Firefly Beach

by Meira Pentermann

  “You have truly found your calling,” Beth announced.

  No response.

  “Although you also sketch a mighty fine Rip Van Winkle,” she said, giggling awkwardly. She fumbled with the ring, sliding it back on her finger.

  Kenny punched some numbers into a calculator.

  “I thought it was pretty funny. I got a good laugh out of it.” Her voice took on an unnatural, clumsy tone. “Yup, I was a little worried you’d run off with my mother’s ring…Then I’d have to go and hunt you down,” Beth stammered nervously. “And that would be a disaster, because I’m a slow climber,” she explained. “Yup. Would probably take me twenty years just to find you, and then you might be—”

  “That will be forty-six even,” Kenny said, interrupting her.

  “Oh, ah, yes.” Beth paid him cash and he nodded silently, handing her the box and silk wrapping. Beth fumbled with her purse. “Thank you so much…ah…yes, you do beautiful work…Okay. Goodbye then.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Kenny said quietly, and he returned to the file cabinet.

  “What’s with all the ma’am stuff?” Beth grumbled after she left the store. “Can’t a woman get any respect around here?” She snickered at the irony of her own joke and glanced back toward the jewelry shop. Through the window, she saw her painting glowing proudly on the wall.

  At least he’s got taste, Beth thought. Even if he is a little creepy.

  * * * *

  The firefly did not return for several days. Beth set aside the guilt and enjoyed her newfound enthusiasm. Her creative energy flowed continuously. She finished the painting of the lighthouse, finally sketched the bed and breakfast at dawn, and spent many hours on the beach renewing her spirit. She spent some time weeding and planting, and she repaired the dilapidated rock wall that bordered the garden. She began planning an inventory for her upcoming website, and she was no longer overwhelmed by the thought of the effort required to make it all happen.

  On Thursday morning, three days before her fortieth birthday, Mary called. Beth ran down the stairs and looked frantically for her cell phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Beth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, hello, dear. This is Mary. I’m just checking in on you.”

  “Oh, I’m doing fine, thank you.”

  “Are you lonely out there at the cottage? Would you like some company?”

  Beth hesitated for a moment. She really did not want to be disturbed. Her creative energy was abundant. It seemed a shame to stifle it with a social meeting. On the other hand, Mary had been kind to her in a time of need, and she could be a potential business reference. The Cove had dozens of visitors every year. If Beth did not fracture the delicate ties beginning to grow between herself and Mary, she could expect to get many referrals.

  “Ah…some company would be…great,” Beth said finally.

  “Tell you what. I’ll drop by tomorrow with lunch. I’m making a ridiculously huge pot of chicken soup today. I don’t know what gets into me. I guess I’m accustomed to feeding a horde of Navy boys, even after all these years.”

  “If I’m hosting, you really shouldn’t be providing the lun—” Beth began.

  “Nonsense,” Mary interrupted. “I just invited myself over. Don’t be silly. What am I going to do with all of this soup? Even if the whole town were sick, I’d never be able to get rid of it.”

  Beth grinned, picturing Mary standing in the kitchen with a stained apron, her forehead sweating, surrounded by scraps of chicken and celery. “All right,” she said, surrendering. “I would enjoy that very much.”

  Beth was pleased with the arrangement. She would have the rest of the day to be in her own personal space, and she could mentally prepare for gossip and soup when morning came. In addition, Mary’s pending visit inspired Beth to work on the painting of The Cove. And so she spent the afternoon in the studio fine-tuning her strokes. Every once and a while, she peered out the window toward the private beach. She was not going to share her secret. It was too precious to disclose, too indulgent to give up. No, it was her beach, she decided. After all, how would she explain how she found it?

  She pictured the expression that would appear on Mary’s face if she told her about the firefly – perhaps a look of bewilderment combined with the excitement of acquiring the best nugget of gossip ever divulged. Beth laughed at the thought.

