Firefly Island

by Lisa Wingate

  We unpacked the sleeping equipment by the light of a waxing moon and settled down on the floor of what appeared to be our new living room. The house smelled musty and old, until we opened the windows to let in fresh air. Outside, a blanket of stars stretched across the sky, and somewhere in the distance, I thought I heard waves gently lapping at the shore. I wondered if it was only my imagination, or if we were closer to the water than I’d thought. Did lakes have tides like an ocean—a cycle of rising and falling that followed the moon?

  Nick curled up in his sleeping bag, and Daniel and I slipped beneath the quilt on our hastily inflated air mattress, the last twinkle of the pen light fading slowly into oblivion as Moses Lake rocked us to sleep with its lullaby of water and stone.

  We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,

  And lay like fish

  Under the net of our kisses.

  —Pablo Neruda

  (Left by Kotoyo and Sgt. Ben [ret.], forbidden love a lifetime ago)

  Chapter 6

  Hawaiian mythology describes Tangaroa, the ruler of the ocean, who breathes only twice in twenty-four hours, creating the tides. I heard the legend when I was thirteen, just entering that spindly-legged and awkward stage of semi-adulthood—not a girl, not a woman, old enough to wish the beefcake Hawaiian storyteller would ditch the luau audience, mysteriously fall in love with me, and sweep me off to a life of bliss in a thatch hut somewhere. I looked into his dark eyes, saw the firelight reflected, heard the pounding of the surf. The corners of my vision narrowed, blocking out the movers and shakers for whom my father’s client had planned this island meeting. I fell into the tale, felt the storyteller’s love of the ocean, his understanding of it, his reverence for the vastness and the mystery of the world around us.

  It wasn’t in the tides that the breath of God could be found, I decided, but in the water itself, in the endless rhythm of it, ever present, ever constant, louder amidst the storms of life, softer in the peaceful times. Not a god only moving twice a day like the mythical Tangaroa, but a God moving countless times. Always. Continually. A God present in the deepest parts of our lives, sometimes crowded out by all the surface clutter as we stroll along the shore, our minds preoccupied with things that seem important. Then a wave rises higher than the rest, strokes soft and cool over sun-warmed skin, and we hear it again, the constant breath of God. We think, How could I not have heard that all along?

  Our first morning on Moses Lake, I woke with the breath of God in my ears. It flowed softly in and out, rocking me to wakefulness in the way of a parent gently rousing a beloved child to a new day. In that misty land between sleep and reality, I wasn’t certain where I was, but I thought, This is perfect. I love it here. I want to wake up to the soft morning breeze and the scent of the water, to this peace forever.

  The air mattress shifted beneath me as I burrowed deeper into the quilt that Grandma Louisa had long ago made in anticipation of my wedding. I felt as if I were floating on the water, a ship drifting at sea. Not a thing in the world to worry about.

  You’re on vacation, a dream-voice whispered. No need to get out of bed. You can lie here as long as you want.

  The smell of coffee teased my senses just as I was beginning to drift again. Coffee. Good. The thought registered, and a stomach rumble concurred. I rolled over, stuck my face in the pillow, fought waking and rising. As much as I’d always wished I could be a morning person, it hadn’t happened yet.

  The coffee wouldn’t leave me alone. It wanted me …

  A heaviness settled in, like Grandma Louisa’s old Fat Cat (that really was his name, Fat Cat) sitting atop the quilt, weighing down the fabric.

  I couldn’t quite remember where I was. Memories flitted in and out like the skittish white moths that hatch in multitudes in late summer. There was a car … something about the air-conditioner … and alligators in the road … no, no deer. Deer in the road …

  I blinked the new day slowly into focus, dapples of sunlight falling over my face. A severed head was staring back at me, its glassy black eyes gazing into the distance from beneath a massive pair of antlers. I did a clumsy upward scramble, bunching the pillow against my back. Instead of a headboard, there was a wall. I smacked my head on a windowsill.

  “If that doesn’t say good morning, I don’t know what does.” Daniel’s voice and the fact that I was now a married woman took a moment to register. So far, I’d remarried Daniel in the first few moments each morning. I wondered how long it would be before I stopped being my old single self in my subconscious mind.

