We Were the Mulvaneys (63 page)

 

Fireflies!
—children were darting to catch the tiny insects, cupped in their hands.

The sun had set behind the dense flaming tree line. In the tall unmowed grass at the edge of the clearing, dozens of fireflies appeared winking like distant galaxies.

It was then Mike called out from the next table, in a teasing singsong he'd never outgrown, “Hey Mom, remember?—fireflies,” and Mom looked around, smiling, puzzled, “Fireflies? What about them?” and Patrick said, with juvenile slyness, “Come on, Mom: fireflies. You must remember,” and Marianne gave a little cry, clapped her hand to her mouth and laughed and said, “Oh, Mom, of course you remember,” and I joined in laughing, it came to me in a rush, “Fireflies, Mom—c'mon, sure you remember,” and Mom was staring at us, each in turn, sensing a joke but perplexed, “Why, no, what?” and in a chorus we Mulvaney children cried, “Ransomville! The snowstorm! Grandma Hausmann! ‘Providence'!” and at last Mom remembered, and must have blushed though by candlelight we couldn't see, “Oh, yes. But that happened in winter, you know—that wasn't summer, like now,” and we laughed harder, we'd never heard anything so funny, and Mom began to laugh too, quaking with laughter like pain, pleading in an undertone, for Sable was out of earshot saying good-bye to relatives of hers who were leaving, “Oh, but please don't tell Sable, she'd tease me mercilessly forever!
Please.
”

 

Laughing so hard, tears leaking from my eyes. There's the danger of cracking like aged brittle crockery.

It was around that time I drifted from the party, needing to escape for a few minutes. I wasn't drunk but my head was ringing like the cowbell.

Walking blindly in this place I knew to be my mom's new home but which I didn't exactly recognize like one of those dreams in which a familiar landscape is subtly yet irrevocably altered. Thinking
If this is another time, then who am I?
I'd gotten to be proud of myself for the personality I'd built, piece by piece like shingling a roof. Precisely overlapping, imbricating to prevent water damage. Not that I'd allow Mom to boast about me in my presence, so young! already editor of a newspaper! nor did I give much thought to my professional accomplishments, such as they were. But I'd built a damned sturdy personality for myself, damned if I was going to dismantle it.

Beyond the antique barn that was lit from within for the evening's festivities, a floating glowing ark. Beyond the goat pasture where the animals dozed on their feet. Beyond the clearing where there was a narrow brook, a tributary of Alder Creek. I stood for a while inhaling deep calming breaths filling my lungs with the sobriety of night.

There was a movement, a rustling in the underbrush. Twenty feet away I saw a doe and two fawns at the brook, drinking. Fawns are born in June so these were scarcely a month old, on slender legs, sides streaked with white. What is the purpose, in nature, of a fawn's streaked sides? What is the purpose, in nature, of a deer's tail, flashing white when it's upturned, as the deer flees? What possible design, intelligence? Yet how could any of this be merely accident? I stood absolutely still, scarcely daring to breathe yet fairly quickly the doe became aware of me, saw or smelled or simply sensed me, and I lifted a hand in slow gentle mute acknowledgment of our fellowship and doe and fawns contemplated me gravely before turning, the doe first, the fawns immediately following, and disappearing into the underbrush.

I heard footsteps behind me, a voice—“Judd?”

It was Patrick. He caught up with me, we stood for a while together in silence, staring at the brook. I felt a childish stab of satisfaction he'd left Katya behind. Just for now.

Finally I said, my voice oddly weak, pleading, “I'm just not used to it anymore, I guess. So many people.” Patrick made a sound meaning he understood. I said, “It's like happiness is a balloon and the balloon is somehow my head and it's being blown up bigger and bigger and I'm scared as hell it's going to burst and I'll be left with nothing but scraps of rubber.”

Patrick said, thoughtfully, “Yes, right. I feel exactly the same way.”

“Being angry, resentful—that's easier, somehow.”

“To a degree.”

