Firefly Nights

by Katie Winters

  Footsteps at the porch door turned Christine’s head. Yet again, her father appeared. He looked steadier, less volatile, and he nodded as he approached to sit with her, saying, “I’m sorry I lost my temper earlier. I try not to get so angry, but it seems like it’s happening more and more since the diagnosis.”

  “Hey. You were standing up for me. I can’t complain,” Christine said.

  Wes gave a soft smile. “Ah, poor Lola. She’ll figure it all out. She’s just so hot-headed. You sometimes have to reel her in when she goes out too far.” He finished and gave her arm a pat.

  “You must have had different modes of operation for all of our moods,” Christine said. “Three teenage girls and no mother. I don’t know how you made it through.”

  “Well, Susan left pretty soon after it all happened,” Wes said. “So it was mostly me versus you and Lola. Actually, it was mostly me versus you. I’m sure you remember. You were the hardest teenager in the world to raise.”

  Christine chuckled. “I’m sorry about that, Dad.”

  “No need to apologize,” Wes said. “I always thought you were the closest in personality to my Anna. You were prone to mood swings and a bit wild sometimes. Always on the verge of something big, if only she was brave enough to go out and get it.”

  “You’ve never told me that,” Christine marveled, remembering how she had been surprised at her mother’s moodiness in the diaries.

  “It’s difficult, sometimes, to talk about exactly how people were when they were alive, especially if it’s not all the cushy, good stuff. Heck, this summer has had that as a theme, hasn’t it? Now that you know everything about your mother—about Stan.”

  Christine blinked down at her half-drunk glass of wine. She felt terribly heavy, as though if she stood, her body might turn to lead and take her down.

  “It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Both Audrey and Lola are petrified of what will come next, just in case whatever comes next doesn’t fulfill whatever it is Lola wants Audrey’s life to be. But life doesn’t pan out the way we plan it, ever.”

  “It’s like that old expression about the best-laid plans,” Wes said, chuckling.

  “Exactly. Did I imagine that I would be back on Martha’s Vineyard, at age forty-one, drinking myself to death? No,” Christine affirmed.

  Her father hesitated. Christine knew that she had taken the conversation just a step too far.

  “You know you’re the most resilient of all of us,” Wes said. “I don’t know even half of the stories of your life away from here. Susan mentioned you studied for a while in Paris, that you made pastries in Stockholm, that you were one of the most renowned pastry chefs in Manhattan. But I imagine that kind of life, all over the world, brought with it loads of heartache and loneliness,” he said.

  Christine had never heard her father so articulate. She dropped her head on his shoulder and felt the first of what would surely be many tears, skate toward her cheeks.

  “You’re a good person, Christine. Remember that you don’t have to escape from anything anymore. Not here on the Vineyard. We’re here for each other, now. Even Lola, although she did a bad job of showing it today,” Wes continued.

  Christine let silence stretch between them for a moment. The waves shuffled up against the dock and shifted it this way, then gently back. She wondered where Zach was, what he thought of the kiss they had shared. Surely, the fact that she had run out had been answer enough. She couldn’t be anything for anyone except her family—least of all him.

  “I love you, Dad,” Christine said.

  “I love you, too, Christine,” her father returned. “At this moment, maybe even slightly more than the other two, but don’t tell them that.”

  Christine laughed at the absurdity of it. Of course, it couldn’t be true. But she held her head on his shoulder for a long time as the pair of them watched the afternoon drip by. They were now deep into the tourist season. Always, in this late-July era, there was the inescapable feeling that it was all about to crash down around them and end. Once summer was over, you couldn’t get it back. It was never exactly the same.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Christine and her father went to bed just after eight in the evening. Although Christine had pondered leaving the bistro altogether, she decided that an early wake-up call of just after three-thirty, alongside an urgent and lonely shift in the bistro kitchen, was the way to go. This way, she could avoid Zach, prepare the pastries and desserts, and make it home for breakfast with her father.

