Chasing Fireflies

by Charles Martin

  For the first time in my life, I’d heard the word son. Aimed at me.

  “But . . .”

  He held up a finger. “Before the trial, Jack produced Ellsworth’s last will and testament, which I knew was fake.”

  “How?”

  He reached into the notebook. “’Cause I had the original.” He pulled out a document that was several sheets long. “The reason Dad had Perry Kenner at the house that evening was because of this.” He handed it to me. “Dad didn’t trust Jack. He loved him, but he said he was ‘akin to meanness and a close cousin to downright nastiness.’ So he wrote up this, which splits everything down the middle. He’d told me about it the day before. Unlike the one Jack produced, it gave me—the younger brother—managerial control of all Zuta Properties.” He shook his head. “He knew Jack would never go for that. But neither Dad nor I thought he’d kill over it. My guess is that Jack stumbled upon Dad and Perry, they told him the truth, and he shot them both, then Suzanne, leaving the gun in Perry’s hand. He must’ve stolen the bonds somewhere shortly after we exited the vault, coming up through the tunnel beneath.”

  “Well . . . what about . . .”

  “One thing at a time. I got out of prison, came home, and started secretly looking for you. I knew Jack wasn’t saying something, so I swam back up the drain, into the basement, and crawled up under his desk. I did that for months. Just listening. Sure enough, he slipped. Made a phone call and started talking about ‘moving him someplace out west where he’d disappear.’ He left his office, I crawled up and inside, pressed redial, and talked to the voice on the other end of the line. It was my second break.”

  Mandy broke in, “And the first?”

  He looked at Lorna. “The pardon. Lorna used to work in house-keeping at the governor’s mansion. Worked the night shift. Responsible for the guesthouse. Seemed the governor was having more guests than his wife knew about. He started coming on to Lorna, she refused him, he started talking about firing her, so she took some pictures for safekeeping, filed them away in a safety deposit box . . . and resigned to go to work with the department of corrections. Guess they had better benefits. She didn’t tell me about the pictures until I’d been in prison a couple of years.” He looked at her. “Still not quite sure why she pulled them out of hiding. She mailed copies off with a real sweet note and told him that William McFarland deserved a pardon. And that if he didn’t get one, the next set of copies was going to his wife and the media.”

  I looked at Lorna, who smiled and shrugged.

  Unc continued, “Next thing I knew, this big guard who was always picking on me unlocked my door and walked me outside into the clean air.” He laughed. “We still got those negatives, too.”

  Mandy just shook her head. “Kind of a lucky break.”

  “I was due one.” He looked back at me. “Once you got old enough, and I knew that Jack couldn’t try anything even if he found out about you, I tried to tell you . . . a thousand times. A man ought to know his own story. I owed you that. But you grew up with people spitting on me and screaming at me from across the street and I . . . I just figured that . . . well, maybe you were better off not being related. At least on the surface. Then I got scared that if I told you, you’d get hacked, take off, and never look back.”

  Mandy sat up. “I’m not sure any of this will stand up in court.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not going back to court.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

  “Don’t have anything to prove.”

  She waved her hands across the notebook. “What about . . .”

  He shook his head, looking from Lorna, to me, and finally to Sketch. He sat the kid in his lap and said, “I got everything I need.”

  “But we can’t let him get away with . . .”

  “Mandy, darling . . .”

  Mandy still had her attorney’s face on. “You know, Jack’s not going to just let you waltz into his office, take a few swings at him, and forget about it.”

  “He will when I show him this.” He looked at Lorna, held out his hand, and she placed an envelope in it. He handed it to me. “Tommye wanted me to give this to you.”

  I slid my finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. I unfolded the single sheet of paper.

  Unc laughed. “I’d like to see his face the next time you show up at a shareholder’s meeting. He’s gonna crap a brick.” He looked at Sketch and put his hands over the kid’s ears. “Oops, sorry. You weren’t supposed to hear that.”

  Sketch smiled as if he’d snuck in on one of the better-kept secrets of life.

