The Firefly Hours (A Silas Sharp Metaphysical Mystery): Chapter 25

 

Stars and Fireflies Late June
by Eric Aho

Chapter 25 – The Offer

 

Nobody walks willingly into a cage. They walk toward whatever the cage has placed inside. By Friday morning, I understood what the Firefly Hours wanted from me. The problem was I wanted something from them too.

My father sat at the end of the dock with his shoes beside him and his trouser legs rolled to his knees. He'd always hated wet socks. Some memories survive because they're important. Others survive because love is built from useless details. He patted the boards beside him. I sat. For a while, neither of us spoke. The lake did most of the talking. Water slapped against wood. Insects chirped in the reeds. A distant outboard motor purred on a part of the lake I couldn't see. Every sound exactly as it had been. Or, rather, exactly as I needed it to be. That distinction had become increasingly difficult to defend.

"You look tired, son." he said. I halfway expected him to offer me a Life Savers.

"I've had a long week,” I muttered. "Hell, a long life."

He nodded toward the tackle box. "Sandwich?"

Inside were two ham sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Mustard. No mayonnaise. He remembered. Of course he remembered. I took one.

"Are you really him?" I asked.

My father considered the question before answering. "Would the answer change how the sandwich tastes?"

"Probably not."

"Then eat before the bread gets soggy."

I did. It tasted like twelve years old. Across the lake, the sun remained suspended just above the tree line. I knew it would never move unless someone made it. My father knew it too. Neither of us mentioned it.

"You can stay," he said, watching the water.

"So I’ve heard. Is that a good idea, though?”

"You don't have to decide today."

"Today seems unusually committed to continuing."

That made him laugh. The real laugh. Not the version I'd reconstructed over the years. The sharp inhale first. Then the sound. I had forgotten the inhale. The Firefly Hours hadn't.

"You could come back," he said. "Whenever you want."

“Forever?"

"If that's what you need."

The offer hung between us: a lifetime of visits. Birthdays. Fishing trips. Ordinary Thursdays. All the small things death had stolen so cruelly.

"What would it cost?" I asked.

He looked at me and said, "Does everything have to cost something?"

"In my experience, anything offering forever usually has very aggressive financing."

"You'd have to let this place remain.” He looked at me. "The neighborhood. The Hours."

"And everyone trapped inside them." I studied my half-eaten ham sandwich.

His expression saddened. "They don't feel trapped."

"I bet they did once."

"Most lives feel like cages from the wrong angle,” he offered with a shrug. “You should know that by now.”

I stood and walked to the end of the dock. The water reflected an endless, motionless sunset. Dead, if you considered movement part of being alive. Behind me, my father opened the tackle box and began organizing lures. He had always done that when waiting for me to say something difficult.

"Walter made this happen," I said.

"He helped it happen,” he said, pointing out a difference.

"What about Danny?” I asked. "He was fourteen."

"So were you, almost."

"I was twelve."

My father glanced up. "Exactly."

His response struck harder than they should have. Because some part of me was still twelve. Still standing beside the water, believing there had been one correct action that would have changed everything. Still investigating every impossible case as though the universe might eventually admit it had made a clerical error. My father set down the lure and locked his eyes on me.

"You couldn't save me, Silas."

"I know."

"No." He shook his head. "You understand the sentence. That's not the same as believing it."

The lake shifted around us. Reality folded in on itself. The dock became a hospital corridor of harsh white walls and oppressive fluorescent lights. My mother's hand gripped mine. A doctor walked toward us with practiced sorrow. Then the lake returned. My father remained.

"This place can give it all back," he told me. “The years we lost. The years you lost.”

I stared at him. The shoreline changed. A cabin appeared among the trees. Smoke curled from its chimney. My father stood on the porch older than I'd ever known him. Gray hair. Reading glasses. A cardigan I would have mocked openly. He waved. The scene shifted again. Christmas morning. Two mugs beside a fire. Another shift. A diner booth. My father arguing politics with two of his buddies. A life assembled from all the doors that had closed. I could reclaim it. Not undo his death. Something more seductive. Live around it. Build new memories beside the old ones until the grief became only one room in a much larger house. Calico's faint, distant voice reached me from somewhere beyond the trees.

"Silas!"

I turned toward it. The path behind me had vanished. Now there were only woods and fireflies. So many fireflies. My father stepped closer.

"You don't have to keep losing people," he said.

"Everyone loses people."

"Not here."

"That's the problem,” I said. I thought of Walter. Margaret. Emily. His preserved Thursday. I thought of Calico laughing like a child beneath her mother's hand. Harold riding home to Eleanor. Murphy chasing a tennis ball. Danny playing basketball in a neighborhood where fourteen never ended. Every one of them had been given something impossible. Every gift had roots wrapped around an absence.

"What happens to the present?" I asked.

My father looked toward the frozen sun. "It waits."

"For how long?"

"As long as it has to."

"That's not living, Dad."

His face softened. "Neither is spending your whole life apologizing to the dead."

I had no answer. Because he was right. Guilt and grief are the most cumbersome of emotional baggage. He held out his hand toward me.

"Stay tonight." His smile was gentle. The fireflies brightened. "Come back tomorrow. And the day after that."

Behind him, the life I'd lost unfolded. My father aging, laughing, forgetting where he left his glasses. Calling at inconvenient times to ask questions I'd answered three conversations earlier. All the ordinary frustrations I would have given anything to possess. The Firefly Hours didn't offer perfection. They offered time. That was worse.

"Silas!" Calico called again. Farther away now. Or maybe I was.

My father kept his hand extended.

"No more almosts," he said.

The phrase found the oldest part of me. The part that had built an entire life around unfinished things. I looked at his hand. Then at the sunset. Then back toward the place where the path had been. I knew what accepting meant. The neighborhood would remain suspended. The lost residents would remain neither alive nor dead. Walter would keep his Thursday. And I would have my father. My mouth opened. The word rose easily. Naturally. Already shaped by decades of wanting. For one suspended moment I was going to say yes.

*****

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