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Fireflies

Kristen Forbes

    My dad asks where I want to go for my birthday and it’s a joke because the only options are Pizza Hut, McDonalds or that one Chinese place a few doors down from my grandma’s hairdresser.
    Once, my grandma asked me to pick up some coffee and Parmesan cheese from the grocery store while she was getting her hair re-permed and when I arrived at the salon five minutes past the time she had told me, her eyes were bulging like she’d just witnessed a car accident. “Oh, thank God,” she said as a hairstylist named Jenna or Gina or Jauna pulled the last pink foam roller out of her hair. “I thought for sure you got lost.”
    “There are five fucking streets in this town,” I wanted to say, looking down to see a stack of outdated hair magazines on an end table near two chairs. “I got stuck talking to Mr. Larson,” I said instead.
    “Oh, that poor man,” my grandma said as she shakily raised herself from her chair and slipped into the jacket Jenna or Gina or Juana was holding out for her. “Did he tell you about his wife?”
    In surprisingly grotesque detail, Mr. Larson, the grocery manager, had told me all about the “mess in her brain” that occurred when his wife squarely hit her head on the corner of a step on their front porch during last winter’s snowstorm.
    “Yeah, it sounds awful,” I told her. “Your hair looks nice.”
    “Oh, I’m too old to look nice,” she said, pausing to sign her check in a shaky scrawl. “Do you think you’ll be able to find the way home okay? I might take a little snooze in the car.”
    “It’s a two-minute drive,” I said, but she didn’t respond. She didn’t always hear me very well.

*

    “So what’ll it be?” my dad asks now and I say let’s go for Chinese and he pulls the menu out of a drawer in the kitchen and grabs his reading glasses from his pocket.
    We pile into the car at 4:45 and Joe lets Grandma sit up front, for once. “Don’t you get that she’s old?” I asked him after the first twenty times he yelled “Shotgun!” and sprinted to the car as Grandma struggled to latch the lock on the chain-link fence behind her. “This isn’t like being home and hanging out with your douchebag friends – the woman is 97 years old, you dumbass.”
     I was ten when Joe was born and I’ve never forgiven him. It is one thing to be three or four or five even and have your life turned upside-down by the arrival of a new sibling, but quite another when you’ve had an entire decade to get used to life as a pampered only child.
    The drive to the Chinese restaurant takes about 45 seconds and we pass the town post office and gas station along the way. “There’s a parking spot, right in front,” Grandma says, as if there aren’t ten million parking spots every goddamn place you look.
    “Isn’t this nice?” Dad says as he holds open the glass doors, allowing us through first so we can tell the hostess we’re a party of four. As she takes us to a table in the center of the room we pass a fish tank, the hallway that leads to the bathrooms, and a framed picture of a mountain range.
    “Why is nobody else here?” Joe asks as he slides into a chair, cutting off Grandma, who stands shakily and wonders aloud where to put her cane. I hold her chair out for her and tuck the cane behind the chair at the next table over.
    “We beat the rush,” Dad says, taking his seat and patting his breast pocket to make sure he still has his reading glasses.
    “What’s mu shu?” Joe asks. “What’s moo goo gai pan?” he continues. “What’s any of this stuff?”
    I look at the way his dirty brown hair sloppily falls to one side and wonder how this could possibly be the trend with teenagers right now. I catch myself thinking “teenagers” and feel like a 97-year-old woman.
    We all sit and pass around oversized, laminated menus. “The big 2-4,” Dad says, and I say, “Yup, can you believe it?” and excuse myself to use the restroom.
    The walls in here are pink and the sink is tiled and I realize this is the fourteenth time we’ve been to this restaurant since I first arrived in June. Dad and Joe have only been here a week, so it’s the first time for them. My eyebrows look weird when I study my reflection and I take a pair of tweezers from my purse, plucking at stray hairs. I wash my hands and dry them with the cloth towels I thought they’d outlawed for being so germy years ago. Different rules apply in these small towns.
    The waitress is ready to take our order when I get back to the table and she glares at me as if I’m holding her back from something. I glance around the empty restaurant and back to her, saying the chicken-lemon-whatever-it-is is fine.
    “Honey chicken?” she asks, glaring harder. “We don’t have lemon chicken.”
    “Honey’s great,” I say. Grandma says she’ll have the same, Dad orders the Kung Pao shrimp, Joe asks a few obnoxious questions before settling on beef and broccoli, and we all order sweet tea and egg rolls as an appetizer.
    “Do you feel older today?” Grandma asks,