  I read the letter out loud: “The Last Will and Testament of Tommye McFarland. I, Tommye Lynn McFarland, being of sound mind but infected and dying body, do hereby leave everything I own, or possess, in any way, shape, or form, to Chase Walker, formerly . . . and hereafter . . . known as William ‘Liam’ Walker McFarland Jr.”

  On the bottom, the letter had been notarized and signed by three witnesses—a notary I did not know, Lorna, and Unc. Across the bottom she’d written in cursive, Chase/Liam, visit Dad’s new vault, safety deposit box #1979 (fitting, don’t you think?). Try the keys around your neck. You’ll like the paper trail. You owe me. But you can pay me when you get here. I love you—Tommye.

  I stared and reread the letter. “She knew? I mean, about you and me?”

  “Yeah, she figured it out a long time ago. Said you had my eyes.”

  “Why didn’t she ever say anything?”

  “I asked her not to.”

  I thought back over our lives together. “That explains a lot.”

  Unc looked at Tommye’s will. “I imagine he’ll contest this, but . . . he knows as well as I do that it’s akin to a royal flush.”

  I interrupted him. “I thought you said you didn’t like to play cards.”

  “I don’t. But I never said I didn’t know how.” He shook his head. “Funny thing, too. Jack’s the one who taught me.”

  I stared again at the birth certificate, doing the math in my head. “You mean I’m already thirty?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I just lost two years of my life.”

  He looked at me, his eyes wondering. “You mad at me?”

  “You mean for making me live a lifetime, wondering, not knowing . . . and you keeping it a secret the entire time?” I looked out across the swamp, Tommye’s grave, and the black water flowing some hundred yards away, floating out to the sea. I shook my head. “I’ve spent most my whole life looking down a dark driveway. Hoping to see headlights. My whole life I’ve envisioned my dad driving up, hopping out of his truck, and taking me home—a shiny new bike in the back. And every time my dreams lasted long enough to let me see his eyes, he had your face.”

  Unc—my dad—dropped his head to his chest, set the kid on the ground, and wept, his tears dripping into the black soil below.

  We stood up and started walking out of the Sanctuary, Ellsworth’s creation rising up all around us. Sketch walked alongside the man who’d always been my dad, holding his hand. All at once, he stopped and tugged on the hand, and Dad knelt down. Sketch’s eyes narrowed, and a wrinkle appeared just above his nose. His lips grew tight, and then he opened his mouth, his neck growing red and his shoulders rising.

  The vein in his neck swelled, and I could see his pulse quickening. He looked at Lorna, Mandy, me, and then the big, callused hand next to him. He gently placed his inside. Finally, a whisper cracked. “A-r-e—” He took a deep breath and spoke slowly, taking his time, making possibly the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. “A-r-e w-e a f-a-m-i-l-y n-o-w?”

  Dad scooped his little body up in his arms and pressed him to his chest. He wrapped his arms around the kid and laughed like a man who had returned from the battlefield to find his family sitting on the front porch, a yellow ribbon wrapped around every tree for a mile. Finally he wrestled the word out of his mouth. “Yes.” Then he threw Sketch over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and tickled his ribs. “
Yes, we are.” He laughed a deep belly laugh. “And you can take that to the bank.”

  Mandy stopped him and looked at Sketch. “You can talk?”

  He shrugged.

  She put her hands on her hips. “Why didn’t you?”

  “D-i-d-n-t w-a-n-t t-o.”

  I put Sketch on my shoulders and waded back through the swamp. He sat atop me, pulled on my ears, and snatched at the fire-flies buzzing around his head. When the water reached my chest, it hit me—after a lifetime of wondering, I finally knew the story of me.

  Love does that. It names the nameless and gives voice to the voiceless.

  Chapter 42

  I was in my office polishing my article when Red walked in and said, “You ’bout finished?”

  I clicked SAVE, pressed PRINT, and handed it to him.

  He leaned against the window that faced the jail and began reading. When he finished, he laid it on the desk and said, “Jack know about this?”

  “Not yet.”

  He laughed. “Might catch him off guard.”

  “I hope it’s not the last time.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “How you coming on that other article?”

  “Which one is that?”

  “The other one.”