  “She’s my little muse,” Beth announced to herself. All of a sudden, it had a gender and a title. “She has not visited since I spent the first day at the beach, so she must be content to know I finally found it.” Beth did not want to acknowledge the fact that she had demanded the light creature leave and never come back. She was too pleased with her achievements to sort through the unpleasant details of their last encounter. What’s more, she was relieved that she no longer considered herself crazy.

  At first, the supernatural experience gravely concerned Beth, but as time progressed she convinced herself that it was a normal occurrence. A muse was a perfectly acceptable explanation in her mind. Why not? Everybody has one, she told herself as if it were just a matter of fact.

  She returned to the studio. “My muse, my beach,” she mumbled as she ascended the stairs.

  Chapter 8

  The Fissure

  That night, as Beth dressed for bed, she noticed the firefly hovering near the edge of the woodland, its radiance subdued by the twilight. No longer dancing in circles, it seemed to quiver, reluctant to approach.

  “Oh, silly little thing,” Beth murmured, shaking her head. “I’m not mad anymore,” she called out the window.

  The creature did not move. It floated five feet above the ground, waiting patiently, almost hopefully.

  “I suppose I must say thank you,” Beth mumbled unenthusiastically, unable to admit to herself that she still found the creature somewhat troubling – muse or no muse. She put on her old jeans and a light windbreaker, grabbed a flashlight, and wandered slowly toward the forest.

  As Beth came within five feet of the firefly’s position, it took off with great speed into the forest in the direction of the private beach, zigzagging through the trees.

  “Oh, I’m too tired to play games tonight.” Beth sighed.

  But she quickened her pace and followed the creature nonetheless. When the firefly reached the clearing, it dropped swiftly over the edge. Beth clipped the flashlight to her belt and followed, hoping that by now her feet knew the way. As she descended, the beam of the flashlight bounced, forming strange shadows amongst the rocks.

  When she reached the ground, she turned around and found the creature hovering at her eye level, two feet away. In an instant it shot upward, about halfway up the cliff, and disappeared into a small fissure, roughly a foot and a half long and eight inches high.

  “Now what?” Beth asked.

  The firefly darted out and then back into the crevice.

  Beth sighed. “I can’t get up there, you know,” she explained with a slight irritation in her voice. Then she took a deep breath and calmed herself. “Listen. This is an amazing beach. I am so thankful that you shared it with me, truly I am. In the space of a few days I’ve made tremendous progress in my work, thanks to this beach. Thanks to you…”

  The firefly popped out briefly, made a small circle, and then returned to its hiding place.

  “More secrets? A hidden treasure perhaps?” She beamed. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to take a look if I can manage it.” She propped the flashlight up in the sand, steadied it with a rock, and examined the face of the cliff leading to the miniature cave. Adjacent to the fissure there was a large, relatively flat stretch of rock against which she might lean while reaching into the hole. Beth cautiously climbed the cliff, carefully testing each foothold before continuing.

  Once she reached the fissure, she leaned back against the flat area. It felt cold on her back. She steadied herself and apprehensively put her hand in the opening. She touched something and pulled her hand back in alarm.
>
  “My God, there really is something here,” she exclaimed.

  She reached in again and pulled out an object approximately twelve inches long, ten inches wide, and five inches high. It appeared to be wrapped in several layers of plastic. Whatever hid inside the plastic was hard and shaped like a rectangular box, and it weighed about twenty pounds. It was not awkward to hold, but it would be impossible for Beth to bring it down while she negotiated the cliff. She sat for a moment, feeling the package and trying to discern its contents, while carefully balancing on the flat section of rock beside the fissure.

  The light creature swirled happily around the beach, darting now and again over the water. The moon had not yet risen, so the firefly’s reflection on the water was especially magical.

  “A treasure indeed. You are full of surprises, Firefly,” Beth announced.