*

    and I am seven again, with my mom’s hand on my wrist; she is kneeling into me and I smell lilacs. She just set a cake on the table – not homemade like the ones Sarah’s mom made for her birthdays, but a chocolate cake loaded with pink and purple flowers she’d picked up from Costco earlier that morning. “How does it feel to be seven?” she asked and I shrugged and said it felt exactly the same as six.
    “But so much will happen to you this year, Sweetie. You’ll go to a new school and make new friends and learn things and it will be so much bigger and better than six. Now, stop being such a frowny-face and get ready for your friends.”
    She straightened her legs to stand up and the lilac smell went with her as she vanished into the kitchen to work on the punch and find a package of napkins. A moment later the doorbell rang and Kelsey and Lisa filed into the living room, leaving their wrapped presents on a pile on the table and letting their moms tie balloons around their wrists. My mom came back in from the kitchen. “I thought I heard the doorbell,” she said as her red lipstick took up the whole room and her purple dress crinkled against her body as she walked. “I was just telling Melanie how exciting it is to turn seven.”
    Yes, oh yes, the other moms agreed. More kids arrived and we pinned tails on a donkey taped to the wall in our living room and ate fat pieces of sugary cake before gathering in a circle so I could open all the wrapped boxes and cards.
    I was on my third present, a stuffed purple elephant, when the door crashed open and in came my dad, smelling like rum. The looseness of his limbs reminded me of a snake as he slithered to the floor and sat in the circle, cross-legged like the kids, as the moms sat with legs neatly crossed on the couch and chairs across the room.
    “Henry,” my mom said, as she pulled a pile of wrapping paper off the floor and slid it into the trash bag she’d brought out a few minutes earlier.
    “Lydia,” my dad said, glassy-eyed and wide-smiled as I opened my next gift, a Barbie in a pink bikini.
    “I’m so sorry, I really apologize,” I heard her whisper to some of the moms, as my dad continued to stare at me and smile.

*

    “I don’t feel a day older,” I say now, peeling the wrapper off my straw and taking a sip of sweet tea.
    “That’s good,” Grandma tells me. “You don’t want to feel your days, trust me.”
    “Why does it take so long if we’re the only ones here?” Joe asks, sitting upright to look toward the kitchen.
    “Are you in a hurry?” Grandma asks, tapping her fingers in front of him on the table.
    “This place is lame,” he replies.
    “You’re lame,” I say quickly, forgetting for a moment how old I am.
    Dad takes a sip too big and I can’t tell if he’s coughing or choking, but he waves his hand in front of him as if to say I’m fine, I’m fine. The egg rolls arrive and we drench them in sweet and sour sauce and Grandma dabs herself with her napkin when grease begins to dribble down her chin.
    “It’s been so nice with you here this summer,” Grandma says, and reaches across the table to squeeze my hand.

*

    “She listens to you more than anyone, don’t ask me why,” my dad said six months ago as we carried cups of coffee and walked across campus. I’d be graduating soon and this was one of his final visits to school. “Why don’t you just go for the summer and get her to at least consider it?” he asked, before waving at this guy named Kyle, who was walking in the other direction, toward the gym. Kyle gave a tiny wave back, then turned his head toward the sidewalk as he continued to walk. My dad loved interacting with students, going to the library and bookstore, even eating in the cafeteria. Maybe he wished he was still here, and not a pharmacist.
    I tried to take a sip and mask my expression, which I feared would be a giveaway that a few weeks earlier I’d drunkenly made out with this Kyle guy. The coffee was still too hot and scalded the tip of my tongue. “You want me to spend my first summer after graduating with a senile grandma in a town with a population of what, twenty people?” I asked my dad.
    “Oh, it’s gotta be at least twenty-seven by now,” my dad said, winking at me. “Remember when those twins were born a few years ago?”
    I tried another sip – still too hot. “And I’m supposed to be like, Hey, Grandma, how are you, by the way, how would you like to move back to Maine so Dad can put you in a retirement home, does that sound good?”
    “I probably wouldn’t use those exact words,” my dad said, then looked at me carefully. “Can I give you a piece of advice?” he asked. We came to a bench and sat down, putting our cups between us. I looked at him expectantly, waiting for some wisdom about life and growing and selflessness.
     “Take the lid off and let it cool a few minutes before you burn your tongue off,” he said instead.

