A Season for Fireflies

by Rebecca Maizel

“Guess you don’t want me to look at that?”

  “It’s just a sketch for Midsummer. It’s no big deal.”

  He licks his lips, which I know he does when he’s nervous. Busted. It makes me feel a little better.

  “Have you been doing a lot of the sets?” I ask.

  In the amber light of the night falling over the sky, I can see that he’s got some scruff that lines his jaw and cheek, like a beard he’s not letting grow all the way in. It looks good on him. A lot has changed since we were friends. He swipes some of the blond hair out of his eyes.

  “I’ve been into woodworking more than drawing,” he says. It’s hard to concentrate on what he’s saying, though, because a rush of thoughts enters my head. No wonder I felt a little awkward grabbing onto him today at auditions. I know it suddenly without being able to explain it. Wes was always my best friend, but I think we were something more. It makes sense why he could barely look at me in the hallway with my stomach exposed. Now I can’t help staring at his mouth. A desire to kiss him overwhelms me. “I made the backdrop for Into the Woods,” he says. I snap out of my reverie.

  “We did Into the Woods?! I hate that play!” I cry.

  “I know,” Wes says with a laugh. “We all did. But Taft was really excited about it.” His smile is so familiar, like he’s got a small joke he’s keeping from me, and for a split second it feels like nothing has changed. But as quickly as it came, his smile falls again.

  “Anyway, Taft liked my designs,” he finishes. “So I got to do some stuff for OSTC this summer. They paid me a thousand bucks.”

  “Wow!”

  With my left hand, I grip the armrest and rub my thumb against it nervously. I wish I had been there to see it. Instead, all I can manage to add is, “That’s cool,” and I want to smack myself.

  “How’s your hand?” he asks. The memory of having the spasm by the tables in the outside caf replays in my head. I cringe.

  “You heard about that?”

  “Not in a bad way,” he says quickly, and I appreciate that he’s trying to make me feel better. “Just that it . . .” He seems to choose his words. “That you were in pain.”

  “It can happen when I move too fast,” I explain. “It’s part of recovery, apparently. It should stop soon. It’s not supposed to last, anyway.”

  I notice more about Wes as we turn onto my street and pass under the streetlamps: the frayed jeans and the black duct tape covering the top of one of his boots. He’s turned into such a theater techie.

  “You’re different,” I say.

  He pulls up to the end of my driveway.

  “Should I walk you in?” he asks, ignoring my comment. He coughs awkwardly, and I realize that he is really asking if I need help walking. He stops the car, but I don’t want to get out.

  “I’ll be okay,” I say quietly. “Thanks for the ride.”

  I open the door, but before I’m even out of the car Wes’s door slams, and he’s helping me out. I know he’s only worried I’ll fall down. Once I’m upright, I hesitate with my hand on the doorframe. Ahead, in the woods that surrounds the houses, pulses of light, the fireflies, dance in the shadows by the thousands.

  “Look,” I say, and gesture with my chin. Wes turns. “I think there’s even more of them now.”

  “I thought it was just media hype at first,” he says, and shuts the door for me. It’s unmistakable. Thousands of tiny glowing, yellow dots bob in the twilight. “They’re kind of cool.”

  We walk up the drive in silence. Then Wes says, “I didn’t know what to say, when you called me from the hospital. I’m sorry I didn’t call you back.”

  “I didn’t know what to say either.”

  “It must be really weird.”

  We’re almost near the end of the driveway.

  “It is. Sometimes think I know myself. I think for one split second that I know exactly who I am. Then someone tells me something or shows me a picture from a life that I just don’t remember. I’m not even sure which version of me is the right one.”

  “Do you have to pick?” he asks.

  “I don’t know anymore. My parents talk to me like I’m split in two. Like there’s an old version of me and a new version. Which I guess there kind of is. I just want to feel like me, whoever that is.”

  “How is your mom?” Wes asks. “You know, since rehab.” It’s so weird that he knows about Mom in rehab, but I don’t.