  She laid out the perfectly-buttered croissants in the window by the walk-up, then turned back to align the pies and cakes in the display case inside. Just as she prepared to remove her apron, there was a knock at the walk-up window. She blinked to see a line nearly twenty-feet long, all the way toward the docks.

  Sunrise Cove Inn Bistro had never had that kind of walk-up traffic before.

  Beyond that, it was still only eight in the morning, which meant most of the morning staff wouldn’t clock in until eight-thirty at the earliest. Panicked, Christine shot up to the window, prepared to tell them that it wasn’t yet time. The moment she did, however, the forty-something woman tourist outside the window flashed her phone around and said, “You won’t believe how Cheryl Donahue raved about you on Instagram. I just have to try one of your croissants before I leave the island.”

  This stopped Christine in her tracks. She hadn’t investigated Cheryl’s social media channels yet, especially after all the chaos of the previous day, but it was clear, they’d made an impression. In the next fifteen minutes, she sold all the croissants and baked breads and other pastries in the walk-up glass case.

  Through the window, she spotted Zach as he parked his truck in the lot next to the Inn. He opened the door and balked at the large line. Immediately after, his eyes connected with Christine’s. She gave him a huge shrug and he laughed, loud enough for her to hear it in the bistro. Although she didn’t want to spend any time with him, seeing him like this made her heart perform little flips of panic.

  “That’s all, folks!” Christine said to the rest of the line. “I’ll be better prepared tomorrow if you promise to come back. I’m so sorry.”

  The rest of the line groaned and turned back. Christine was left with a pile of money and a huge grin smeared across her face. When she turned around, she nearly fell directly into Ronnie, who struggled to see out the window.

  “Were all those people here for your baked goods?” he asked.

  “I guess so,” Christine said.

  Christine could hear Zach’s booming voice just outside the kitchen. She didn’t want to hang around, so she gave Ronnie a tip to clean up the walk-up area, then grabbed her purse and headed out.

  Back outside, there was a little skip to her step. The air still felt fresh and vibrant. It hinted at all the possibilities of an early morning, after such a long shift of work.

  When Christine arrived back home, she found Wes, Audrey, and Aunt Kerry out on the back porch eating croissants she had brought home the day before. Each held a mug of coffee.

  “Hey there!” Aunt Kerry said.

  “Hey!” Christine said. “Where’s Lola?”

  “She got a random call last night asking her to do a story about some writer in Boston,” Audrey said. “She didn’t want to pass it up, so she caught the early ferry this morning. She’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Christine sat with everyone for a while. Wes and Aunt Kerry discussed Charlotte, who had lost her husband in a boating accident the year before and now struggled with bouts of depression. Wes’s eyes burned toward Christine’s. She was grateful that now, he understood the weight of her inner emotional struggles. It felt incredible to have such honesty with her father.

  Around noon, Aunt Kerry and Wes decided to head to town for lunch and a card game with some of their friends from high school. This left Audrey and Christine alone at the house together for the first time ever.

  Perhaps on a different day, this would have made Christine panick
ed, especially given what had happened between Audrey and Christine and Lola the day before. But today? She was still high off her kiss with Zach Walters. Her croissants were Vineyard-famous and she refused to fall into the depths of sadness once again.

  “Why don’t we borrow Scott’s boat?” she heard herself ask Audrey.

  Audrey blinked those big eyes up from her phone. At first, Christine thought she would say she was busy or tired, but she surprised her and said, “Yeah, sure. Let me change into my suit.”

  Since Scott and Susan were still off the island, Christine texted real quick to make sure Scott was cool with them using it. Susan texted back immediately that it was fine and to have fun. After all, Scott had left the boat docked at the Sheridan residence for just this purpose.

  Just before Audrey arrived downstairs, Christine made them turkey and cheddar sandwiches on homemade bread, grabbed a spare bag of chips, and, pointedly, left the wine at home. Audrey couldn’t drink at nineteen and pregnant, and she didn’t want to drink in front of her niece anyway. She wanted to spend some much-needed quality time to get to know her better.

