A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel

by Kristin Fields

  Gia nodded, but even at fourteen, she felt rooted here. The pull of everywhere else wasn’t strong enough.

  Lorraine was out of words. She shifted the straps on her shoulders, the flannel scrunching beneath, and startled at a plane overhead, maybe because they’d never been this close to the airport before, had never buckled a seat belt onboard and gone anywhere else except Florida and back, bouncing in the back seat with mesh bags of fresh oranges at their feet, making Help us, we’re kidnapped signs for the window, breaking pecan logs in thirds and sucking sugar from their teeth as Eddie drank cups of gas station coffee and drove. Falling asleep on each other, a tangle of arms and legs, unaware they’d ever grow up and untangle. Gia threw her arms around Lorraine one last time, wishing they could go back to those car rides or float away on the canal, somewhere Lorraine could forget without going away. She smelled like soap and water. Clean and warm. A fresh start. Then she pulled away and spun through the revolving doors, a flash of green flannel in a ticket line.

  Gia wished a supersonic jet could take Lorraine off so that everyone would know. It was too big an event, too blinding. Let the supersonic jet scream it over the water, rattle the picture frames, wake babies in their bassinets, and set off car alarms so everyone would know something had happened even if they didn’t know what.

  She sat for a while watching planes before dropping change into the pay phone. Her father answered on the first ring, didn’t say hello, and didn’t ask any questions as Gia sobbed into the receiver. Only when the operator asked for more change did he say to stay put. He’d be there soon. Gia sat down outside the phone booth, not caring that she was sitting on the dirty ground as people rushed past.

  Gia did not remember getting in the car, only that it was him and her driving slowly through the neighborhood, looking for people in the shadows, except there was no one left to find. Gia pulled her knees to her chest and buried her face. She couldn’t stand passing Aunt Ida’s house without Ray and Tommy, or her own, where Leo wasn’t, and now Lorraine’s.

  When they were kids, they used to ride the cleaned-up bikes Uncle Frank had brought home from the dump. They’d fit the spokes with plastic covers and put streamers on the handlebars and ride down the street after the mosquito trucks, laughing in the white cloud and rubbing it over their skin so they’d be bug proof. In her memory, they were shadows in that cloud. Arms and legs, silhouettes of bikes, a splash of color from someone’s shirt, Gia trailing behind on her smallest bike and pedaling as fast as she could, the cloud settling bitter on her lips as she called out for the others to wait up, though they never did. Eventually the truck would outrun them, and they’d be left panting in the street. Bikes stopped. Laughing as the cloud dissipated and the light resettled again.

  But now as the car turned onto their street, she was somehow in the lead, no longer trailing behind, only it still felt like she’d been left behind, all of their journeys taking them elsewhere. She was glad that Lorraine was free to cross oceans. Only she wished it had been something more beautiful that had made Lorraine fly away.

  EPILOGUE

  In 1971, President Nixon declared a war on drugs. You’re a little late, she thought. But the academy was buzzing about it. There were rumors of a federal task force, but to Gia, it was only newspaper promises. As long as there was demand, people would take risks, like Ray, five years into his sentence, probably making deals and building an empire on the inside. Maybe not. She didn’t know. Ray felt far removed from her now, but she sometimes wondered if he was glad her father had saved him when the first shots had gone off or if he wished one had gone straight through him, if his opinion shifted depending on the day, each one ticking past in a blur.

  The following Sunday, Gia was sitting next to her mother in church when Father Gentile asked for a moment of silence for the young men in Vietnam, soon to be joined by one of their own, Thomas Edward, a good son to his parents, Frank and Ida. If Tommy had gone to college like Aunt Ida wanted, he could’ve deferred, but he’d gotten a job fixing electronics instead. Funny, Gia thought, that while they could’ve grown up and sought each other out, they just hadn’t. But it was enough knowing Tommy was in the shop tinkering with parts and soldering irons while Gia trained. Aunt Ida’s usual spot in the third pew was empty, and Gia wondered if Tommy was going or if he’d already gone. It bothered her that Father Gentile, who’d put Communion wafers on all their tongues and absolved their early sins, hadn’t mentioned her. Agnes slipped her hand over Gia’s, the pulse in her wrist beating strongly. I approve, it said. That was enough.

  The FOR SALE sign in the front yard, hammered in two days after Eddie had filed his retirement papers and put a down payment on a five-acre farm on Long Island, was less startling now, as were the “new” houses, the filled-in swimming canal. Sometimes when the street flooded, she could almost pretend nothing had ever changed. Lorraine’s old house was a sunny yellow now, the front lawn strewed with bikes and a blue plastic swimming pool full of floating grass. After Lorraine had left, Agnes had packed up Aunt Diane and moved her into Nonna’s old apartment. “You can’t live on your own anymore,” Agnes had told her as she’d shoved things into boxes, but Gia suspected Agnes had needed someone new to take care of. Agnes had wavered a little on the day they’d signed the papers for Aunt Diane’s house, when the couple had pulled up with a little boy and a little girl trading Cracker Jack pieces in the back seat. Now she set aside candy for them on Halloween, looked forward to seeing them in their Easter clothes or Christmas outfits, their first-day-of-school pictures, even as she packed the house, emptied the garage, fretted over how to dig the peony bush out of the ground without breaking the roots because she couldn’t leave it behind. Nonna had planted it. And their new house was almost finished.