  “Nice, huh?” he added. He was sitting on the other side of the air mattress, wearing a pair of jogging shorts and a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, his dark hair tousled into slightly damp curls, his long legs crossed one over the other.

  He made a very appealing picture.

  I blinked to gain a clearer focus, trying to concentrate on Daniel, that gorgeous hunka-hunka husband, rather than the disembodied head on the wall.

  The head was powerful, though. It pulled at my gaze until I was looking sideways at it with morbid fascination. I thought of the Bambi movie. Bambi’s father. He was on our wall, nicely highlighted by the sun filtering through a set of ancient mini-blinds that hung off kilter, a slat or two missing.

  There was a head in our living room. A body part of a dead animal. My stomach roiled, and I wondered what was inside the head. Bones and flesh, preserved with formaldehyde or something? Was that even possible? How long could eyeballs possibly last, hanging on a wall?

  Maybe it was mummified, the brains removed through the ear, like the body in an Egyptian sarcophagus… .

  “Do you think the eyeballs are real?” I kept a sideways focus on the head as Daniel grabbed an already prepared cup of coffee and handed it to me.

  He chuckled. “Of course not. They’re glass. None of it’s real. It’s just hide stretched over a plastic form, like a … leather coat.”

  I took a sip of my coffee. Perfect. A random thought, an endearment of sorts, traveled through me, warm like the sip. He already knows how I fix my coffee. “What’s it doing there? I mean, you think we’re in the wrong house?” Maybe we’d misread the directions last night after all, and we were trespassing where we shouldn’t be.

  “What? You don’t find that sort of woodsy and charming?” A hand flourish added dramatic flair. “Don’t go in the bathroom, then.”

  “The bathroom?” Suddenly last night’s power outage seemed like a blessing in disguise.

  “And the master bedroom.” He pointed toward a doorway that led to the shadowy hall where some sort of ancient velvet wallpaper was peeling off the wall. “The good news is that the place does come with electricity. I finally found the breaker this morning and turned it on.” He grinned at me, and I couldn’t help it, I laughed.

  “Okay, but if you tell me there are stuffed dead animals in the kitchen, I’m going to be sick.”

  He gently shoulder bumped me, creating waves in my coffee. “Kitchen’s clean. Well, not clean, exactly, but there are no dead animals. We’re going to have to do some work in there. The good news is that there’s a nice little café in town—The Waterbird Bait and Grocery—and they open at five a.m. for the fishermen. The coffee’s good. Nick and I brought back a breakfast burrito for you. They’re good, too.”

  “You guys went to town without me?” I looked around the room. Some stepmother I was. Until that very moment, I hadn’t thought about the fact that there was supposed to be a third person with us. A little person. “Where’s Nick?” A tiny spear of panic cut through my morning fog, ramping up my heartbeat. Surely Daniel wouldn’t just forget about Nick. If the lake was close enough that I could smell the water, Nick might be in danger of wandering into it.

  “He’s outside, with … someone.”

  “Someone?” I threw off the covers, envisioning our new boss just on the other side of the wall. I couldn’t meet Jack West for the first time looking like this. I wanted to make a good impression, to help Daniel
start off his new job on the right foot. “You didn’t tell me there was someone here. Is the shower working?”

  “Relax.” Daniel snaked out a hand, palm-up, like he was going to catch the coffee cup if I dropped it. “He doesn’t care, I promise. Besides, you look beautiful.” His fingers caught my T-shirt, stalling me in a crouch as I set my coffee cup on the floor.

  “Daniel, I’m serious. I don’t want him to think you’re married to some kind of … lazy person who sleeps all day.” Based on my limited knowledge of Jack West, I was already scared to death of meeting him. I needed to be prepared.

  The pull on my T-shirt increased, tipping me back onto the air mattress. I landed on Daniel’s chest, and he wrapped his arms around me. “Just stay here with me a minute. We haven’t had much alone time so far.” A sigh softened him against the pillow. “I’m sorry, Mal. I know this hasn’t been what you dreamed of for a honeymoon.”

