The Firefly Dance

by Sarah Addison Allen

  I tried to scoot slowly, invisibly, to the top of the twin bed, so Great Aunt Sophie wouldn’t see what I was doing and order me back to the ghost room. “Why doesn’t everybody go to heaven, Aunt Sophie?” I asked, as I put my head on the pillow.

  “God decides that, not me,” she said, though I knew she had her own ideas on the subject.

  I stared at the textured ceiling. “Do you think my dad’s in heaven?”

  My dad knew of heaven. He didn’t go to church, but I think he understood the idea.

  The winter before, on a cold, still Appalachian night in December, he had come in from somewhere, I don’t remember where, and he was smiling. He smelled like the cold and cigarette smoke when he picked me up and carried me outside without even giving me time to put on my coat. My mom only smiled at him the way she always did, as if she loved him so much she couldn’t speak.

  The snow was frozen and it had hushed the neighborhood. It was so quiet that each step he took in the hard snow sounded like the pop of a paper bag full of air. Once we were in the front yard, he put me down, then pointed up. I followed his finger to the millions of bright stars overhead. There were so many of them it looked like there was no night, just stars, packed like an audience trying to get a better view of us.

  “Look at that, Louise,” he said in awe. “God, will you look at that. There you go.”

  There you go.

  “Is that where he went?”

  Great Aunt Sophie was silent for a good many moments. She reached over and took a bookmark off the table to her right. She marked the place in her book and set it aside. “I’ve pondered this now,” she finally said. “And I believe your daddy’s in heaven. Dreaming and dancing are heavenly things. Your daddy would fit right in.”

  “Your Harry’s in heaven, I guess,” I said.

  “Yes, he is.” She took a quick, deep, decision-making breath. “Do you want to know why I took that door away, Louise?” She pointed to the doorway separating the rooms. “It’s because I can lie here and look into that room and see where he lived. My memories are in there, but my life is in here. That’s the way it is, Louise. You can look at them, but you can’t live them.”

  “I want to be home.” I tried to keep my voice straight so Great Aunt Sophie wouldn’t know I was crying. She didn’t like for people to cry. It made her fidget. She all but left the room last week when Lorelei Horton tearfully told the Sunday school committee that her son was finally coming home from Vietnam.

  I woke up just after two in the morning and static was coming from Great Aunt Sophie’s clock radio. The big band station out of Asheville signed off at two and resumed broadcasting at six. I was still in the bed next to Great Aunt Sophie. She had covered me with the scratchy bedspread. I looked over to her and saw that she was asleep, breathing through her mouth. The static didn’t seem to bother her.

  I got out of bed, half-asleep, and went to the featherbed ghost room, my need to make sure my house was still there greater than my fear of being haunted. I knelt at the window again and stared at my house. Every single light was on now, even the front and back porch lights. It looked like the sun had fallen into the house and was shining out of every opening the hot yellow light could find. Even the basement light was on. I could see the shine crawling out of the one window in the bricks at the bottom of the house. That was my dad’s wonder room. He made stuff there, fixed stuff, too. He fixed Great Aunt Sophie’s coffee percolator once, which I thought was very nice of him.

  I rested my chin in my hands. The static from the radio was becoming familiar now and it was lulling me back to sleep. But that’s when I noticed something on the roof of my house. I lifted my head and stared hard, trying to make out what it was.

  The figure moved from between the dormer windows at the front of the house, to the edge of the back of the house. She wore a white nightgown I could see in the darkness. She sort of danced around the rooftop for a while, like she testing her balance. I didn’t understand her presence on my rooftop. Before this night, I’d never had the perspective of looking out over my house. I wondered if she had visited before, or if tonight was special.

  The lights from the house illuminated her figure like stage lights. She went to the edge of the roof and held her arms out wide like she was going to fly.

  I remember thinking, She can do it. She can fly.