  Down in the speed boat, Christine revved the engine, making the boat shake beneath her. Audrey walked down the dock in only a red two-piece swimming suit. It was hard to believe there was any kind of being in that stomach. It looked as though she couldn’t even fit a sandwich in there.

  “You know how to drive this thing?” Audrey said with a laugh as she hopped on.

  “Oh, yeah. Growing up on the Vineyard, you kind of have to know this stuff,” Christine returned. “Dad would have felt he failed us as a father if we didn’t know.”

  They chugged out onto the open Vineyard Sound on the northwestern part of the island, between Martha’s Vineyard and Naushon Island, and eased about a half-mile away from Makonikey. Christine pointed out the various places she remembered, including Cedar Tree Neck Sanctuary. “There’s a great beach over there. North Shore,” she said. “I had a few wild nights there if you can believe it. I know to you it must feel like I’m a million years old, though.”

  Audrey rolled her eyes. “No way. You and Mom and Aunt Susan all seem so young. I’ll be grateful if I look anything like you guys later.”

  Christine laughed. There was a strange pause. Christine’s thoughts raced to the ideas of Audrey’s child. Would she have a daughter? A fourth generation of Sheridan women?

  “Thanks for what you said yesterday to Mom,” Audrey said suddenly. She ripped open a bag of chips and peered into it contemplatively before grabbing one single salty crisp and placing it on her tongue.

  “I don’t know if I said the right thing or not,” Christine said. She gripped the steering wheel and sat at the edge of the driver’s seat with her athletic legs flung out before her, in the splendor of the sun. “But I know it must be so stressful for both of you in really different ways.”

  Audrey nodded. “I mean, I agree with her about almost all of it. That’s the hardest part. I do want a journalism career. I do want to get the top jobs at the New York Times or The Tribune or LA Times. I don’t want to be glanced over because I already have a kid. I was a complete idiot. He wants me to deal with it, I just...”

  “I understand,” Christine murmured, although, how could she?

  Audrey dropped her head further back on the seat rest and stared at the beautiful blue sky. She looked like a painting of youthful longing.

  “Like, do you think when I have this baby, I will look at it every day and blame it for everything that’s wrong with my life?” Audrey asked with a fear in her eyes that made Christine almost flinch.

  “I don’t think it’s possible to feel that way about your baby,” Christine assured her as best she could.

  “I don’t think so, either. I asked Mom last night at the hotel if she thought that way about me. She said no, but that it was different. She didn’t want anything really until after I was born. Apparently, my birth made her want to become something.”

  “Babies can do a lot of things, but I think, generally, they normally do good in this world,” Christine offered. “They’re a bit of hope.”

  “That’s what I think, too.”

  Audrey and Christine unwrapped their sandwiches. Before Audrey took a bite, she said, “I hate that I never knew you guys growing up. I used to ask Mom about it, and she just said, she wasn’t a family person anymore. I guess that’s all changed.”

  “Like the drop of a hat,” Christine said with a laugh.

  “I’m happy it worked out that way. Mom seems different. At least, she did, before all this happened. Ugh. Making that phone call that day to tell her that I had messed everything up? It was one of the worst days of my life.”

  “I’ve had a lot of bad days. Trust me. You’re doing okay for yourself,” Christine said.

  Audrey chuckled and opened her fingers so that she could peer between them. “Tell me.”

  So, Christine told her a few stories of her shadowed past. She told her about the French boyfriend she’d had during her stint in Paris who had cheated on her with an Italian model. She told her about the first apartment she’d had to herself in Brooklyn, where rats had infested the first floor and forced them all out on the street for a full week. “I stayed at a crummy hostel because I hardly knew anyone in the city at the time,” Christine confessed. “Until, of course, I slept with one of my culinary school professors and stayed with him for a few days.”

