Fire in the Firefly

by Scott Gardiner

  Anne is of the view that this interval is ludicrously brief. “Have you given any thought at all to what’s going to happen, after?”

  Roebuck’s world view is narrowed down to what is going to happen after half-past twelve tomorrow.

  “There’s nothing more destructive than a man without a purpose,” Anne says.

  It slips beneath his guard. “Wow,” he says. “That was a good one! Can I add it to my collection? Would that that, technically speaking, be plagiarism?” Despite his best intentions, Roebuck has allowed himself to backtalk.

  Foolish, foolish. He’s an idiot. Anne pretends to smack herself on the forehead, stunned. She can be quite the drama queen when the mood comes on. “Why didn’t I think of that?” She has followed him into the kitchen. He has been hoping that the bags of spinach, set out like bales of fodder, might provide distraction—or at least divert her temper in a new direction—but no such luck. “That’s what you can do with the rest of your life,” she tells him, escalating volume, “polish up you little proverbs!” Once her voice gets up like this, there is really no other option but retreat. “Watch out, Oscar Wilde,” Anne warns the neighbours. “Stand aside Hippocrates. Here comes Julius Roebuck!” Any second now she’ll be starting in on Blake. Anne loathes Blake even more than Lily; this is another example of evolutionary convergence Roebuck has grasped, but never fully comprehended.

  “Oh look,” he says. “I forgot the goat cheese!”

  Once he’s in the car and safely out of sight, he tries again. He has become so used to no one answering that the sound of her voice almost causes him to drop the phone.

  “Hello.” It’s as if she’s sitting right there in the car beside him. “Hello!”

  “Lily! How are you? How are you feeling?” by which he means, “Are you having morning sickness too?”

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” Lily tells him.

  “I thought you already did.”

  A long silence. Roebuck’s attempts at levity are not remarkably successful today.

  “No,” she says. “Something … related.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to have this conversation on the phone.”

  He has learned from experience that a woman in the initial stages of pregnancy is like a woman with PMS 24/7. “Tell me what you want me to do,” Roebuck says, “and I’ll do that.”

  “Can you come over?”

  “Sure. Absolutely!”

  “Now?”

  His heart sinks. “It’s dinnertime …” He hears himself falter. “I’m expected …”

  “Of course.”

  The absence of bitterness, even now, stops his breath. “What about tomorrow? Would tomorrow work?”

  “Tomorrow, yes. Come at lunch.”

  “Good. No! Dammit! That’s the one time I can’t. I have an appointment. It’s … impossible to miss.” The thought of seeing Lily is like a shipwreck’s sudden glimpse of land. “After?” he asks. “What if I come right over afterward, after my appointment?”

  “Too long. Before?”

  “Okay, before.”

  “I have a project due at 10:00 AM. Come right after that.”

  “10:15?”

  “That’s good. Be here at 10:15.”

  Mood swings. Another chapter straight out of the manual. Anne is a different person when he ventures back into the kitchen, elbows on her teakwood table, chin cradled in her hands, eyes smeary-red. “You got spinach,” she says, pushing the fat green bags around the polished wood.

  To be honest, he’d expected the spinach to achieve the opposite effect. Last time around, while she was carrying Zach, even catching sight of leafy greens, let alone detecting them in what she ate, was enough to set Anne spitting like a rabid cat. She puts her arms around him from behind and hugs. Roebuck drops his tub of chèvre, pivots from the hip, and hugs her back. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  He says he’s sorry too.

  Anne is still clinging. “Remember when I took you to Alison’s?”

  “We had sex in the bathroom!” Roebuck smiles and shifts his feet to embrace his wife more properly. “I’ve never been more surprised.”

  “Seems like a thousand years ago.” The memory has made her wistful.

  “We can go again if you want. It’s still in business—at least it was a few months back.”

  “And how would you know that?”