  “It’s been an adventure.” The words were upbeat, confident, a smokescreen for what I was really feeling. The hint of brokenness in Daniel’s voice rattled me to the core. I wanted to take some of the pressure off. “Listen to me.” Twisting in his arms, I touched his face, turned him toward me. I saw him in minute detail, the squareness of his chin, the freshly shaven skin, the dark, arched brows, the glint of sunlight against his eyes. “I married you. You. Daniel Webster Everson. Not a road trip, or a house, or job, or a salary, or a location, or a living room wall.” I waved a hand toward the severed head, hanging on ugly gold-flocked wallpaper of seventies vintage. “As long as you and I are okay, that’s all I need. You and me and Nick. The three of us. You don’t have to try to make things perfect for me or pretend you’ve got it under control all by yourself. I can handle it, okay?” I can. I will. Somehow. “I’m not some fragile little china doll you need to shelter and protect.”

  His gaze connected with mine in a way that seemed to reach into my soul. “I want you to be happy. I want to take care of you. Of us.”

  I felt my center turning to mush. That was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me. I was the heroine in a 1950’s western, the scene shot with a misty lens softening all the rough edges, leaving only perfection. We kissed, and I wished we could lock the doors and spend the morning curled up together in the wedding quilt, floating on the air mattress, two lovers lost at sea.

  Something crashed outside, and the serenity vanished like vapor. We jerked apart. Daniel climbed off the air mattress, and I followed.

  “I’ve got it.” He moved ahead of me into the adjoining room, which we’d come through in the dark last night. Judging by the row of old wooden windows and a painted stone footer, the long, narrow space had been an outdoor porch at one time. The kitchen doorway was off to the right, and there was an old oak desk in the left corner of the room. Apparently this area served as an office, and maybe a dining room. The floor was covered with butternut yellow carpet. It felt sticky beneath my feet, and was dotted with stains I didn’t want to contemplate.

  “Well … but who’s outside?” Surely Daniel wouldn’t just leave Nick out there with Mr. West. I tried to peer around Daniel’s shoulder. If the new boss really was outside, I was going to bolt for the bathroom … if I could remember where I’d found it last night in the dark.

  “Come see for yourself.” Daniel opened the back door and stepped onto the wide covered porch behind the house. He held the screen until I could catch it, then disappeared around the corner as I tiptoed cautiously out.

  The yard was huge by DC standards, an acre or two at least, enclosed by the iron pipe fence with rusty mesh wire over it. Ancient-looking stone footpaths fanned out from the porch, one leading to the driveway gate, another leading to an old garage building on the left side of the house, and a third heading directly across the backyard to what appeared to be another house, smaller than our own, with a low-roofed front porch that somehow looked empty and barren. From the overgrown flowerbed in front, a cement angel watched me. Sunlight glittered against the water in the birdbath at her feet, casting shifting ribbons of light over her skirt. A yellow butterfly sat on the basin rim, fanning its wings.

  I thought of the woman and the little boy who’d disappeared. Jack’s wife and stepson. Was the birdbath hers? Had the little boy chased butterflies in that very garden? Had she planted the irises that now bloomed thick along the foundation? Even with the gardens gone to seed and most of the paint faded off the porch furniture, that place had the look of a woman’s touch. There were lace curtains in the windows. Had she sewn them herself?

  Shaking off the questions, I surveyed the roofs of barns and outbuildings beyond the little house. A grassy hillside dotted with pecan trees lay beyond. In the distance, the azure waters of Moses Lake peeked through. From the looks of things, it was close enough to walk to, but even though the view was beautiful, it was eerily empty. As far as I looked in any direction, there wasn’t a single sign of another human. The ranch was like a tiny island in a vast wilderness.

  I stood there feeling out of body, lost, vulnerable. Was this what it would be like here all the time—just Daniel and me, living in this house with no one else around? Even straining my ears into the distance, all I could hear were the sounds of crickets chirring, the rustle of the breeze in branches, the ragged caw of a bird.

  “Daniel?” I called, stepping off the porch and onto the stone path. “Nick?”