*

    “It’s been fun here,” I say to Grandma now, and think how much I’ve failed. There were so many opportunities, so many chances to say, “Hey, would you ever consider moving and being closer to Dad?” But I chickened out every time, instead spending my days watching Murder She Wrote and doing crossword puzzles with her.
    Dad said he and Joe were coming for my birthday. I haven’t officially celebrated a birthday since I was fifteen,

*

    a few months before my mother barreled into my room after a quick, light knock on my bedroom door.
    “I didn’t say you could come in,” I said as she sat on the corner of my bed, where I lay with my knees bent toward the ceiling. “What’s the point of knocking if you’re just gonna come in anyway?” She picked at imaginary lint on her dress and waited for me to shut up.
    “I’m leaving your father,” she said. “Do you want to come with me?”

*

    The honey chicken is crispy and greasy and sweet and I think I’ve gained five pounds in the three months I’ve been here.
    “Mmm mmm mmm,” Grandma says and Joe shovels food into his mouth by the forkful. “I’ve always liked this place,” Dad says, and Grandma murmurs in agreement.
    “There’s nothing special about it,” Joe says, then goes back to his shoveling.
    “We’ll have to get dessert,” Dad says.
    “Oh, no,” I say. “I’m already so full.”
    “You only get one birthday a year,” Dad says, and motions toward the waitress, who comes over in a firestorm of annoyance. “It’s my daughter’s birthday,” my dad informs this woman who couldn’t care less. “Do you have any cake?”
    “We have mango ice cream or deep-fried banana spring rolls,” the waitress says, squinting. Dad looks toward me. “What do you think, Sweetie?” he asks.
    They both sound awful. “The ice cream sounds good,” I say.
    “I’ll have one of those too, and a coffee,” my dad says. He looks at my brother, whose hair has fallen directly in front of his eyes. “Do you want anything?” my dad asks.
    “Coffee,” he says, shaking his head to get his hair to move.
    “You’re fourteen, what do you need coffee for?” my dad asks.
    “You’re sixty, what do you need coffee for?” Joe asks.
    “Jesus. Mom, what do you want?” Dad asks Grandma.
    “I’ll have those pineapple eggroll things,” Grandma says.
    “Banana spring rolls,” the waitress says, and I wonder if murderous thoughts are going through her mind because that’s certainly how it looks from the outside.
    A few minutes later we’re clinking our cups of coffee together and Dad and Grandma are saying, “To Melanie, may it be your greatest year yet.” I swirl creamer into my coffee and pass the sugar down to Joe, who scoffs and says he drinks his coffee black.
    “Coffee should be coffee,” he says, as if he’s been drinking it for a million years. “What’s the point of masquerading it as an ice cream sundae?” I’m pretty sure he learned the word “masquerade” recently and has been dying to put it in conversation. “It’s like ugly chicks,” he continues and I look to Grandma and see her raise her eyebrows. “Doesn’t matter how much makeup they wear, they’re still ugly underneath. Let ugly be ugly. Let coffee be coffee.”
    Dad is looking at him with his head cocked to the side and his eyebrows scrunched, the same look he uses when he’s doing a Sudoku puzzle or reading a map. He shakes his head and looks at me. “Want to open your presents?”
    Nobody brought any presents into the restaurant, so I don’t know how to respond. “You mean, now?” I say.
    Dad grabs his jacket from the chair behind him and pulls out an envelope. “Yes, now,” he says, handing the envelope to me. I open it and find a Starbucks card inside.
    “Thanks,” I say. “They don’t have Starbucks here, though.”
    “Well, they have them back home,” Dad says, now looking at me with the Sudoku face. “Or wherever you decide to go.”
    Grandma and I look at each other. “You haven’t told him?” she asks, before biting into a deep-friend banana spring roll.
    Now Dad and Joe look at each other, then back at me. “Told me what?” Dad asks.
    “I decided to stay here a little longer,” I say, looking down at the mango ice cream that’s melting to mush.
    “What the fuck?” slips out of Joe’s mouth and Dad looks at him sternly. “Watch your mouth,” he says. “What are you talking about?” he asks me.
    “I like it here,” I say quietly.
    “Here?” Joe asks, and now he’s practically choking. “Here?” he repeats.
    “I don’t know what I want to do,” I say. “I need time to figure it out.” I use the back of my spoon to mash the mango mush.
    “But Mel, you were supposed to,” Dad starts, then stops.
    “You had a very easy assignment,” Joe cuts in. “Convince Grandma to move to an old people home. Done. Not difficult. What have you been doing these last three months?”
    Grandma is looking from one member of the family to the next, like she’s watching a never-ending tennis match.
    “This is her home,” I say. “This is where she lives, where she’s always lived.”
    “But that’s not what,” my dad tries again.
    “You people want me to move to a home?” grandma says and the waitress brings us our bill.
    The ride home is quiet and after everyone gets settled inside, I slip out the back door and sit on the porch, where fireflies cast their glow in the summer breeze. My mom had been the one to teach me how to catch them in jars, how to collect an entire family of fireflies in a little glass container.