  “Ha! Funny. Greenwood, of all people. He went there with his girlfriend.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “A former client, as a matter of fact. I was a bit worried for a while there that things would get awkward. Professionally, I mean. But she left the company a while back. Funny,” he says, recollecting. “She always reminded me of you.”

  He would gladly have gone on longer with this neutral train of thought, but Anne has lost interest and exited the kitchen. Mood swings.

  Roebuck chops his spinach. The kids straggle in for dinner. Katie first, rubbing eyes from too much Facebook; Morgan, who’s had to be called twice, clumping down the stairs blaming Katie for her missing calculator; and Zach, with his jeans ripped out at the knees for the second time this week; one cliché after another. And it washes over him again, how good this is, domestic normalcy, how calming to the heart and soothing to the soul. He has done everything he can, until tomorrow. They eat and bicker and bicker and debate at length whose turn it is to do the dishes and eventually—much later than it should have been, as ever, the kids are packed off to their beds. Roebuck, expecting a long night, settles in to read. Sometime later he is startled by his wife. Anne puts her head on his chest and a long bare leg across his hips and in minutes falls asleep. Roebuck breathes from his stomach listening to his heartbeat and drifts off, too, subsiding pulse by drowsy pulse.

  30

  The future never lasts.

  The Collected Sayings of Julius Roebuck

  Lily is on the phone when he arrives, waving him in with that

  look that people put on to show how embarrassing it is to be caught at the door while talking to somebody else. Her deadline, he guesses. Either late or sent with missing pieces; he catches a reference to a file not uploading, possibly corrupt. Roebuck knows his way around. He lays a finger to his lips and squeezes by, kissing her cheek as he passes. Lily’s brows are furrowed to almost comic depths; she smiles and scowls simultaneously. Roebuck makes himself scarce in the kitchen. She was preparing coffee by the looks of it: water poured into the pot; filter in its basket; beans ground but not yet spooned. Roebuck finishes the job and pours himself a cup, his eighth or tenth this morning. He’s been up since dawn, measuring time. “The font you sent was Times New Roman,” he hears her growling through the wall. “What would make me think they wanted sans serif?”

  He has always loved this kitchen, so bright and self-contained. For him it is a sensory amalgam of good things caramelizing while soup pots simmer at the back of the stove, of stews and baking, of citruses and cloves: of Lily. “You said Photoshop,” she says heatedly. “Now you tell me Illustrator!”

  There’s an avocado plant growing the in window, up from its divided pit. The stem has bent toward the sun. Roebuck shifts the pot a quarter turn and wipes the counter, then turns the pothos cuttings she’s been rooting. Philodendron they are called in his house. Lily pronounces it pathos. She stalks into the room, head still crooked to the phone, sketches an indignant wave, turns, and marches out again. Roebuck wishes he had something he could say. It comes unbidden, out of nowhere: Choose me.

  And she has.

  Whatever happens this afternoon, whatever the fallout, he will defend this. Anne, too. Anne’s choice, too. What does he deserve, in all of this? Pointless asking.

  Lily is pacing. He can hear her in the other room, back and forth, her voice rising and falling. Roebuck is not aware his cellphone has been ringing u
ntil he feels the ticking whirr against his chest.

  “Hello” he says. “Hello?” The coffeemaker rattles. Lily’s voice grows louder; she isn’t given to anger, but he can tell she’s very angry now. Somewhere outside an ambulance wails by. Roebuck puts his finger to his ear. He doesn’t recognize this number. “Who’s calling?”

  “Ophelia …”

  “Ophelia?”—at least that’s what it sounds like—then something else he can’t make out. Roebuck doesn’t know any Ophelias. “I think you have the wrong number.”

  “Mistalowbak?”

  “Sorry, I can’t hear you. Who is calling?”

  A crackle; traffic noise beyond the house, then a little clearer. “MistaLoebuck, this …”

  “Holy crap, what a bunch of pricks!” Lily is standing in front of him. Roebuck has been head down, concentrating. “Sorry about that,” she says stepping close.