  Then I heard a sound over the static, like a voice rising above applause. The angel standing on my roof was crying. It was the unhappiest sound I’d ever heard. The hurt in it pricked my skin like someone had pinched me, and tears came to my eyes.

  She doesn’t want to fly.

  Then she lifted her hands up to the sky as if asking for help from God. She put her hands on top of her head and tucked her chin to her chest. Was she praying?

  God, help me not fly.

  I heard some movement in the next room, like maybe Great Aunt Sophie had gotten out of bed and gone to her window. Then I think maybe she said, “Good Lord in heaven, no.”

  I closed my eyes and felt the warm from the light from my house. I hoped the angel would stay, that she wouldn’t fly away since the thought was agonizing her so. I remember hearing Great Aunt Sophie saying softly, over and over, “Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it.”

  But I couldn’t help it. I had to go to sleep.

  When I woke up again, it was morning and the air was wet with the scent of cut grass and gasoline. Someone was mowing somewhere in the neighborhood. I was on the floor below the window and Great Aunt Sophie’s pink polyester bedspread was again covering me. I sat up and looked around. I could hear voices coming from outside so I crawled to the window and looked out. Great Aunt Sophie was down in her rose garden, and my mom was hanging her favorite green and white striped bed sheets on the clothesline in our backyard. They were talking to each other, calling back and forth like they did almost every sunny day when there was outdoor work to be done.

  “Mom!” I yelled.

  Both she and Great Aunt Sophie turned at the sound of my voice. Mom smiled up at me. “Come over here and give me a hug, sweetie girl,” she called.

  And I was out of the house in nothing flat.

  I ran right past Great Aunt Sophie and over to my mother. As I hugged her, I grabbed her shirt tight in my fists as if she would fly away if I let go, as if I’d caught her just in time. She bent down and kissed the top of my head. She was fine, the way all Southern ladies were fine, as if there were no hurts great enough to break them. But I knew there were, and I held her tighter.

  Great Aunt Sophie watched us, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun. She stood there for a long time. Finally, she lowered her hand and picked up her basket of roses. She walked back to her house and her ghost there, and Mom and I held hands and walked slowly together to our house to greet ours.

  Nothing Disastrous

  It was the spring Great Aunt Sophie was caught without her Coca-Colas. That’s how she remembered things, in terms of events that were importantly disastrous to her and only her. One morning in late April the whole town woke up to two inches of ice and, inconveniently, it was Great Aunt Sophie’s grocery day. She stocked up on her weekly supply of Coca-Colas every Wednesday. Within forty-eight hours everyone in town was referring to it as the spring Sophie got caught without her Coca-Colas because the power might have gone out but the telephone lines were blessedly spared. Reverend Joe finally got his car out and took her to the grocery store. That’s when Great Aunt Sophie decided that being a Yankee, even a single one, wasn’t such a sin and maybe he did have a right to be in the pulpit.

  That spring was also the one-year anniversary of my mom losing her breasts to cancer. But that wasn’t disaster enough for Great Aunt Sophie. She said, “Your Mama’s alive and well now and there’s nothing disastrous about that.”

  The ice storm passed and May that year was divine and war
m. Mom started wearing summer dresses again. Her counselor had told her she would go through a mourning period, missing her breasts. And she quietly did.

  The spring that Great Aunt Sophie was caught without her Coca-Colas, the one year anniversary of my mom losing her breasts, was also when Reverend Joe finally brought his wife down from Connecticut.

  Her name was Fala and she had beautiful dark hair that wasn’t quite brown, but not quite red either. And it was always so shiny. The light through the stained glass made it look like she had glitter in her hair. I liked to watch her. She sat alone on the very first pew every Sunday.

  I think she was afraid of us. She asked us to repeat ourselves like we were speaking a new language she was trying to learn. I think she tried to be a good preacher’s wife, but Great Aunt Sophie complained that the parsonage’s telephone line was always busy because Fala called her family every seven minutes. I thought that was extraordinary. I’d never known anyone who called somebody every seven minutes. My babysitter talked for at least a half an hour before calling someone else when she watched me on the evenings Mom had to work. At the homecoming picnic the first Sunday in July, I decided to ask Fala about it.