*

    “What do you mean, you’re leaving Dad?” I had asked, and she leaned across the bed to push a strand of hair that was falling in my face behind my ear.
    “Mel,” she said. “You know what I mean.”
    Her eyes were swollen from crying and her face looked long and tired. “Do you want to come with me, Sweetie?”
    I sat up in my bed, straightening the legs on my pajama bottoms. “Is Joe coming?” I asked.
    “I’m not asking Joe,” she said. “I’m asking you.”

*

    “What are you doing out here?” Joe asks, now standing in front of the back door. He makes his way down the porch steps and I point toward the sky.
    “Watching the fireflies,” I tell him. “Remember when we used to do that with Mom?”
    “No,” he says quickly, and pushes past me to sit on the grass, which he starts pulling from the ground in clumps.
    The fireflies make a buzz-buzz sound and I feel like my entire childhood is hanging in the summer air.
    “This place sucks,” Joe says, looking up at me from the grass. “What are you going to do here?”
    “What am I going to do anywhere?” I ask, leaning my head back to see more of the sky.
    “You’re acting like a child,” Joe says.
    “You are a child,” I say.
    The next morning we make pancakes and fry strips of bacon in a pan on the stove. Grandma shuffles in, still wearing her robe, and starts the coffee maker. Dad reads the paper and says softly, as though he doesn’t expect anyone to hear, “I’ve been sober exactly seventeen years now. The day after Mel’s birthday. Seventeen years.”
    “I’m not going to a home and if that’s all you came here to do, you might as well leave,” Grandma says as I flip bacon with a fork. I look up to see my dad’s reaction and am surprised to see she’s looking directly at me.
    “Grandma,” I say.
    “I mean it,” she says. “I was getting along just fine without you. You’ve always been so,” and then she stops.
    “So what?” I ask and Dad’s newspaper is down and Joe’s coffee cup is up and they’re both staring in my direction.
    “So like your mother,” she finishes, then excuses herself to go to the bathroom.
    I transfer the strips of bacon onto a serving platter and turn off the stove. I set the bacon in the center of the table and ask my dad if he wants any orange juice.
    “Melanie,” he says, and it’s the worst thing he could say, and tears start welling in my eyes.

*

    “You’re splitting us up?” I asked my mother as she looked at me, expectantly.
    “You hate your brother,” she said matter-of-factly, like she had just ordered a pizza without olives and was doing me some kind of favor.
    “I don’t hate him, hate him,” I said. “He’s just annoying sometimes.”
    “Well, I’m not taking him with me,” she said. “He is way too much like your father.”
    “Mom, he’s five,” I said and she looked at me blankly.
    “Do you want to come with me or not?” she asked.