  “Oh, my gosh, Aunt Christine!” Audrey said. She grinned madly. “I knew you’ve had a wild life, but I didn’t know the details. I think my mom was jealous of that—of you not having kids.”

  This surprised Christine. Immediately, Audrey backtracked and said, “I mean, don’t get me wrong; she loves me. But she wanted to live in New York and Paris and wherever else you lived, just for the stories. And she had to keep things kind of stable because of me.”

  As she spoke, Audrey’s face grew more and more shadowed. She bit down on her lower lip and then stretched her arm down to drip her fingers through the light waves. “I guess I’ve trapped myself, too.”

  Christine furrowed her brow and listened as the waves lapped against the boat, rocking it. Finally, she said, “You know, I lost my chance to have a baby.”

  Immediately, Audrey tore her head toward Christine, her eyes wide in shock. “What? I just thought that you didn’t want any.”

  Christine shook her head, vehemently. “Not true at all. I wanted to be a mother almost more than anything in the world. But there was something wrong with my ovary, and I had to get it taken out about six years ago. Your Aunt Susan came up to New York to help me through it. It was one of the worst moments of my life. After that, a lot of the guys I dated always dated me with an asterisk. They knew I couldn’t have their kids. I wasn’t a real option. I lived in one of the most beautiful metropolitan cities in the world, and still, all the old rules of Martha’s Vineyard applied. I didn’t matter to them.”

  Audrey’s eyes glowed with tears. “You’re saying there’s never a right time for anything, aren’t you?”

  Christine nodded, adding an ironic laugh. “Being a woman is the toughest thing in the world. I swear every woman I know is five times stronger than any man.”

  Suddenly, Audrey stood and rushed toward Christine and hugged her hard, making the boat rip to-and-fro. Christine felt overwhelmed with emotion. Whatever this was, it felt akin to a love from a child to a mother. She had never had anything like that before. There, they hugged beneath the gorgeous eggshell blue sky, surrounded by the chaos of the Vineyard Sound, the same water that had swallowed up her mother and never given her back.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next morning, Christine rose early to perform the same duties she had done the previous day. Luckily, Ronnie arrived at seven-thirty to help her with the last of it and man the back walk-up window. When Christine asked him about it, he shrugged and said Zach had asked if he could come in to help. This could have been taken one of two ways, Christine reasoned. One, Zach
wanted to keep a distance between himself and Christine just as much as she did, or two, Zach just wanted to relieve her after a hard several-hour shift.

  Back at the house, Christine found Lola, Scott, Susan, Wes, and Audrey on the back porch. As she entered, Audrey finished up her story about the previous afternoon with Christine on the Sound. Lola’s eyes turned toward Christine’s. She seemed both surprised and a bit upset, as though Christine wasn’t allowed this spare time alone with her niece. Still, regardless of Lola’s apparent jealousy, Christine wouldn’t have traded that memory for the world.

  “Sounds like you guys had a beautiful day,” Susan said. “Was it strange to be back at the wheel of the boat?”

  “Not really,” Christine said. “I guess I was never really a city girl, after all. How did it go with the police?”

  Susan and Scott exchanged a glance. Again, Christine found it very difficult to decipher, like they had created a language all their own.

  “It was okay,” Susan finally sputtered. “There’s still no sign of exactly where he went, but they’re on the hunt.”

  “He’s kind of an old-fashioned guy, so modern techniques don’t work so well with him,” Scott affirmed.

  “And your story, Lola?” Christine asked.

  “Oh? Just another stuck-up writer with a lot of stories to tell,” Lola said with a laugh. “Of course, he has every reason to be stuck-up. It was some of the better stuff I’ve read in years.”

  “So you don’t have to fake the story,” Audrey said. “Make him seem more important than he is.”

  “Thankfully,” Lola said.

  “I had to do that last year at the paper,” Audrey said. “This man who did sculptures—his entire masterpiece fell apart right before the art show. He tried to make it seem like it had all been on purpose. I forgot exactly what he said in the interview, something about how it was meant to reflect the loose nature of time or something.”