Page 21

2016

Sarah sat on the front steps of her home watching the August evening drift into twilight. The setting sun muted some of the heat, but humidity slid into her lungs with each breath. The streetscape was a still life, as if the outside was a child’s model of the real world. It was an enchanting night, and Sarah resented it.

How had things gone so wrong? It was supposed to be a week of family fun: museums, water parks, country drives to cute little towns for riverside lunches. Matthew had agreed to the time off, and she thought he was on board with her plans. Instead, they’d spent the week arguing.

Sitting on the steps, Sarah felt energy leach out of her, drawn out by the humidity and the endlessness of what her life had become. Kids, work, Matt, bills, demands, recrimination. She wondered if she sat there long enough whether she would eventually be drained of everything—blood, tissue, bone—all evaporating into the night air. It was a strangely comforting thought, the idea of disappearing into a void. Everything you carried stayed in a physical space, while you became ethereal, a part of the wind and the trees and the road.

Sarah didn’t know who the other woman was, and she didn’t really care to know. The long nights at work, the evasiveness about his whereabouts, the short temper with her and the kids. It all added up. Matthew was seeing another woman. Sarah didn’t need a smoking gun, though it came just the same.

“Who’s Grace?” Sarah had asked Matthew when the name popped up as a contact on his cell phone. Sarah had been waiting in the car while Matthew stepped out to pick up Charlie from a birthday party. Her own phone was buried in her bag, so she’d grabbed his to call their local pizza place, thinking she would order so they could pick up dinner on the way home. The phone screen had been left unlocked.

“Who?” Matthew’s voice was calm, but his stiffened shoulders and subsequent babble told otherwise. “Grace? I don’t know any Grace. Pretty old-fashioned name, isn’t it? Think maybe my mother had a friend named Grace.”

Sarah just turned to the window as they drove away while Charlie prattled about the party from the back seat. She’d needed to decide if she had even been angry.

The kids’ excited voices drew her thoughts back to the here and now, away from the other woman. “I wanna show Mommy! I wanna show!” Charlie yelled as he came around the house with his hands clasped together in front of him. Bella trailed behind with a self-satisfied look.

“Okay, show her,” Bella said.

Charlie slowly opened his palms, a whisper of anticipation in his breathing. Sarah looked down at the emptiness in his upturned hand.

“What is it?” she asked. Both kids immediately looked around.

“Charlie, you dropped it!” Bella’s accusations rang against the pavement.

“Nuh-uh. I got it.”

“What did you catch, honey?”

“Flyfires,” Charlie said, his voice quivering with excitement.

“Fireflies, dummy,” Bella said. Despite the layers of pain from her dissolving marriage, Sarah couldn’t help but smile at the magic of discovering fireflies on a warm summer evening.

“Tell you what, I’ll get a couple of jars, and we can walk down to the pond for a firefly hunt.” The kids cheered.

In the house, the chill of air-conditioning was delicious against her moist skin. Sarah ran a hand along her forearm and watched goose bumps rise.

She listened for sounds of Matthew. Had it not been for the faint click of a keyboard, she would have thought the house was empty. She slipped off her sandals and stepped barefoot toward the kitchen. Step, click, click, step, click, step. The rhythm was off, which seemed a funny expression of their relationship as of late. She moved deeper into the house, afraid of wakening another fight that could disturb the quiet of a summer evening hunting fireflies.

A squeak of the floorboard underfoot brought her to a halt. The keyboard clicks stopped. Sarah held her breath, waited. A click, followed by two more in quick succession. Sarah felt like Bilbo Baggins from Lord of the Rings , stealing through Smaug’s lair in the Lonely Mountain, searching for ... mason jars. Abandoning stealth, she walked purposely through the kitchen into Matthew’s study.

“What are you doing?” she asked from the study’s threshold.

Matt had been so engrossed in the screen he hadn’t heard her steps. His body swiveled in its chair, though his hand kept hold on the computer mouse. His recovery was quick. “Just finances,” he said. “Updating the accounts.” Click.

The monitor slid to the screen saver, a photo from the previous fall while on a hike in nearby Gatineau Park. The four of them—she, Matt, Bella, and Charlie—had spent the afternoon ambling along leaf-strewn trails. They had stopped by the ruins of an abandoned mill, a legacy from generations before, when the area was mined by settlers. The crumbling foundation walls straddled a small set of rapids, with an encroaching forest reclaiming its own with emerald green mosses and young saplings. The photo showed the kids peeking through a crumbled space in one of the walls, ringed by a blurred background of reds and oranges from the changing leaves. Sarah remembered that day, and her anger softened.