  On weekends Eddie and Gia lugged tools and lumber, hammered a frame of two-by-fours, hired an excavator to dig the foundation and a water well. It was the kind of project he might have wanted to do with Leo one day, but aside from pausing on the beams every so often to stare out at the surrounding forest of pitch pines or to listen as a blackbird called, he never showed it. It was a small house, but there would always be room for her, he’d promised, and extra room in case there were grandkids one day. He’d shrugged at the idea as Gia had lined up a saw over a pencil mark. She’d laughed, but the idea of a little one running on this lawn of leaves and pine cones scattered with yellow buttercups, as they built a house under a tree with a lightning-strike scar, was touching. Another generation. Another chance.

  There had been a little while after high school graduation when Gia had been unsure of the future, the whole thing stretching endlessly, too many days to fill. She hadn’t seen Lorraine since that day at the airport, but Lorraine had met someone, a scientist, and together they taught families to use water purifiers, treated illnesses. It was right, Lorraine carrying a small bag of medical supplies from village to village, asking little kids to stick out their tongues outside their homes instead of in a sterile hospital somewhere. It reminded Gia that she couldn’t work in an office forever. It was time to start over. If Lorraine could do it, so could she, so she’d dropped her new boat into the water and started rowing, building strength until she could row for hours.

  She’d thought about becoming a researcher. They were out there every morning as she rowed past in her unnamed boat: studying oysters and mussels and periwinkles, tagging osprey, each studying a piece that connected back to the whole of the bay. But she could never study the marsh like they could. Not when, at heart, she was a protector, and the bay needed her.

  Because the bay would soon be a wildlife refuge protecting the water, its shorelines, islands, dunes, brackish ponds, and woodlands, and all its creatures. It would never be a port, and the airport couldn’t expand. Trash dumping would be illegal. Though she doubted anyone would ever be able to stop the baymen in their rubbers from pulling up eel traps, not when the bay was in their blood like hers. For them, the water went beyond rules and regulations. It was life. No
t a place for the things she’d seen that night on Sister Island. That, she realized one morning on the water before the sun had fully risen over the horizon, was her moment. Even outside of her bay, there were 150 miles of waterways surrounding the city, needing someone who understood water and the secrets it kept.

  “Dad,” she said one fall night after they’d packed away the tools, debating whether to tell him now or wait until they’d driven home, but here was their future. Home was the past. It felt fitting. “I made it into the academy.”

  Her graduation was set for early July, just after his last day. She imagined slipping behind his desk with its piled papers, mugs rimmed with coffee, Sweet’n Lo wrappers, a phone with a tangled cord that rang and rang, and turning the calendar page from his last one, circled in red, to her first.

  Her father was quiet for a long time, staring into the darkening pines, where a squirrel skittered past, rattling the leaves, until it was quiet again and the squirrel was gone.

  “I wish you would’ve been a teacher.” He sighed, rubbing his forehead with his palm. “Because it won’t be easy.”

  But she wasn’t a teacher, and they both knew it.

  “Do you know where you want to be?”

  “Harbor Patrol,” she said.

  “I could make some calls,” he said.

  “No.” Gia shook her head. She couldn’t be a cop’s kid dropped into a good position. They’d never respect her. “I want to earn it.”

  In one of the distant houses, someone had made a fire. Woodsmoke filled the crisp air, reminding them that they’d have to pause building once the cold weather came, but there were enough other things to work toward now. The academy, for one, and dismantling their old lives.

  “It won’t be easy,” he said again.

  And Gia understood. There would be jokes about bench-pressing and what her man thought about his woman being a cop, if there was one, and could she still perform her duties on the rag? But the truth was she could outrun all of them and jump fences faster, the nimblest of the bunch, even if female officers were required to wear skirts and low-heeled pumps, even if they made her carry her gun in a handbag. Every morning she took her boat out on the bay despite the weather, preferring rowing to running. It built a quiet strength in her. She couldn’t deadlift, but so what? Over the next few months, Eddie made sure she could load and unload her piece faster than anyone. And it was in her blood. Her training had started the first time Leo had put her in a headlock. And she knew, deep down, what the others wouldn’t until their moments came: that she was brave, truly brave, in the way most people only hoped to be.

  On graduation day, it didn’t matter that Father Gentile hadn’t mentioned her graduation at Mass. The world was changing, maybe not as fast as she would like, but slowly and surely. All around her was a sea of metal stars, affixed over hearts that would try to be brave and honest and answer when called, to do their best in the worst of the world. Sometimes they’d get it right; other times, they’d fail spectacularly because people were not like dunes or tides, readjusting with the seasons. They were fixed points, Gia believed now, and could only sway so much during their short time on Earth.