  She looked a little confused when I asked her, so I repeated myself, more slowly this time.

  “I understood you,” she said. She had walked away from the church picnic to smoke under the hickory tree near the road and I had followed her. “I talk to my family a lot, but not every seven minutes.” She flicked the ashes off her cigarette with an agitated movement. She smiled at me, a little thinly. “I think your great-aunt was just trying to make a point.”

  “Oh,” I said. She finished her cigarette but made no move to return to the picnic. Instead, she fished out another and lit it. I leaned against the trunk of the tree figuring she would tell me to leave if she didn’t want me there. “How do you get your hair to do that?” I said after a stretch of silence. “It’s so shiny.”

  Her hand went to her hair and she stroked it as if comforting herself. “Cream rinse. My sister sends me down a supply of it every couple of months. It’s from a salon we used to go to in Hartford.”

  “My hair won’t do anything but braid,” I said.

  Fala reached over and touched my hair. “It’s dry,” she said. “You need some cream rinse. I’ll bring you a bottle of mine next week. You can tell me how it works.” Then, out of the blue, she asked me, “Your mother had breast cancer, didn’t she?”

  I nodded.

  “My grandmother had breast cancer, too.” No one in town ever said that word breast, at least not twice during the same conversation. As far as the town was concerned, my mother had an affliction. But it seemed to me that whether or not it was an affliction didn’t matter because it was still in her breasts. But here Fala was saying it out loud like she was saying cabbage or antelope. She took another drag off the cigarette and looked out across the field. “I was named after my grandmother. Fala means ‘crow.’”

  She said that as if it really pleased her and I thought if my name meant crow, I wouldn’t be too happy about it. Neither would Great Aunt Sophie. She didn’t like crows. She was always shooing them out of her yard, running out her back door, waving her arms and fussing. We lived next door to her so the crows would fly over to us until she went back inside and then they flew back.

  “I’ll come by. How about tomorrow? When will your mom be home?”

  “Usually about five-thirty except on Thursday and then she works at night.”

  “I’ll come after dinner,” she said with a nod. She dropped her cigarette and stepped on it. “We should get back. Some of the church ladies are giving me that look.”

  Fala came by at seven-thirty the next evening and gave me a yellow bottle of cream rinse which I promptly used. It stung my eyes. She was still in the kitchen, talking to my mom, when I went to bed.

  She was over at our house a lot the next few weeks. Then Reverend Joe, larger than life and as big as our doorway, started showing up.

  It was hard to eavesdrop because the kitchen opened into the dining room and there was no place to hide close enough to hear. Sometimes I would sit outside on the back porch steps in the evening and throw rocks from the driveway into the yard to try to quiet the cicadas so I could catch words coming from the kitchen. Reverend Joe and Fala talked a lot. When Mom talked, she talked very low like she knew I was trying to listen. I had to stop eavesdropping after Robert Junior, who mowed our grass in the summer, complained about the rocks in our yard flying up and hitting him in the head.

  I finally asked my mom about these sessions when we were at the grocery store. I tried to slide into the conversation by remarking over the cantaloupes, “Reverend Joe and Fala are over at our house a lot.”

  “Friends talk.” She put some oranges in the cart and walked ahead of me.

  “But why you? I mean, there are lots of other people in this town.”

  “Would you share all your secrets with your Great Aunt Sophie?” she asked over her shoulder.

  She had a point. “No way. What do they talk about, Reverend Joe and Fala?”

  “Fala’s grandmother always wanted her to marry a preacher,” Mom said, putting a package of bacon into our cart, which she told me I couldn’t push if I ran into her heels one more time.

  “The grandmother she was named after?”

  “Uh-huh,” Mom said, looking at the ground beef.

  “She had breast cancer, right?”