  “Still missing a few pieces.”

  “Got any leads?”

  I shrugged. “I think I know what happened, I just can’t prove it.”

  He walked to the door. “Keep digging.”

  I put my computer to sleep and grabbed my keys.

  “Where you going?”

  “Taking my little brother fishing.” I shrugged. “Well . . . sort of.”

  “What’s biting?”

  “Vicky, I hope.”

  Because of the restraining order, Mandy had asked the court to allow her to accompany me to the bank. She and my shadow met me downstairs. He was wearing flip-flops, cutoffs, and one of Tommye’s Georgia Bulldogs T-shirts.

  I squatted down and said, “Nice shirt.”

  He smiled and jumped up on my back. While I piggybacked the kid, Mandy escorted us to the bank, where an expressionless manager met us, assisted by one of the police who’d arrested me. Without a “Hello” or a “Would you like a cup of coffee,” he led us through the lobby and into a private sitting room adjacent to the bank’s high-tech vault.

  I showed him the number, he retrieved the box, we turned our keys, and he walked out, closing the door behind him. I lifted the lid, pulled out a stack of papers, and laid them on the desk. They were old and yellowed, but they smelled of Tommye’s perfume, which told me she’d been here. Most of the sheets were deposit receipts from 1979 and 1980. One set came from a wholesale brokerage house in New Orleans, and others from an offshore bank in the Bahamas. The dollar amounts were staggering. I picked up the first, reading and rereading it several times. About the third time, the numbers added up and the truth sank in.

  “Holy sh—” I looked at Sketch. “I mean, smokes!”

  Mandy leaned in and we stared, shoulder to shoulder.

  Tommye had arranged the receipts according to date, so I spread them across the desk and tried to make sense of the bigger picture. It didn’t take either one of us very long.

  Mandy’s eyes grew wide, and her jaw dropped. “And to think this has been sitting under his nose the entire time. This could ruin him. How’d she get it?”

  If there ever was such a thing as a paper trail, we were looking at it.

  “No telling. Tommye could get into anywhere.” I looked at the puzzle pieces in front of me and, in my mind, began writing the story I’d been wanting to write for most of my life.

  At the back of the stack I found two pictures. The first was a picture of Tommye taken in high school. She stood between Unc and me, her arms around our shoulders. It was the Tommye I wanted to remember. She must’ve known this.

  The second picture was one that Lorna had taken on the front porch just after Sketch ate his birthday cake. Dad and I stood on either side, while Sketch sat in Tommye’s arms wearing an icing mustache. Her hair was thin, eyes dark and sunk deep into their sockets, and pain had wrinkled her forehead. I studied the picture and noticed something I’d not seen that night. Printed in small black letters across the bottom of her T-shirt were the words AMERICAN PIE. A yellow sticky note was attached to the back of the picture. On it she’d written, The three men I admire most . . . they caught the last train for the coast. . . .

  I could hear her voice, see her sly smile and the look behind her eyes. I held the picture while the edges grew cloudy and my insides began to ache.

  Mandy put her hand on mine. Quiet comfort that felt no need to speak.

  Sketch looked at the picture and then at me. He’d been practicing, but we were still a long way off. His face grew red as his mouth tried to remember how to form the words. The whisper was broken and raspy. “Y-o-u m-i-s-s h-e-r?”

  “Yeah . . . I do.”

  He held the picture, tried to speak, but then just smiled and tapped himself on the chest.

  I make a living with words, but sometimes words can’t say what needs saying. Sketch taught me that. I slid the picture into my shirt pocket and then shoved all the papers back in the box, locking it and hanging the keys around my neck. “Might as well let him keep it safe for us. Leastways ’til we can get the FBI down here.”

  Mandy nodded, pushed the box away, and sat back. “Ironic, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah . . . but sometimes the thing you need the most is right there under your nose.”

  We walked out of the vault, Sketch’s hand in mine, the sound of our flip-flops echoing off the shiny steel walls. We stood on the side-walk, where a September breeze met us after it had stirred on some foreign continent, swept across the sea, and filtered through the marsh, carrying with it the smell of home and moments worth remembering.