  She stared at the flags on the dais, past the tip of her star-pointed hat, the crowd behind her pulsing. Her parents were in there somewhere. There was applause now. People standing. Cameras flashing as the captain congratulated the rookies. Hats flying. Confetti falling, raining down on her, just like when she would throw a handful of velvet flowers over Lorraine in two weeks at her wedding, all the way in India. It would be beautiful, Lorraine in a pale-gold dress, henna spiraling her hands, a sea of flower petals, all to wish her into a new and beautiful life, far from the coffee-and-cake Sundays their parents had imagined for them. But today, she stared through everyone in the audience as she had through marsh grass that night on her island, staring out at a world she hadn’t understood then, still didn’t, but she was trying.

  And then she thought of her parents anchoring their small boat beside Uncle Frank’s, the kids swimming between, splashing for sandbars, and filling buckets with clams and Leo cannonballing and swimming beneath the boat. And the bridge he’d walked on years later, their two shadows in the blinding sun, only now it was she who was tightrope walking the ledge, bridging the world they’d come from with the way it was heading, carrying memories of Ray and Tommy, Lorraine and Leo, and the hopes of her grandparents when they’d sailed across the Atlantic and stepped foot on new soil, and it filled her with pride so strong she could feel her heart beating furiously beneath her own metal star, against the two broken bullets in her breast pocket to remind her of the person she wanted to be on the job and off.

  I will make you proud, she promised them all, pressing her toe against the bottom of her shoe, imagining she could press all the way into the earth to call out her need and that the world would answer.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A Frenzy of Sparks is about a family, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the inspiration and support of my own . . .

  Dad, first and foremost, I will always be incredibly grateful for the time we spent together while I was writing this book. It’s a special thing to imagine the adult you’ve known your entire life as a little kid.

  Mom, Michael, Jenna, and Emma, I will always appreciate how honest you are with me. You’ve been my earliest editors, teasing and supporting and sussing out the essence of what I was going for both on the page and off. Dad, this goes for you too.

  Robyn, I’ve lost count of the reads but will never forget the sanity and wisdom you poured into this book. I will always be grateful we met by chance as kids at Hofstra—and we were kids—and of the writing journey we’ve been on ever since. Thank you for G-chatting at all hours to toss ideas back and forth.

  Abby, remember when this was a proposal and I sent you the same outline . . . a hundred times? Well, it worked. Thank you, my friend.

  To Alicia Clancy and the Lake Union Team: You’re magic. Thank you, endlessly, for believing in me as a writer and trusting me to bring another story into this world, even when it was only an idea.

  Rachel. The enthusiasm in your voice when you talk about my writing gets me every time. Thank you . . .

  To the fantastic readers and fabulous Bookstagram community who welcomed A Lily in the Light with so much love it made me want to write a hundred more—thank you!

  Rob, I saved you for last because in real life, you’re always first: first to tell me I can do something I’m doubting, first to congratulate me on the wins, first to joke about the setbacks until I have enough kick to keep going again, first to order a pizza when all else fails. Thank you for always believing.

  Finally, A Frenzy of Sparks was inspired by my uncle, who overdosed long before I was born. I know very little about him, but there was always a pervasive, unexplained sadness in his absence, and I will always wonder about the life he could have had. For those of you who have lived similar stories to Gia and her family, may you also find moments of peace.

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  The 1960s were a turning point for women’s rights. How is Gia impacted by these changes, both in how she views the world and in how she can participate in it? How does Gia deviate from the roles expected of her?

  How has understanding of drugs and addiction changed since the 1960s? How would Gia’s family have coped differently with Leo’s addiction if it had happened now instead of in 1965?

  The theme of opportunity repeats throughout the story. What are some ways the characters had opportunities they didn’t recognize at the time?

  Gia’s relationship to the boat and the bay changes throughout the story. What do the boat and the bay symbolize for Gia? How do they reflect other themes within the story?

  There are several potential turning points for Gia, Leo, Lorraine, and Ray. Which are most impactful for each character? Do you agree or disagree with their choices?

  Parenting in the 1960s was very different than today. As children of working
parents, Gia and Leo had a lot of freedom. How do you feel their parents contributed to the development of both characters and the choices they made?

  How does the setting of the marsh alongside one of the biggest cities in the world shape the story? How does Gia’s changing neighborhood shape the story and these characters?

  How do Gia’s observations of nature and her reading of Silent Spring influence her understanding of the world?

  Ray’s decisions led to many serious consequences for each of the characters, whether they were active participants in the choices he made or not. Who, in your opinion, has suffered the most for those decisions? How much do you blame Ray for his actions?

  In what ways does the title, A Frenzy of Sparks, reflect the story as a whole?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kristin Fields grew up in Queens, which she likes to think of as a small town next to a big city. Fields studied writing at Hofstra University, where she received the Eugene Schneider Fiction Award. After college, Fields found herself working on a historic farm, teaching high school English, and designing museum education programs. She is currently leading an initiative to bring gardens to public schools in New York City, where she lives with her husband.