  Mom looked up at me. “How did you know that?”

  “Fala told me.”

  “Oh. Yes, her grandmother had cancer. And her grandmother wanted her to marry a preacher so Fala promised her. That’s why she’s here.”

  “Was Reverend Joe the only preacher she could marry?”

  Mom laughed at that and I was glad because I loved her laugh. It caused these little lines around her eyes as if she was so happy she had to squint. She was so beautiful. She had started wearing make-up like she used to and by this time she had stopped remarking every time she passed a mirror that she was as flat as a boy. “No, honey. Reverend Joe is originally from Hartford and he went up there to visit some family last year. It was right after Fala’s grandmother died. Reverend Joe and Fala knew each other in school and they renewed their acquaintance. He proposed and she accepted.” Mom had this way of explaining things that always made them make sense. I missed that when she wasn’t around.

  “They’re over at our house a lot,” I managed to work in again. “Great Aunt Sophie says visitation means visiting lots of people, not just one.”

  “Aunt Sophie’s being persnickety, honey.” We moved to the cereal aisle and I darted off. “Don’t tell her I said that!” Mom called after me.

  The sessions with Fala and Reverend Joe lasted through the summer, sometimes stopping for a few weeks, sometimes happening every other day. The last session was on the day before Halloween, and it was with Fala. I remember because Fala brought the costumes she was making for some of the Sunday school kids and Mom helped her sew. A few weeks later Reverend Joe and Fala went up to Hartford to spend Thanksgiving with their families. Only Reverend Joe came back.

  Reverend Joe and Fala divorced in the spring of the next year and the ladies at church clucked with sympathy. Two months later Reverend Joe started seeing my mom. I remember the night he took up half the couch as he sat waiting for my mom to get ready for their first date. He told me my mother was the most serene and compassionate person he had ever known. I told my mom this the next day but she just smiled as she did the dishes. It was the two-year anniversary of my mom losing her breasts, the spring great-aunt Sophie ran over her iris bed with her lawn mower.

  I asked Great Aunt Sophie what she thought about the divorce. It was pretty big news. It was even in the newspaper. Fala had floated into our lives, left conditioner at several people’s houses, made some peo
ple envious, some mad, left cigarette butts in the church courtyard, and only ever talked to my mother. I thought she was fun and mysterious, like someone on summer break from school who had come down to visit with us like the Jessup twins from Illinois.

  Great Aunt Sophie sat in her iris bed wearing her big straw visiting hat and black and white gardening gloves. “Fala’s much better off than my poor irises,” she said to me, poking the ground with a trowel. “Everyone is alive and well and, in all probability, happy.” She looked at me, shaking her head as if I should understand this by now. “There’s nothing disastrous about that.”

  Lazarus

  I was ten when my mother remarried. When I got out of bed the day of the wedding, I was not happy. I was in an early morning state of confusion that didn’t often happen on Saturdays because I was usually allowed to sleep in. But by eight o’clock there had to have been at least twelve women in the house already, and they were clucking like a yard full of guinea hens. No one could find my mother’s wedding shoes. Shelly Gaddy, my mother’s maid of honor, was the one who had jarred me awake that morning. She came into my room, looked under my bed, looked in my closet, then finally looked under my covers. Why in the world she thought I was sleeping with my mother’s wedding shoes, I don’t know.

  They were low-heeled white patent leather pumps that had aged yellow and my mom had worn them when she married my dad. She didn’t even know she still had the shoes until I told her about them. A couple of months before, she and some of her friends had been sitting around the kitchen table, lamenting. Apparently, they couldn’t find the right shoes to go with the wedding dress Mom had bought with her employee discount at Staler’s department store. The dress was so creamy it was almost yellow. It was long and silky with a layer of lace overlapping the dress which Mom said she liked because, ever since her breast cancer, she didn’t particularly care to wear form-fitting things. I’d walked in and said, “What about those old yellow shoes in your closet, Mom?”