*

    “Melanie,” my dad repeats, and he gets out of his chair and stands next to me at the fridge, rubbing his hands on my shoulders. I squeeze my eyes shut, suck my tears back inside of me, and reach for the orange juice.
    “I think she got the kind with the pulp,” I say. “I don’t know why she likes it so much.”
    Nobody talks during breakfast and Joe looks blind every time he looks toward the window, where sun is shining fiercely through the panes of glass. The pancakes are too thick and gooey in the middle, but we eat them anyway as we drink our coffee and rattle our silverware against the plates.
    “Maybe we could drive to the falls,” Dad says finally.
    Grandma collects her dishes and puts them in the sink. “I’m too old for drives,” she says, and heads to the living room to work on a crossword puzzle.
    “Maybe you two should go, and I’ll stay with Grandma,” Dad says, putting his own dishes in the sink on top of Grandma’s.
    “Us?” I say, looking at Joe, who rolls his eyes. Dad nods and I realize this is one of those times where the decision’s already been made.
    “Don’t worry, I’ll finish the dishes,” Dad says.
    Joe and I put on our jackets and I grab my purse. He tries to open his door before I’ve had a chance to unlock it and yells at me to hurry up. I get in the car and start the ignition and we’ve gone about a block when he asks if we can stop somewhere and get beer.
    “Absolutely not,” I say, and start making my way toward the waterfalls as he fiddles with the radio controls, bouncing from one station to the next.
    “Cigarettes, then,” Joe says. “Something to make this a little less shitty.”
    “You are fourteen years old,” I remind him and slap his hand away so the music will rest on one station.
    “I know,” he says. “Same age you were when you were drinking at the house, right?”
    We’re driving on the only main road of town and I look over at him quickly. “I never drank at the house,” I say. “And you were four, so it’s not like you would know.”
    “Fine, maybe not when I was four,” he says. “But I remember everything from five on.”
    “Yeah, right,” I tell him. We pass the town library.
    “I remember the day mom left,” he says as we pass the town church.
    “You could not possibly remember that,” I say.
    “She was wearing a green shirt and she called you an ungrateful bitch and said that if you don’t leave with her now, she’ll never talk to you again,” he says.
    The road is straight from here to the falls and I turn sideways to look at him closely. He has very smooth skin, not like most of the boys his age. And when his hair isn’t falling in them, his brown eyes are big and bright. The freckles that line his cheeks and nose look the same as the ones I see in the mirror every day.
    “You said you were tired of being the adult and that she was the bitch for leaving behind a little kid and she grabbed that big black suitcase with wheels and slammed the door behind her,” Joe says. “And then you sat on the couch and cried forever.”
    I look at him again and he’s looking back at me and all I can do is blink and breathe. Finally I look back toward the road and drive. When I see the gas station, I pull in and tell him to wait in the car while I go inside. I come back with a case of Budweiser and a pack of Parliament Lights.
    We go to the waterfalls and stay there all day, drinking beer and chain-smoking and counting the cars that pass: three in three hours. We don’t talk anymore; we just stare at the cascading water, until darkness descends and the fireflies come out.
    “I wish we had these back home,” I say finally.
    “I thought this was your home now,” Joe says.
    We get back in the car and it takes every ounce of concentration to drive in a semi-straight line. I hit the curb when I park Grandma’s car and we both realize we forgot to get rid of the beer cans that now line the back seat. Joe looks at me, panic in his eyes.
    “We’ll deal with it later,” I tell him.
    We tiptoe into the house and are stopped immediately by Dad and Grandma, both sitting alert at the table near the door.
    “Oh, thank God,” Grandma says. “I thought for sure you got lost.”
    “Have you been at the falls this whole time?” Dad asks, Sudoku expression taking over his face.
    “Yes,” we both say, stumbling inside.
    “You smell like smoke,” Grandma says as she rises from her seat. “And I’m moving back to Maine.”
    “There was a campfire,” I say at the same time Joe says, “What?”
    Grandma shrugs. “I’m getting too old for this,” she says, motioning her hands through the air, like she’s including the whole town in her “this.”
    I stare at Grandma, then Dad, then look at the clock and the stack of bills on the counter, then back to Grandma. “Why’d you ask me to stay with you, then?” I ask her finally.
    She gazes at me carefully. “I thought you could take care of me,” she says. She looks at Joe, who has leaned down to tie his shoes and almost falls in the process. “But maybe it’s time you take care of you.”
    It’s cooler in the kitchen than it was outside. My skin feels dewy from the humidity and I’m starting to get a headache. The fireflies are swarming outside the windows and I can’t keep myself from staring at them. In their soft green glow, I try to see what lies ahead.

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