an area where a group of rangers spoke to the gathering crowd. Paulie — whose knees almost cleared his navel as he marched, whose taut fingers at his sides seemed liable to snap off — had fallen into a manic feedback loop.

“Eddy do you think we’ll see them? Claude I hope we see them. Claude do you think we’ll see the fireflies ? Eddy I hope we see them!”

As they approached the bend in the river that held the desperate hordes, Edward imagined the ineluctable pushing and sweating and yelling once the spectacle actualized — if it actualized at all — and knew he couldn’t be there for it.

“Paulie,” he said. “I’ve heard it’s better firefly watching up the river a mile or so. Let’s go that way.”

Claudia screwed up her face to protest, but Paulie had already begun to follow the confidence in Edward’s voice, and so she fell in behind them, listening only to the sounds of the violent mountain stream, looking towards the winks of light up ahead, single fireflies pulsing, oblivious to expectations of awe.

CALIFORNIA DUSK came and went, and they stayed by the fire, the smoke of it shifting like a bored child’s attention. No one moved, except to feed the flame with gusts of breath, to rearrange the kindling’s structure. All perched on oddly tumbled logs save mother and daughter, who sat several feet higher on a chair designed for two, the community’s decades-old gift to Song and Root. Thomas, leaning on a boulder just below them, watched and listened closely, resisting the mollification of the flames. Whether Edith realized the person next to her was one she’d raised and lost, or Song gave any real thought to the convergence of her two lives, was a question whose import seemed to have passed with the light. They stroked each other’s knees and hands occasionally, sometimes sighing in synchronicity.

Settled on the ground beside him, her back against the warmed rock, Adeleine remained quiet. She absorbed Thomas’s affection without returning it: for most of the night he kept his hand over hers, where the fingers lay flat and never reacted to touch. As it grew darker and more retreated to their homes, his breath caught at the very real possibility that she would decline to retire with him to his modest bed. She didn’t flinch when the wind pushed the smoke in their direction, or a stray ember leapt from the pit towards her.

Finally in the company of family, Edith had fallen asleep. With a loose motion that swept from nose to toe, Song had beckoned the delivery of a blanket, and Thomas observed how carefully she wrapped it around the person who had once been her mother, how she stroked a thumb down the frail cup of Edith’s ear. The roughly hewn greens and browns of the wool, as illuminated by the firelight, looked like land sliding and eroding.

—

ADELEINE HAD, ultimately, fallen limply into sleep with him, but when Thomas awoke from clutching her all night, his arms felt as though they had carried something unwieldy for miles. Her body had left a scent on the linens, sweat that was by turns sweet and putrid, and he found her on the porch, where the mid-morning light wheedled through the uneven planks overhead and fell on her face like a complicated question. Her feet were bare, and a polyester slip of a murky yellow fell halfway down her legs. She had not spoken in any significant way before she fell asleep, had hardly moved to find the right position.

“Good morning. How did you sleep? Where are Edith and Song?”

“Went to the lawyer’s. In town. Edith was mumbling about watching the tightwire walker and Song was just nodding like a secretary. In some ways they’re perfect together.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“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.