I realized I was fearful of Patrick asking me questions that must be asked, yet not now. I would talk to him tomorrow, the next day—all the days to come! I would never let him go again and I would tell him everything in my heart. I would tell him how Marianne had never known, had never guessed. What had been done for her sake. For the family's sake. I would tell him that so far as I knew, Zachary Lundt had kept the secret, too; if in fact he'd recognized Patrick in his disguise. I would tell him that neither Mom nor I knew anything of the Lundts now, we'd put all that behind us. I would tell him that Dad had insisted upon cremation, that had been his last coherent request. Overriding Mom's pleas. His hoarse adamant words
Cremate my body and scatter my ashes and that's the kindest thing you can do for me. Amen.
How at the end before lapsing into his final delirium he'd been assured and even dignified in that old bulldog way of Michael Mulvaney Sr. wanting to get a job finished, over and done. That was why there was no cemetery plot anywhere. No gravestone. No memorial.

All this I would tell my brother. In time.

Patrick said, as if he'd been hearing my thoughts, “After I left that day, Easter Sunday, remember?—it all just drained out of me. Like poison draining out of my blood. Like I'd been sick, infected, and hadn't known it until the poison was gone. I don't regret any of it, though. I think revenge must be good. The Greeks knew—how blood calls out for blood. I think it must be inborn, in our genes, the instinct for ‘justice.' The need to restore balance. I could have torn his throat out with my teeth, almost. But, well…” He shrugged. His voice trailed off. I saw a shimmering movement of white in the woods, a patch of movement, and wondered if the doe had returned, or would return. But we were alone.

Patrick laughed. “Bet you didn't think I'd make it for the family reunion, right?”

I protested, “Oh, no, Patrick—I had a premonition, actually, you would.”

On the way back, Patrick took me to his and Katya's campsite in a grove of trees above a turn in the New Canaan Road, about fifty yards from Mom's and Sable's house. His motorcycle was parked on the hillside just below. He'd taken out of his pocket what appeared to be a Swiss army knife and switched on the pencil-thin flashlight attachment to illuminate the Honda, which was a two-seater, a 1988 model and fairly battered. “Ever ridden one of these?” he asked, and when I said no, he said, “Tomorrow, then. You are staying over tonight, aren't you?” I said I wasn't sure and he said, “Oh, come on. Mom's counting on it, all her kids under one roof.” I pointed out that he wouldn't be under the same roof with the rest of us and he said, in his old, contrary way, “At breakfast I will. Count on it.”

With big-brotherly zeal then, as if all adult complexities of emotion might as well be shrugged off, for the moment at least, Patrick lifted the mosquito-net flap of the tent, and led me inside. Both of us had to bend, and then to squat, the tent was no more than five feet at its pitch. Patrick spoke proudly of the tent which was made of “breathable” nylon with a collapsible fiberglass pole. He'd bought it at an Army-Navy store in Berkeley—“A real bargain.” There was a damp-grassy fragrance here mixed with something delicate and sweet I wanted to think was Katya's cologne or even her hair. I saw Katya's hair unbraided, unwound and brushed shining around her face. Patrick was saying, again as if in response to my unuttered thoughts, that he'd introduced Katya to camping out, backpacking shortly after they met. He loved her very much, he said, she was the first woman he'd ever been able to love and that only at the age of thirty-two and he'd been frightened it would never happen but somehow it had, it does, in time.

There was a moment of silence between us. I understood that I wasn't expected to say anything, not a word. As if we'd been like this, at such ease with each other, for all of the fourteen years we'd lost.

Patrick showed me by flashlight a first aid kit small enough to fit in a jacket pocket. Waterproof candles, a waterproof lantern. Everything so wonderfully small, compact. He and Katya shared a single sleeping bag, nylon, with flannel lining you could unzip and remove, as of course they had, for summer. And look, Patrick said, pleasure in his voice, at this pocket-sized weather radio that provided up-to-the-minute bulletins twenty-four hours a day from the National Weather Service. As if a demonstration were necessary Patrick switched on the radio and at once a man's voice intoned through pulses of static, “—prevailing winds out of the north-northeast from Saskatchewan, twenty to twenty-five miles an hour, at the airport in Billings, Montana temperature sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit and barometer steady at—” and there was Patrick smiling happily, squatting in his nylon tent showing his kid brother a pocket-sized weather radio that was in fact a miracle of technology, what relief in having access to detailed weather facts twenty-four hours a day 365 days a year, you have only to switch on a tiny button to hear so solemn and incantatory a recitation of simple unassailable facts beyond all human subjectivity, will, yearning. I laughed, poking Patrick in the arm, had to laugh at that expression in his face he'd had when we were boys, when we were the Mulvaneys.