She glanced around the room and spotted the mason jars lined up like watchmen on the windowsill, each filled with office bric-a-brac—paper clips, pencils, elastics. “I need to borrow a couple of these,” she said as she moved into the room. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Matthew flinch in annoyance, but she chose to ignore it. “The kids and I are heading down to the pond for a firefly hunt.” And then as a peace offering: “Wanna join us?”

Silence hung between them as Sarah emptied the jars onto the desk, leaving behind misshapen piles of black clips and used batteries. She turned to face her husband.

“Charlie calls them flyfires, which I kind of like better,” she said.

Matt’s eyes were trained on the discarded piles, and from his expression, Sarah braced herself for the complaint. Instead, he half smiled and said, “Ya, okay. I’ll come.”

Sarah handed him the jars and headed to the kitchen for a drink of water. Out the window, the sun had dipped to that balanced moment when night and day shared the spaces of the world. Suspicion dogged her thoughts; its presence annoyed her.

Sarah would not have called herself superstitious, but she did believe there were signs: moments where if you chose to listen, you could hear the universe whispering toward an expectation. Unlike many who believed in compassionate design, Sarah knew cold, hard will was required to heed the mutterings. She bundled her suspicion and anger, pushed it away until it sputtered like a flicker of a dying candle.

“Ready?” Matt asked from behind her, a jar in each hand and a childlike expression on his face. “It’s probably dark enough now. They should be easy to spot.”

“Ya, all right. Let’s go.”

They walked down the front stairs side by side, a rhythm in their shared strides. The kids ran around on the front lawn hunting for “flyfires”; Bella had taken on the word as well, and Sarah savored the unexpected harmony in her family.

“Hey, here’s a thought,” Matt said as they followed the sidewalk toward the pond. “What do you think of a late-season canoe trip?”

The suggestion carried a weight that each recognized but neither mentioned. The kids chased hapless squirrels across lawns and around listless trees.

“I know you have that run-through at the theater next weekend,” he said, “but we can try for the weekend after. We could get a site on Nagadon Lake. The water’ll probably stay warm well into September, and it’ll be quiet. Most of the cottagers will have cleared off.”

“We can’t. Bella has Justine’s birthday party that weekend. We’ve already accepted the invitation, so she can’t just not show up. And you know how Felix always wants a debrief the weekend after opening nights. He’ll want me to be part of that.”

“Come on. The kids would love it. We haven’t been in so long. I’m sure the theater can get by without you for one weekend. We can bring fishing rods, see if we can get the kids to catch our dinner.” Matt’s elbow tapped her arm gingerly.

Sarah knew her knee-jerk response had slapped away the olive branch in his suggestion.

She wanted him to work for her.

“We can go the weekend after the birthday party then. How about that? I’ll take care of all the packing. I don’t mind,” he said.

“And there’s school. It starts up next week.”

“Nagadon’s only a couple of hours away. If we leave a little early on Friday, we can be on the site before dark.”

“I don’t know, Matt.”

“Come on, Sarah. It’ll be fun. And it’ll be good for us. You won’t have to do a thing, I promise. It’ll be like luxury camping. Glamping. I’ll be Sherpa, cook, tent pitcher, fire starter. All you’ll need is your clothes and a good book.”

Sarah felt her resolve slacken in the ping-pong of their discussion.

“Won’t it be too cold?”

“It might be a little chilly at night, but we can bring the down sleeping bags and build a big fire. Don’t you remember how gorgeous it can be in September? There’s usually only a handful of boaters. And the leaves! Remember when we went for our first anniversary? That had to have been late September. Ya, remember? We delayed the trip because you had that summer festival. The leaves were just turning, and we had that amazingly warm day.”

His final strike rang a death knell to her opposition.

“I remember you standing on those rocks the day we decided to circumnavigate the whole lake. God, it was so hot, remember, but the sight of those leaves reflected on that super-calm water in the little bay was so worth it. And you, all young and nubile.” His voice hushed. “Leaving your clothes on the rock and diving straight into that golden water, buck naked. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.”

Sarah closed her eyes, letting the memory of that shared experience glide between them.

He had her then. She could keep her eyes closed. Look the other way. Will the universe to give her the sign she wanted.

“Hey, guys.” Matthew whooped. “Who wants to go camping?”

“I do, I do!” the kids said in unison, their voices indistinguishable.

“I do!” Sarah added her own voice.

The week of fighting, the unknown woman, the thin thread of her marriage—all drifted to the further reaches of her mind, settling beneath layers of must-dos and could-have-beens. She could bury them. Let them be pulled down, submerge the pesky details that marred the happy picture of her family. Or at least that’s what she told herself.

“Now, let’s go find us some flyfires,” Sarah said.