  She carefully returned the box to its hiding place and scrambled down the cliff as quickly as humanly possible with her weak climbing skills. Then she crawled up the rocks leading to the exit and ran to the cottage. Less than forty-five minutes later, Beth returned wearing the backpack, and she repeated the tedious climbing in reverse. Balancing herself on the flat section next to the fissure, she carefully placed the treasure in her backpack and made her way back to the cottage.

  Beth sat on the floor in her living room and placed the package on the coffee table. She stared at it for a long time, almost afraid to touch it. In her peripheral vision, she could see the firefly hovering just outside the bay window.

  “Don’t come in, please. I’m spooked out enough as it is…but thank you…I think,” she whispered.

  Beth reached for the salt covered package and set it in her lap. Carefully she unwrapped the plastic, which turned out to be several large, dark green garbage bags wrapped and layered. The bags seemed fairly crisp and worn, but Beth could not discern whether that was due to age or the harsh sea air. Under the layers of garbage bags, she found a sturdy, dull silver box with a lid that lay flat, not overlapping along the sides. It looked like a very simple cashbox. A small latch flipped closed over a loop and a faded gold padlock secured the box. Beth shook out the garbage bags, but she did not find a key.

  She turned the box around several times and attempted to twist the padlock with her hands. Eventually, she grabbed a pair of pliers and a screwdriver from her kitchen junk drawer. She tried prying off the lid with the screwdriver and twisting off the latch with the pliers. After forty-five minutes of struggling, she set the box down in defeat. The latch was bent and the box was scratched up, but the small lock stood firm and the lid remained flat. Beth went to the garage and returned with a pair of hedge clippers. With her otherwise fruitless efforts, she had made a large enough gap to fit the nose of the sheers between the box and the latch. She snipped the sheers impatiently, eventually cutting the latch on one side. After about twenty minutes of straining and cursing, she was able to twist the latch around the ring with her pliers. Even though she eventually lifted the lid, the little gold lock stayed intact hanging on its loop.

  Inside she found an opaque plastic Tupperware container. She sighed.

  “What’s next? A set of nested matryoshka dolls?”

  She cautiously pulled up one corner of the Tupperware. It contained a faded, cloth-covered book decorated with sunflowers. Beth turned it on its side. The edges of the pages were gold and slightly crinkled from dampness. She flipped through the pages at a glance and noticed curvy handwriting in blue ink. She opened the front cover of the book. On the first page, in the same handwriting with swirls and loops, it read: “Katherine’s Diary.”

  Beth closed the cover gently and let out a long, slow breath.

  “A diary. All this effort over a diary.”

  Beth stared at the cover for a long time. She glanced out the window. The firefly was gone, but a gibbous moon rose on the horizon.

  “Would I want someone to read my diary?” she asked herself as she turned the diary around in her hands. She opened the front cover again. “I would guess by the handwriting that this is probably the diary of a young girl…maybe one of Mr. Thompson’s previous tenants. I should return it to her. That is the right thing to do.”

  Beth sighed, rose to her feet, and walked over to her mother’s photo, clutching the diary against her chest.

  “I miss you, Mom.”

  She gazed at the photo for several minutes, wondering what her mother would do in this situation. She speculated that her mother would come to the same conclusion. Respect the girl’s privacy. Return the diary. So, she brought it upstairs to her bedroom. Then she put it in the bottom drawer of her dresser where she kept letters and birthday cards, most of them sent by her mother, few of them answered or even acknowledged.

  * * * *

  Sleep came quickly, although plagued with disturbing dreams. The last image she saw before she awoke at 6:17 the following morning was a bright yellow, rubber duck tumbling down a hill.

  She sat up and rubbed her head. Waking up with a headache was not an ideal way to start the day but she gently eased herself to the side of the bed. Then an unexpected memory flashed through her mind.