  “I haven’t seen her drinking too much,” I say. “She’s better now that the reporters have shown up and her company is courting her with big paychecks.”

  “That’s good,” Wes says, and we make it to the part of the driveway where the stone tiles curve around the house to the screened-in porch. “Maybe she’s really different.”

  “I think maybe she is.”

  We share a small smile, and the only sound I hear is our footsteps.

  “You seem different too,” Wes finally says. “Even if you’re split in two. Penny, you don’t have to be a certain way just because people tell you that’s who you are. You don’t have to listen to them.”

  “Well.” I fidget. “Maybe you can help me. Figure it out. Remind me.”

  “I’d like that,” he says.

  My left leg aches so I take a second to lean on the hood of Mom’s car. I can sense the heat from the engine. I glance up at the house, but the lights are out. Good, Mom must be upstairs already.

  Wes’s eyes widen at something beyond me on the grass.

  “Oh my god!”

  He runs toward a figure lying on the grass.

  Oh no. Something dark tugs at my memory. My stomach seizes. I want to race after Wes but can’t. I’m messier when I’m trying to move quickly.

  “Wait!” I call. “Wait!”

  Wes stops short in the grass, making the car keys in his pocket jangle loudly.

  I freeze next to him, trying to put together who I am seeing and what it means.

  Mom lies on her side, her black hair framing her face. The cream-colored sweater she wears contrasts sharply against the bright green grass. Ropes pull at my stomach from each side in an invisible tug-of-war. I reach for Wes’s arm and our skin touches, finally. He looks back to me; his eyes soften.

  “Your mom—” he starts to say but doesn’t finish. I don’t want to know what he would have said.

  “This is the first time I’ve seen her like this since I’ve been back,” I say.

  “You’ve seen her like this before?”

  “In tenth grade. Just before Much Ado auditions. It was really bad then.”

  An understanding passes over his features and he nods.

  Wes squats to be closer to Mom. She sleeps in the fetal position. The lawn hose runs next to her, bubbling water onto the base of the hydrangea plants and pooling in the grass.

  I walk to the side of the house, squeeze between some other hydrangeas, and turn off the valve. When I come back, Wes is checking Mom’s pulse. She snorts, and he stands quickly.

  “Well,” he says. “Shit. What do we do now?”

  Wes frowns at the ground, at Mom sleeping, and the shiny pool of water drowning the grass. Fireflies pulse around us, but even though I am in the yard, I stand in the center of a stage, a spotlight on me. My cheeks burn, rooting me to my body and the ground where my mother remains passed out. The way her face is positioned on the grass, the skin of her cheek pulls down, making it seem as though it sags when it doesn’t naturally.

  “She was doing so much better,” I whisper. “I don’t know what . . .” I search for the reason. It’s sick but in a weird way I almost wish she had tripped or fallen or hurt herself. It would be a better reason for lying here than being too drunk to walk ten feet to the house.

  “Where’s your dad?” Wes whispers. He can talk in his normal voice, she’s out, but he speaks softly anyway.

  “He’s in Boston for a dinner meeting.” I look down at my right foot. “I have to get her inside,” I say.

  “You think you’re getting her inside?
Penny, I’ve seen you at school since the strike. You can only carry two books at a time. Your textbook and some journal thing.”

  “Please, Wes, just go. I’m already completely humiliated.”

  Being out here with Wes and the moonlight, and the beautiful fireflies, should have been an important moment. It should have been special. Instead, it’s all about Mom.

  Wes lifts Mom under her arms so her back rests against his chest. He lifts her enough so that her heels don’t scrape against the ground, and carries her the rest of the way down the stone path toward the house. I open the door for them, and help them onto the screened-in porch.

  “Put me dowwwn,” Mom groans. “I’m sleeping.”

  I grab an extra pillow from the porch swing and place it under Mom’s head, as Wes lays her lengthwise on the couch. Thank god she’s wearing black dress pants and not a skirt. I pull her sweater down a little so it doesn’t rise up and show her stomach.