  JOHN DOE #117 ADOPTED

  John Doe #117 was given a permanent home this week, as he was adopted by William and Lorna McFarland of Brunswick. The State of Georgia, along with the help of an independent investigator, determined that John Doe #117 was a foundling—abandoned since birth. Parental rights were terminated five years ago in Atlanta and, in an effort to place the child in a permanent home, the child was named Stuart Smoak.

  Two years ago he was adopted by Sonya Beckers, a Certified Nursing Assistant at Cedar Lakes Assisted Living Facility. Shortly thereafter, Sonya and Stuart disappeared. The two reappeared three months ago when Ms. Beckers dropped Stuart off at a railroad crossing south of Thalmann on Highway 99 just before her car was struck by a southbound freight train. Authorities did not speculate if the death was a suicide, as no note was found. Stuart was placed in Brunswick Boys’ Home, then transferred to the McFarlands’ home until a permanent living situation could be arranged.

  Last week Mr. and Mrs. McFarland filed a petition with the courts to permanently adopt the child. Yesterday, in a private ceremony before the judge, the couple officially adopted John Doe #117. At the child’s request, he changed his name to Tommye Chase McFarland. When asked what he wanted to be called, he scratched his head and said, “T.C.”

  When asked why he would adopt at the age of fifty-five, William McFarland said, “Every boy is born with a hole in his belly. If his dad don’t fill it, it festers and becomes an aching black hole—one that he’ll spend his waking hours trying to fill. Mostly with things that do him more harm than good.

  “Lord knows I’m not as young as I once was, and I’ve made my fair share of mistakes, but . . . well, I ain’t that old, and if I got to put a square peg in a round hole, well . . . That boy might not have been born of my loins, but he’s been born of my heart. And I reckon that’s good enough.”

  Mr. and Mrs. McFarland first became foster parents some twenty years ago when they accepted the placement of then seven-year-old Chase Walker.

  When asked why he chose to adopt Stuart, but hadn’t adopted Chase more than twenty years ago, Mr. McFarland smiled, shook his head, and asked, “Why w
ould I adopt my own son?”

  Afterword

  Since I met him at the hospital, my new little brother had known six names: “the kid,” Snoot, Sketch, Buddy, Stuart, and finally, T.C. The first five seemed like impostors, or standins until the real thing could be located. But when we finally started calling him T.C., well, the name was like an old shirt. It draped across his shoulders, hung loose around his neck, and the sleeves weren’t too long. Besides, he seemed to like it. The more difficult transition occurred when I tried to insert “Dad” where “Unc” had once been. Problem was, when I tried to do so, I found they both meant the same thing.

  T.C. and I watched from the porch steps as William “Liam” McFarland stepped out of Sally and walked beneath the pecan trees to the mailbox. His boots were muddy, shirt stained with salt and manure, and his hat was tipped back, shading the falling sun off his neck. He reached the end of the drive, flipped open the door, pulled out the mail, and pitched the junk into the trash can. He flipped through the bills, slid them into his shirt pocket, and meandered back toward us.

  He climbed the steps, patted T.C. on the head, knocked my Braves cap on the floor, and sat between us, letting out a deep breath. “Phew, my dogs is tired.” He tilted his hat back, leaned on his elbows, and stared out across the pasture. After a few minutes, he reached into his shirt pocket and handed me a small slip of paper.

  It was a picture—yellowed and wrinkled from time. It looked like it was taken somewhere in the seventies. A small boy sat on a man’s shoulders. The boy was smiling, pulling on the man’s right ear. The man had sideburns, one leg in a cast, and was leaning on a single wooden crutch. The other hand supported the boy’s foot, but also kept him from falling backward.

  I held up the picture and studied it. The boy wore a pair of cut-off jeans, cowboy boots, no shirt, and a summer tan. The man was a mixture of faded denim, snap cuffs, and a smile that spoke of contentedness.

  In the distant background, I saw a brick building with a dark shingled roof and clock tower. It stood at the end of a long drive lined with trees. I extended the picture at arm’s length and compared it to the driveway that spread out before me.