  He holds up a finger for her to hang on just one sec. “We have a bad connection. What did you say …?”

  Lily wraps her arms around him. “Sorry.” She’s waiting for him to hug her back. “The phone I mean. Julius, I just have to get this said …”

  “Mista Roebuck. This is Opheliafromgamacrackle …”

  “Ophelia who?”

  “Opheliafromgamacrackle …”

  “Cama what?”

  “I’ve been practising. Actually practising how I’m going say this. Rehearsing. And then the phone rang just as you were coming up the walk …”

  “Gama-Care … test results … You …”

  “It’s been a nightmare, Julius, keeping this inside …”

  “Test results?”

  “You know those, Julius. I’m pregnant, that’s established. But what you don’t know …”

  “Who did you say was calling?”

  “Gama-Care Laboratories …” He hears it this time, clearly: “Semen analysis … MistaLowbak … results … maybe … happy.”

  For Roebuck it is like that liquid pop inside the ear that happens sometimes when he steps out of the shower, an instantaneous transition to hearing from not-hearing. It stuns him, shocks his balance as he wrestles with the incredible, the unbelievable discovery that he’s forgotten this, that in the tsunami of these last hours, Gama-Care and what it represents has been completely swept from mind. Lily is saying something, but Roebuck is now absorbing the harder blow that follows. That it doesn’t matter. That they are only calling to tell him what he knows already. Except for that one word …

  “Did you say happy?”

  “No. I said Danny.”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “Not permitted to say.”

  “It means I slept with Daniel. That’s what it means. How hard do you have to make this?”

  Roebuck is holding the phone like child with a disconnected walky-talky.

  “Did you just say …?”

  “Cannot provide that information on telephone …”

  “Not you!”

  “Yes, me, Julius. I have to live with this too!”

  “I wasn’t …” Roebuck, like a carnival automaton, slowly cants the phone back toward his ear. He is aware that Lily’s mouth is moving, but now other sounds are coming through. “Shift ends … come … noon.”

  “Julius! Hang up the phone and talk to me!”

  “Say that again …”

  Lily snatches the phone and hurls it across the room. “Listen to me! Listen to me!”

  Roebuck watches, slow-mo, as his phone goes spinning end-over-end along a shallow arc clear across the kitchen. His same finger, dumbly tracking, follows its trajectory. It strikes the corner of the stove and breaks into balletic fragments. Roebuck’s eyes tack from piece to spinning piece and come to rest on one that’s skidded to a stop just opposite his foot, a modem by the look of it, possibly a piece of motherboard.

  “Lily …” he says.

  “I think it’s you. But you have to know it could be Daniel.”

  But Roebuck is thinking: Could it be? Could it really be? Is that possible?

  “I have to go,” he says.

  “Oh, Julius! Please don’t do this.”

  He stares at his watch. “It’s not …” But of course it partly is. “I mean …” But he has to know.

  “Please, Julius. Please!”

  “It’s …” His finger drifts moronically toward the scattered bits of circuitry.

  “You’re leaving me because I broke your phone!”

  “I have just received a very important …”

  “Oh, my God! Your call means more to you than this?”

  He doesn’t know how to answer that one either. “I’ll be back … I promise. It’s not … I’ll be back.”

  For the rest of his life, the name will lose all connection to Hamlet or to Shakespeare, to willows grown aslant the brook or the properties of rue—and relate only to this small and oddly hostile Chinese woman in a lab coat frowning from behind the breastwork of her tall white counter. He can make out only the top half of her face.

  “Ophelia!”

  “MistaLoebuck.”

  “Ophelia!” Roebuck’s heart is beating so spasmodically his hand is pressing at his chest. He gulps down gouts of air. “I’m here!”

  “Ejaculate analysis complete, MistaLoebuck.”

  “Oh please, what does it say?”