  She snorts again and rolls into a fetal position. Truthfully, since the strike, I’ve forgotten about these nights. My head has been so full with everything else. I had just been so happy that she was better. Maybe I saw it because I wanted it to be true.

  Mom tucks her hands under her cheek and curls her knees in to her belly. Good. If she’s on her side I don’t have to sleep out here and watch her. We learned in health class that drunk people can choke on their own vomit if they sleep on their backs. The one thing I learned in that class that applied to my actual life.

  “I can bring her inside,” he whispers. I am grateful that the moonlight shines onto the floor, hiding my face. I don’t want to make eye contact right now.

  I cross my arms over my chest.

  “No, it’s best if I let her think she chose to be out here.”

  I bring my hands up to cover my face.

  “I am so sorry,” I say, and I’ve never meant anything more. “Sorry for everything. For this, and for ignoring you, and even the things I don’t remember. I was horrible.”

  “You’re not horrible,” he says after a pause that takes too long.

  His features are hard and chiseled, yet the look in his eyes is soft. He has a face of contradictions. I miss him and he’s standing right in front of me.

  A tremble runs through me.

  “You’re shaking,” he says, and the concern in his voice makes me shudder again. I can tell he wants to say something else. He opens his mouth but then closes it quickly.

  “I should go,” he says, and in the silence that follows, we both know that’s not what he wanted to say.

  We walk back to his car at the same pace, even though I’m being slow. The fireflies pop in and out of the darkness in a syncopation of light.

  “Want me to stay to make sure she’s okay?” he asks, and bends down to grab something from the driveway. It’s the bag that I brought with me to auditions. The journal has slipped out, along with my brush and makeup case. He picks them up and hands back the journal last.

  “What are you always scribbling in this thing?”

  He’s already seen the truth of my life, seen my crying at auditions. I don’t want to hide anything from Wes ever again. I flip through the entries and show him what I have so far. I show him the hospital bracelet and Panda’s card. Tonight I’ll add the memory I had earlier, about the constellations in the theater. It will help if I have it written down so I can reference it if and when more of my memories return.

  He leans over to get a better look at the book and I inhale his scent; a sweet but woodsy smell that I can’t quite identify. My whole body hums. I want him to tell me that he misses me as much as I miss him—that he misses our jokes and our friendship. He leans on the back of Mom’s old Lexus, my car, and crosses one ankle over the other. I pick one of Mom’s hydrangeas from a flowering bush when he asks, “Have you been able to piece anything together?”

  “Some.” I gesture to the journal. “I paste in important documents or items like my hospital bracelet. Sometimes I just scribble stuff down. Like today at auditions.” I decide to be daring again. “I remembered something—or, I think I did. And I wrote it down.”

  “What?”

  I inhale slowly. “We were lying on our backs on the stage. The ceiling was a constellation of stars.”

  He looks at me sharply. “You remembered this?”

  “Yeah,” I spin the hydrangea flower nervously between my fingers. “But that couldn’t be a real memory, right? How could there be stars on the ceiling of the theater?”

  Wes gives me a strange look. Then he gets into the Mustang without another word.

  “What did I say?” I call after him.

  The car engine revs and he pulls out of the driveway so fast that dust kicks up around the tires.

  “Wes! Wait!” I cry, but he doesn’t stop.

  I watch the red taillights as they burn through the blackness at the end of the street and pull away.

  FOURTEEN

  LATER THAT NIGHT, I’M HALFWAY THROUGH revising my English paper on Beowulf. I would have been done hours ago but I keep getting distracted, alternating between thinking about Wes and checking in on Mom. The look on Wes’s face keeps running through my head. Finally, around 11:30, Mom moved herself from the porch to her bed, and I could finally stop worrying and concentrate.

  Now, I replay the awful moment when Wes got into his car like it’s a video on loop—you remembered this?—when there’s a knock on my patio door.

  My room has two doors, one that leads to the rest of the house, and one that leads to an outside landing with a staircase going down to the driveway. Only two people ever use that entrance, and one of them couldn’t get away from me fast enough earlier.