  Something black, white, brown, hairy, and rather large rocketed from the corner of the house and flashed by in a blur. Nick was chasing it with his arms outstretched, laughing and squealing, calling, “He gots it! He gots it! C’mere, doggie!”

  Doggie? I watched as what looked like at least a hundred pounds of dog circled the yard. Hair, slobber, and clods of grass flew as it rounded a bush near the stone footpath, then doubled back, racing past Nick before making another hairpin turn. The two played a wild game of keep-away, the dog cavorting back and forth in front of Nick, and Nick jumping and diving, trying to grab something from the dog’s mouth.

  Whose dog? There hadn’t been a dog around last night. When we’d pulled in, the place was as quiet as—I hated to even think it in view of Corbin’s wedding-breakfast revelations—a graveyard.

  Daniel’s arm slipped around me, and I jumped. I hadn’t even realized he’d come back up the path.

  “What’s that?” I motioned to Nick’s playmate.

  “A dog.”

  “But where did it come from? It looks like a … hairy Rottweiler or something. Should Nick be playing with it?” Growing up, I’d had a friend whose father kept a Doberman in the backyard. My mother wouldn’t allow me over to that house to play. She was afraid I would be mauled.

  “Stock dog. Australian shepherd. His name’s Pecos.”

  Pecos … So, someone had been here this morning while I was sleeping, and left behind … a dog?

  “Well, who does Pecos belong to?”

  “I don’t know.” Daniel’s fingers smoothed over my skin as Nick caught the dog, wrestled a tennis ball from his massive jowls, and then tossed the ball across the grass, sprays of slobber flicking off in all directions, catching the sunlight.

  I had the urge to grab Nick and wash his hands. I could hear my mother saying, Good heavens, the germs! “You didn’t ask?” Was it a good idea to let a small child play with a strange dog? As much as I was aware of my newcomer status in this threesome, sometimes I wondered if Daniel was too casual about things.

  “He doesn’t talk much.”

  “Who?”

  “The dog.”

  A little chuckle attempted to chase my worries. “No, I mean whomever the dog was with. You didn’t ask who he belongs to and whether he’s safe for children? I mean, dogs can maul little …” I bit my tongue just as Daniel’s arm stiffened. This whole stepparent thing was complicated.

  “His name’s on his collar.” The answer was flat, a little clipped. The meaty, manly hand stopped caressing and instead settled on my elbow. I felt slightly off-balance. There were so many n
ew things to figure out at once. Where did my parental responsibilities for Nick begin and end? At what point was I supposed to start acting like his mother, instead of a casual family friend? Would that process occur naturally, or should we plan it? Everything had happened so fast that Nick was still calling me Tante M. We hadn’t even talked about whether to change that, and how.

  Had Daniel thought of any of those things?

  He seemed to have none of my worries. “They’re fine. We had a couple dogs like that when we were kids. They’re good dogs. I did a genetics thing on the breed in grad school. That one’s a tri-color pattern, but if you take two with the blue merle color pattern and breed them, there’s a sixty-seven-percent chance …” He went on with facts and figures having to do with canine genetics and white puppies born with inherited recessive something-or-other, causing blindness, deafness, or stillbirth.

  The science talk dissolved into a background hum as I watched Nick and the dog. Finally, Daniel squeezed me and said, “I’m boring you, aren’t I?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Why don’t you go on in and get your shower? Mr. West—or somebody—will probably show up here pretty soon. The manager and the ranch hands do most of their work over on the main ranch, but they come by here daily to feed and check on the animals. Someone was by this morning while Nick and I were gone. That’s probably how the dog got here.”

  “Okay.” I wished I hadn’t missed the trip into Moses Lake. I wanted to know what it was like. “How was the town, by the way—other than the bait shop café—what did you call it? The Waterbird?”

  “It’s … small.”

  I decided not to ask for details. Sometimes it’s better to take things in little bites. I chose not to explore the house, either, but went straight back the way I’d come. I stopped in the living room long enough to get clothing from my suitcase and nibble the breakfast burrito Daniel had left for me in a paper sack, then proceeded to locate the bathroom.