  Ophelia lifts a sheet of printed paper from a stack of documents and arranges it neatly beside her, squaring its edge to the rim of her desk. She selects another page and sets it down precisely alongside the first, edge to edge in perfect symmetry. “I ordered two tests,” she tells him primly. “Make sure.” Roebuck cranes his neck and jacks upward from his toes to see over the counter. “What do they say?” He’s still clutching his chest with the hand he’s not using to hold himself up. Ophelia extracts from her drawer a pair of bright red reading glasses, raises the first page, and studies it narrowly. “First test, azoospermic.”

  “Azoowhat? What the fuck does that means?”

  Ophelia looks reproachfully away.

  “Please, Ophelia. Just tell me what that means. Please!”

  Roebuck wonders if he’s panting audibly. The blood in his ear is pounding so hard he can’t really tell. She lets him wait another, sterner interval, then says, “Negative sperm count. No sperm.”

  Relief floods over him in a tide of oxygen, the whole of him is trembling, then a second choke of panic. “The other one! What about the other one?”

  Ophelia locates the second sheet and reads it thoughtfully, looks Roebuck up, and down, returns her eyes to the page, coughs, removes her glasses. “Second test also azoospermic.”

  He needs to spend the next few seconds with both hands on the counter, gasping at his shoes. “Thank God! Thank God.” When his heartbeat has reduced to something near the hundred-beats-per-minute mark, a whole new terror strikes. “You didn’t fake the results?”

  Ophelia—who up until this moment has been carved in stone—shoots backward in her chair and bounces to her feet, hissing. “You pay to go first, not cheat!” The chair careens off a metal filing cabinet and clangs into the wall. Two bodies freeze, two sets of eyes dart fearfully toward the sliding window. Roebuck and Ophelia share a long and agonizing silence. When at last it’s certain no one’s overheard, she sets into him in a grim and glottal gush. He doesn’t follow word for word, but Roebuck grasps enough of it to comprehend.

  What she has done, she tells him, is divided his ejaculate into two batches, each analyzed independently. The double-testing was her initiative, because she guessed it would be useful to him. She also wishes him to understand, to clearly understand, that there’s a backlog at this clinic, that she broke the rules to help. What she did not do is tamper with the data. What she did not do was cheat. Only accelerate the process.

  Roebuck lets t
he waves of wrath wash over him. Now that he’s sure he’s not having a coronary, he wants to vault across the counter and kiss her on the lips.

  “Bless you,” he says, reaching for his papers.

  Ophelia snatches them away. “You pay for one, you get one.” She passes him a single sheet. The other she has put behind her back. Roebuck checks his wallet: two twenties, only. “Would you accept a cheque?

  “Cash!” This Ophelia is more practical than her literary her namesake. “ATM across the street.” Roebuck skips out. She affects not to notice his return a few minutes later, or the lather he’s worked up racing to and from the bank machine. Roebuck places five $100 bills reverently on the counter; his hands are damp and shaking. Ophelia removes a single note and pushes the rest away with the tips of her fingers. Roebuck takes possession of his second certificate.

  “You …” he says, quoting blindly before bounding down the stairs, “are of the angels.”

  It is exactly 12:00 PM.

  Roebuck has made a snap decision. He is making them small and snappy now, one-at-a-timers; no scope for grander vistas; no panoramas, no wide-angle lenses. When did people start taking decisions and stop making them? Making is constructive; taking more in line with common theft. Around the time the biz-heads took over. Yes, almost certainly then. Stop that. His brain is skittering all around the back seat of the cab. Give it a break; it’s had a tough week. Roebuck will devote every available neuron to Anne and Lily, later. Later. Right now every time his thinking tries to sneak away in that direction, he’s going to put a bag over it, tie it in a knot, and lock it in the trunk. Right at this moment, Roebuck is aiming squarely up the road with Yasmin. Yasmin and her lawyer. Right now that’s all that matters. He is aware he’s in a hurry. He has left his car parked on the street outside Gama-Care and hailed a taxi. That was his decision. Roebuck doesn’t trust himself to drive.