  I have to squint, but when I flip on the outside light May stands on the landing, batting fireflies out of her face. This is where she used to always come in the house whenever it was past “appropriate hours.” The door is locked, but she tries the knob. She’s in pajama bottoms and an EG Private T-shirt.

  I unlock the door and she bursts inside, her arms crossed over her chest. “In light of your emotional outburst at auditions, I’ve been doing some thinking. Here are the terms of our relationship.”

  I jump on my friend, holding her close to me, and squeezing tight.

  “Can’t breathe!” she squeals.

  “Sorry!” I say quickly, and pull away. May tucks her long black hair behind her ears. I wonder if she’s here because Wes told her about Mom’s lovely show on the lawn tonight, but then I stop myself. It doesn’t matter why May’s here. I’m just glad she is.

  “The terms are this,” she says. “Complete and total honesty.”

  “I promise,” I say.

  She paces my room, ticking things off on her fingers.

  “No more bullshit. You tell me when something is wrong. Don’t shut me out.”

  I salute.

  “Now close that door, because you’re about to have a lightning bug colony take up residence in your bedroom,” she says, and I rush to close the door behind her. A handful of fireflies are already bobbing around the ceiling.

  May looks about the room. “It looks the same,” she says, “except . . .”

  “What?”

  “It’s gone,” she says, and gestures to the window, empty except for dots of light from the fireflies outside.

  In a flash—I see a ghost of a memory—May and I work together to hang a mobile made from geode slices, right there in the center window.

  “The mobile,” I say. “That’s right. It was my fourteenth birthday. You helped me put it up.” I can’t help but smile. “I looked for it, when I got home from the hospital. I can’t find it, though.” May is not smiling, so I add quickly, “Who knows what pre-lightning Penny did with it.”

  She nods and sits down on the edge of my bed.

  “I’m glad you came,” I say, and sit down on my desk chair. “And don’t worry, my mom hauled herself inside about an hour ago.”

  “From where?” May says, but I can tell she’s
playing dumb.

  “Come on,” I say with a raise of an eyebrow. “I know Wes told you.”

  May frowns. “Okay, maybe.”

  This is my chance.

  “May,” I say quietly. “What happened?”

  “I only know my side of the story,” she says. But she talks, tells me everything—all the things I haven’t been able to remember for myself. The party when I made fun of her—the day I quit the play, and the expression on my face. That she had to find out about her best friend’s mom going to rehab from the Channel Six news.

  She fiddles with the blanket she’s sitting on. “I know you probably threw out my mobile,” she says. “Does that mean you also threw out the planetarium Wes made you?”

  Wait. “What? He made me the planetarium?”

  She tells me Wes spent nearly eighteen hours making a revolving star light show for me. It makes so much sense now why Wes freaked out when I brought it up.

  “Why would he do that?” I breathe.

  “Penny,” May says with a familiar raise of her eyebrow. “Wes loved you. He’d always loved you. You broke his heart.”

  Wes loved me?

  “Come on, he can barely look at you now. He was seeing some girl. Sabrina something? He ended it the other day. We all know why.”

  We talk for a couple of hours. At two in the morning, we’re still sitting in my window seat with steaming hot mugs of tea. May let me go down on my own in case Mom got up.

  “I forgot how much I missed London Fogs,” I say.

  “That’s one thing I thought you’d never forget.”

  The fireflies dot the night sky by the hundreds. They make it seem like the stars are lower tonight, strewn about in the green foliage instead of the sky. “It’s weird though,” May continues. Her eyes seem pensive. “What you’re blocking out.”

  “Blocking out?” I say.

  “Well, it’s just the last year or so—you know? Maybe it’s . . .” She searches for the right word. “Denial?”

  “Maybe,” I say, and take a deep breath. “But I’m getting some of my life back.” I smile a little at my best friend. “So maybe that’s a good start.” We clink mugs.

  “I should go to bed,” May says, and gets up to go.