  Three days following her father’s fatal car accident, Beth threw away her favorite bath toys – a large rubber duck, several smaller ducks, an old shampoo bottle, and a blue sponge shaped like a whale. She declared that ten-year-olds did not play with bath toys. In truth, she had warm memories of her father sitting at the edge of her bath when she was four and five, playing with the rubber ducks. He would push them under the water and let them pop up again. He made silly voices for the daddy duck and all the little ducklings. Sometime before she turned six, he stopped sitting with her when she bathed, but she still enjoyed playing with her ducks, remembering the fun they had together, and recreating their adventures.

  After her father’s death, she suddenly despised the toys. Subsequently she marched into the garage and threw them away. They lay next to the coffee grounds and orange peels, looking up at her sadly. She averted her eyes and placed the metal lid tightly on the garbage can. From that day forward, she took showers.

  Beth quivered as the memory flooded her brain, washing over her with a sadness she had not felt for quite some time.

  Why had I forgotten that? she asked herself. Then she scanned her brain and realized she could recall very little from her pre-teen years. She could not even remember her eleventh or twelfth birthdays. It was as if those memories were erased or hidden away somewhere safe. The sad recollection of the bath toys did not make Beth eager to drudge up the others, so she promptly tucked that memory away, dressed, and thought about what to do with the day.

  She knew Mary would be coming around noon with chicken soup. The afternoon was shot. All the same, she didn’t feel very inspired to sketch or paint so the morning was wide open. She looked at the dresser drawer that held the diary and came up with an odd idea.

  It was a chilly, foggy morning. Beth dressed warmly and left the house a little after seven. She headed for Rod Thompson’s house, which was located five miles inland at the furthest edge of the township. It didn’t surprise Beth that Rod had chosen a house distinctly isolated from its neighbors.

  At the corner of Sears Road and Main Street an Irving gas station and an antique store vied for the attention of travelers. Beth headed north at that juncture, looking for Glen Road, a winding street which led to the Thompson house. Along the way, she passed an incongruent assortment of houses. Several late nineteenth and early twentieth century homes with elaborate gardens presented themselves with pride. Some homes needed a fresh coat of paint or a few repairs, but they were still charming. A brown shingled house from the mid-fifties, its yard filled with lobster traps and buoys, made Beth smile. She passed a bright pink house with a matching pink barn, and she chuckled, while next door, an old gray trailer with a dent in the roof and a rusted truck in its unkempt yard made her cringe. A quarter of a mile past the trailer, the road turned and a meadow filled with purple lupine came into view,
enchanting Beth. She wished she had thought to bring her camera, but then she reminded herself, this is not a sightseeing mission.

  She almost missed the entranceway to Rod’s house. The mailbox at the side of the road leaned to one side and a digit of the address was missing. But three of the numbers matched, so Beth figured she probably had the right place. She drove cautiously up the dirt road. Rod’s once white house was dingy and in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint. It appeared to have been built around 1960. The left side of a railing, which bordered the twenty-foot long porch, tilted forward slightly. No flowers adorned the property and the grass was littered with weeds. Several untamed bushes dominated the front of the house and a large maple in the center of the yard towered above the pitiful display. All the curtains were closed, and the house seemed dark and uninviting.

  Beth parked her car at the end of the driveway and approached the door tentatively. A faded, tarnished brass mail slot curled open on one side. It would clearly be a liability during inclement weather. “He doesn’t need a mail slot,” Beth mumbled. “Why doesn’t he just board it up?” She shook her head and mounted the steps.

  She knocked quietly, waited two minutes, then knocked a little louder and rang the bell. No one came to the door.

  “Mary did say he doesn’t answer the door. But perhaps he simply isn’t home.”

  She wandered around the side of the house and peeked into the backyard. Another flowerless, weed-infested yard met her eyes. In addition, a ten-foot wide swamp filled with reeds and cattails languished near the back of the property. She ventured a little farther, her heart pounding. The windows on the back of the house were also curtained and dark.